Edgar Wind

An exploration of philosophical and mystical sources of iconography in Renaissance art.

Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance

Will works of the imagination ever regain the power they once had to challenge and mould society and the individual? This was the question posed by Edgar Wind's influential Reith Lectures delivered in 1960 and later expanded into his book Art and Anarchy. The book examines the various forces that have fashioned the modern view of the art, from mechanization and fear of intellect to connoisseurship and--perhaps the fundamental weakness of our age--the dispassionate acceptance of art. In the course of his discussion, Wind surveyed a wide range of topics in the history of painting, literature, music, and the plastic arts from the Renaissance to modern times.

Art and Anarchy

John W. O'Malley

Former Professor of the History of Art Edgar Wind

gar Wind

Elizabeth Sears

Edgar Wind (1900-1971), German-born art historian, cultural historian, and philosopher, emerges as one of the most brilliant thinkers of his remarkable generation. A student of Panofsky and Cassirer in Hamburg, he was profoundly influenced by the thought of C. S. Peirce and, more especially,Aby Warburg, whom he came to know in the two years before Warburg's death in 1929. Teaching in England and the United States, Wind would do much to promote an interpretive art history crossing disciplinary boundaries. This richly illustrated volume collects Wind's published articles and his extensive unpublished writings on Michelangelo, the latter never before available. His interpretation of the Sistine Ceiling as a typological programme, its Old Testament scenes adumbrating New Testament events, stands as aclassic demonstration of the complex relationships possible between art and ideas. The volume opens with an introduction to Wind's art-historical work by Elizabeth Sears and a survey of recent accomplishments in the field of Renaissance theology by John W. O'Malley, Professor of Church History,Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edgar Wind

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