David Freedberg

Studies in the History and Theory of Response

The Power of Images

"This learned and heavy volume should be placed on the shelves of every art historical library."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books "This is an engaged and passionate work by a writer with powerful convictions about art, images, aesthetics, the art establishment, and especially the discipline of art history. It is animated by an extraordinary erudition."—Arthur C. Danto, The Art Bulletin "Freedberg's ethnographic and historical range is simply stunning. . . . The Power of Images is an extraordinary critical achievement, exhilarating in its polemic against aesthetic orthodoxy, endlessly fascinating in its details. . . . This is a powerful, disturbing book."—T. J. Jackson Lears, Wilson Quarterly "Freedberg helps us to see that one cannot do justice to the images of art unless one recognizes in them the entire range of human responses, from the lowly impulses prevailing in popular imagery to their refinement in the great visions of the ages."—Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

Michael Bracewell

Rochelle Steiner

Three Exhibitions

Glenn Brown

Iconoclasm

Slavoj Žižek

Jean

Walter Siti

Julia Kristeva

Werner Herzog

Jacques Rancière

Roberto Esposito

Francesco Casetti

Marie

Richard Schechner

Paul Schrader

Toni Servillo

Edgar Reitz

Paolo Jedlowski

Yervant Gianikian

Angela Ricci Lucchi

Julio Bressane

Roberto De Gaetano

Georges Didi

Huberman

Luc Nancy

Mario Martone

Francesco Ceraolo

Louis Comolli

Raoul Ruiz

Marco Bellocchio

José Mondzain

Shinya Tsukamoto

Amos Gitai

24 conversazioni apparse su Fata Morgana con grandi figure della contemporaneità, studiosi e artisti che parlano del cinema facendone un luogo del pensiero e una forma di vita. Un viaggio in cui il cinema e l’immagine, più di ogni altra forma d’arte, si riscoprono indissolubilmente legati alla complessità del nostro presente. Per la prima volta riunite e tradotte in inglese in un’unica pubblicazione, queste conversazioni offrono al lettore una costellazione unica di autori e temi per pensare il cinema a partire dal nostro presente e viceversa. 24 conversations originally published by Fata Morgana with important scholars and artists who have intended cinema as a place of thought and a form of life. A unique constellation of authors and themes in which cinema and the image, more than any other art form, are inextricably intertwined with the complexity of the contemporary. Edited and translated into English for the first time, these conversations offer to the reader a unique constellation of authors and themes, which leads one to reconsider cinema starting from our present and vice versa. Roberto De Gaetano is full professor of Filmology at the University of Calabria (Italy). He is the author of important books on the relationship between cinema and philosophy (Il cinema secondo Gilles Deleuze, Bulzoni, 1996; Il visibile cinematografico, Bulzoni, 2002; La potenza delle immagini, Ets, 2012), cinema and the contemporary (L’immagine contemporanea. Cinema e mondo presente, Marsilio, 2010), and authors and forms of Italian cinema (Il corpo e la maschera. Il grottesco nel cinema italiano, Bulzoni, 1999; Nanni Moretti. Lo smarrimento del presente, Pellegrini, 2015). He is the Editor of the three-volume edition Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2014-2016), and the Editor in Chief of Fata Morgana. Francesco Ceraolo (PhD, Qmul) teaches Film Analysis and Theater and Opera at the University of Calabria (Italy). His work mainly focuses on the relationship between philosophy, performing and visual arts. Among his recent publications are Verso un'estetica della totalità. Una lettura critico-filosofica del pensiero di Richard Wagner (Mimesis, 2013) and the chapter entitled ‘Opera’ in Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2015). He has edited and translated into Italian Alain Badiou’s writings on the theater (Rapsodia per il teatro. Arte, politica, evento, Pellegrini, 2015). In 2015 he was awarded the ‘Arthur Rubinstein – A Life In Music’ Prize by Teatro La Fenice for his musicological scholarship. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Fata Morgana.

CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE. Conversations with Fata Morgana

This book was ground-breaking for its time because of Freedberg's insistence on a new? approach to the study of images that focused on writing biographies of particular images which highlighted the historical and locally constructed responses, and what those responses could tell us about the psychology of the human response to images generally, rather than the more "traditional" art-historical aesthetic analysis approach. "Power of Images" is organized thematically with topics such as versimiltude, iconoclasm, and desire played out in front of the eyes of particular representative images. One of best aspects of this book is how clearly Freedberg takes seriously the notion of "presence" in images. The biggest limitation of this book is that it is almost completely bereft of information on non-pre-Enlightenment-European-Christian images. Rather than recusing himself from treating say Thai amulets, Freedberg overextends his conclusions in an unfortunately totalizing metanarrative. To be specific, I disagree with his brief rejoinder aimed at Stanley Tambiah's "Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets," and generally, I think many of Freedberg's conclusions would map poorly onto Tibetan or Japanese sacred statuary. In conclusion, I would still highly recommend this as a first-book for someone who wants to either learn about how to begin thinking about (religious) imagery and our responses to it, or someone who is looking for a wealth of short biographies and references to information on some of the most famous European Christian images.

El viaje de Aby Warburg a Nuevo México es un hito en la biografía del historiador alemán. Son muchos los estudios que han tratado el viaje de una u otra manera, ya sea como objeto de estudio o como elemento colateral de otras cuestiones de su trabajo: si la literatura sobre Warburg es inmensa, la del viaje no se queda a la zaga. Si Warburg ha llegado a ser un tema en la historiografía del arte, el viaje al Southwest de los Estados Unidos se ha convertido, también, en tema específico. Además, a los propios textos que versan sobre el viaje hay que añadir la no menos extensa producción académica en torno a la conferencia sobre el ritual de la serpiente que pronunció en Kreuzlingen, otro tema que alarga el número de trabajos sobre la estancia de Warburg en América hacia un horizonte muy lejano. Warburg no solo fue el creador de una escuela sino que él mismo se ha convertido en objeto de estudio. Sin embargo, son escasísimos aquellos trabajos sobre este tema que han mostrado una actitud crítica hacia el viaje y el encuentro con los indios pueblo. Los estudios de David Freedberg que aquí se presentan, inéditos en castellano, plantean el viaje de Warburg a Nuevo México como nunca antes se había hecho. Si la historiografía de la historia del arte había alabado el acercamiento de Warburg a la antropología, resultado de sus encuentros con los etnólogos del Bureau of American Ethnology que trabajaban en la zona, Freedberg nos abre los ojos sobre el discutible comportamiento antropológico de Warburg con los indios, sobre cómo obtuvo las muñecas kachinas, cómo pudo acceder a los recintos sagrados o cómo consiguió realizar sus fotografías sobre los rituales a los que asistió. Con Freedberg, y empleando una expresión de Walter Benjamin muy adecuada para este contexto, pasamos la historia del viaje a contrapelo, para ver en ese movimiento lo que los discursos sobre el mismo han silenciado o no han mostrado, para vislumbrar la fascinación de Warburg por el far west o para pergeñar una ética para historiadores al amparo del postcolonialismo. En la presente edición se incluyen las fotografías que él mismo tomó y buena parte de su diario personal –testimonios visuales y escritos de sus andanzas– con la intención de contrastar lo que Warburg experimentó y registró con lo que hoy reflexionamos a partir de él.

Las máscaras de Aby Warburg

Joseph Kosuth

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Brooklyn Museum

At the height of the controversy over government funding for "obscene" works of art, internationally renowned conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth created "The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable," an exhibit about censorship. His installation, one of the best-attended, most widely reviewed of the year, juxtaposed works of art from throughout history that had been deemed politically, religiously, or sexually objectionable, with statements about the role of art in society by writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Adolf Hitler, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This handsome book documents the exhibit with twenty-one pages of color and more than a hundred duotone photographs along with a major essay by art historian David Freedberg.

An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum

The Play of the Unmentionable

Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from seventeenth-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes). Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection, and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member Galileo Galilei—whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career—to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils, and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favorite method—visual description-as a mode of scientific classification. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers a crucial episode in the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits, and more.

Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History

The Eye of the Lynx

Jan de Vries

Historians and art historians provide a critique of existing methodologies and an interdisciplinary inquiry into seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture.

Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture

Art in History/History in Art

David Freedberg

About

Books

Join the club