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Aby Warburg (1866-1929). The Survival of an Idea

Mathias Bruhn

Prof. Martin Warnke, who is head of our department kindly asks you to excusethat he couldn't come; he would have been able to deliver his talk inPortuguese. Unfortunately, I am not able to, in spite of the many occasions toget used to it, since people from Portugal belong to the streetlife of Hamburg;in the quarter where I live you will not only count several Portugueserestaurants, bakeries, or a football club; theres also a weekly sunday mass inPortuguese. As a port city exchanging goods with trade partners from all overthe world, it is no surprise that the city of Hamburg has a old relationship withPortugal.

As a document of this relationship, the most important medal that is awardedto Hamburg citizens is the so-calledPortugaleser; this used to be a coin insilver that was slowly adopted by Hamburg merchants in the 16th century

before it became an official currency as the so called silverBank-Portugaleser.This coin expressed not only the importance of Portugal in sea-trade but alsostood for the tolerance of liberal Hamburg that accepted Portuguesemerchants of all confessions to live and work in the city. You can deduce thise.g. from the fact that these two different versions of the medal already know achristian and a jewish symbolism.

I do not mention this for reasons of politeness. Aby M. Warburg, the person

Id like to introduce you to tonight, came from one of the richest bankersfamilies in Germany, and the name Warburg is usually not associated with thescholar, but with the WarburgBank that is a global players with headquartersin New York or London. Although the young Aby refused succeeding in thefamily tradition and decided to study the humanities, the world of trading andthe mechanisms of social exchange remained one of the threads of hismethodology. Not by chance Warburg took a look at the arts from the

viewpoint of economic history, and studied the patronage of merchants andbankers. To a certain degree, thePortugaleser medal might stand as a symbolfor various problems Warburg had to face and the questions he had raised.

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg in 1866 as the first heir of a Bank that hadplayed a central role in pre-war imperial Germany. The legend says that he"sold" this privilege of being the future head of the family for his brothers'promise to support the scholar until the end of his life. The brothers acceptedthis condition and so allowed Warburg to fully concentrate on his studies, totravel, to support and engage assistants and gather an impressive collection of

books.

Warburg studied archeology and art history while he was as well interestedin medicine, psychology, or the history of religion - in Bonn, Munich, and in

Strassburg where he finished his doctorate thesis on Sandro Botticelli's twopaintings "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". He continued his work bytravelling to Florence and producing a number of small studies on single


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works of art and their wealthy patrons, in particular bankers themselves, likethe Medici or Sassetti, who mediated between the demands of civicrepresentation and the ideal principles of high art; and, perhaps better known,

by going to the United States and the reservs of the Hopi Indians in 1896, inorder to study the ethnological aspects of rites and ceremonies in other

cultures and their difference to or similarity with the so-called western world.

After his return Warburg decided to set up a library that would serve as aprivate collection and as an institution for public education. He called it"Kultur-wissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg". As has sometimes beenstated, Warburgs dissertation could be read as the mission statement of thelibrary and its future structure; the study on Botticelli synthesized philology,style analysis, iconography, and other fields in order to produce a morecomprehensive picture of the artistic process. His main assertions were:

1. Classical patterns have always attracted artists for they keep the energy of

antiquity and recharge any work of art theyre implanted into. TheRenaissance is characterized not only by the use of these antique patterns, butalso by the fact that they can always be distinguished by both their gesturesand their accessories from their environment on the painting (e.g. the hair of

Venus). Applying these antique forms means to surrender to the power ofeternal forms that lead their own life in the new context of the image. Certainsforms thus become containers for what Warburg would latercallPathosformeland moved accessories.

2. Secondly, the "program" of the paintings discussed here, commissioned byLorenzo de' Medici, was delivered by the famous poet Poliziano. All structures

of the paintings have their textual correspondence in his poemLa giostraaswell as in the sources he has used himself. The works can be explained only bycombining philological and visual analysis.

3. Both paintings belong together in that they not only tell the story of Venusbut were to commemorate a most beautiful Florentine woman, SimonettaVespucci, a painters wife who had died in her early years and who is depictedhere, so Warburg demonstrates, as the Spring goddess.

