Antiquity Unleashed

The Hamburg banker's son Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was one of the most influential art historians and cultural theorists of the 20th century. His life's work was devoted to tracing antique formulas of representation in the depiction of human passions in Renaissance art. For this epoch-spanning relationship, he developed the term 'pathos formula' (Pathosformel). In a lecture given in 1905 in the Konzerthaus in Hamburg, focusing on the young Albrecht Durer's Death of Orpheus, Warburg outlined his thoughts in front of the original drawing, which he had borrowed from the rich holdings of the Kunsthalle in order to better illustrate his idea. This drawing, pivotal in the young artist's development as an ambitious response to classical antiquity, was displayed during the lecture alongside a group of engravings and woodcuts which included not only some of Durer's own seminal later prints, such as Melencolia I, but also engravings by Andrea Mantegna which Durer copied in 1494, the same year he d