Aby Warburg and astral theology

ABSRTACTThis article offers a new reading of Aby Warburg's seminal lecture on “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” in which he deciphered some of the obscure iconography as referring to astrological decans of Egyptian and Indian provenance. The article argues that Warburg recovered the ancient discourse of “astral theology,” of neo-Pythagorean and Platonic provenance, in order to bolster his more general and systematic accounts of the role played by astrological images to bridge myth and science in the Italian Renaissance. Warburg showed that the “survival of antiquity” in early modernity was crucially dependent on the previous “wanderings” of astrological images and cosmological speculations from West to East and back again. My hypothesis is that Warburg understood the Renaissance reception of these “wandering” astrological images as being motivated by a desire to recover astral theology and its attendant astral politics

Art · Theology · Multidisciplinary Warburg-centric Studies · Philosophy