Warburgian Studies in Australia

Jaynie Anderson

Abstract

Jaynie Anderson, University of Melbourne

My Warburgian journey began as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where two art historians introduced me to Warburg’s writings and to the Institute in London that bears his name: Franz Phillip and Bernard Smith.

Bernard Smith (1916-2011), the first Australian born art historian, wrote a doctoral dissertation at the Warburg Institute on the origins of European art in Australia, under the supervision of Charles Mitchell and Rudolph Wittkower. The outcome was his European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850 (1960), still considered the most influential work produced by an Australian art historian (J. Anderson, Obituary of Bernard Smith, “Australian Academy of the Humanities” 2012, 39-42). Smith was the first to study how the earliest European artists in Australia represented previously unknown flora and fauna.

Franz Phillip (1914-1970) was my mentor in Italian Renaissance art and was one of the last pupils of Julius Von Schlosser, when he was forced to flee Vienna, before completing his thesis on Mannerist art. His fourth-year honours course for the Melbourne Bachelor of Arts introduced us to the methodology of Warburg and his followers, especially Edgar Wind (J. Anderson, Philipp, Franz Adolf (1914–1970), entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Canberra 2000, accessed online 3 January 2023).

After my graduation, Charles Mitchell (1912-1995), by then head of a flourishing department of art history in the United States at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, invited me to undertake a doctoral dissertation, following the recommendation of Bernard Smith. From 1945 to 1960 Mitchell had been on the staff of the Warburg Institute, London, and his teaching at Bryn Mawr was often enlivened with memories of Fritz Saxl and Gertrude Bing, successive directors of the Warburg when he taught there (J. Anderson, ‘Professor Charles Mitchell’, Obituary, “The Independent”, London, 31 October 1995).

I wrote my thesis on Giorgione, under Mitchell’s supervision. I completed the thesis in Oxford as the first woman Rhodes Fellow. I was examined for the position by Edgar Wind, then writing his monograph on Giorgione.

After completing my doctorate, Oxford University Press invited me to edit two volumes of works by Edgar Wind, who believed he was the true heir to Aby Warburg. My truly Warburgian publications are the editions of Wind’s works, two volumes that I edited, that were translated and sold in thousands of copies. The Italian translations were commissioned by Roberto Calasso for the Milanese publishing house, Adelphi, and were particularly successful (Wind [1983] 1992, 1993, 2007, Wind [1986] 2000). 

More recently I have written two articles about Edgar Wind’s writings, based on novel archival material from the Wind Archive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, that have been published in the Edgar Wind Journal, edited by Bernardino Branca and Fabio Tonini (Anderson 2022a, Anderson 2022b).

Jaynie Andersen’s Bibliography: An Update

Editorial boards

• “The Edgar Wind Journal”, Editorial Board (2021-ongoing)
• “La Rivista di Engramma”, International Advisory Board (2022-ongoing)

Edited books

• Wind [1983] 1992, 1993, 2007
  E. Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art, edited by J. Anderson, with a biographical memoir by H. Lloyd-Jones, Oxford 1983; revised edition: Oxford 1993. Italian translation: E. Wind, L’eloquenza dei simboli (e) La Tempesta, a cura di J. Anderson, traduzione di E. Colli, Milano 1992. Spanish translation: E. Wind, La elocuencia de los simbolos. Estudios sobre arte humanista, traducción de L. Millán, editado por J. Anderson, Madrid 1993. Japanese translation: E. Wind, Shinboru no shujigaku, edited by J. Anderson, translated by F. Akiba, T. Katoì, Tokyo 2007.
•  Wind [1986] 2000
  E. Wind, Hume and the Heoric Portrait. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery, edited by J. Anderson, Oxford 1986. Italian translation: E. Wind, Humanitas e ritratto eroico: studi sul linguaggio figurativo del Settecento inglese, a cura di J. Anderson e C. Harrison, traduzione di P. Bertolucci, Milano 2000.