Only by referring to a variety of sources, like classic literature, contemporarycoins and medals or medieval wallpaintings Warburg can trace down thehidden meaning of the paintings elements and solve the riddle. This is whatturns the complexity of Botticellis paintings, though strange in theircomposition and simple in their overall object (the admiration of a woman),into high art worthy of a noble patron. Warburgs study on Poliziano as theprogrammer in Lorenzos service and Botticelli as his servant was in itself aconcept and an idea that required a different type of a library and shouldsurvive in an independent institution, his later KBW.

But their was one obstacle to this project. At the time of Warburgs promotion,there was no university in Hamburg; public lectures where organized and held

by private individuals and societies; renowned teachers of this time, likeyoung art historian Erwin Panofsky, were not exactly professors but servedthis privately organized "Vorlesungswesen".


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For this reason Warburg who knew Panofsky well, was one of the initiators forfounding a university, improving the intellectual situation of the public andthrough this promoting new fields of research, and Panofsky was appointedone of its first professors together with Warburg. Panofsky applied Warburgsideas in a slightly different sense as he stayed in the realm of traditional art

historical objects; nevertheless his study Idea. A concept in art theory thatnarrated the development of the mannerist concetto was a tribute to

Warburgs own dissertation and helped it survive. With Panofskys emigrationto the United States in 1933 Europe lost one of the most distinguishedscholars who transplanted the tradition of German art history to the UnitedStates (here a photo with two other emigrants: H. Janson and W. S.Heckscher) and thereby continued to write the history of an idea, the survivalof antiquity in different cultures.

Warburg himself did not live the rise of Nazi-Germany or the outbreak of asecond world-war - he had died in 1929. But still, the setting up of an

institution and his personal mental disposition consumed his energies. Afterhis return from Florence in 1904 he had started employing assistants for aprofessional library and invited scholars to his private house; but only in 1919the University became reality, and only in 1926 the library building, next tohis own home, was finished. Having accomplished what he always contended,

Warburg was hardly able to enjoy this late success. He was hospitalized inLudwig Binswanger's renowned neurological clinic in Kreuzlingen,Switzerland from 1921 on.

Warburg suffered strong depressions and symptoms of schizophrenia, andhis assistants, in particular Fritz Saxl (whom you see in the left figure below),

had to manage not only the entire library but also its ongoing research for awhole couple of years. When you read the early lectures of the WarburgLibrary in Hamburg, you have to realize that most of them were delivered inhis private home, and some of them in the absence of Warburg who hadinitiated it all.

This is for example when the later president of Hamburg University, thefamous philosopher Ernst Cassirer (right figure) presented his ideas of whathe called the "symbolic forms" of man: the different means of expressinghuman needs and notions, and the relation to their media, like language,pictures, rites, dance etc. Cassirer, a Neo-Kantian theorist by training, was afaithful grateful in Warburg's rich but still private library since it covered allaspects of ethnology, religious history, philology, or astrology, and he also

visited him in Kreuzlingen to support his colleague.Cassirer appreciated Warburg's approach, and it encouraged him to continuehis manuscript on the "symbolic forms" - an ambitious project which, in theend, resulted in a 4-volume "philosophic encyclopedia" of mankind and itssymbols. It became clearer and clearer that Warburgs research was not onlydevoted to art historical subjects and historical empirism, but that the centralidea of his work was of a purely inter-disciplinary kind.

When the new library was opened in 1926, it was already a monument for thehistory of human thought and the afterlife of antique tradition. From thismoment on, Cassirer and his colleagues were welcomed by an inscription


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went on studying his international subjects, and in the 20s once againpresented his results on the International Art History Congress in Rome,

where he once again used photograps, fixed on black boards, to illustrate histopics. This was the modell for a later project, the famous Mnemosyne Atlasthat nowadays receives the most attention. More about that later.

