Saturn as a sign: Renaissance cosmology between intellectual history and theory

Abstract

This article considers Renaissance cosmology as a research topic. The article poses the question whether contemporary works on this topic are influenced by the theoretical problematics of Aby Warburg’s and Erwin Panofsky’s iconological tradition. One of the most important factors for this influence is Susan Sontag’s essay “Under the Sign of Saturn” (1978), where Sontag used the metaphor of Saturn and Melancholy to characterise Walter Benjamin`s methodological innovations in 20th century humanities. This metaphor leads to an unwilling juxtaposition of Benjamin in Sontag’s essay with the book Saturn and melancholy by R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl (1964). The aim of this article is to show that this parallelism endows the topic of Renaissance cosmology with the traits of an image and to describe the ways these traits manifest themselves in the relevant historiography. The article proves that this image is determined by scholars’ interest in the phenomenon of proportion as the crucial logic and idea in Renaissance cosmologies. The authors of this article conclude that although dealing with this phenomenon connects contemporary scholars with Warburg and Panofsky, this phenomenon cannot restore the iconological tradition, but only outlines its inner intellectual contradictions.