Summary
Edgar Wind: Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance
Warburg believed that the works of the great Renaissance artists were not mere illustrations, representations whose purpose was exhausted in decorativeness. A work of art should be approached almost like a secret to be discovered, a locked room whose key is hidden somewhere in the details and needs to be found. In the motifs, the choice of characters, the details of the composition, Warburg, and then Vjetar believed, there are hidden (or, rather, deposited) layers of meaning that the artist transferred to the medium from a personal fund of inherited ideas, beliefs and knowledge whose origins go back to the deep past. In search of the key, the art historian must not run away from philology, philosophy, religious studies and other fields. Windo's Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance is a kind of manifesto of such an approach.
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