Aby Warburg is regarded as one of the great pioneers of modern cultural studies. This book brings together texts by many of the most renowned researchers in the field who have been influenced by his work. They address his extraordinary impact on the understanding of cultural transmission and the influence of images and texts across time and space. What emerges is the continuing significance of Warburg for our own times. No one concerned with the many forms of the survival of the past in the present and the infinitely complex relationships between images and society will want to miss this book. Published in cooperation with the Warburg Institute, London and with the assistance of a grant from the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, New York. Look inside

From 1925 until his death in 1929 the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric. This folio volume and the exhibition in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin succeed in restoring Warburg's vanished legacy-something that researchers have long considered impossible.

The art historian Aby M. Warburg and the philosopher Walter Benjamin are widely respected as two of the most significant cultural theorists of the twentieth century. Their common interests in historiography, the function of collective memory, and the relation of modern society to earlier stages of human social existence, were important examples of the attempt to articulate, analyse and represent the experience of modernity. Drawing on a variety of discourses from aesthetics, art history, anthropology and psychology, they presented an account of modernity and human development that represented an important counter to the optimistic belief in progress prevalent amongst their contemporaries. Rarely, however, have the connections between these two thinkers been explored in depth. This volume consists of an exploration of the intellectual relation between them, considering their varying responses to the question of the meaning of modernity, and above all their common legacy for the present.

A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.

Introduction. Artworks and their modalities of egress -- Aer, Aurae, Venti: Warburg's aerial forms and historical milieus -- Luftraum: Riegl's vitalist mesology of form -- Saturated forms: Rilke's and Rodin's sculpture of environment -- The "Kinesphere" and the body's other spatial envelopes in Rudolf Laban's Theory of Dance -- Coda. Space as form.

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity's afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought. While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg's published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg's cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West's cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg's lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History offers a broad survey of cutting-edge intersections between digital technologies and the study of art history, museum practices, and cultural heritage. The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historical theory, method and historiography, and research methods in education.