The Pontifical Gaze. Morphology and the History of the Images

The pontifical gaze teaches how to see the same in the different, while respecting it as dissimilar. Such a pedagogy of vision is rooted in Goethe’s morphology as in a methodological paradigm – open and plural, neither prescriptive nor doctrinaire – that operated deeply in the context of the humanities of the XX century. This paper addresses the articulations of this paradigm developed in the domain of the so-called Kunstwissenschaft, from Semper and Burckhardt, through Wickhoff, Wölfflin, Riegl, and Warburg, down to its radicalization in Benjamin and Bataille, and recently in Didi-Huberman.