ABY WARBURG IN ERNST GOMBRICH’S EYES: AN EXPERIENCE OF SYMBOLISM AND COMMENTARY
The experience of meditation on works of art, including those belonging in a historical past, is not free of experiencing the circumstances that gave birth to them. These circumstances are, first and foremost, connected with the process of creating a work of art, i.e. with thoughts and feelings of those who made or ordered and used works of art. The questions is, are we really able to perceive what happened in people’s minds in the past or do we need to deal with all kinds of symbolism, starting with visual? The personality and works of the most influential historian and theorist of art AW show that a historian of art copes with the whole system of symbols related to the time of the creation of a monument as well as to more remote times, including prehistorical, archaic epochs ruled by laws which have nothing in common with cultural traditions of modern Europe. In W’s mind, pain caused by the mismatch of the spiritual experiences was aggravated by his Darwinist belief in the evolutionary-biological character of the historical processes. The other great theorist of art, EG, reproduces thoroughly W’s spiritual and conceptual experience in order to neutralize the spiritual tension of the scientific and life heritage of the father of iconology and a brilliant representative of ‘psychohistory’.