Warburg And Living Thought

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Aby Warburg and Living Thought

Author : M. Centanni
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : Art
ISBN : 9791259970640

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Aby Warburg and Living Thought by M. Centanni Pdf

Warburg and Living Thought

Author : Monica Centanni
Publisher : Ronzani Editore
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2022-07-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9791259601322

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Warburg and Living Thought by Monica Centanni Pdf

Aby Warburg, the founder of a new Science of Culture, the scholar who gave back word to the image; a “militant” intellectual (so wrote Gertrud Bing), for whom no distinction exists between life and thought; pioneer of new research methods, inventing ‘machines’ of knowledge; architect of spaces designed as arenas of thought. The Library for the Science of Culture (transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933) and the Mnemosyne Atlas are the achievements to which the most substantial part of his heritage is linked. The ten essays here collected for the first time, all stemming from the Italian cultural milieu, trace with clarity Warburg’s “living thought”. Giorgio Pasquali, Mario Praz, Gertrud Bing, Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Agamben, Guglielmo Bilancioni, Alessandro Dal Lago, Gianni Carchia, Salvatore Settis, Kurt W. Forster, Maurizio Ghelardi: the polyphonic dialogue, whether from close up or at a distance, between scholars of diverse backgrounds casts a new beacon of light that illuminates with clarity and precision Warburg’s personality and intellectual legacy. Summary Foreword by Monica Centanni Giorgio Pasquali, A Tribute to Aby Warburg [1930] Mario Praz, Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften [1934] Gertrud Bing, Aby M. Warburg [1960] Arsenio Frugoni, The Renewal of Aby Warburg [1967] Giorgio Agamben, Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science [1975, 19842] Guglielmo Bilancioni, Aby Warburg, the great Lord of the Labyrinth [1984] Alessandro Dal Lago, The Archaic and its Double: Aby Warburg and Anthropology [1984] Gianni Carchia, Aby Warburg: Symbol and Tragedy [1984] Salvatore Settis, Warburg continuatus. The Description of a Library [1985, 19952] Kurt W. Forster, Aby Warburg, A Cartographer of Passions [1999] Maurizio Ghelardi, The final Warburg [2004] Afterword Monica Centanni, Aby Warburg and Living Thought Monica Centanni Monica Centanni, a classical philologist, teaches Greek Language and Literature in Venice, where the activities of the “Seminario Mnemosyne” take place since 2000. Centanni is the director of

The Surviving Image

Author : Georges Didi-Huberman
Publisher : Penn State University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2018-01-09
Category : Art
ISBN : 0271072091

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The Surviving Image by Georges Didi-Huberman Pdf

Originally published in French in 2002, examines the life and work of art historian Aby Warburg. Demonstrates the complexity and importance of Warburg's ideas, addressing broader questions regarding art historians' conceptions of time, memory, symbols, and the relationship between art and the rational and irrational forces of the psyche.

Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

Author : Christopher D. Johnson
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2012-09-15
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780801464539

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Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images by Christopher D. Johnson Pdf

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.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

Author : Philippe-Alain Michaud
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2024-09-10
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781890951818

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Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Philippe-Alain Michaud Pdf

A compelling analysis of the work of art historian Aby Warburg and its radical implications for the study of visual images Aby Warburg (1866–1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included some of the celebrated art historians of the twentieth century, such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Philippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg’s project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a “critical iconology” to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture. Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari, Warburg’s method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using procedures of “montage-collision” he brought together pagan artifacts with masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, the astrology of the ancient Near East with the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals with the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was not only the recognition of the radical heterogeneity of objects but the discovery within the art work itself of lines of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism. Michaud provides us with a book that not only is about Warburg but also extends his intuitions and discoveries into analyses of other categories of imagery like the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loïe Fuller. This edition also includes a foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and texts by Warburg not previously translated into English. Chosen as one of the best art books of 2004 by the Washington Post and Bookforum.

Obsessed by Art

Author : Francesca Cernia Slovin
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2006-11-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781425739157

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Obsessed by Art by Francesca Cernia Slovin Pdf

