Pathos at Oraibi: What Warburg Did Not See

On May 1, 1896 Aby Warburg saw the Hemis Kachina dance at Oraibi, the ancient and remote Hopi pueblo on Third Mesa in the was below Tuba City in Arizona. Though Shongopovi was settled a little earlier, twelfth-century Oraibi is probably the oldest continuously inhabited place in the United States. The date on which Warburg saw the dance is not often recorded in the voluminous literature on the lecture he gave on the Serpent Ritual some twenty- seven years later – and this is just the least of the many strange omissions and distortions in the history of what has become a landmark in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. Warburg’s lecture is fraught with the tension between between paganism and classical culture, and with the implications of this tension for the human soul. It is unresolved in its view of the psychic and cultural resonance of the rational versus the irrational. It is full of the then modish preoccupation with the relations between Athens and Alexandria -- that is, between classical civilization and its roots in something wilder and less restrained. Underneath it all lies Warburg’s anxiety about what he felt to be the tragic split between man’s need for distance and his lost and irrecoverable ability to control nature directly

Choirs of Praise: Some Aspects of Action Understanding in Fifteenth-Century Painting and Sculpture

Did Jan van Eyck go to Italy? This is an old question about Van Eyck, and raises a number of important issues about his art. I do not intend to settle it here. Rather, I ask it because it casts into high relief a central issue in the ways we think about responses to art, and, more specifically, about the relations between observation and action imitation

Johannes Molanus on Provocative Paintings: "De Historia Sanctarum Imaginum et Picturarum," Book II, Chapter 42

The first ecclesiastical writer to take the Tridentine decrees relating to the use and abuse of religious imagery as a starting point for an analysis of the question of nudity in art was Johannes Molanus, in his De Picturis et Imaginibus Sacris (Louvain 1570). It is true that Gilio da Fabriano had already published his Dialogo degli Errori de' Pittori in 1564,t~he year after the final session of the Council of Trent, but he does not mention its decrees concerning art at all, and the problem of nudity is dealt with only in the specific context of Michelangelo's Last J~dgment.~Molanus, on the other hand, makes the first generalized investigation of this problem in the chapter headed 'In picturis cavendum esse quidquid ad libidinem provocat'

The Power of Wood and Stone; The Taliban Is Not the First to Fear the Mysterious Lure of Art

Essay on the demolition of the two colossal Buddhas of Bamian, Afghanistan

Feelings on Faces. From Physiognomics to Neuroscience

Of all the ways in which the outward signs of the body express inner feeling, physiognomy and gesture have been the most studied. In this essay, I will deal with physiognomy and its related form, pathognomy. Gesture must wait for another occasion. Both physiognomy and the study of gesture, at least in their traditional and historical forms, have generally been taken as the very type of disciplines that have ignored the pressures of culture and difference, failing to take into account the social construction both of interiority and of its outward manifestations. It is true that physiognomy and pathognomy, like the study of gesture, sought to establish fixed correlations between expression and emotion, when in fact the relationship between particular expressions and specific emotions are very oft en the product of cultural and contextual constraints, pressures, and circumstance. Or so the usual insistence runs. Hence, for example, the continuing high scepticism about projects like Charles Le Brun's and the complete disdain of the physiognomic projects of Lavater. Even Darwin's great work on the subject has only recently begun to return to favor (though only hesitantly amongst academic humanists), despite its clear articulation of the role of cultural constraints on emotional expression) In what follows, I will set out how, contrary to conventional views of the neurosciences as reductionist, the neuroscience of facial expression and its emotional recognition does not in fact impugn this role, but substantially enhances it. My aim is to suggest that the role of culture in the construction of both feeling and expression is considerably more complex than current views of cultural determinism seem to allow