본문 바로가기
  • Home

The Survival of Images: Aby Warburg’s Methodological Challenge

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2024, (55), pp.7-36
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History
  • Received : April 18, 2024
  • Accepted : May 28, 2024
  • Published : June 30, 2024

Seung-Chol Shin 1

1강릉원주대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the meaning of ‘the afterlife of antiquity’ in the context of contemporaneity. The afterlife of antiquity refers to the phenomenon in which ancient motifs appear in early Renaissance art. Aby Warburg considered, but did not clearly define this concept or establish a methodology to study it. However, the Warburg Institute took the survival of antiquity as a Hauptproblem for cultural study, and after moving to London, attempted to take a critical approach to the concept by translating the term. In this process, survival is confused with revival, and Georges Didi-Huberman criticizes it as an attempt to establish an objective and chronological art history. According to Didi-Huberman, survival is not a chronological but an anachronistic phenomenon in which images from the past are experienced in the present, thus making art history rather impure. In fact, in Warburg’s manuscript, antiquity is presented as multiple, and survival is described not as a one-time event but as a structural phenomenon that recurs in different times and places. In other words, Warburg’s antiquity is heterochronic, and surviving images confuse the history of art through memory and empathy. The afterlife of images achieves in advance the modern concept of time, nonsynchronous contemporaneity.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.