I

Writing from the sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, February 1924, Aby Warburg expressed to his wife Mary the regret he felt over a decision two of his younger colleagues had made back at the Bibliothek Warburg.London, The Warburg Institute Archive, WIA GC/37292, Warburg, Aby to Warburg, Mary 04/02/1924. He had received a copy of Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl’s study of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I (Fig. 1), a book completed just four years after his own interpretation of the engraving that would be included in the posthumously published The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (1932). What had disappointed Warburg was that Panofsky and Saxl – the former having written the majority of the manuscript – had failed to include in their study his own research on the melancholic condition in the literary sources of Faust and Hamlet.See Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky and Dürer’s Melencolia I’, Schifanoia: notizie dell'istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, 48/49 1/2, 2015, pp. 27–44. This led him to admit to Mary that, whilst he found the newly published material ‘extremely valuable’, it was still his belief that ‘the “rhythm” of the book leads from the prison of apathy to despair and mysticism’.London, The Warburg Institute Archive, WIA GC/37292, Warburg, Aby to Warburg, Mary 04/02/1924.

Warburg’s letter reminds us that these scholars, even whilst they worked together and shared many interests, did not share a common approach. As Michael Podro put it, ‘In no writer was the conception of art as like knowledge so elaborately developed as by Panofsky; in no writer had art been so integrated into the sense of social behaviour as by Warburg’.Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 205. That this comment happens to refer to the example of Melencolia – alluding to the conclusions Panofsky came to in his later monograph on Dürer – emphasises how this enigmatic print had found its way to the core of both scholars’ intellectual pursuits. It is in their analysis of this image, Podro suggests, that one can see most clearly how their ‘commitment to the ideal of art as the mind’s pursuit of freedom, could hardly have been realised in more different ways’.Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 205. Whilst the specifics of both Warburg’s and Panofsky’s research on Melencolia are too complex to elaborate upon here, what seems to be most important to acknowledge is their different conceptions and use of the iconographical/iconological method.

This short essay attempts to compare Warburg’s and Panofsky’s approach to the work of art by setting their views off against those of another scholar – of our own time – Enzo Traverso, whose interest in images has informed much of his thinking as an intellectual historian about the relationships between history, memory and politics. Whilst it was against the backdrop of the end of World War I and the formation of the pioneering Hamburg School that Warburg and Panofsky developed their ideas in the fields of cultural and art history, Traverso’s work has taken shape in the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall and is characterised by his adoption of an anti-Stalinist ‘open’ Marxism which he shares with other European Trotskyist intellectuals of the post-war generations.See Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School, Chicago, 2013; Esther Leslie, ‘Revolutionary Potential and Walter Benjamin: A Postwar Reception History’, in: Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (Eds.) Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Leiden and Boston, 2008, pp. 553–554. Despite the differences between them and the contexts in which they worked, all three figures have turned to Dürer’s Melencolia. The aim here then, is to make a start of following the thread that draws Warburg’s and Panofsky’s interest in the engraving together with Traverso’s, to discuss – in a preliminary and by no means complete way – how they have thought with this image, on the one hand, to develop the practice of art history and, on the other, to use that art historical scholarship  to serve different, more explicitly political, ends. It is to attempt to capture the movement of Melencolia as it passes from one set of problematics to another – from issues of interpretation to issues of politics – whilst forever orbiting around the central question of modernity.

II

In 1901, Alois Riegl, epitomising the scientifically inspired formalism of the Vienna School, positioned iconography as a ‘secondary field’, suggesting that its ‘overestimation’ had caused art historical literature to exhaust itself.Alois Riegl, ‘From Late Roman Art Industry’, in: E. C. Fernie (Ed.), Art history and its Methods: A Critical Anthology, London, 1995, p. 121. Warburg and his circle, however, would insist on the importance of a relationship between form and content. They shared a common ambition to develop an anti-formalist model that would prove to liberate art history from its disciplinary boundaries and position it within the realm of cultural and intellectual history. Somewhat paradoxically, however, Warburg’s and Panofsky’s development of this new iconographical model appears to be, in part, where their differing interpretations take shape and thus where – with this method pioneered by the one and arguably taken to its highest form by the other – one must begin in order to understand some of the later interpretations of Dürer’s engraving. As one of these more recent insights will suggest, this exchange, characterised by continuity and change, has lost none of its relevance or urgency. 