Aby Warburg (1896-1929) was the scion of M. M. Warburg & CO the German Jewish banking empire. At thirteen, he made a pact with the youngest brother, by which he granted his birthright in exchange for the promise that the sibling would purchase for him every book he would desire. It is thus that the famous Warburg Library was born. During a long trip in Italy, as a young man, Warburg falls in love with Italian Renaissance and starts to accumulate all related texts. Once back home, in Hamburg, he further develops the nucleus of the library with volumes concerning unique and original disciplines, from Magic to Astrology, from Alchemy to Primitive Civilizations. Placed in a newly built, perfectly round library Warburg organizes the order of the volumes following his theory of "migration of symbols". Thanks to this visionary and revolutionary approach, the History of Art acquires a new dimension and a new tool of interpretation, through what would ultimately be called Iconology. With the explosion of the First World War, Warburg's mental equilibrium collapses and he is hospitalized in a Swiss psychiatric institution where he will remain for more than ten years. It is from here, that the fascinating narrative of Francesca Cernia Slovin starts, looking back at Aby's life in a compelling reconstruction as a flash back. The second part of the book continues when Warburg's disciple, Fritz Saxl, takes his place as director of what had become the famous Warburg Institute. After Aby's death, with the rise of Hitler, the Nazis threaten to burn down the library. On the night of December 12, 1933, with the help of a few assistants, Saxl with an heroic effort transported the entire library of over a hundred thousand volumes onto two small steamships and flees to London. Thanks to these few brave men and the hospitality of Lord Courtauld, today the Warburg Institute is a holy place of pilgrimage for every Art historian. With more than three hundred thousand titles and two hundred thousand periodicals the library contains forty percent of items missing at the British Library.

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

Author : Aby Warburg,Roberto Ohrt,Claudia Wedepohl
Publisher : Hatje Cantz
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2020-03-23
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 3775746935

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Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg,Roberto Ohrt,Claudia Wedepohl Pdf

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 Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis

Author : Mischa Twitchin
Publisher : Springer
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2016-10-20
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781137478726

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The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis by Mischa Twitchin Pdf

This book is concerned with such questions as the following: What is the life of the past in the present? How might “the theatre of death” and “the uncanny in mimesis” allow us to conceive of the afterlife of a supposedly ephemeral art practice? How might a theatrical iconology engage with such fundamental social relations as those between the living and the dead? Distinct from the dominant expectation that actors should appear life-like onstage, why is it that some theatre artists – from Craig to Castellucci – have conceived of the actor in the image of the dead? Furthermore, how might an iconology of the actor allow us to imagine the afterlife of an apparently ephemeral art practice? This book explores such questions through the implications of the twofold analogy proposed in its very title: as theatre is to the uncanny, so death is to mimesis; and as theatre is to mimesis, so death is to the uncanny. Walter Benjamin once observed that: “The point at issue in the theatre today can be more accurately defined in relation to the stage than to the play. It concerns the filling-in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living...” If the relation between the living and the dead can be thought of in terms of an analogy with ancient theatre, how might avant-garde theatre be thought of in terms of this same relation “today”?

191 | Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods

Author : Monica Centanni,Giulia Zanon,Filippo Perfetti,Dorothee Gelhard,Matilde Sergio,Salvatore Settis,Clio Nicastro,Katia Pizzi,Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino,Barbara Baert,Victoria Cirlot,Georges Didi-Huberman,Michael Diers,Andrea Pinotti,Ianick Takaes
Publisher : Edizioni Engramma
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2024-07-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9788831494854

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191 | Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods by Monica Centanni,Giulia Zanon,Filippo Perfetti,Dorothee Gelhard,Matilde Sergio,Salvatore Settis,Clio Nicastro,Katia Pizzi,Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino,Barbara Baert,Victoria Cirlot,Georges Didi-Huberman,Michael Diers,Andrea Pinotti,Ianick Takaes Pdf

In this issue of Engramma: Giulia Zanon’s Zooming Mnemosyne deals with the use of details in Warburg’s Bilderatlas, Monica Centanni’s Collateral effects of the “visibile parlare” (Dante, Pg. X, v. 95) reconstructs the hypothesis of a visual model for the legend of Trajan’s Justice, according to Warburg intuition about it; this contribution is connected of the paper by Filippo Perfetti’s Dante, Botticelli, and Trajan. An Open Note where the author investigates how Botticelli could have come to know that the bas-relief of the Arch of Constantine liberatori urbis was related to an episode in Trajan's life”. The focus of this issue is then extended to Warburg's cultural environment. Matilde Sergio’s Aby Warburg, Walter Benjaming, and the Memory of Images investigates the influence of Warburg's essay about Luther, on Benjamin's thought, while Dorothee Gelhard’s Gertrud Bing’s Scientific Beginnings reconstructs the intellectual history of Bing's doctoral thesis and its influences on Warburgian work. The theme of Warburg’s Denkraum is the focal point of Salvatore Settis’ Anselm Kiefer's Logic of Inversion: a fundamental overview of Kiefer's Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce(Andrea Emo) on display at Sala dello Scrutinio in Palazzo Ducale, Venezia from March to October 2022. The third section of the issue is dedicated to new publications and exhibitions. Echoing Settis’ reflection on Denkraum, we present Clio Nicastro’s La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg, published this year for Palermo University Press; an introduction to Cultural Memories: a series published by Peter Lang and edited by Katia Pizzi. Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino with Mary Hertz Warburg: Free and Unconventional reviews the exhibition of the artist Mary Hertz Warburg. The issue closes with the important Choral Reading of Il metodo di Aby Warburg by Kurt W. Forster. L’antico dei gesti. Il futuro della memoria, where Barbara Baert, Victoria Cirlot, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Diers, Andrea Pinotti and Ianick Takaes offer us their personal reading of Warburg’s life and thought as they are presented by Forster’s newly translated book, edited by Ronzani editore.

