Fabio Tononi

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• PostDoc Position at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

This course examines some problems of aesthetics and art theory by analysing texts from the history of Western thought. Students will develop appropriate critical and analytical reading skills of philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on topics such as aisthesis, poetics, taste, the sublime, aesthetic judgement, imagination, beauty, spirit, empa...

This course examines Western culture and society from the 1840s to the present by focusing on the concepts of modernism, postmodernism, and hypermodernism (or hyperculture). Students will develop appropriate critical and analytical reading skills of philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on topics such as capitalism, the concept of modernity, th...

This study examines Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s aesthetic treatise Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) from an experimental aesthetic perspective. In his wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between the visual arts and poetry, Lessing assigns a critical role to the beholder’s imagination in aesthetic response. As Les...

The seventh issue of The Edgar Wind Journal is divided into two parts. The first part includes three articles by Jaynie Anderson, Peter Burke, and Oswyn Murray, who reflect on their encounters with Edgar Wind and the reception of Wind’s thought. Anderson was examined by Wind on the occasion of her Rhodes Fellowship, whereas Burke and Murray attende...

Fabio Tononi (born 1985) is an Italian historian and theorist of art and culture, philosopher, essayist, and poet living in London, Lisbon, and Brescia. He is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM) of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (FCHS) of NOVA University of Lisbon. He has taught several philosophy course...

What is the state of democracy today? In the Western world, people often take the meaning of this term for granted, but do they genuinely know what democracy is? In this sense, how can we define democracy in today’s digitalized world? What is the relationship between democracy and information? Furthermore, do we really live in a democratic world? I...

This course explores the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) by analysing some of his most important works. Students will develop adequate critical and analytical reading skills of philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on topics concerning the concept of being, the concept of freedom, the concept of reason, the concept of truth, the proc...

This course explores the three Theban plays (i.e. Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) by Sophocles (c. 497/496-406/405 BC), and the different interpretations that philosophers, psychoanalysts, and literary critics have offered of them. Students will develop adequate critical and analytical skills through the reading of literary work...

Volume 6 of The Edgar Wind Journal is a Festschrift honouring the Australian art historian, biographer, and curator Emeritus Professor Jaynie Anderson AM, FAHA, OSI, published to celebrate her eightieth birthday (she was born on 15 December 1944). Anderson is known for her monograph Giorgione: The Painter of ‘Poetic Brevity’ (1997), her biography o...

“Edgar Wind in Oxford”. Launch of the book: Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment, ed. by Jaynie Anderson, Bernardino Branca and Fabio Tononi, Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York: Peter Lang, 2024. Launchers: Professor Peter Burke and Professor Oswyn Murray. Trinity College, Garden Room and de Jager Auditorium, University of Oxford, Uni...

This study explores Edgar Wind’s interpretation of Aby Warburg’s central ideas about the biology of images, offering a fresh perspective on both scholars in light of recent research on neurophysiology and experimental aesthetics. In the Warburgian historiography, Wind’s perspective stands in contrast to that of Ernst Gombrich. Through its focus on...

This volume presents a collection of studies on the pioneering art historian and philosopher Edgar Wind (1900–71) (Figure 0.1), who is also remembered as the first professor of art history at the University of Oxford. Since the death of his widow, Margaret Wind, at the age of 91 in 2006, the Edgar Wind Archive has been accessible at the Bodleian Li...

Edgar Wind (1900–1971) was a cosmopolitan scholar who made important contributions to many disciplines, including philosophy, Renaissance art history and modern art criticism. This book considers a crucial question: to understand the work of an art historian, how important is it to know their life story? In the case of Edgar Wind, biography and sch...

This essay analyses the concept of ‘ill-defined area’ that Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) coined in Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960). Gombrich’s insights, seen in light of recent advances in the fields of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, open up new perspectives in the study of images: the...

This course investigates a series of aesthetic concepts and phenomena by analysing some of the most important philosophical treatises in the history of Western thought. Students will develop critical and analytical skills by reading philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on concepts such as aesthetic experience, aesthetic judgement, aisthesis, a...

This course explores a series of metaphysical concepts by analysing some of the most important philosophical treatises in the history of Western thought. Students will develop critical and analytical skills by reading philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on concepts such as being, causation, freedom and determinism, God, idealism and realism,...

This course investigates the aesthetics of Aby Warburg (1866–1929) by analysing some of his most important works. Students will develop critical and analytical skills by reading philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on interdisciplinary research, cultural memory, empathy, style, symbols, and the biology of images. Furthermore, students will lea...

This course explores the distinctive features of Western culture since the 1960s through the reading and analysis of crucial texts by leading philosophers such as Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, David Harvey, Jean-François Lyotard, Zygmunt Bauman, Marc Augé, Fredric Jameson, Alain Badiou, and Byung-Chul Han. Students will develop adequate critical and...

This course explores some aesthetic concepts through the analysis of some of the most important philosophical and scientific texts in the history of Western thought. Students will develop adequate critical and analytical skills by reading philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on topics such as aisthesis, taste, beauty, judgement, imagination, e...

