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Bilderatlas
Mnemosyne
Laura Caon
Rembrandt and his models: light and shade. Thematic journey
through Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
This
montage constitutes a thematic jourrney within the Mnemosyne
Atlas, and presents a transversal reading of plates
30, 37, 45 e 70, 72, 73, 74 placed in relationship with
Warburg’s essay The introduction of the idealising style
of antiquity in the painting of the early Renaissance (1914).
The plates connect works that are in the Bilderatlas,
from the early Florentine Renaissance to Rembrandt,
and develop around four core issues: copy of moderls, light
and shade, interiority and art officiel, and the
Pathosformel of rape.
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P&M
Lorenzo Bonoldi
At the School of Classics: "magnum miraculum est homo"
A brand of fashion knitwear has chosen to enhance the
value of its product by referring to the auctoritas of a well-known
iconographic model (the School of Athens by Rafaello),
and using as its headline a Latin quotation (from De dignitate
hominis by Pico della Mirandola). |
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News
– Classisistic
music. The ‘Renaissance’ of Hasse
(Giacomo Dalla Pietà)
Raffaele Mellace, Johann Adolf Hasse, L’Epos, Palermo
2004
– Hamilton
and Antiquity: chronicle of a meeting
(Lorenzo Bonoldi)
Pierre-François Hugues D’Hancarville, The Complete
Collection of Antiquities from the Cabinet of Sir William
Hamilton, edited by Sebastian Schütze and Madeleine
Gisler-Huwiler, Taschen, Köln 2004
–Variations
of the Nymph
(Daniele Pisani)
Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, Il Saggiatore,
Milano 2004
– Paganism
en grisaille: the "Barberini Plates" on show
in Milan
(Monica Centanni)
Fra Carnevale. Un
artista rinascimentale da Filippo Lippi a Piero della Francesca,
Milano, Pinacoteca di Brera, 13 october 2004 - 9 january 2005.
Exhibition curated by Matteo Ceriana, Keith Christiansen,
Emanuela Daffra, Andrea De Marchi. Catalogue edited by Carlotta
Sembenelli, Edizioni Olivares, Milano 2004 |
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Essays
– Antonella
Sbrilli
Warburg’s memetic mine. Links between
Mneme, memes and flowing hair
The flexibility and wealth of warburghian research accords with
many different contemporary methods of research: Antonella Sbrilli
compares Warburg’s work with a recently founded discipline
memetics. Memetics explores the expression of thoughts,
ideas, figures, and words as the result of the reproductive
strategies of the building blocks of cultural transmission,
similar to genes, called "memes". Cultural transmission
occurs by the selective reproduction of single memes (common
places, ideas, habits) or groups of memes (languages, religions,
styles), battling to reproduce. With origins in the philosophical
branch of genetics derived from the theories of Semon, inventor
of the term "engramma", memetics places the phenomena
of cultural transmission in the framework of evolution, as a
distant relative of Darwinism (its founder is the Darwinian
biologist and zoologist from Oxford University, Richard Dawkins).
According to memetics, a fertile idea will colonise the brain
in which it finds itself, "just like a virus can become
a parasite in the genetic mechanism of a host cell, and expands
by imitation from one mind to another": memetics, therefore,
grafts itself onto the culture of informatics by way of the
analogy between mind/computer and meme/virus.
Memetics makes it possible to re-interpret Warburg’s work in
a modern context: some aspects of the Mnemosyne Atlas can
be seen as the testing ground for the definition of meme. Sbrilli
uses as an example of this definition a modern representation
of physical movement via accessories such as fashions and hairstyles
(to which Warburg dedicated his famous essay on Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus), taken from the computer animated
film Final Fantasy (2001). The makers of the film took
considerable trouble with the realistic rendering of the protagonist,
and developed software to reproduce the movement of each of
the 60,000 hairs on the character’s head: if one thinks of computer
animation as the boundary of contemporary mimesis, flowing
hair continues to be the proof of animated verisimilitude, which
even now, as in the times of Botticelli, attempts to capture
in something living an instance of external motion, as defined
by Warburg. It could be said that flowing hair is a kind of
meme, a unit of cultural transmission that re-emerges as a necessary
characteristic of narrative expression.
– Sergio
Polano
The invasive icon
A study of graphics not produced on
paper, from computer monitors to money dispensers and the mini-screens
of cell phones, reveals a landscape of icons, a figurative display
which has expanded exponentially over the last ten years. The
world of these special images appears to be in rapid and competitive
development; any new visual invention the greater its capacity
of identification, the faster it is replicated the recent
fortune of favicons serves as an example.
However, the widespread world of images is also accompanied
by an unprecedented invasion of words and verbal letters; the
volume of exchanges of e-mail has reached a hyperbolic figure,
and the phenomenon of blogs says much for the power of
words; likewise, sms now outnumber the number of voice comunications
via cell phones.
During recent years, these areas of verbal communication via
electronic and digital systems have seen the rise of strange
repertories of figures derived from alphabet symbols. Signs
of this, for example, are the collections of ascii art and emoticons,
the latter having transmigrated from e-mail to sms. It constitutes
a form of poor and ancient art, linked to typewriting, and characterised
by a necessary expressive synthesis, and resulting in a form
of writing in vertical columns (typical of ideographies), as
though two expressive modes coexist and intersect one horizonatl
and alphabetical, the other orthogonal and figurative. |
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engramma
