Abstract
This statement, which is simultaneously naive and arrogant, was made by one of the most famous literary scholars of his century—no less a personage than Ernst Robert Curtius—and it appears in the introduction to his equally famous book European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 1 He even dedicated this book (and one is tempted to regard this as an intended insult) to Aby Warburg, that same Aby Warburg who, already at the beginning of the twentieth century and long before it became fashionable, practiced an integrated form of cultural studies that organized “the rest of the so-called ‘humanities’ around the focal point of pictorial art, thereby creating an overall program of cultural history” and demonstrating the ways in which art is indeed the bearer of thought.2
Literature [… is] the bearer of thought […]; art is not. […] A book is, above all else, a “text. “ One understands it, or one does not understand it. […] One needs a technique in order to unlock [the text]. This [technique] is called philology. Since the field of literary studies deals with texts, it is helpless without philology. […] It is easier for scholars of art. They work with pictures—and photographs. There is nothing incomprehensible there. One must rack one’s brains in order to understand Pindar’s poems; this is not the case with the frieze on the Parthenon. One finds the same relationship between Dante and the cathedrals, etc. The study of images is effortless compared to the study of books.
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Notes
See the introduction in Dagobert Frey, Gotik und Renaissance als Grundlagen der modernen Weltanschauung (Augsburg: Dr. B. Filser, 1929), pp. xvii–xxxi.
On Warburg, see Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984).
William Heckscher, Art and Literature: Studies in Relationship, ed. Egon Verheyen (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1985)
Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis, Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (1938; repr. London: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1966).
Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Schwäbische Federzeichnungen: Studien zur Buchillustration Augsburgs im XV. Jahrhundert (Berlin: W de Gruyter, 1929).
See Loomis and Loomis, Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art; David J.A. Ross, Illustrated Medieval Alexander-Books in Germany and the Netherlands: A Study in Comparative Iconography (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1971)
Chiara Settis-Frugoni, Historia Alexandri elevati pergriphos ad aerem: Originbe, iconografia e fortuna di un tema (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1973)
Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, La legende de Roland dans l’art du Moyen Age (Brussels: Arcade, 1966).
See Otto Pacht, Buchmalerei des Mittelalters: Eine Einführung, ed. Dagmar Thoss and Ulrike Jenni (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1984); see particularly the bibliography in that volume listing all of Pacht ‘s works on book illustration (pp. 214–15).
Compare, for example, Wolfgang Kemp, ed. Der Text des Bildes, Literatur und andere Künste 4 (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1989).
Aby M. Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara,” in Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke in collaboration with Carl Georg Heise (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1979), p. 185 [173–98].
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© 2005 Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel
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Ott, N.H. (2005). Word and Image as a Field of Research: Sound Methodologies or just a Fashionable Trend? A Polemic from a European Perspective. In: Starkey, K., Wenzel, H. (eds) Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05655-9_2
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