"Aby Warburg (1866-1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included such celebrated art historians of the twentieth century such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Phillippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg's project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a "critical iconology" to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture." "Michaud provides us with a book not only about Warburg but one that extends his intuitions and discoveries into analyses of other categories of imagery like the Daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loie Fuller. This edition also includes a foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and texts by Warburg not previously translated into English."--BOOK JACKET.