이미지사이언스로서의 아비 바르부르크(Aby Warburg)의 미술사

Abstract

With the increasing recognition of Image's power to shape the way of perceiving and structuring the world, recently the images became the centrale object of the scholarly concern. As a result, Image Science as the interdisciplinary research area came to birth. In this context Art History as a scholarly discipline also began to extend its scope to the Image Science, expanding the research objects to all the image products of humankind. In this new orientation of Art History, 20th-century German scholar Aby Warburg was regarded as a pathfinder and came to be the focus of scholarly interest. Warburg researched the Images not according to the aesthetic criterion but rather in the perspective of cultural anthropology. For him the images are the results of the effort of mankind to solve their basic existential conflict with the nature, in which they are thrown to survive. According to Warburg there are two basic polar dispositions of human mind facing the unknown natural force, namely the rationality and logos on one hand and the affect and mythos on the other hand. The human being oriented themselves in the world antagonistically oscillating between these two poles. Warburg argued that the Image reflected the human way of orientation between these two poles and therefore the images should be regarded as the symptom of the psychosocial development in every historical periods. Therefore Warburg didn't limit his research objects to the fine arts and dealt with all kinds of man-made images seriously. So he proclaimed himself as an image historian instead of art historian. According to Warburg the Classical ancient world provided the later historical periods with the archetypes for the expression of the affect, which he called "Pathosformel". Warburg understood the "Pathosformel" as a engram of ecstatic experience in intensely excited state of mind, which originated in the ancient Dionysian ritual. When the psychical state of given historical period came to be rigid because of the suppression of affect, than the ancient "Pathosformel" provides the energy for the antagonism. In this way the Classical ancient archetypes constantly run in the European image world. But these archetypes get modified and transformed passing through the history, as the original pagan aspects of the intense affect were sublimated into the acceptable form according to the needs of the given historical period. Therefore for Warburg the way how the recalled Pathosfomel is reprocessed and transformed provides an important clue to reconstruct the psychosocial history. In his latter years he invented a new method to present the result of his life long research on the reception and transformation of ancient archetypes as a symptom for the psychosocial state. He produced systematical image atlas, called "Mnemosyne Atlas", which remained unfinished due to his death. The Mnemosyne Atlas consists of 66 boards with more than 1000 montaged images, which encompass all kind of visual symbols including painting, illustration, scientific schematic drawing, news photos and stamps. So it is the history of human psychosocial development pursued not in descriptive written words but in images. Warburg arranged each image and board in such a way that between images and boards the various significant connections of meanings are to be found. In this way Mnemosyne Atlas leads the viewer to an open understanding of history.