As I have mentioned, Warburg died 3 years after the library had beenopened. Another 4 years passed by, and the political change had made itimpossible for the Warburg circle to remain in the city. The assistants FritzSaxl and Gertrud Bing as well as young scholars Edgar Wind or RaymondKlibansky organised the transfer to London, pretending that it was atemporary loan to the London University. The 60.000 volumes, notes, some20.000 photographs as well as all files and furniture never came back toHamburg. After the war the library was re-opened in London by Saxl and Bingto be incorporated into the University, now to be called The WarburgInstitute, with Saxl as its first director. Different in size and attitude, it

somehow tried to preserve the interdisciplinary idea and the classificationsystem of Warburg, but was soon forced to abandon the open structure as itgrew to one of the biggest art historical libraries in the world. MNEMOSYNEnow took on a second meaning: the survival of a methodological concept

within a professionalized research and education environment. The originalGerman word for Mnemosyne, theNachlebenor Afterlife, became ametaphorical term for this always ambivalent situation.

If you visit the library today you will still see this inscription; but you have tokeep in mind that youll find a building that didn't serve the public but for afew years. In former times the library consisted of 4 floors with book stacks

plus the contents of the impressive, oval reading room. The order of thedifferent floors and the ways the library was organized has caused somedispute among scholars since it was assumed that the KBW was more than

just as storage for books, but that it had, in a certain sense, envisioned theidea of a library as a creative place, a generator that combines objects andconcepts of all kinds in a limited space and thus could be compared toaKunstkammer rather than to a museum..

Despite the discussion of the original structure, its categories and keywords, itis, in my opinion, more important to stress the ambivalence of differentpeople and mentalities coming together in this library. When Saxl classified

books, gave them call numbers and entitles the different floors as Image Word Orientation Practice he also stated how problematic it was tofollow Warburgs flexible and somewhat anarchistic practise. Warburg alwaysmoved the books and re-classified them according to his personalassumptions and spontaenous ideas, for the significance of every bookdepended on its context within the library, its neighborhood on the shelf. Inthis respect, the entire library was moving most of the time during its settingup in Hamburg. Assistants, at least two on each floor, supervised by Saxl andBing, had to take care that Warburgs anarchism did not interfere with theirduties as library servicepeople. It was also Saxl who introduced the series oflectures in 1921 in order to protect Warburgs achievements from oblivion,and to gather a community of researchers around him; and it was him, withEdgar Wind and Gertrud Bing, to continue the work on poster like picture


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displays that summarized central interests of Warburgs work (see Gombrich).In the end, the collection became a mixture of both a private, mobile,thematical reference library, and a public library with a fixed system of callnumbers. The library was partly integrated into the academic structures of the

young university, and Librarian Fritz Saxl finally managed to include it into

the Prussian inter-library loan system, as he later succeded in making itfunded by the London University.

Even though they did their best in supporting Warburgs research theycould not avoid standardizing the library, its divisions and contents in order tokeep them usable. Even though, for example, the Warburg Institute in Londonimitated the original building by erecting a house with four floors in order tomirror the central issues of Warburg's iconology, Gertrud Bing, Warburgssecond assistant, had to change the order of books into Image Word Orientation- Practice, turning the classification system into an ontologicalstruture that ascends from the religious reveration to enlightened practise.

Following generations themselves considered Warburg's discoveries as"bookish", daring and abstract, have altered the notion of what the KBW wasabout.

As late as with the director Ernst Gombrich, famous for his easy-to-read"history of art" and himself being an emigrant from Vienna, a certain distanceto the confusing treasures of Warburg's collections became apprehensible inthe London institute. Gombrich clearly expressed his doubts in his firstcomprehensive biography of the scholar. Still the Warburg Institute is devotedto Warburgs original fields of research. It investigates the iconologic relationof word and image; the passage of symbols throughout history; the revival of

antiquity in Renaissance and its presence in modern life; the role of northernart, especially Drer or Flemish North, for the lasting success of theRenaissance in the West; but on the other hand, the Warburg is now identifiedas a typical art historical institution. To a certain degree, this is not a proof fora lack of originality, but also a consequence of the fact, that so many ideas of

Warburg have been adopted and popularized as art historical methods.