Articles

• Anderson 1984
  J. Anderson, Letter to the Editor about Charles Hope’s review of The Eloquence of Symbols, “The London Review of Books” VI, 5, (April) 1984.
• Anderson 2016
  J. Anderson, Arte e Antropologia nel Novecento australiano: la traduzione warburghiana nell’Australia, in C. Cieri Via, E. Kieve, A. Nova (a cura di), L’Italia e l’arte straniera. La storia dell'arte e le sue frontiere. A cento anni dal X Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell'Arte in Roma (1912). Un bilancio storiografico e una riflessione del presente, Atti del Convegno (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Roma 23-24 novembre 2012), Roma 2016. 
• Anderson 2000
  J. Anderson, Art History’s History in Melbourne: Franz Philipp in correspondence with Arthur Boyd, “Australian and New Zeland Journal of Art” I, 2, 2000, 111-129.
• Aderson 2022a
  J. Anderson, Edgar Wind and Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, an iconographic Enfant Terrible, “The Edgar Wind Journal” 2, (April 2022), 9-37.
• Anderson 2022b
  J. Anderson, ‘Posthumous Reputations’: Edgar Wind’s Rejected Review of Ernst Gombrich’s Biography of Warburg, “The Edgar Wind Journal” 3, (October 2022), 14-35.

Robert Gaston, University of Melbourne

I studied history and art history at the University of Melbourne from the early 1960s until 1967, focusing on Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance History and Renaissance Art History and Theory and Method, the latter a fourth-year seminar taught by a Viennese refugee scholar from the Vienna School, Franz Philipp. That very testing subject exposed us to all of the major scholars from the Vienna School and the Warburg group in Hamburg, as well as the developments in the London Institute after Warburg, and knowing German was essential. Philipp's exile was doubtless a stimulus for him in his approach to teaching his ‘lost’ and lamented art history, but it was a revelation to us students who were at the time being directed towards a very English 'narrative' theorising of method in the history department, based partially on a suspicion of European conceptual investigation. I was strongly attracted to researching the manifestations of Western ideas about artistic genius and wrote my honours thesis on Michelangelo’s poetry and my master’s thesis on 'The concept of artistic skill in Roman and early Christian writers'. This thesis gained me admission to research a PhD at the Warburg Institute in 1967. Otto Kurz had read my MA and was interested in having me as one of his few students, perhaps because I had especially noticed his book of 1934 published with Ernst Kris, Die Legende vom Kúnstler.

My publications have been less directly targeted at Warburg and his followers or the Vienna School than being pieces of research inspired or stimulated by a number of problems of theory that arose for me from the publications of those scholars. The theoretical difficulties emerging from the interactions of image and text within a discipline of art history, common to the entire group of European scholars, have remained fundamental for me. But the more I studied the issues involved in convincingly connecting religious ideas and changing practices among both clergy and laity in the Western tradition, the more I began to doubt that we art historians had a strong enough grasp of the historical evidence. Distinctions drawn between ‘liturgical’ and ‘devotional’ began to seem less convincing. I was surprised but encouraged when I joined a small seminar with Charles Trinkaus while he was a visiting professor and I a fellow at I Tatti in 1981. He was then one of the leading scholars on humanism and religious ideas. He immediately agreed with my apparently shocking belief that we art historians lacked a firm understanding of how the sphere of religion actually functioned in Renaissance Italy. Warburg’s investigation of Sassetti was of course a starting point of thinking that archival research directed at the ecclesiastical libraries surviving in Florence might open up these questions to fresh and profitable analysis. And during the 1970s and 1980s there was an eruption of new research into the Florentine ruling families and the testimony of their archives. This aspect of my work perhaps culminated in the listed volume devoted to San Lorenzo's archive from 2017, where I was able to direct many contributors to unexplored parts of the archive. My research interests in this field began with exploring the transmission of the Patristic issues from my Warburg PhD on Paulinus of Nola and his explanatory early Christian inscriptions for wall decoration into the Counter-Reformation debates on images (Gaston 1973; Gaston 1983a; Gaston 1983b; Gaston 1987; Gaston 1993; Gaston 1995a; Gaston 1996c; Gaston 2005a; Gaston 2009a; Gaston 2013a; Gaston 2014a; Gaston, Waldman 2017; Gaston 2017b; Gaston 2017d; Gaston 2019b).

