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 works, both in philosophy of science and art history, contain the elements that generate one of his main philosophical contributions: the notion of embodiment.

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? In Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy—the 2022 translation of the original German book Infokratie. Digitalisierung und die Krise der Demokratie, published in 2021 by MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH—Byung-Chul Han reflects on these and other related issues. Han’s analysis of the current political, social, and technological situation indicates that a profound democratic crisis is emerging. The loss of interest in truth, the end of grand narratives, the replacement of reason with data analysis (even in philosophy), the fragmentation of the population due to digitalization, and the predominant role of information in everyday life are all symptoms of a radical transformation underway in Western society, with severe consequences for democratic stability. In these terms, Han’s vision, at times excessively pessimistic, orients us on the crucial issues of our time.

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 of Giovanni Morelli (2019), her exhibitions on Venetian painting, and her editions of the writings of Edgar Wind. Wind examined her in 1969 for her Rhodes Fellowship at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In 1983, she edited the first posthumous collection of Wind’s essays, The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, thereby reviving an interest in Wind’s works. That volume enjoyed an international critical success, being reprinted three times in English, and translated into Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. In 1986, Anderson edited a second collection of Wind’s essays, focused on English art of the eighteenth century, Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery, which was translated into Italian in 2000. Working on these editions, Anderson collaborated closely with Wind’s widow, Margaret Wind, who was organising her husband’s archive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, now recognised as an important resource for art historiography. More recently, together with Bernardino Branca and the author of this editorial, Anderson co-edited a book on Wind, and is a frequent contributor to The Edgar Wind Journal, where she has been a member of the editorial board since its foundation in 2021.

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 biological implications of image perception. Under examination are two specific types of images: partially visible figures and unfinished works of art, that is, open-ended images that distinguish themselves in their inclusion of a significant absence (hence, ‘ill-defined area’), suggested by incomplete forms. These images offer important indications about the role that the beholder’s imagination plays in aesthetic response. In addressing this issue, this study focuses on the representation of human figures that either have features covered or no faces. In the second case, Gombrich talks about the ‘egg shape formula’, and tackles the way beholders perceive it. Considering the neuroscientific research on face perception and filling-in, this paper explores the neural process through which beholders may complete in their minds the blank spaces present in incomplete figures. My argument is that it is possible to find the neural underpinning of imagination, which is at the base of the aesthetic experience of beholders when perceiving figures that are not entirely visible.

This article investigates the conception of art history and culture of the Viennese art historian Max Dvořák (1874–1921), as well as his methodological approach to the study of images, comparing it with that of other philosophers and scholars, including Wilhelm Dilthey, Wassily Kandinsky, Edmund Husserl, Aby Warburg, and Walter Benjamin. Dvořák was affiliated to the so-called Vienna School of Art History, and conceived art history as the history of ideas or spirit (Geist). The spiritual in art is a major concern in Dvořák’s late works, an interest that he shared with other intellectuals of the time, including Dilthey, Kandinsky, and Husserl. The affinity between Dvořák, Warburg, and Benjamin is another theme that has not yet been fully developed. In this sense, the present study compares Warburg’s idea of the ‘Afterlife of Antiquity’ (Nachleben der Antike) in European culture and Benjamin’s conception of history as a source of redemption with Dvořák’s understanding of art history. As this study shows, their critiques of technological development converge in the idea that there is no progress in history but only catastrophes. By considering these themes, this essay sheds new light on the relevance of Dvořák’s contribution to the study of art and culture.

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 Lessing maintains, the beholder of a painting or sculpture—such as the statue Laocoön and His Sons (c. 150 BC)—is able to anticipate subsequent events, including actions, gestures, and sounds. Recent achievements in the cognitive neurosciences can shed new light on Lessing’s insights about the way viewers engage with works of art. Such breakthroughs include the discovery of mirror neurons and the development of concepts such as embodied simulation, empathy, intersubjectivity, motor imagery, and predictive processing. According to empirical studies, the perception of human actions, postures, gestures, and physiognomic expressions can enable observers to understand the emotions and intentions of others. Therefore, it is now possible to address the question of how biological processes underlie the observation of body movements, gestures, postures, and expressions and their implications for the aesthetic experience of—and empathy toward—images that depict human figures in movement, thus bringing Lessing’s insights up to date.

The eighth issue of The Edgar Wind Journal focuses on the art of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti and Edgar Wind’s interpretation of their works. Wind devoted several studies to the two Renaissance artists, some published and other still unpublished. In this issue, Bernardino Branca analyses Wind’s Leonardo Papers, Pablo Schneider reflects on Wind’s investigation of Michelangelo’s pictorial language, and Ang Li offers a new perspective on the display modalities of Michelangelo’s Pietà and Bruges Madonna.