This course explores the concepts of philosophy, science, and reality by analysing some of the most important philosophical and scientific texts in history. Students will develop adequate critical and analytical skills by focusing on the essence and tasks of philosophy and science, and the possible dialogue between the two. Furthermore, students wi...

Since the advent of social media like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok – which are mainly based on worldwide image sharing – we have witnessed the radicalization of a phenomenon that was already established: “iconomania.” Iconomania is the tendency to place images everywhere and document in pictures everything we do in daily life, from looking in th...

Alenka Zupančič (born 1966) is a distinguished Lacanian philosopher and social theorist from Slovenia whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. She is a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. Toget...

Byung-Chul Han (born 1959) is one of the most prominent South Korean-born philosophers and cultural theorists. In his works, Han explores the late capitalist culture in its various facets, including concepts such as freedom, the internet, love, mental health (in particular, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, burnout, and depression), multita...

This study investigates how the essence of the image has changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, according to the cultural hegemony that emerged in Western societies. It does so by comparing and contrasting three different types of images that belong to three different epochs: modernism, postmodernism, and the age of digital reproducib...

We asked Fabio to tell us more about his work as editor-in-chief of the Edgar Wind Journal, his new role as a Post-Doc in Lisbon, his experience at the Warburg Institute, and how studying at the Institute helped shape his research interests and career.

The purpose of this essay is to advocate the ideas of Wilhelm Worringer, John Dewey, and Nelson Goodman on the roles of perception, empathy, emotion, and enjoyment in aesthetic experience. I will attempt to do this by offering a novel interpretation of some of these thinkers’ insights from a biological perspective. To this end, I will consider the...

Massimo Cacciari (born 1944) is one of the most popular Italian philosophers, politicians, and intellectuals of his generation. Much of his philosophical career has been centred on the concept of “negative thought”, inspired by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is conveyed through a dialogue be...

This study investigates aesthetic responses to Michelangelo Buonarroti's sculpture Night with a focus on the concepts of animism and imagination. Accounts left by Giovanni di Carlo Strozzi (1517-1570), Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), and Michelangelo Buonarroti himself (1475-1564) describe this statue as if it were a living human. These reactions not o...

This paper analyses Edgar Wind’s interpretation of Aby Warburg’s opus by focusing on the role of the concept of Einfühlung (empathy) theorised by Robert Vischer in Warburg’s thought. The notion of empathy is at the core of Warburg’s investigation of Renaissance imagery, style, symbols, and human expression. This study also updates Vischer’s, Warbur...

The present issue is inspired by the conference Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment, organised by Bernardino Branca and Benjamin Thomas at the Italian Cultural Institute of London on 28 and 29 October 2021. The aim of this issue is to reflect on a number of themes and concepts investigated by Edgar Wind throughout his intellectual career. Many of his wo...

This essay addresses the debate on the unfinished in the visual arts from classical antiquity to the Italian Renaissance and its aesthetic implications. It is divided into two sections. The first section analyses the history of the unfinished, focusing on the debate that unfinished sculptures and paintings have stirred among theorists, artists, and...

This issue inaugurates the Edgar Wind Journal, which is dedicated to the works and research interests of the historian and theorist of art and culture, Edgar Wind (1900–1971). The foundation of a journal is always a challenge, entailing a declaration of intent. Our belief is that fifty years after his death, Wind’s remarkable achievements deserve n...

This study addresses the problem of the representation and perception of movement in sculpture. The starting point is the aesthetics of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who, in dealing with sculpture, emphasises the importance of the beholder's imagination during the contemplation of human figures the posture of which suggests movement to the viewer. Und...

Records of discussions about unfinished works of art, their morphologies, and the ways in which they are perceived date back to classical antiquity. However, the insights from these debates have never been fully explored in relation to the aesthetic responses of beholders to works of art. This dissertation seeks to address this gap by asking the fo...

This study proposes that intermediality in Renaissance art makes a strong impact on both the aesthetic space and the beholder's attention, memory, and imagination. It does so by focusing on the vision of the "Adoration of the Magi" that Gaudenzio Ferrari realised in Chapel V of the Sacred Mountain of Varallo. As suggested in the handbook "Garden of...

This study proposes a novel analysis of Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (c. 1470-1480) by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and the iconography of mourners. Particularly, it focuses on the role played by the three mourners in enhancing the emotional contagion of the painting. In creating this scene, Mantegna relied on the tradition of the iconography of...

This contribution proposes how beholders may internally process unfinished works of art. It does so by considering five of Michelangelo Buonarroti's interrupted sculptures and pointing out their empathic and imaginative potential. The beholder focused on the surface, I propose, is inclined to mentally simulate the artist's gesture that drafted the...

This article analyses a set of performances and installations created by the Italian artist Fabio Mauri (1926-2009) in connection with his theoretical writings and anchors them to the international artistic concern of the time: institutional critique. Eight of Mauri's performances from the 1970s are documented. This study centres on the first three...