Then a swerve toward Pirro Ligorio’s problems and antiquarianism: in the late 1970s I discovered the full forty volumes of Ligorio’s unpublished works and in visiting them saw that art historians were with few exceptions (Marcello Fagiolo, Maria Luisa Madonna, Ginette Vagenheim) solely interested in his drawings and ignoring his thousands of dense autograph pages of text. Mandowsky and Mitchell's pioneering Warburg Institute volume of 1963 had been ruthlessly reviewed from the text-edition viewpoint and a fresh approach by art historians was clearly necessary, a solution developed soon by Fagiolo and Madonna with the Edizione Nazionale (Gaston 1988a, Gaston 1988b; related studies: Gaston 1996b; Gaston 2002a; Gaston 2010a; Gaston 2010b; Gaston, Campbell 2010; Gaston 2010c; Gaston 2013; Gaston 2015a; Gaston 2015b; Gaston 2015c; Gaston 2016; Gaston 2019a).

Studies on the reception (or rejection) of classical Iconography: these publications all relate to that central difficulty I encountered especially with Panofsky and Wind. There were plentiful classical and medieval texts accessible to Latin and Greek-reading humanists, but were those texts available in a historically convincing way to artists? Did the fact that a text existed in a published edition somewhere in Europe make it a feasible source for an artist elsewhere? Were ‘artistic advisers’ as frequent as art historians had wanted to believe. Some are certainly fully documented, but what scope was left to artists to devleop their own ideas? (Gaston 1983b; Gaston 1991; Gaston 1995b; Gaston 1995c; Gaston 1998a; Gaston 2000; Gaston 2002b; Gaston 2003 in which I refer to the Census at the WI; Gaston 2005b; Gaston 2012; Gaston 2015d; Gaston 2015e).

Studies on Classical and Christian concepts of decorum and their afterlife. Decorum is one of the most ubiquitous but also controversial group of concepts applied to the visual arts. It played an important role in the value system of both the Vienna School and the Warburg group, having a crucial bearing on how artists were rated within stylistic systems and their estimated cultural value (Gaston 1996a; Gaston 1998b; a more developed version: Gaston 2001b; Gaston 2004; Gaston 2006; Gaston 2009b; Gaston 2014b; Gaston 2014d; Gaston 2017c; Gaston 2019c).

