Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment in the Italian Renaissance

This historiographic thesis analyses Edgar Wind’s lifelong published and unpublished interdisciplinary studies on the Cultural History and Art History of the Italian Renaissance. This thesis focuses with a particular attention on Wind’s Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo papers. This is done by constantly bearing in mind the role played by his theoretical framework, primarily based upon the related notions of the ‘embodiment’ of metaphysics into the imagery of the Renaissance, and of the ‘symbolic function’ of images. ‘Embodiment’ and ‘symbolic function’ were Wind’s personal contribution to Twentieth Century Philosophy of Science and Art Theory. However, Wind’s 1938 letter to Frances Yates notion of the ‘allegorical as mystical’ approach to Christianity during the Italian Renaissance—one of the primary influences on the renewed interest in paganism—is also very important for understanding his interpretation of the Renaissance’s ‘Spiritual World’. Like Warburg, Wind saw in the Renaissance’s ‘Spiritual World’ an expression of the ‘Afterlife of Antiquity’ (Nachleben der Antike). Like Nietzsche and Warburg, Wind saw in the art and culture of the Renaissance an attempt of ‘Transvaluation’ (Umwertung aller Werte) of moral values. The ‘allegorical as mystical’ approach to Christianity is of the essence in order to understand the connections Wind drew between the spiritual world of the age of Pope Julius II and Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s imagery in the Vatican frescoes, or Bruno’s and Leonardo’s relationship with the esoteric culture of the Renaissance. Across his Renaissance studies, Wind interprets the Italian Renaissance as an attempt to find a balance or equilibrium between ‘the essential forces of the human mind and its history’. In striving to perceive these ‘essential forces’, Wind recognises the presence, in the ‘history of the European tradition’, of a ‘dialectical’ tension between what Nietzsche identified as the ‘Apollonian’ and the ‘Dionysian’ psychological forces which drive the human experience. To put it in Warburg’s words, this clash is between ‘Athens and Alexandria’, or ‘Logos’ and ‘Magic’, that is, opposing rational and irrational stances coexisting in Renaissance art and culture. In Warburg’s and Nietzsche’s footsteps, Wind made the search for these ‘essential forces’ the purpose of his life.