the moon's favors: Edgar Wind: Trained as a philosopher before becoming an art historian, he waged a long battle in his work in aesthetics and intellectual history and in his historical studies of Renaissance art on behalf of the symbol and against formalism in both theoretical and pragmatic terms. Following Warburg and mindful of Plato’s “divine fear” of the power of art, he insisted on the complexity of symbols and a constant, vital, and sometimes risky tension between reason and ritual (with Warburg, he believed ritual and magic tapped into pow-erful, irrational forces within the human psyche).

2012/07/13

Edgar Wind: Trained as a philosopher before becoming an art historian, he waged a long battle in his work in aesthetics and intellectual history and in his historical studies of Renaissance art on behalf of the symbol and against formalism in both theoretical and pragmatic terms. Following Warburg and mindful of Plato’s “divine fear” of the power of art, he insisted on the complexity of symbols and a constant, vital, and sometimes risky tension between reason and ritual (with Warburg, he believed ritual and magic tapped into pow-erful, irrational forces within the human psyche).

Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence; or, What Edgar Wind Didn't See In Botticelli's Primavera more

Words whisper, carrying more than one might know, hypostases, rather than mere understanding. Words grow from roots, spawn families, travel and mingle, get lost, get found, and often marry the strangest bedfellows. Like our bodies, our ideas, and our culture, words evolve, handed down to us from a place beyond memory. As the warp and woof of language, words possess the magic to shape the immaterial into the solid things of psyche ~From my intro to AO's The Archives of the Heart

The Platonic tradition may be likened to an underground river that from time to time sends up a spring; wherever its waters flow, the soul is reborn, and with it the conception of intellectual form, the beautiful, and true art.~ Kathleen Raine