Mnemosyne

One of Warburg's and Saxl's last and unaccomplished projects wastheMnemosyne Atlas: Even though I cant go into detail here it is worthoutlining its history and drawing some general conclusions. The AtlasProject is now often quoted in academic lectures, and one might compare it,in its size, its infinite structure and ambitious intention, to collective projectsas Proust'sRecherche de la temp perdue. The title of it as well as thedescription of its function was the object of long discussions between Warburgand Bing and took years to develop. Menmosyne Atlas is thus only anabbreviated title for a much longer description, and the word Atlas refers tothe German meaning of it as Album or printed collection.

[The following paragraphs have not been part of my lecture; they paraphrase apublication by Dutch Art Historian Peter van Huisstede who has written aboutthe project in 1998.]


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What is nowadays referred to as the Mnemosyne Atlas in fact consists of theremains of a project that was unfinished when Warburg died in 1929. Asmentioned, the idea came from using images placed on large screens asinstruments for the preparation of lectures and exhibitions, like in his RomanSchifanoia conference. Only much later, nearly at the end of his life,

somewhere in the summer of 1927, Warburg formulated the idea of producinga systematicBilderatlas,based on suggestions made by his assistants, makinghis lectures and small exhibitions a spin-off of this larger project in which hesought to present his scientific work, old and new, methods and results, in acoherent and novel way. It was presumably Saxl once again who hoped that, if

Warburg is no longer able to publish linear texts, this would at least furnishhim with a means to document the width of his focus and his ideas. But onceagain, Warburg took his time to move and re-arrange and explain, and so onlya few number of photographs has been taken from the different walls, whichare preserved in the archive of the Warburg Institute in London.While thefirst series consisted of about 43 screens, the second one, with a slightly

different focus, had grown to already 71 screens. And the experiment went on.Logically there have been attempts to reconstruct the original structure, inparticular by Bing and Gombrich in the 1930s, in order to demostrate theprogramme of Warburgian research, but all attempts have been considered asunsatisfying.

Most of the screens are devoted to Warburgs classical subjects as therelation between Northern Europe and Italy; the survival ofthePathosformelthrough the interest of Renaissance artists; the role ofastrology; or the cultural aspects of festivities (Festwesen); Florentine civicculture etc.

From the beginning, the logic of the Bilderatlas was problematic, as thedifferent screens had to mediate between problems on different levels: Werethey to show chronologically, the tradition of forms and gestures; or were theyto make invisible things, like the function of a given work of art, visible byrelating it to similar or different objects? And how can the relationofPathosformel and Astrology be shown in a single exhibition concept?

Warburg makes his own experiments with layouts and headlines, and thecomplexity of his short languages shows in how far he overcharges the objects:

Habe angefangen, die ganze Gtterwelt auszuschneiden, um sie zunchstkosmologisch-monstrs, tragisch-griechisch, rmisch-heroisch zu ordnen alschronologisch-historisches Phnomen.

Saxls idea to apply movable images as a visual aid proved indeed to be fertilesoil for Warburgs work with images. Warburg was used to work with sets ofimages and already in 1920 he spoke generally of a kulturwissenschaftliche

Bildgeschichte. Furthermore, throughout Warburgs work we find story-boards for lectures and articles. There he would draw small rectangles andsquares standing for works of art and use lines and colors noting relations

between these elements. Also very often we find sheets with a textual synopsison certain topics, and drawings combined with text that layout the structure ofa manuscript.


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Several notes from summer 1927 inform us that Warburg contemplated ona printed collection of images forming an Atlas that contained both researchtopics, astrology andPathosformel, hitherto treated separately. Only some

weeks later another one states optimistically that

[...] der Gesamtrahmen fr den Atlas formuliert sich(kulturwissenschaftliche Beschreibung) Von berlebenden Prgekraftantiker Ausdruckswerte im europischen Geisteshaushalt (Kulturkreis) [...] .

At the end of November 1927, Warburg returns from a journey to Italy. Duringhis absence work must have continued. At the end of 1927, first parts of thepublication are presented to visitors of the KBW. As Bing writes in thefollowing entry of the scientific journal, work goes on without interruption.