Robert Gaston’s Updated Bibliography

• Gaston 1973
  R. Gaston, Prudentius and Sixteenth-Century Antiquarian Scholarship, “Medievalia et Humanistica” 4, 1973, 161-76.
• Gaston 1983a
  R. Gaston, British Scholars and Travellers in the Roman Catacombs, 1450-1900, “JWCI” 46, 1983, 144-65.
• Gaston 1983b
  R. Gaston, Iconography and Portraiture in Bronzino's Christ in Limbo, “Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz” 27, 1983, 41-72.
• Gaston 1984
  R. Gaston, Pirro Ligorio, the Casino of Pius IV, and Antiques for the Medici: Some new documents, “JWCI” 47, 1984, 205-209.
• Gaston 1987
  R. Gaston, Liturgy and Patronage in San Lorenzo, Florence, 1350-1650, “Patronage, Art, and Society in the Italian Renaissance”, edited by F.W. Kent and P. Simons, Oxford 1987, 111-133.
• Gaston 1988a
  R. Gaston, Pirro Ligorio Artist and Antiquarian, Firenze 1988.
• Gaston 1988b
  R. Gaston, Pirro Ligorio on Rivers and Fountains: Prolegomena to a Study of Naples XIII.B.9, in Gaston 1988a, 159-208.
• Gaston 1991
  R. Gaston, Love’s Sweet Poison: A New Reading of Bronzino’s London Allegory, “I Tatti Studies. Essays in the Renaissance” 4, 1991, 249-288.
• Gaston 1993
  R. Gaston, Iconography and Liturgy at St. Mark’s, “Plainsong and Medieval Music” 2, 2, 1993, 181-187.
• Gaston 1995a
  R. Gaston, The Body in Limbo: Bronzino, the Dante Illustrators, and the Iconography of Inferno IV, “Spunti e Ricerche” XI, 1995, 59-97.
• Gaston 1995b
  R. Gaston, Review of: S. Howard, Antiquity Restored. Essays on the Afterlife of the Antique, Vienna 1990, “International Journal of the Classical Tradition” 2, 2, 1995, 155-157.
• Gaston 1995c
  R. Gaston, Sacred Erotica: The Classical figura in Religious Painting of the Early Cinquecento, “International Journal of the Classical Tradition” 2, 2, 1995, 238-264.
• Gaston 1996a
  R. Gaston, Decorum, entry in The Dictionary of Art, vol. 8, edited by J. Turner, London 1996, 612-614.
• Gaston 1996b
  R. Gaston, Antonio Bosio, Andrea Fulvio, Pirro Ligorio, Onofrio Panvinio, entries in An Encyclopaedia of the History of Classical Archaeology, edited by N.T. de Grummond, Westport 1996, 182, 471-472, 680-682, 851-852. 
• Gaston 1996c
  R. Gaston, Review of: M. Rubin, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge 1992, “The Journal of Ecclesiastical History” 47, 1, 1996, 157-159.
• Gaston 1998a
  R. Gaston, Erwin Panofsky and the Classical Tradition, “International Journal of the Classical Tradition” 4, 4, 1998, 613-623.
• Gaston 1998b
  R. Gaston, Attention and Decorum in Early Christian Prayer, in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, edited by P. Allen, R. Canning, L. Cross, Everton Park 1998, 81-96.
• Gaston 2000
  R. Gaston, Review of: L. Barkan, Unearthing the Past. Archaeology and Aesthetics in Renaissance Culture, New Haven 1999, “The Art Bulletin” 82, 4, 2000, 770-772.
• Gaston 2001a
  R. Gaston, Attention and Decorum in Early Christian Prayer, in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, vol. 1, edited by P. Allen, R. Canning, L. Cross, Everton Park 1998, 81-96.
• Gaston 2001b
  R. Gaston, Attention in Court: Visual decorum in medieval prayer theory and early Italian art, in A. Ladis, S. Zuraw (eds.), Visions of Holiness: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Italy, Athens, Georgia 2001, 137-62.
• Gaston 2002a
  R. Gaston, Merely Antiquarian: Pirro Ligorio and the Critical Tradition of Antiquarian Scholarship, in A. Grieco, F. Superbi Gioffredi (eds.), The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, Firenze 2002, 355-73.
• Gaston 2002b
  R. Gaston, Review of: A. Payne, A. Kuttner, R. Smick (eds.), Antiquity and its Interpreters, Cambridge 2000, “Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians” 61, 1, (March 2002), 120-122.
• Gaston 2003
  R. Gaston, Review of: E. Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo. The Sistine Ceiling, edited by E. Sears with essays by J.W.O. Malley and E. Sears, Oxford 2000, “The Burlington Magazine” (November 2003), 797-798.
• Gaston 2004
  R. Gaston, The Rhetoric of Atrocity: Guercino’s Martyrdom of St Lawrence in Lugano, in D. Marshall (ed.), The Italians. Three Centuries of Italian Art: A Symposium, Firenze 2004, 153-166.
• Gaston 2005a
  R. Gaston, Affective Devotion and the Dominicans: the case of Fra Angelico, in F.W. Kent and C. Zika (eds.), Religious Rituals, Images and Words. The Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Turnhout 2005, 87-117.
• Gaston 2005b
  R. Gaston, Review of: P.A. Emison, Creating the “Divine” Artist. From Dante to Michelangelo, Leiden/Boston 2004, “Renaissance Quarterly” LVIII, 1 (Spring 2005), 197-198.
• Gaston [1991] 2006
  R. Gaston, Love’s Sweet Poison: A New Reading of Bronzino’s London Allegory, “I Tatti Studies. Essays in the Renaissance” 4, 1991, 249-288; reprinted in M.W. Cole (ed.), Sixteenth-Century Italian Art, Oxford 2006, 56-87.
• Gaston 2006
  R. Gaston, Sacred Place and Liturgical Space: Florence’s Renaissance Churches, in J. Paoletti, R. Crum (eds.), Renaissance Florence: A Social History, New York 2006, 331-352, 566-582.
• Gaston 2009a
  R. Gaston, Review of: I. Bianchi, La politica delle immagini nell’età della Controriforma: Gabriele Paleotti teorico e committente, Bologna, 2008, “Renaissance Quarterly” 62, 2009, 932-934.
