Anthropology of images (Ordinario)

In the introduction to the Mnemosyne Atlas, Aby Warburg observes that “the conscious creation of a distance between the self and the external world is what we might describe as the fundamental act of human civilisation.” This distance is the product of the mediating function exercised by the image in the dialectic between stimulus and response, impulse and action. Warburg thus highlights the biological function and anthropological dimension of images, inaugurating a research programme that brings together art history, aesthetics, and anthropology. The course will be devoted to an analysis of this theoretical nexus through a discussion of the major contemporary anthropological theories of the image. Within this framework, particular attention will be paid to key concepts in aesthetics—such as representation, expression, medium, icon, and the relation between the visible and the invisible—and to the transformations these concepts undergo within anthropological reflection on images. The course will also examine authors who anticipated the development of this line of inquiry, including Aby Warburg himself, Gottfried Semper, Carl Einstein, and Franz Boas, whose contributions proved decisive in shaping an interdisciplinary approach to the study of images.