Edgar Wind

Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand (The Object of Aesthetics and Art History)
Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte (A Contribution toward the Methodology of Art History)
VOLUME 192

The Knowing Eye Sees More. Methodological Milestones on the Road to Art History

In 1922, the philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind submitted his thesis Aesthetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte at the University of Hamburg, where he was doing his doctorate under Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer. Wind analyzed the relationship between the aesthetic encounter with artworks and their theoretical interpretation as a methodological problem. However, he didn’t play the two poles off against each other, as would have been typical at the time. Rather, he was more interested in determining the purview of art history and “theoretically demonstrating the unity of individual and evaluative significance,” as Panofsky noted in his evaluation. For Wind described the methodological transformation of the art-aesthetic object into an art-historical one. Given this train of thought, the text has lost none of its relevance for the present since the knowing eye sees more. The work is now published here for the first time—as the second volume of an Edgar Wind edition (see FUNDUS 174).

Edgar Wind (1900–1971) was a German art historian of the Warburg School. In 1933, he played a major role in rescuing Aby Warburg’s library during the latter’s exile in London, where Wind was also one of the founders and first staff members of the Warburg Institute.

Pablo Schneider (b. 1968) is an art historian and has been the program director for art and science at Deutscher Kunstverlag since 2021.