• Gaston 2009b
  R. Gaston, Review of: P. Jones, Altarpieces and their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni, Aldershot 2008, “Renaissance Quarterly” 62, 2009, 1, 252-253.
• Gaston 2010a
  R. Gaston, La mirabile natura dell’acque correnti: Pirro Ligorio’s view of the waters of the “old” world, in Le civiltà delle acque tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, a cura di A. Calzona, D. Lamberini, Firenze 2010, 657-69.
• Gaston 2010b
  R. Gaston, Pirro Ligorio’s Roman fountains and the concept of the antique: Investigations of the ancient nymphaeum in Cinquecento antiquarian culture, in Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture, edited by K. Christian, D. Drogin, Aldershot 2010, 223-250.
• Gaston 2010c
  R. Gaston, Review of: A. Nagel and C.S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York 2010, “Renaissance Quarterly” 63, 4 (Winter 2010), 1374-1377.
• Gaston 2012
  R. Gaston, Peeling the Onion: Bronzino’s In lode della Cipolla and vernacular learning in the Cinquecento, in Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art & Cultural Practice, edited by A.E. Sanger, S.T. Kulbrandstad Walker, Ashgate 2012, 93-108.
• Gaston 2013a
  R. Gaston, How Words Control Images: The Rhetoric of Decorum in Counter-Reformation Italy, in M.B. Hall, T.E. Cooper (eds.), The Sensuous and the Curch: Re-encountering the Counter-Reformation, New York 2013, 74-90.
• Gaston 2013b
  R. Gaston, Vituperation and Revenge: Giorgio Vasari and the Reputation of Pirro Ligorio, Firenze 2013, 466-471.
• Gaston 2014a
  R. Gaston, Souls in Limbo: visualizing the disembodied, in La festa delle arti: Studi in onore di Marcello Fagiolo, a cura di V. Cazzato, S. Roberto, M. Bevilacqua (eds.), Roma 2014, 266-269.
• Gaston 2014b
  R. Gaston, Vasari and the Rhetoric of Decorum, in A Research Companion to Vasari, edited by D. Cast, Ashgate 2014, 245-260.
• Gaston 2014c
  R. Gaston, Review of: S. Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance. The Legacy of the Natural History, New Haven/London 2013, “Renaissance Quarterly” 67, 1 (Spring 2014), 205-207.
• Gaston 2014d
  R. Gaston, Review of: F. de Hollanda, On Antique Painting, translated by A. Sedwick Wohl, University Park 2013; G.P. Lomazzo, Idea of the Temple of Painting, edited by J.J. Chai, University Park 2013, “Renaissance Quarterly” 67,3 (Fall 2014), 945-948.
• Gaston 2015a
  R. Gaston, Piranesi and Pirro Ligorio: the vernacular antiquarian imagination, in K. Stone, G. Vaughan (eds.), The Piranesi Effect, Sydney 2015, 200-211.
• Gaston 2015b
  R. Gaston, Pirro Ligorio, Libro dei Fiumi e dei Fonti antichi: Napoli. Biblioteca Nazionale, codice B.9, Roma 2015.
• Gaston 2015c
  R. Gaston, What I wanted was concepts. Review of: P. Mack and R. Williams (eds.), Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words, Ashgate 2015, “Journal of Art Historiography”, (December 2015), 1-25.
• Gaston 2015d
  R. Gaston, Review of: M. Cole, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure, New Haven/London 2014, “CAA Online Reviews”, (September 10), 2015.
• Gaston 2015e
  R. Gaston, Review of: S. Cohen, Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art, Leiden 2014, “Renaissance Quarterly” 68, 2, 2015, 629-631.
• Gaston 2016
  R. Gaston, “My greatest debt”. Bernard Smith, the Warburg Institute, and the evolution of European Vision, in The Legacies of Bernard Smith, edited by J. Anderson, C. Marshall, A. Yip, Sydney 2016, 39-54.
• Gaston 2017a
  R. Gaston, Souls in Limbo: visualizing the disembodied, in La festa delle arti: Studi in onore di Marcello Fagiolo, a cura di V. Cazzato, S. Roberto, M. Bevilacqua (eds.), Roma 2014, 266-269.
• Gaston 2017b
  R. Gaston, Introduction in Gaston, Waldman 2017, 1-13. 
• Gaston 2017c
  R. Gaston, Paradigm hunting: architectural and argumentational decorum in Marvin Trachtenberg’s research, “Journal of Art Historiography” 17, (December 2017), 1-28.
• Gaston 2017d
  R. Gaston, A Parish Church and its Community: changing perspectives for research in San Lorenzo’s archive, in Gaston, Waldman 2017, 14-39.
• Gaston 2019a
   R. Gaston, Pirro Ligorio’s Antiquarian Philology, in G. Vagenheim and F. Loffredo (eds.), The Worlds of Pirro Ligorio, Leiden 2019, 25-38.
• Gaston 2019b
  R. Gaston, Review of: D.L. Sadler, Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith, Leiden 2018, “Renaissance Quarterly”, 2019, 509. 
• Gaston 2019c
  R. Gaston, Review of: P. D’Angelo, Sprezzatura: Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp, New York 2018, “Renaissance Quarterly”, 2019, 272.
• Gaston 2020
  R. Gaston, “Our befores and our afters”: another antipodean perspective on Bernard Smith? Review of: Antipodean Perspective. Selected Writings of Bernard Smith, edited by R. Butler and S. Palmer, Melbourne 2020, 1-29.
• Gaston, Campbell 2010
  R. Gaston, I. Campbell, Pirro Ligorio and two columna caelata drawings at Windsor Castle, “Papers of the British School at Rome” 78, 2010, 265-287.
• Gaston, Waldman 2017
  R. Gaston, L.A. Waldman (eds.), San Lorenzo: A Florentine Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2017. 

