Aby Warburg

Introduction

Aby Warburg, born 1866 in Hamburg was a German art historian and cultural theorist. Warburg is credited with establishing iconology as an independent discipline within art history.

Work

After his studies of art history, archaeology and history of religions in Bonn 1886, Warburg moved to Florence to study at the Kunsthistorisches Institut. There, he got interested in applying methods of natural sciences to human sciences, which led to a new methodology, iconology. Warburg created a metaphoric encyclopedia, Mnemosyne Atlas [1]. Although Warburg never finished the Mnemosyne Atlas, it is now digitalized and read all over the world [2].

Iconology and Digital Humanities

Iconology is a model for interpreting the general meaning of a piece of art set in a particular context. It is meant to uncover the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts.

Many projects in the Digital Humanities are related to iconology, which has deeply benefited from the state-of-the-art advances driving the field : massive digitalisation of pictural resources and the share of collections, progress in Machine Learning, and mostly Deep Learning, allow the iconologist to have a a much more comprehensive view over the context of his study, by enabling him to analyse a large corpus of data. As opposed to traditional methods, where it is not reasonable to consider analysing large corpora.

Examples

The Cervantes Project : The Digital Quixote Iconography Collection

The Cervantes Project (CP) is creating a fully accessible, searchable and documented electronic database and digital archive of all the illustrations that form the textual iconography of the Quixote, as permitted by copyright limitations, along with the necessary interfaces and visualization tools to allow for the kind of access and knowledge until now unavailable. We further envision the archive as a research depository to complement the textual and bibliographical electronic resources already present in the CP. This comprehensive archive will allow worldwide electronic access to unique and rare textual and graphic resources by scholars, students and users in general interested in Cervantes work and on the impact and influence of his masterpiece through 400 years from several perspectives: textual, artistic, critical, bibliographical, and historical.[3]