Wind left to teach briefly in the United States for financial reasons (he had a two-year appointment at the University of North Carolina from 1925 to 1927), but then returned to Hamburg as a research assistant.
He was a key example of the encyclopedic phenomenon of the "Warburgian scholar" in the American academic scene,[6] equally at home in art, literature, history, and philosophy, and giving "pyrotechnical lectures."
Says one student of Wind's at Smith, "his Hamburg accent and his puckish smile ... remain the most delightful memories...his...charisma...is the quality that made the greatest impression... [His] utterly charming European manner, urbane, intellectual must have been stimulating and encouraging to [his colleagues.
[7] Someone who in 1967 attended his Oxford lectures on the Sistine ceiling recalls the packed house at the Sheldonian Theatre, the vast erudition behind the tracing of the "theology" of Michelangelo's figures, and simply the excitement of learning about the order of one Renaissance world picture.
[2] His thesis was that "the presence of unresolved residues of meaning is an obstacle to the enjoyment of art",[8] and he attempted to "help remove the veil of obscurity which not only distance in time...but a deliberate obliqueness in the use of metaphor has spread over some of the greatest Renaissance paintings.
"[8] Wind's book has been heavily criticised (by André Chastel, Carlo Ginzburg, E.H. Gombrich, and others) for frequent misreadings of sources and a "one-sided" fixation on the Neoplatonic perspective.
Wind begins his argument by presenting the long-standing conceptual correlation between art and forces of chaos or disorder, citing a lineage of thinkers and artists including Plato, Goethe, Baudelaire and Burckhardt.
Wind also notes the repeated historical coincidence – in Greece at Plato's time and in Italy during the Renaissance – of peaks in artistic accomplishment with political turmoil and breakdown.
By way of resolution, Wind suggests an intermediate and integrative approach, supplementing the tolerance afforded by aesthetic detachment with an insistence on personal assessment on behalf of the work's audience: “We should react to a work of art on two levels: we should judge it aesthetically in its own terms, but we should also decide whether we find those terms acceptable.” As such, Wind indicates that the intellectual advantages of the contemporary approach to art may be retained without sacrificing the “directly [felt]” quality that is so fundamental to it.