Charles Green, University of Melbourne. Updated Bibliography related to Warburgian Studies 

Books

• Green 2001
  C. Green, The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Minneapolis 2001. 
• Green 2009
  C. Green, The atlas effect: constraint, freedom and the circulation of images, in Crossing cultures: conflict, migration and convergence, Proceedings of the 32nd CIHA Conference, edited by J. Anderson, Melbourne 2009, 971-975. 

Articles

• Green 2008
  C. Green, The Memory Effect: Anachronism, Time and Motion, “Third Text” 22/6, n. 95, (November 2008), 681-698.
• Green, Brown, 2002
  C. Green, L. Brown, Robert Smithson’s Ghost in 1920s Hamburg: Reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a Non-Site, “Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation” 18/2, (June 2002), 167-181.

English abstract

In this contribution, edited by Jaynie Anderson, the history Australian studies about Warburg and his legacy are summarised by the intellectual and scientific history of the three most important and influential scholars in this field: Jaynie Anderson, Robert Gaston and Charles Green.

keywords | Aby Warburg; Edgar Wind; Erwin Panofsky; Jaynie Anderson; Robert Gaston; Charles Green; Australia.

Per citare questo articolo / To cite this article: J. Anderson, Warburgian Studies in Australia, “La Rivista di Engramma” n. 199, febbraio 2023, pp. 113-124 | PDF of the article