Warburg himself was very eager to complete the project and looked out for anadequate title. He discussed it via the diary entries with Getrud Bing, but he isnot satisfied with the first attempts which read:Mnemosyne.

Kulturwissenschaftliche Betrachtung ber Stilwandel in der Menschendar-stellung der europischen Renaissance. Now he suggests

Titel: Mnemosyne. Bilderreihen zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichenBetrachtung der europischen Renaissance.

After Bings comment to this Warburg, at half past four in the morning, comesup with the following proposal:

Titel: Mnemosyne. Bilderreihen zu einer kulturwissenschaftlichenBetrachtung antikisierender Ausdrucksprgung.

Warburg died on the 26thof October 1929. The journals make clear that textswould constitute an important part of the publication of the Atlas; to inter-prete it as Art History without words would clearly oversubtilize the matter.

As we see, the Atlas was a highly dynamic project: it changed, travelled, wasused to design exhibitions, and stayed, until its very end, work in progress.

There were other problems that made the work on the Atlas an infiniteendeavour. Warburg was a technophile. He was interested intelecommunication, the press and travelling; all these new technologiesenabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migrationthat connected civilizations from the beginning. Technology, for example inthe form of printing,was also the direct link between Drers engravings andthe 28 telephones in his avant-garde library building. He had already writtenan article entitled Airship and submarine in medieval imagination thatsuggested that former societies had anticipated what he called vehicles ofthought and imagination that we dispose of today. Images were their

vehicles.

The Mnemosyne Atlas was not only an invention of the KBW it hadpredessors in other published forms of encyclopedia and collections in the

mid 19th

century when the term Atlas was introduced into the Germanbookmarket language. But the Mnemosyne Atlas was insofar the formulation


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research grant that enabled him to extend his own project called politicaliconography. This project had tried to apply Warburg's methodology to asmaller but more actual aspect of artistic production: politics. Warnke tries touncover the languages of fine arts in terms of their patronage, politicalmeanings, and public functions, in order to distinguish it from mere

classical or "christian interpretation. Warnkes approach is less esoteric orcomplex, but clearly more pragmatic. Disposing of a larger amount of money,he could create a collection of photographs and books that explicetely followedsome of Warburg's principles, i.e. a) using the "good neighborhood" of objects

being brought in variable contexts and b) using images to visualize abstractprocesses and ideas. This collection was considered the proper follower of

Warburg's own one and it was thus decided to place it in the former KBW in1995. It is today called "Research Department for Political Iconography" and itformally belongs to the University's Institute of Art History. Other parts arethe Warburg Archiv that contains original and copied documents of hishistory as well as all his publications, and the Archive of Scholarly Emigration.

When most of the members of the German community and the Hamburgschoo in particular were expelled, they turned to London, the U.S., Southern

America or Israel. By this, Warburg's method of Iconology became one of themost applied methods in art history, even though people associated it more

with the Warburg Institute and did not read his writings in detail.

Warburg did not describe the development of the arts or the history ofWestern culture; he was looking for the meaning and the functions of art fordifferent societies, their role for different social classes and the energy ofcultural memory they preserve. This is what must be called iconology (eventhough the terms is often used in other misleading senses). Warburg used his

"laboratory of the mind" (so he said) to cure the world from the ignorances ofits heritage, making the reader in his lecture room a "patient" to be cured fromnarrow-mindedness, from the defects of western culture and psychicdependence. This is the main difference between a Cultural history (written bycontemporary scholars like Karl Lamprecht or Georg Steinhausen) and aLibrary for CulturalStudies, searching for the presence of a problem. Definingthe relevance of the Antique was to go beyond modern history back to theroots of culture, where east meets west. Unlike famous Swiss Historian JacobBurckhardt, who was admired and criticized as the "wise man from Basel",history was nothing to be narrated or reported as an event. "Detail" did not somuch mean the details of historical events, but the traces and clues within an

work of art that lead the interpreter beyond its framework. The arrangementof the library therefore did not attempt to gather a large number of historicaldocuments, but to combine them in different and multi-dimensional modes.The detail of the image is not only a sophisticated quotation of contemporaryideas, it is a hyperlink to cultural history.

