Reading the Stars of the Renaissance. Fritz Saxl and Astrology

• Main Author: Rembrandt Duits
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Art History, University of Birmingham 2011-12-01
• Series: Journal of Art Historiography
• Subjects: Fritz Saxl (1890-1948); Aby Warburg (1866-1929); Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968); astrology; Renaissance; planets; planet children; constellations; Villa Farnesina (Rome); iconography
• Online Access: http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/duits.pdf

This article discusses Fritz Saxl’s publications on astrological images from the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, from his early study on the representation of the planets (1912), via his catalogues of astrological and mythological manuscripts (1915 and 1927) and his contributions on the depiction of the children of the planets (1919, 1923, 1927) to his booklet on the astrological ceiling in the Villa Farnesina in Rome (1934). It aims to assess the importance of Saxl’s work and to show his development from a close follower of Aby Warburg to an independent theorist, with his own method and approach and his own answer to one of the central issues Warburg had raised – how the integrate the old image of the Renaissance as the revival of classical Antiquity with the new picture of the Renaissance as the birth of the modern rational world presented by Burckhardt during the nineteenth century.