Renaissance or Baroque: Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin on the Sky

Abstract

“Renaissance” and “Baroque” name, beyond periods or styles in the History of Art, antagonistic ways of conceiving the “origin” of our time. When today the Aby Warburg-Walter Benjamin connection (as it is, for example, understood by Georges Didi-Huberman) continues to be conceptualized as the threshold of the transformations in Art History and Criticism in European culture, these two philosophers of art are forced to coexist and dialogue. In any case, clearly both Warburg and Benjamin elaborated their methodological frameworks out of these two concepts (from Renaissance one, from Baroque the other); concepts that, at least since Heinrich Wölfflin (Renaissance and Baroque, 1888), were already understood a two cultural poles in intimate tension in Modernity. Starting from an inquiry into the ways in which each of these thinkers contemplates the sky, it is possible to discuss what notion of Urerfahrung each of them elaborated. Afterwards, on that basis, it is offered a review of the implications involved in the different conceptions they had over these two categories. Finally, a hypothetical reading of the failed dialogue between them is drawn out.