In 1997 when the funds of our research department were nearly consumed, anew project was given to the institute, and it was called "Warburg ElectronicLibrary". The WEL is mainly based on the collections of the researchdepartment and tries to digitize and classify its contents in a new way.Librarians in the audience may know that the term "Electronic Library" is atechnical one, that means, it does not only stand for books on the shelf, but itmeans an information system where all objects can be individually arranged


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and resorted, turning the public library of a database into the personalized,the reference library of an individual.

Also the WEL is not a library in the traditional sense, but a multimediainformation system containing images, texts, an other files, classified

according to a flexible web of indexes. It is entirely built on Internettechnology and can be consulted through the www. Like in Warburgs or inMartin Warnkes card box, all cards are classified thematically, i. e., not bynames of kings or artists but exclusively by keywords like "Piece" or Arrival;this is a merely comparative access in Warburgs tradition. This is onlypossible when connecting all entries by hypertext in a quasi three-dimensional

way. Since we know Warburg's fascination for technology, we assumed that hewould have applied the computer in precisely this way and felt thereforelegitimized to name the project after him.

Peter van Huisstede has produced electronic versions of the Bilderatlas in

oder to prove their complexity as well as their history; this is an alternative ofwhat could be done with Warburg's heritage. Another one is the project I havebeen responsible for during the last couple of years and which intends topreserve some of Warburgs ideas not materially, but in litteris, byestablishing a digital information system and to set up a flexible tool for arthistorical research that not only stores andprovides objects butalso documents the use of these objects.

It is interesting to see that Warburg's person and his ideas, after having beenneglected for a certain period, have become recepted once again and evenstronger than while he was alive. Even though most art historians in the U.S.

have somehow been influenced by what we call the Hamburg School, that isthe emigrated and expelled members of our local institute and their directdescendants in America, the name Warburg was usually combined with adifferent institution, the Warburg Institute in London that keeps up histradition as well as it houses all his former collections of books, photographsetc. The discussion of his works in France and their recent translation intoEnglish have changed the situation dramatically. There is no conference

where his name wouldn't be mentioned at least once. When I attended ameeting in the U.S. some weeks ago, almost every speaker quoted him.

When the interest in his work remained restricted to a small community, ithad various reasons: His refined and creative style of writing (which is, indeedmuch easier to read than sometinmes pretended, but you have to read him

very slowly); the limited number of publications in relation to the lenght andintensity of his studies; and finally the complexity of his method that hedeveloped and refined during his lifetime and that provoked other scholars -even friends - to draw the conclusion it may sometimes be advisable not tofollow and not to believe the author in spite of the fact that he was right, dueto the intensity and scrutiny of his being a detective of cultural history in all itsdetails (Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail). In the end, Warburg became one ofthose tragic names of academic life that are always mentioned with reveration,

but no longer really read.


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This situation changed when, maybe by accident, scholars and biographersin the United States, in England, France and Germany, started re-reading histexts after the war and realized how much it had to to with all of their singledisciplines. The Holocaust memory made the idea of collective memory thatMaurice Halbwachs had expressed a general metaphor for the global

catastrophe of modernity and the suffering of a whole generation. His memorywas never lost among scholars like Jean Seznec (Survival of the pagan gods),Pierre Bourdieu (On the symbolic forms), Francis Yates, and through them it

became known among artists, journalists, and filmmakers. Artists likeRichter, Kabakov, or Boltanski themselves used the idea and concept of'Mnemosyne' to express the inexpressable catastrophe of a collapsed europeanmemory and its self-destruction.

By re-reading Warburg, it was realized that every page of his printedarticles corresponds to 500 pages of manuscript, thousands of notes andhundreds of books. Slowly people became aware that Warburg must have

produced one of the most fascinating archives and complex libraries everdone; and that his work in total was an unparalleled survey of collectivememory and its various media.

