Aby Warburg: From the Interest in Marsilio Ficino to His Own Life and Work

Abstract

The gateway chosen to address Aby Warburg's work in this paper is Marsilio Ficino's astrology, a synthesis of the Neoplatonic worldview and the Ficinian obsession in the search of reconciliation among diverse philosophical currents coexisting in Western culture. This typically Renaissance philosophical cosmovision, with its unitive vocation, manifests in several Warburgian topics: the frescoes of the Schifanoia palace, the renewed devotion to the goddess Fortuna and the resignification of the death of Orpheus in the Renaissance, the analysis of the Serpent’s Ritual in the Pueblo indians, the Atlas Mnemosyne. Through this brief tour, a hypothesis emerged that would explain both Warburg’s fascination with astrology and the schizophrenia that he was diagnosed with. Hypothesis that might also account for the absence, in his works, of general conclusions, the usual purpose of hermeneutic pieces with scientific aspirations.