Aby Warburg’s Science of Translation · This paper aims to discuss translation as the driving force of Aby Warburg’s work, in showing how it affects many different aspects of his oeuvre :
from the vocabulary and the legacy of his texts and ideas, to its methodology, and to the form of exposition.
Concerning his method, the attitudes toward translation are caused by Warburg’s openness toward other fields (like anthropology, linguistics, natural sciences, philology, philosophy and psychology), discovering new areas of research in the interspaces between disciplines. This methodology also has a significant impact on his form of exposition : Warburg’s language is a very visual one, both with regard to the terms used (it is full of metaphors and neologisms, like Bilderwanderungen,
Bilderfahrzeuge, Nachleben and Pathosformel) and the way of argumentation, translating the linearity of the linguistic argumentation into the simultaneity of a visual way of thinking. His aim is to build an intertextual field of correspondences, juxtaposing textual and visual sources from different provenance and using translation both in a literal sense and as intermedial translation. The
paper’s main focus will be on intermedial translation, that is on Warburg’s enterprise of building a visual epistemology, translating the concepts and ideas developed in his previous texts into a visual language. At the center of this effort are the Mnemosyne Atlas and a series of conferences and exhibition projects developed from off 1924, collecting photographs under a series of themes, which should serve as orientation in his work. These images are intended as “pathos formulae”, that is as visual condensation of emotions, recurring in different forms throughout spaces and epochs.
The term pathos formula itself is built translating H. Osthoff ’s linguistic theory on the suppletive nature of Indogermanic languages into the history of images, developing a new methodology for art history that we can call as Science of Translation.