Both Warburg’s and Panofsky’s studies developed out of Karl Giehlow’s 1903–04 essays, on the same image, which had revealed Dürer’s intention to personify melancholy under the influence of Saturn and had, for the first time, connected the artist’s print with the theories of, and therapies for, the melancholic temperament advocated by Marsillio Ficino in his De vita libri tres (1480–1489).Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky and Dürer’s Melencolia I’, Schifanoia: notizie dell'istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, 48/49 1/2, 2015, pp. 28–30. Both agreed that the famous winged figure surrounded by mathematical instruments was an allegory for the melancholic condition – moving between states of crippling apathy and creative genius – and that she represented the efforts of reason to overcome irrational forces. However, where Warburg saw in Dürer’s depiction of this movement a transformative element at work – a ‘liberation of the fear of Saturn’ through ‘spiritualisation’ – Panofsky took the artist to have represented this movement as one of entrapment, with melancholy being a characteristic of ‘those who cannot extend their thoughts beyond the limits of space’.Warburg quoted in Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky and Dürer’s Melencolia I’, Schifanoia: notizie dell'istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, 48/49 1/2, 2015, p. 29; Panofsky quoted in Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 205. See Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, translated by David Britt, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 644; Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton, 1955, p. 170. In recasting Giehlow’s findings, Warburg had found optimism within Dürer’s iconography, an enabling quality. Panofsky, however, had perceived an image telling of human limitation and the defeat of reason.

Identifying the site of these different interpretations around the nature of the melancholic spirit personified by Dürer involves returning to Warburg’s letter. As Claudia Wedepohl explains, Warburg’s approach towards an understanding of the print took the form of ‘an exploration and discussion of two quintessentially melancholic types: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Goethe’s Faust’.Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky and Dürer’s Melencolia I’, Schifanoia: notizie dell'istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, 48/49 1/2, 2015, p. 32. For Warburg, the creation of these literary figures testified to the afterlife, or Nachleben, of the classical tradition into this period, a phenomenon so crucial to his overall project. His ideas on the melancholic temperament’s dual nature and ‘the sublimation of the dark demon’ in these figures are ones he evidently considered to be some of his most important.London, The Warburg Institute Archive, WIA GC/37292, Warburg, Aby to Warburg, Mary 04/02/1924; Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky and Dürer’s Melencolia I’, Schifanoia: notizie dell'istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, 48/49 1/2, 2015, pp. 34–35. There is little doubt, it seems, that Warburg’s attention to such issues was also associated with his own unstable condition. But it is precisely this spiritualised transformation he affirms which he found lacking in his colleagues’ co-written study on Melencolia.