Recently, the understanding of Warburg's method has once againundergone several revisions; two of them may be mentioned, one by Frankfurt

Art Historian Klaus Herding, who connected him to Freud's concept of"Psychohistory", and one by Charlotte Schoell-Glass from Hamburg; she iseditor of Warburgs Diaries. She also demonstrated in how far antisemitismand the attempts to extinguish it by unveiling the history of culturalmisunderstandings were a motor for Aby Warburg's ambitious and self-

exploiting work. Warburg, a scholar from Hamburg and a cosmopolitan whocalled himself a Jew by blood, a Hamburger by heart and a Florentine in hissoul. Schoell-Glass shows in how far Warburg's work was devoted not only tothe history of culture but also to their present relevance in society; sheassumes that antisemitism in particular was the motor, the hidden thread ormotive for a research that tried to analyze processes of western culture inorder to understand and extinct the roots of superstition, of antisemitism, orpolitical radicalism.

Research is thus more than just objective and empirical exploration that islegitimized in itself by its unforseen discoveries. Research has to trace thesocial meaning of cultural and natural phenomena and contribute to a"Second Enlightenment" as Warburg called it. While Freud tried to formulatea "psychohistory" that defines man as a being that is caught in a web ofsubindividual forces and superindividual demands, Warburg wrote a historyof images that teaches us the function of images in general, i.e.: as an organ toexpress social expectations and needs, and thus as a means of religious orpolitical communication.

I would concede that anti-semitism has increased Warburg's fears and hispessimism, adding that his personal disposition made it easier for the diseaseto break out, being a symptomatic expression of the difficult culturaltransition of his time.


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A choice of recent titles on Aby Warburg

(See also the re-edition of his complete works, Berlin 2000-)

Robert Galitz, Brita Reimers (ed.):Aby M Warburg. "Ekstatische Nymphe...trauernder Flugott". Portrait eines Gelehrten, Hamburg 1995 (unfortunatelyout of print)

Aby Warburg: The renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the culturalhistory of the European Renaissance, Introduction by Kurt W. Forster,Translation by David Britt, Los Angeles, CA (Getty Research Institute for theHistory of Art and the Humanities) 1999

Bernd Roeck:Der junge Aby Warburg, Mnchen 1997

Martin Warnke, coll. Claudia Brink (ed.):Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Berlin2000

Marc Baratin (ed.):Le pouvoir des bibliothques: la mmoire des livres enOccident, Paris 1996

Tilmann von Stockhausen:Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg:Architektur, Einrichtung und Organisation, Hamburg : Dlling und Galitz,1992

Expo. Cat.Il cosmo incantato di Schifanoia. Aby Warburg e la storia delleimmagini astrologiche, ed. Cinzia Fratucello and Christina Knorr, Ferrara1997

Charlotte Schoell-Glass:Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus:Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik, Frankfurt am Main 1998

Michael Diers (ed.):Portrt aus Bchern: Bibliothek Warburg und WarburgInstitute, Hamburg - 1933 - London [Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung inder Staats- und Universittsbibliothek Hamburg - Carl von Ossietzky, vom 3. -

23. November 1993], Hamburg 1993

Michael Diers: Von der Ideologie- zur Ikonologiekritik: die Warburg-Renaissancen, in:Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte [beruht aufReferaten des Symposiums Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte EndeJuni 1991 im Museum fr Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am Main] Berlin 1992,S. 19-39

Horst Bredekamp / Michael Diers / Charlotte Schoell-Glass (ed.):AbyWarburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions[Hamburg 1990],

Weinheim 1991


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Matthew Rampley: The Remembrance of Things Past. On Aby M. Warburgand Walter Benjamin, Wiesbaden 2000

Marianne Koos (ed.):Begleitmaterial zur Ausstellung "Aby M. Warburg.Mnemosyne",Hamburg 1994

Expo. Cat.Aby M. Warburg: Bildersammlung zur Geschichte vonSternglaube und Sternkunde im Hamburger Planetarium (Katalog zu denAusstellungen 25.1.1993 - 13.3.1993: "Aby Warburg. Mnemosyne"), hrsg. vonUwe Fleckner, Hamburg 1993

L'art et les Rvolutions, Akten des 17. Intern. Kunsthistorikerkongresses,CIHA, Straburg 1992, Sektion 5

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