Joseph Leo Koerner

Ideas about the thing, not the thing itself: Hans Blumenberg's style

In his lecture on ’Science as a Vocation’, delivered at the university in Munich during its first semester after the First World War, Max Weber discovered in the modem pursuit of knowledge the dimension of vanity.’ The human and natural sciences, Weber argued, no longer fulfill a person within his or her own life. Individuals participate in a science’s ’infinite &dquo;progress&dquo;’ only episodically, their own contribution contingent upon the moment of their arrival at and departure from its histories. Unable themselves to know more than a fraction of even the

Introduction: Warburg's Library and Its Legacy

In this introduction to a Common Knowledge special issue on the Warburg Institute, the authors argue that the Institute remains today—as it has been, in different forms, for almost a century—one of Europes central institutions for the study of cultural history. At once a rich and uniquely organized library, a center for doctoral and postdoctoral research, and a teaching faculty, the Institute was first envisioned by Aby Warburg, a pioneering historian of art and culture from a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. Warburg rejected the traditional view that the classical tradition was a simple, purely rational Greek creation, inherited by modern Europe. He argued that it was as much Mesopotamian as Greek in origin, as at home in the Islamic as in the European world, and as often irrational as rational in its content—and on the basis of this rich vision he devised brilliant new interpretations of medieval and Renaissance symbols and ideas. Warburgs chosen associate Fritz Saxl put his creation on a firm institutional base, first in Hamburg and then, after a narrow escape from the Nazi regime, in London. For all the changes the Institute has undergone over the decades since then, it continues to ask the questions that Warburg was the first to raise and to build on the methods that he created.

Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper

A picture universally recognized, endlessly scrutinized and described, incessantly copied, adapted, lampooned: does Leonardos near-ruined Last Supper still offer anything new to be seen or to be said? This book is a resounding Yes to both questions. With direct perception -- -and with attention paid to the work of earlier scholars and to the criticism embodied in the production of copyists over the past five hundred years -- Leo Steinberg demonstrates that Leonardos mural has been consistently oversimplified. This most thought-out picture in Western art, painted in the 1490s on the north wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, is a marvel of compressed meanings. Its subject is not one arrested moment, but successiveness and duration. It is not only Christs announcement of the forthcoming betrayal, but in equal measure the institution of the Eucharist. More than the spur of the moment animates the disciples, and more than perspective determines their housing. Though Leonardos geometry obeys all rules, it responds as well to Christs action at center, as if in emanation from the prime mover. The picture is simultaneously narrative and sacramental. As its protagonist is two-natured, as the twofold event of this night is both human submission and divine dispensation -- -so the entire picture is shown to have been conceived in duplexity: a sublime pun.Meanwhile, the unending disagreement as to what exactly is represented, what the depicted actions express, how and where this assembly is seated -- -all these still-raging disputes are traced to a single mistaken assumption: that Leonardo intended throughout to be unambiguous and clear, and that any one meaning necessarily rules out every other.As Steinberg reveals an abundance of significant interrelations previously overlooked, Leonardos masterpiece regains the freshness of its initial conception and the power to fascinate.

Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation

Keith Moxey examines woodcut images from the Nuremburg area, arguing that far from being crude representations of popular culture, they in fact represent the means by which the middle and upper classes could disseminate reformed attitudes to a broader audience.