Aby Warburg 1866-1929

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg to a wealthy family of bankers. He studied art history, archaeology and classical

philology in Bonn, Munich, Florence and Strasbourg where he graduated with a dissertation on Botticelli’s mythological paintings. He travelled to America in 1895-96. The broad cultural approach that characterizes his subsequent studies was profoundly influenced by the anthropological and psychological interests he developed over the course of this journey - a journey which he recorded through photographs, drawings and diary entries. Back in Europe, Warburg continued his intellectual research between Hamburg and Florence.

After a mental breakdown in the aftermath of the First World War followed by a long recovery period (1918-1924), Warburg devoted the last part of his career to the unfinished project of the Mnemosyne Atlas conceived as a visual map of the links connecting figurative memory in Western art across time and space.

Warburg’s interests are often described in terms of the afterlife of the ancient world in early modern Europe. In fact they extended much further, encompassing the circulation of energies, tensions, ideas and images across time and space as well as the relationship between so-called primitive, that is to say anthropomorphic, thinking and abstract thinking. He approached images and their history from an anthropological perspective, as crucial elements to the understanding of the human psyche and as repositories of individual and social memories.

The images of title pages above and below are taken from some of the books which were essential to the development of his thought.

From the works of Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) and his son Robert Vischer (1847-1933) Warburg absorbed ideas about the anthropological origins of symbols and symbolism, as well as the concept of Einfühlung which accounts for the empathic response to works of art. Reading Das Problem der Form (1893) by the art historian and theoretician Adolf Hildebrand, Warburg developed the notion that the creation and fruition of art involves the entire body as well as the relationship between perception and expression.

He found Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals particularly useful to understand the role of the central nervous system in directing the unconscious execution of bodily gestures expressive of specific emotional states. Darwin’s insights also drew Warburg’s attention to the biological transmission of the bodily expression of emotion, understood as a form of unconscious memory. Warburg was also inspired by the works of German scientists of his time, in particular the research of neurophysiologists Ewald Hering (1834-1918) and his disciple Richard Semon (1859-1918). The involuntary and unconscious aspects of memory highlighted by Hering became crucial to Warburg’s approach to the transmission of images and symbols from Antiquity to modern times. From Semon’s work Warburg borrowed the terms Mneme and Engram, employed by the former to refer to a form of organic memory and suggesting a neurobiological connection between the past and the present. Warburg used the concept of Engram, and coined the term Dynamogram, to describe the dynamism of symbols occupying human social memory in virtue of their accumulated energy. The Laocoon plate from the Mnemosyne Atlas illustrated here provides an example of such energy.

The other title pages illustrated here point to the fields of historical research to which Warburg contributed through the practical application of his ideas. The annotated edition of the account of a tournament which took place in Florence in 1468 as well as the edition of the Discorso sopra Mascherata della Genealogia degl’ Iddei dei Gentili (Florence 1565) belong to the collection of festival books he assembled to study the afterlife of the ancient gods in early modern European festivals and pageants. His heavily annotated edition of the prophecies of Hans Sachs (1494-1576) is part of the collection of early texts on divination and prophecy - including a section on comets illustrated below - assembled for his study of prophecy in the age of Luther.

The Warburg Institute Library warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/

In order to develop his ideas Warburg assembled and built his own research tools: a library and a photographic collection.

In 1921 his personal library was turned into a more open research institution specialized in the so-called ‘science of culture’ (Kulturwissenschaft), and both its historical scope and its role as a centre for lectures and publications were expanded. In 1933, four years after Warburg’s death, the Institute, its collections and its staff moved from Germany to London to escape the Nazi regime. In 1944 the Warburg Institute was incorporated in the University of London where it is now a member-Institute of the University’s School of Advanced Study. The Institute and its Library and Photographic Collection constitute a lively centre for reading and research. Since its arrival in the UK the Library has grown from around 60 000 volumes to over 350 000.

The Library classification system, set up by Warburg with the assistance of Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, and refined by their successors, organises the library’s collections into four main sections: IMAGE (art history); WORD (language and literature); ORIENTATION (religion, science and philosophy); and ACTION (social and political history). In this way the Library is meant to guide the reader from the visual image, as the first stage in human’s awareness (Image), to language (Word) and then to religion, science and philosophy, all of them products of humanity’s search for Orientation which influences patterns of behaviour and actions, the subject matter of history (Action).

Now over 8000 titles are freely available for download while the entire catalogue can be consulted using the Library’s unique classification system.

Read more at: warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/digital-collections/

Iconographic database warburg.sas.ac.uk/photographic-collection/iconographic-database/

The Photographic Collection was mounted by Aby Warburg in the late 1880s, and includes tens of thousands of late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century photographs and slides, together with hundreds of thousands of images which have been added since the Institute came to London in 1933. The Institute’s Iconographic Database contains digitised images from both the Photographic Collection and the Library. It currently houses one of the world’s largest collections of photographs of mythological subjects (some 30,000).

The images in the background, below the plates from the Mnemosyne Atlas, are screenshots of search results displaying over 1000 images of river gods and nymphs. They constitute an echo to Warburg’s observation:

“Sometimes it looks to me as if, in my role as a psycho-historian, I tried to diagnose the schizophrenia of Western civilization from its images in an autobiographical reflex. The ecstatic ‘Nympha’ (manic) on the one side and the mourning river-god (depressive) on the other.”

Warburg’s work bears witness to the fruitful potential of a multidisciplinary approach to images. It shows that it is possible to use the body and its biological expressive power as recorded by images to shed light on the mind and its cultures.

The challenge for future scholars will be to expand this multidisciplinary project with the tools, results and outcomes of more than a hundred years of bustling neuroscientific activity.

warburg.sas.ac.ukTexts and graphics François Quiviger

© The Warburg Institute