Image Science as approached by the Georgekreis, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

The project Image Science as approached by the Georgekreis, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton aims at the critical reconstruction of the genesis of modern Image Science and Cultural Studies from the intersection of ideologically antagonistic interdisciplinary work of historians and literary scholars from the Georgekreis (in particular, Friedrich Gundolf, Ernst Kantorowicz and Erich von Kahler) with the work of scientists from diverse academic disciplines in the orbit of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (in particular, Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, and Erwin Panofsky). The project should order the intellectual landscape out of which the history of images and image science and their respective offshoots in modern iconology arose, an iconology which still today informs the methods and investigations of entire philologico-historic sciences from art history, history, and literature up to the newer Cultural Studies. To be investigated is the period of time from the original appearance of an explicit semiotic methodology in the years from Aby Warburg's early work until the end of the 60's, when Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Kantorowicz at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton put forward their later works on iconology. In addition, the project analyzes the cultural, intellectual, social, and political realities which were the background against which modern image science was possible and were the preconditions of the rise of iconology and image science to the level of paradigm in art history. As it concerns the connections between bodies of work that reached from the late Kaiserreich, through the Weimar Republic, to the transfer of the Warburg Library to London, to the emigration of important proponents to the USA, all the way to the work at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the project can also provide a foundational contribution to the emigration history of the scholars involved.