About Heroes and Times. Triumph, Decadence and Afterlife of the Heroic Image According to Aby Warburg

Abstract

Aby Warburg devoted much of his ambitious iconological project to the study of the ancient hero and his reappearances throughout the history of images. Although the morphology of the nymph can be thought as an understanding key for his ideas on the Nachleben der Antike, the heroic topic occupied a place in Warburg’s work equivalent to that of the Gradient, reappeared in 15th century images. Warburg studied how the heroic pathos conquered the imagination of the Renaissance and how it managed to consolidate a new cultural sensibility in the representation of triumph, suffering and the good death. In this sense, this paper offers an approach to the heroic figure in Warburg’ thought, by analyzing his ideas on the return of heroes found in his academic writings and in the associations and groupings that he left, as suggested, in the Mnemosyne Atlas.