EN
An attempt at following the mutual dependencies of two key problems examined by Aby Warburg – artistic expression and the praxis of borrowing image motifs from the past – in the light of the targets of his method of studying culture and art. A comparison with the conceptions launched by the eighteenth-century theoretician Joshua Reynolds, on the one hand, and Ernst H. Gombrich, the director of The Warburg Institute, on the other hand, intends to demonstrate not solely methodological fluctuations in historical reflections on art, but also the topical nature of the method applied by the Hamburg scholar.