Warburg Models

Author : Tim Anstey,Mari Lending
Publisher : Hatje Cantz Verlag
Page : 91 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2023-12-04
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9783775757089

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Warburg Models by Tim Anstey,Mari Lending Pdf

Architectural patronage was crucial for the thinking of Aby Warburg and his circle. In Hamburg the purpose-designed Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, completed in 1926, organized Warburg's remarkable library. From 1927 Warburg developed ideas about orientation in the radical transformation of a disused water tower into the Hamburg Planetarium. After the Warburg Institute transferred to London in 1933 this pattern of seminal architectural commissioning continued, including projects designed by the avant-garde practice Tecton during the 1930s, and culminating in the construction of the library's present home at Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in 1958. Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge follows this history, using archive photographs, architectural drawings and a series of architectural models to show how the Warburg scholars projected a connection between their own physical occupancy of architectural space and their shared ideas about intellectual order, cultural survival, and memory. MARI LENDING and TIM ANSTEY are both professors of architectural history at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Their continuing archive-based seminar on the relationship between the Warburg Institute and architecture has developed into an exhibition and a book, not least because of the skilled participation of their model-building students.

Agamben and the Signature of Astrology

Author : Paul Colilli
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2015-10-16
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9781498505963

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Agamben and the Signature of Astrology by Paul Colilli Pdf

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of the world’s most important living philosophers, has been the object of much scrutiny. Yet, there is one dimension of his thought that remains unexamined by scholars: the presence of the ancient science of astrology in his writings. This book, the first of its kind, identifies the astrological elements and explains the implications of their usage by Agamben. In so doing, this study challenges us to imagine Agamben’s thought in a radically new light. A critical account of the presence of astrology and related themes in Agamben’s writings, ranging from the earlier works to the more recent publications, illustrates that the astrological signature constitutes a mode of philosophical archaeology that allows for an enhanced understanding of concepts that are central to his works, such as potentiality, the signature, bare life and biopolitics.

Ravenous

Author : Sam Apple
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2021-05-25
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781631493157

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Ravenous by Sam Apple Pdf

The extraordinary story of the Nazi-era scientific genius who discovered how cancer cells eat—and what it means for how we should. The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg—a cousin of the famous finance Warburgs—was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the twentieth century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it. In Ravenous, Sam Apple reclaims Otto Warburg as a forgotten, morally compromised genius who pursued cancer single-mindedly even as Europe disintegrated around him. While the vast majority of Jewish scientists fled Germany in the anxious years leading up to World War II, Warburg remained in Berlin, working under the watchful eye of the dictatorship. With the Nazis goose-stepping their way across Europe, systematically rounding up and murdering millions of Jews, Warburg awoke each morning in an elegant, antiques-filled home and rode horses with his partner, Jacob Heiss, before delving into his research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Hitler and other Nazi leaders, Apple shows, were deeply troubled by skyrocketing cancer rates across the Western world, viewing cancer as an existential threat akin to Judaism or homosexuality. Ironically, they viewed Warburg as Germany’s best chance of survival. Setting Warburg’s work against an absorbing history of cancer science, Apple follows him as he arrives at his central belief that cancer is a problem of metabolism. Though Warburg’s metabolic approach to cancer was considered groundbreaking, his work was soon eclipsed in the early postwar era, after the discovery of the structure of DNA set off a search for the genetic origins of cancer. Remarkably, Warburg’s theory has undergone a resurgence in our own time, as scientists have begun to investigate the dangers of sugar and the link between obesity and cancer, finding that the way we eat can influence how cancer cells take up nutrients and grow. Rooting his revelations in extensive archival research as well as dozens of interviews with today’s leading cancer authorities, Apple demonstrates how Warburg’s midcentury work may well hold the secret to why cancer became so common in the modern world and how we can reverse the trend. A tale of scientific discovery, personal peril, and the race to end a disastrous disease, Ravenous would be the stuff of the most inventive fiction were it not, in fact, true.

CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE. Conversations with Fata Morgana

Author : Paolo Jedlowski,Roberto De Gaetano,Jacques Rancière,Roberto Esposito,Slavoj Žižek,Paul Schrader,Werner Herzog,Angela Ricci Lucchi,Yervant Gianikian,Julio Bressane,Marie,Jean,Francesco Casetti,Mario Martone,Francesco Ceraolo,Luc Nancy,Louis Comolli,Georges Didi,Huberman,Raoul Ruiz,David Freedberg,Marco Bellocchio,Julia Kristeva,Edgar Reitz,José Mondzain,Walter Siti,Toni Servillo,Richard Schechner,Shinya Tsukamoto,Amos Gitai
Publisher : Luigi Pellegrini Editore
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2016-06-30
Category : Photography
ISBN : 9788868224424

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CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE. Conversations with Fata Morgana by Paolo Jedlowski,Roberto De Gaetano,Jacques Rancière,Roberto Esposito,Slavoj Žižek,Paul Schrader,Werner Herzog,Angela Ricci Lucchi,Yervant Gianikian,Julio Bressane,Marie,Jean,Francesco Casetti,Mario Martone,Francesco Ceraolo,Luc Nancy,Louis Comolli,Georges Didi,Huberman,Raoul Ruiz,David Freedberg,Marco Bellocchio,Julia Kristeva,Edgar Reitz,José Mondzain,Walter Siti,Toni Servillo,Richard Schechner,Shinya Tsukamoto,Amos Gitai Pdf

24 conversazioni apparse su Fata Morgana con grandi figure della contemporaneità, studiosi e artisti che parlano del cinema facendone un luogo del pensiero e una forma di vita. Un viaggio in cui il cinema e l’immagine, più di ogni altra forma d’arte, si riscoprono indissolubilmente legati alla complessità del nostro presente. Per la prima volta riunite e tradotte in inglese in un’unica pubblicazione, queste conversazioni offrono al lettore una costellazione unica di autori e temi per pensare il cinema a partire dal nostro presente e viceversa. 24 conversations originally published by Fata Morgana with important scholars and artists who have intended cinema as a place of thought and a form of life. A unique constellation of authors and themes in which cinema and the image, more than any other art form, are inextricably intertwined with the complexity of the contemporary. Edited and translated into English for the first time, these conversations offer to the reader a unique constellation of authors and themes, which leads one to reconsider cinema starting from our present and vice versa. Roberto De Gaetano is full professor of Filmology at the University of Calabria (Italy). He is the author of important books on the relationship between cinema and philosophy (Il cinema secondo Gilles Deleuze, Bulzoni, 1996; Il visibile cinematografico, Bulzoni, 2002; La potenza delle immagini, Ets, 2012), cinema and the contemporary (L’immagine contemporanea. Cinema e mondo presente, Marsilio, 2010), and authors and forms of Italian cinema (Il corpo e la maschera. Il grottesco nel cinema italiano, Bulzoni, 1999; Nanni Moretti. Lo smarrimento del presente, Pellegrini, 2015). He is the Editor of the three-volume edition Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2014-2016), and the Editor in Chief of Fata Morgana. Francesco Ceraolo (PhD, Qmul) teaches Film Analysis and Theater and Opera at the University of Calabria (Italy). His work mainly focuses on the relationship between philosophy, performing and visual arts. Among his recent publications are Verso un'estetica della totalità. Una lettura critico-filosofica del pensiero di Richard Wagner (Mimesis, 2013) and the chapter entitled ‘Opera’ in Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2015). He has edited and translated into Italian Alain Badiou’s writings on the theater (Rapsodia per il teatro. Arte, politica, evento, Pellegrini, 2015). In 2015 he was awarded the ‘Arthur Rubinstein – A Life In Music’ Prize by Teatro La Fenice for his musicological scholarship. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Fata Morgana.

Art, Agency and Living Presence

Author : Caroline van Eck
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2015-03-10
Category : Art
ISBN : 9783110345568

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Art, Agency and Living Presence by Caroline van Eck Pdf

Throughout history, and all over the world, viewers have treated works of art as if they are living beings: speaking to them, falling in love with them, kissing or beating them. Although over the past 20 years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses, drawing on the work of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell.

The Warburgs

Author : Ron Chernow
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 882 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2016-11-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780525431831

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The Warburgs by Ron Chernow Pdf

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning bestselling author of Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical, comes this definitive biography of the Warburgs, one of the great German-Jewish banking families of the twentieth century. Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy. Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.