Warburg’s attempts to plumb the depths of a period’s psychological complexion through a unified, historical analysis of images were, as Craig Harbison notes, largely ignored by Panofsky, for whom ‘the work of art…was to be seen as an elite, intellectual and aesthetic form of communication’.Craig Harbison, Craig, ‘Iconography and Iconology’, in: Bernhard Ridderbos et al (Eds.), Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception, and Research, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 387. Indeed, where Warburg had approached the ambiguity of melancholy portrayed by Dürer by transferring it into representative ‘types’, Panofsky and Saxl’s analysis draws its conclusions on the basis of a systematic account of the artist’s use of ‘set pieces’, various motifs (‘keys and purse, head on hand’ etc.), the individual iconographic tradition associated with them and the manner in which they were constructed (Fig. 2).Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky and Dürer’s Melencolia I’, Schifanoia: notizie dell'istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, 48/49 1/2, 2015, p. 39; Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art, London, 1964, pp. 317–318. This method prefigured that which he would fully develop by his later study on Dürer, namely his three levels of interpretation, the third of which, iconology, implying an unlocking of the artwork’s ‘intrinsic meaning or content’ composed of ‘symbolical’ values.Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in The Art of The Renaissance, Colorado, 1972, pp. 7–8. Iconology, for Panofsky, did not involve an understanding based on the dynamic between word and image, theme and form, as it had for Warburg. Rather it meant locating the theoretical basis for the symbols he identified beyond the ‘conventional subject matter’ of stories and allegories.Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in The Art of The Renaissance, Colorado, 1972, p. 6. Panofsky’s rationalisation of Dürer’s creativity, through this formulaic approach, was far from what his older colleague had considered as revealing an inner conflict of the human condition that had been handed down from antiquity through the process of Pathosformel.Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Maryland, 2013, pp. 33–36. Warburg had perceived a psychological pattern in Hamlet and Faust’s behaviour that attested to the memory of the humanist spirit’s ‘struggle to cast off pagan cosmological fatalism’, resulting in ‘the spirit of Saturn neutralised by the individual thinking creature’ that Dürer depicted in his engraving.Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky and Dürer’s Melencolia I’, Schifanoia: notizie dell'istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara, 48/49 1/2, 2015, p. 35; Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, translated by David Britt, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 645. Yet, for Panofsky, what Dürer deduced, even in just the angel’s clenched fist, was that a ‘symptom of disease’ had been reimagined and now ‘symbolise[d] the fanatical concentration of a mind which has truly grasped a problem, but which at the same moment feels itself incapable either of solving or of dismissing it’ (Fig. 3).Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art, London, 1964, p. 319.

III

The delayed second printing in 1964 of Panofsky and Saxl’s study, with its additional contribution by Raymond Klibansky, firmly situated the text as the seminal publication on the topic. Consequently, few later interpretations of Dürer’s masterwork fail to acknowledge the authority of its authors, Panofsky in particular. However, as T. J. Clark’s remark in 1974 (echoing Rigel’s earlier one) regarding the work of these ‘really important art historians’ being reduced to mere ‘methods’ within the modern discipline – resulting in ‘dreary professional literature’ – would suggest, the upheaval of methodological approaches was underway.T. J. Clark, ‘The Conditions of Artistic Creation’, Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, pp. 561–562. This saw some later readings of Melencolia demonstrating a loss of faith in the validity of the iconographical model. Joseph Leo Koerner proposed that the search for underlying unity of meaning, behind the apparent chaos of symbols, was a futile one. Indeed, for Koerner, Dürer created his print to be deliberately obscure: ‘Instead of mediating a meaning Melencolia seems designed to generate multiple and contradictory readings’.Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 1993, p. 23. The image, far from being a puzzle to be solved, resists a final explanation, and yet the act of interpretation still promotes self-reflection, becomes ‘an occasion for thought’.Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 1993, p. 23. Whilst Koerner appears to follow Panofsky and Saxl’s belief in the print as being something of a self-portrait, he questions the idea – one taken, it seems, as near fact by Warburg and Panofsky – of the humanist Renaissance breaking free of the Middle Ages, its moving from darkness into light, to instead situate it firmly within the tumultuous context of the approaching Reformation.

