Aby Warburg is regarded as one of the great pioneers of modern cultural studies. This book brings together texts by many of the most renowned researchers in the field who have been influenced by his work. They address his extraordinary impact on the understanding of cultural transmission and the influence of images and texts across time and space. What emerges is the continuing significance of Warburg for our own times. No one concerned with the many forms of the survival of the past in the present and the infinitely complex relationships between images and society will want to miss this book. Published in cooperation with the Warburg Institute, London and with the assistance of a grant from the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, New York.

With new surges of activity from religious, political, and military extremists, the destruction of images has become increasingly relevant on a global scale. A founder of the study of early modern and contemporary iconoclasm, David Freedberg has addressed this topic for five decades. His work has brought this subject to a central place in art history, critical to the understanding not only of art but of all images in society. This volume collects the most significant of Freedberg's texts on iconoclasm and censorship, bringing five key works back into print alongside new assessments of contemporary iconoclasm in places ranging from the Near and Middle East to the United States, as well as a fresh survey of the entire subject. The writings in this compact volume explore the dynamics and history of iconoclasm, from the furious battles over images in the Reformation to government repression in modern South Africa, the American culture wars of the early 1990s, and today's cancel culture. Freedberg combines fresh thinking with deep expertise to address the renewed significance of iconoclasm, its ideologies, and its impact. This volume also provides a supplement to Freedberg's essay on idolatry and iconoclasm from his pathbreaking book, The Power of Images. Freedberg's writings are of foundational importance to this discussion, and this volume will be a welcome resource for historians, museum professionals, international law specialists, preservationists, and students.

This learned and heavy volume should be placed on the shelves of every art historical library.--E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books This is an engaged and passionate work by a writer with powerful convictions about art, images, aesthetics, the art establishment, and especially the discipline of art history. It is animated by an extraordinary erudition.--Arthur C. Danto, The Art Bulletin Freedberg's ethnographic and historical range is simply stunning. . . . The Power of Images is an extraordinary critical achievement, exhilarating in its polemic against aesthetic orthodoxy, endlessly fascinating in its details. . . . This is a powerful, disturbing book.--T. J. Jackson Lears, Wilson Quarterly Freedberg helps us to see that one cannot do justice to the images of art unless one recognizes in them the entire range of human responses, from the lowly impulses prevailing in popular imagery to their refinement in the great visions of the ages.--Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly coloured, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from 17th-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes). Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member, Galileo Galilei - whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career - to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favourite method - visual description - as a mode of scientific classification. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, "The Eye of the Lynx" uncovers a crucial episode n the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits and more.

Covering 40 years of South African artist William Kentridge's (born 1955) internationally acclaimed production in drawing, stop-frame animation, video, prints, sculpture, tapestry and large-scale installation, Why Should I Hesitate stands as a definitive statement on his vast oeuvre. This deluxe production, published in an edition of 1,800 copies, is comprised of two slipcased volumes with a unique print in lapis lazuli.

The title references Kentridge’s primary practice of drawing and how this core activity informs and enables his studio practice. It also references the impact of individual action on history and the reverse―how history shapes the contemporary and the future―and serves as a commentary on various shifting hegemonies of power politics, economies, language and the authority to narrate history.

The two volumes showcase two complementary exhibitions, held at the Norval Foundation and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), Cape Town, which together form the largest, most comprehensive presentation of Kentridge’s work, anywhere, ever.

Why Should I Hesitate?: Sculpture, at Norval Foundation, is the first exhibition to address Kentridge’s output as a sculptor, from the props used in his operas to his recent, monumental bronze sculptures, premiering as part of this exhibition. As an extension of Why Should I Hesitate?: Sculpture, the publication includes a visual index of his sculptural practice; a photo essay charting the development of his large Lexicon sculptures; and a comprehensive essay by Columbia University’s Dr. David Freedberg, which locates Kentridge’s work within several key artistic movements.

Held at Zeitz MOCAA, Why Should I Hesitate?: Putting Drawings to Work spans more than forty years of art making, with a focus on Kentridge’s studio practice. The accompanying publication includes essays, conversations, a lecture, and a meticulous timeline of the history of 20th-century South Africa, interwoven with a chronology of the artist’s life, work and thinking over the decades

These three volumes catalogue the extensive corpus of mycological drawings in the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Executed mostly in watercolour between 1625 and 1630 and depicting fungi native to Umbria and the environs of Rome, they constitute the first sustained attempt to survey all the larger fungi of a region, recording in detail the stages of their growth. Laden with notes on colour, smell, taste, weight, season and the locality in which the specimens had been found, the almost six hundred folios were commissioned by Federico Cesi (1585-1630), founder of Europe's first scientific academy, the Accademia dei Lincei. They were acquired by Cassiano dal Pozzo after Cesi's death and were greatly admired by those who saw them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thought to have been lost until their rediscovery in 1979 in the library of the Institut de France in Paris, the drawings are also remarkable for their pioneering use of the microscope, a novel instrument given to Cesi in 1624 by Galileo and used throughout the pages of these manuscripts to enhance the direct observation of nature. Also included are drawings of fungi commissioned by Cassiano and his brother Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo now in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and an early set of copies of the Cesi originals in the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Each drawing is reproduced in colour with accompanying text, and two introductory essays discuss the scientific investigations and collecting activities of Cesi and Cassiano and the importance of these drawings in the history of science and art. David Pegler retired in 1998 as Head of Mycology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His taxonomic research has specialized in tropical and temperate Basidiomycetes, for which he received a Science Research Council individual merit promotion, and he has published 16 books and over 300 scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, London, of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and Centenary Fellow of the British Mycological Society. He has held visiting professorships at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Lodz, Poland, the Instituto do Botanica, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the University of Jilin, China. David Freedberg is Professor in the History of Art at Columbia University, New York, and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies. He has written extensively on the art and culture of the seventeenth century, including the intersection of art and science in the age of Galileo, most notably in The Eye of the Lynx (Chicago, 2002).

A beautifully designed monograph surveying the career of artist Glenn Brown. Luxuriously filled with over 56 images, this book documents the bravura of Brown’s brushwork and his unique evocation of images. Recognized for his sheer, flat surfaces—intricately described yet deprived of mass, whose ambiguity is heightened further when altering colors, forms, or details taken from such gestural artists as Frank Auerbach, Salvador Dalí, Chiam Soutine, or Vincent Van Gogh—Brown creates a carnivalesque world where the rational and irrational, the beautiful and the grotesque are brought together in a vigorous state of play.

A graphic look at how public and institutional ideas of obscenity have changed throughout history.