It took exactly 70 years between the death of Aby Warburg in 1929 and the full publication in English of his oeuvre “The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity” on 9/9/1999 (!) by Getty Publications, effectively delivering his seminal thought from the confines of purely academic research.
Readers familiar with my theory of the “70-year itch” will recognise in the recent rediscovery of the unique mind of Aby Warburg a typical example of a precocious idea the time of which has finally come – 70 years after its first conception.
Warburg had an initial intuition that the history of culture was becoming too atomised, too segregated into mutually exclusive disciplines – too formal and too formalistic. In this short multi-part article, I would like to catalyse a reflection about the context that makes this intuition relevant again, and question what would Warburg’s project be if he were alive today. This will obviously be an excuse to introduce a few asides and to smudge some disciplinary boundaries of our own.