Manet, Manebit! Aby Warburg’s “Manet and Italian Antiquity” as psycho-intellectual self-portrait

Abstract

The paper traces the course of Aby Warburg’s researches on the pictorial production of Édouard Manet and images of previous times to present evidence of the effect this work had not only to the theoretical understanding about methodological questions with regards to the historical transit of motives but also in the sense of an autobiographical and psycho-intellectual reflection. Setting forth pictorial relations among the Antiquity, Rafaello Sanzio and Manet plays a central role for Warburg toward building a genealogy of the painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), which besides exploring the problem of the Nachleben der Antike [the afterlife of Antiquity] beyond the fields of the Renaissance and Baroque, opens a way to the expression of human emancipation in Western art. This process ended up on the series of images, Manet und die italienische Antike [Manet and the Italian Antiquity], a work that, apart from indicating Warburg’s identification with the French painter, revealed a self-diagnosis of a maniac-depressive existence.