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4 Translating the Symbol: Warburg and Cassirer Beyond Iconology It bears repeating: Mnemosyne is largely divorced from iconology as practiced by Warburg’s chief successors, who turn rather to his earlier work for their methodological inspiration.1 Briefly put, iconology aims to explicate the significance of an individual artwork through the interpretation of the symbolic values attached to compositional or iconographic features. To decipher these contingent features, imbricated as they are in a medieval or humanist culture long since past, great erudition is usually demanded. Yet to grasp next the meaning of the work’s symbolic values, interpretation becomes mostly an intuitive act. This is because iconology tends to regard the individual artwork, its form and its details, as symptomatic of more general tendencies of the period and culture in which it is produced. Indeed, it is this attempt at historical synthesis rather than iconology’s reliance on intuition per se that ultimately distances Warburg from the method he invented. Gombrich, in “Aims and Limits of Iconology,” insists: “Iconology must start with a study of institutions rather than with a study of symbols.”2 The visual symbol , that is, must first undergo an iconographical analysis, where texts and contexts 1. See Peter Schmidt, Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993). 2. Gombrich, “Aims and Limits of Iconology,” 21. Translating the Symbol 111 are adduced to track its possible references; subsequently, though, an iconological “synthesis” is sought that would leave particulars behind. As Panofsky writes in his programmatic essay, “Iconography and Iconology”: “Iconology is the identification of ‘intrinsic meaning or content,’” which is “apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion—qualified by one personality and condensed into one work.”3 To exemplify such meaning, he points to how in “the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries . . . the traditional type of the Nativity with the Virgin Mary reclining in a bed or on a couch was frequently replaced by a new one which shows the Virgin kneeling before the Child in adoration.” In addition to signaling changes in compositional style, this gesture “reveals a new emotional attitude peculiar to the later phases of the Middle Ages.”4 Here, in effect, we see a permutation of one of Warburg’s Pathosformeln cast as evidence of a definitive historical judgment. This contrasts, though, with how panel 43 (fig. 7) of the Atlas juxtaposes Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Shepherds with his brother Benedetto’s Adoration of the Child (ca. 1490), where the Child lies on the Virgin’s lap and is surrounded by various figures whose size, as typical in much medieval art, is symbolically reduced. By showing how two different compositional styles can exist synchronically in the same milieu, even among brothers, Warburg complicates, even frustrates, the kinds of generalizations about styles and periods promoted by iconology. His visual metonymy, in brief, challenges avant la lettre Panofsky’s search for “intrinsic meaning or content,” to say nothing of the narrative of historical progress dear to most forms of Geistesgeschichte. Notably, Panofsky credits his attempts to isolate and therefore fix symbolic meaning to Cassirer’s influence: “In thus conceiving of pure forms, motifs, images, stories and allegories as manifestations of underlying principles, we interpret all these elements as what Ernst Cassirer has called ‘symbolic’ values. . . . The discovery and interpretation of these ‘symbolic’ values (which are often unknown to the artist himself and may even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended to express) is the object of what we may call ‘iconology.’”5 How, then, do the “‘symbolic’ values” prized by Panofsky and Cassirer differ from those discovered by Warburg in Mnemosyne?6 And how do the “discovery and interpretation” 3. Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 30. Iconology aims for “synthesis rather than analysis. And as the correct identification of motifs [or images] is the prerequisite of their correct iconographic analysis , so is the correct analysis of images, stories and allegories the prerequisite of the correct iconological interpretation” (ibid., 32). In the “Introductory” to Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939) (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Panofsky writes: “Iconography is that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter of meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form” (3). 4. Panofsky, “Introductory,” 7. 5. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” 31. 6...

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