The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Texts & Documents) Hardcover – September 9, 1999

It has been seven decades since the idea of bringing this work to the English-reading public was first broached; I learned German over twenty years ago, among other reasons, because I simply could wait no longer! Thanks to David Britt and the tireless labor of the staff of the Getty Center, the wait has been worth it.I believe Warburg represents not only one of the most gifted thinkers in art history, a true father of the discipline and a vital bridge to its professional incarnation in the 20th century, but also a bridge into the neuroscientific concerns of the early 21rst century, when we are even more attuned to the emotional formulas (Pathosformeln) in the worlds of art, cinema and commercial design.No doubt about it, this work is not for the uninitiated. But patient reading will pay off handsomely! I would suggest first obtaining Ernst Gombrich's intellectual biography (1970/1986) and Richard Woodfield's handy anthology of recent scholarship about Warburg's "projects."

Translating is always, as they say, a labor of love, and yet the eyes of lovers are famous for falsifying their beloved. While we cannot accuse Britt's long awaited and long needed translation of Warburg into English of neglect, unfortunately the very care and attentiveness that he lavishes on the text, and his often overwrought attempt to get at its original meaning, results in almost grotesque distortions, as if, worried about how his beloved might appear under the gaze of his contemporaries, he feels the need to mask his beloved's true virtues with invented conceits. Two examples will suffice: the translation of "ideal" as "ideological," --- as if he were ashamed of Warburg's somewhat naive reference to the transcendental tendencies of the Italian renaissance --- and of "pathos" as "pagan histrionics," as if an American readership would necessarily stumble over this technical term from Aristotle's Poetics.

impeccable