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“... Kenneth Clark did more than anyone else to create an interest in the art of Renaissance Italy, but Edgar Wind had a much greater influence on the way in which this art has been studied. Both men were outstanding lecturers and gifted writers, and both, in very different ways, were influenced by the work of Aby Warburg. Both, too, were particularly drawn to ...”

“... the Ruskin School of Drawing in the late 1950s, he attended lectures by the German art historian Edgar Wind, so popular that they were held at the Oxford Playhouse Theatre. The lectures taught him about the intellectualised world of floating images. ‘Wind led me to his master, [Aby] Warburg, who died semi-mad in ...”

“... disease off the page? Do not despair. There is a remedy. The second posthumous volume of Edgar Wind’s essays outdoes even its sumptuous predecessor in intellectual glitter and academic burnishing. Only 120 large pages of text, but they come with 124 plates; in the ratio of historical weight to linear extent they must constitute the densest ...”

“... cult of the incomplete has had its critics. In his Reith Lectures of 1960, the art historian Edgar Wind complained that society had been seduced by the ‘sophistry’ of production:We put a premium on the inchoate work of art arrested at its inception for the sake of spontaneity. On the production of art this prejudice has a debilitating effect: it ...”

“... assumptions about the independence of intellectual disciplines. Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind and many others who joined the new university in Hamburg in the Twenties did remarkable research work here before 1933, when the Institute’s members fled, along with its books, to London. Warburg himself had died in 1929, the bulk of his ...”

“... was contested among his heirs. When Ernst Gombrich called him a ‘man lost in a maze’, Edgar Wind rose to his defence. ‘No doubt there was some obsessional quirk in Warburg’s over-extravagant habit of preserving all of his superseded drafts and notes, thus swelling his personal files to gargantuan proportions, with comic side effects that ...”

“... and sometimes perhaps in arcane mysteries, but the impressive detective work of scholars such as Edgar Wind which has been so extensively imitated is now recognised as often inappropriate. It helps to read Ovid (Titian himself seems to have used translations), but there is no need to read Hermes Trismegistus in order to understand Titian’s great ...”

“... to the innovative nature of their work. From the Thirties to the Sixties, Panofsky, Gombrich, Edgar Wind and many others created an art history of exactly this kind – one that directed much of its attention to the erudite programmes Renaissance artists had realised in both religious and secular painting. The pioneers of what came, misleadingly, to ...”

“... Iconography is a notoriously controversial art. The confidence of the age of Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind has given way to doubt and conflict. In no area is this latterday dispute between iconoclasts and iconodules so vigorous or so sharp as in the field of 17th-century Dutch art, long taken to be a paradigm case of descriptive realism. It was the ...”

“... Oxford established its chair of the history of art in 1955, the two candidates – Edgar Wind and Otto Pächt – were both Jewish refugee scholars’: in terms of schools or approaches, Oxford was choosing between Hamburg and Vienna. Or again: ‘When an Italian scholar was asked in the 1950s which was the best German department of ...”

“... metaphysical fog. He hoarded his scholarly discoveries, morbidly suspicious that others would get wind of them. His decision to refuse a prestigious position at Bonn stemmed from his unwillingness to endure the humiliation of a public viva voce.Warburg wanted to be a scholar on his own terms. This reflected his fidelity to an older model of intellectual ...”

“... The demands of actual patrons were crude, and easily fulfilled without the aid of large books. Edgar Wind remarks towards the end of his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance – the kind of study of the subject Bull is determined not to write – that the modern art historian’s great armoury of learned suggestions is not meant to imply that most ...”

“... from one another in silence. A girl bounces a fat ball on the cement over and over and over. The wind is freshening and the sloped light is turning gold. Birds speak with each other in the hushed leaves and in the wind there are the soft calls of children, but these noises are blown by the ...”

“... comedy; but the comedy’s high You must admit: palazzo, contessa, and I. Hear how the north wind batters at the pane! A spot of grog’s the thing for nights like this – Not too much seltzer. Sailors on the main Have grog for birthdays – victories – and Christmas – And I’m a sailor – and I’ve no champagne – So here’s to Doctor ...”

“... her father’s. On the second occasion Ronald Reagan gave the memorial address. Her father was Edgar Bergen, whose ventriloquist dummy, Charlie Macarthy, was the star of American radio before the war. The early chapters, which deal with the triangular relationship between father, daughter and wooden doll, are the best. Bergen skilfully describes the ...”