Practice question · True or false
Warburg's Pathosformel describes a gestural formula whose emotional charge can invert when it is reused.
Hints
- Ask what survives when a maenad's pose becomes a mourning figure.
- The form travels; the meaning does not.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and it is the strangeness that makes the concept valuable. A pose developed for ecstatic abandon can serve grief centuries later without contradiction, because what was transmitted was the configuration of the body, not what it once expressed.
Practise Greco-Roman Sources II: Survival and Transformation
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Greco-Roman Sources II: Survival and Transformation
- Warburg observed that an ecstatic classical pose often reappears in a Renaissance depiction of grief. If…
- How does allegory expect to be read? Select every true statement about the mode.
- Match each concept to what it names.
- In what year did the Council of Trent issue its decree on images?
- Sort each context by whether the nude was PERMITTED or RESTRICTED in Renaissance and Baroque practice.
- Arrange these treatments of the naked body in chronological order.
- Roughly how many centuries separate the Greek maenad poses Warburg studied from their Baroque reappearances?