Elisabetta Villari, ABY WARBURG, ANTROPOLOGO DELL’IMMAGINE, 2014

For a long time antiques and art historian has negletcred the contribution of Aby Waarburg. Today he is considered as the one who laid the foundations for an anthropology of the image, a parallel discipline to the history of art, which deals with to outline a wider history of the image as an “anthropological” product and to trace a real history of the gaze. Warburg has revolutionized the traditional framework of these disciplines and the relationship, in the study of the image, between the historical artistic contribution and the anthropological one. The reflection on some central aspects of his research is addressed by A. Pinotti and A. Ducei, while the relationship with the ancient is deepened by B. Cestelli Guidi on the project for setting up the Gipsoteca in the Kunsthalle of Hamburg, which refers to materials unpublished. G. Chiarini deals with the theme of Orpheus, central in the “Bilderatlas”. The interest in the circulation of images between the North and South of Europe and between East and West and the relationship between the clients and the work of art are topics addressed by E. Villari who retraces the studies on tapestries as ” mobile vehicles of iconography “. Closes the volume C. Cieri Via which traces the history of the reception of the relationship between Aby Warburg and anthropology through the studies of the last decades and analyzes some of the crucial points of the anthropology of Warburghian images.