Another more recent interpretation, however, sees Dürer’s engraving go from an artist’s self-portrait of the early sixteenth century to an image representative of a late twentieth-century epistemo-political framework. In Left-Wing Melancholia, Enzo Traverso takes the defining cesura of 1989 as a central thread around which he weaves his investigation into the current of melancholia that runs through left-wing culture. As the Berlin Wall fell, a new historical consciousness bound socialism’s past to a reductive narrative representative of totalitarianism and, for the left, following the failure of past attempts, this meant the need to reinvent the revolutionary project.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, pp. 2–3. Neoliberalism’s emergence as a post-totalitarian ideology – revolving around the market and competition – had coincided with a new world picture without a utopian vision. In a memorial landscape set up to subsume the hopes, struggles and defeats of the vanquished under the weight of the remembrance of the victim, Traverso explains, memory ceased to appear strategically within projections of the future as it had within the traditional framework of Marxism.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, p. 10; p. 58. For Traverso, Dürer’s Melencolia appears as the defining image of this period, something its haunting presence throughout the book demonstrates. Drawing first on the debate between the scholars of the Warburg circle and then on Lucien Goldmann – who had ‘embodied a link between the classical tradition of melancholy and left culture’ in his 1956 study of ‘the tragic vision’, The Hidden God – Traverso suggests that ‘Dürer’s engraving could allegorise both the crisis of Marxism and left melancholy insofar as the defeat of the revolutions of the twentieth century refutes the old teleological vision positing socialism as the end of history’.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, pp. 41–42. Thus, the melancholic spirit in this engraving, understood as disclosing the limits of knowledge is, for Traverso, the same as that which arises with the awareness that the ‘conception of socialism as science’ had failed.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, p. 42. Nevertheless, it is precisely such introspection that allows for a new dimension of melancholy to come forth.

This melancholy aligns, above all, with the work of Walter Benjamin, whose appropriation of the Warburg scholars’ insights on Melencolia inspired his vision of melancholy, contributed to his reinvigoration of allegory and allowed him to develop his critique of modernity – to reveal the ruins of progress – in Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928).See Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, translated by Howard Eiland, Cambridge, Mass, 2019, pp. 140–164. Traverso’s book shares a similar title with an essay Benjamin wrote in 1930 in which he criticised the left-wing melancholy that manifested itself as a state of acedia in the methodology of historicism and as a political attitude.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, pp. 45–46; see Walter Benjamin, ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’, in: Anton Kaes et al (Eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, California, 1995, pp. 304–306. For Traverso, however, citing an earlier passage of the Trauerspiel study, it is another approach to melancholy, as an ‘epistemological posture’, that enabled Benjamin to retrieve and invest with new meaning that which had become lost or forgotten within a victor’s history.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, p. 48. Thus, the former emphasises his understanding of melancholy as a ‘memory and awareness of the potentialities of the past: a fidelity to the emancipatory promises of revolution, not to its consequences’.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, p. 52. Clearly aware of Wendy Brown’s critique of left melancholy as a conservative clinging to the ‘formations and formulations of another epoch’ resulting in the betrayal of effective praxis – and having already acknowledged that with the end of communism came ‘the eclipse of utopias’ – Traverso nevertheless reveals the ambition to mobilise melancholy for both the reassessment of socialism’s history and the future of Marxism.Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, boundary 2, 26:3, 1999, p. 25; Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, p. 5. For, by acknowledging socialism’s collapse but refusing to submit to capitalist domination, melancholy could be considered a form of resistance.Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York, 2016, p. 45.

Without abandoning the intellectual and iconographic traditions behind Dürer’s Melencolia I, epitomised by Warburg and Panofsky, but also without limiting himself to them, Traverso manages to reconcile these scholars’ differences. For in the observation that, for the one, the print offered a ‘consoling humanistic message’, whilst for the other, an indication of ‘human frailty and intellectual finiteness’, Traverso proposes another option, one situated between utopia and memory, hope and despair.Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, translated by David Britt, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 644; Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton, 1955, p. 171. Far from letting melancholia obscure his vision or bind him to the frameworks of a former age, he seeks to rediscover the revolutionary element that lies within melancholy and which has the potential not only to confront difficulties but overcome them too. Looking again, is it perhaps this which Dürer wanted us to realise all along in the resolute countenance of his angel?

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