Ernst Hans Gombrich, Aby Warburg.

The Study of Image by Aby Warburg

Warburg is one of the most inspiring figures in the German tradition of art historiography. Although one of the well-known aspects of Warburg’s intellectual work is its relation to iconology, this article seeks to go beyond the conventional understanding of Warburg to mapping a picture of his “special” view of the image as a whole. To this end, by re-reading the classic Warburg texts and new in...

Pose and Pathosformel in Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas

We look at Aby Warburg’s concept of Pathosformel, the repeatable formula for the expression of emotion, through the depiction of human pose in art. Using crowdsourcing, we annotate 2D human pose in one-third of the panels of Warburg’s atlas of art, and perform some exploratory data analysis. Concentrating only on the relative angles of limbs, we find meaningful clusters of related poses, explor...

Hans Arnold Heilbronn 1908-1975 Hans

A study on the effects of imported engravings on the structure of Farangi-sazi in Safavid’s era based on the views of Ernst Gombrich and Kendall Walton

Persian painting has been influenced by European art since the Safavid era, resulting in a painting style that became known as Farangi-sazi. Although some of the engravings used in the Farangi-Sazi have been identified in recent years, it seems that research has neglected visual distortion caused due to transferring images and printmaking process up to now. Most sources and studies on Farangi-S...

Ernst Mayr, a retrospective.

During the late summer of 1979, Ernst Mayr and I (Figure 1) had finished editing The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology [1]. He knew that I was working on a long essay about Theodosius Dobzhansky and also planning a book about Sewall Wright. From his farm in Wilton, New Hampshire, Ernst handwrote me a letter (Figure 2) from which this excerpt is taken: ‘In your w...