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Conference

French

ID: <

2268/160245

>

Where these data come from
The iconology of the intervals. Footage and still image arrangements (Warburg)

Abstract

I will try here to reformulate the issues discussed during these days from the specific disciplinary field of iconology — which can be more or less placed at the intersection of the philosophy and history of art (as its founders, Aby Warburg and then Erwin Panofsky, have built the principles of the method as part of a general reflection on symbolic, in dialogue with Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy, in particular). I shall address — very quickly — the recent criticisms of the iconological method by the theory of contemporary image, which are broadly based on the idea of a denial of the visual and its specificity (= its own means and logic) in favour of the Norway paradigm — ubiquitous when it comes to identifying the meaning of an image. In particular, I will draw on the statements of one of the main protagonists of the current Bildwissenschaft (= image science), G. Boehm. The criticism of iconology seems to me sometimes to be caricatural, even if these questions are essential, and I would like to try to destabilise it somewhat by returning to the sources of the method. Stefania Caliandro describes Warburg’s plan for an atlas of images called mnemosyne as a vast undertaking to explain, by image, the function of the visual — an idea which I will support here. By developing what he himself called an ‘iconology of the interval’, Aby Warburg suggests that the layout of images, and the variety of arrangements/series in which they can be taken, contribute to the development of a meta-speech which goes far beyond the established meanings conveyed by those images individually. Far from simply attributing specific meanings to artistic visual motifs, iconology — in this inaugural version — aims to show (through the image) the constant transformation dynamic that drives the symbols of art.

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