Objects and papers: assemblages that speak

Abstract

German art historian Aby Moritz Warburg (1866-1929) was the first to introduce a revolution in the traditional criteria for classifying works of art. He challenged the ‘organ pipes’ conception of the various art genres and advocated its opposite, the ‘blending’, thus valorising, rather than the canonical division, the melting, the synergies and the mutual contamination. The catalogue-book Beni svelati, by studying the agglomeration that has accumulated over time in the closed rooms of the State, illustrates precisely how this fusion, accidental at the start, resolved itself, as time passed, into something historically meaningful in itself. This is even truer at the present moment, now that the advent of the digital format has decisively affected the traditional division by subject, characterising the culture of the last centuries.