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Aby Warburg
A Biographical Fragment

"Amburghese di cuore, ebreo di sangue, d'anima Fiorentino" ("By heart a native of

Hamburg, by blood a Hebrew, in spirit a Florentine") with this motto Aby M. Warburg
(1866-1929) neatly distilled the tripartite forces that animated his life and thought.
Warburg was the firstborn son of a prominent Hamburg-Jewish family of bankers. When
he was only thirteen years old and already determined to become a scholar, Aby is said
to have passed his birthright to his brother Max in exchange for the promise that he
would be able to purchase as many books as he needed for his studies. This promise to
feed Abys bibliophilia would eventually provide the financial support for the founding of
the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) (Warburg Library of Cultural
Studies) in Hamburg in 1926, which would later move to London in the face of the Nazi
threat in 1933.
From 1886 to 1888, Warburg studied at the University of Bonn, under Carl Justi. And
though Justi showed little enthusiasm for Warburgs proposal to work on Botticelli for
his dissertation, Warburg did attend there Hermann Usener's course on comparative
mythologya crossroads in his intellectual formation that would have far-reaching
consequences for his conception of art history and, more specifically, his ideas about
morphology and symbols. He also attended the courses of the historian Karl Lamprecht,
whose notion of historical change as partially driven by psychological factors would
resonate everywhere in Warburg's thought. Indeed, like many in his generation, Warburg
was greatly influenced by Jacob Burckhardts The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy, but especially Burckhardts notion that the viewers psychology was, more than
aesthetics, the decisive factor in understanding the artwork.

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In 1888 Warburg went to Florence for the winter semester to attend August
Schmarsows seminar in art history. Thus he was also able to visit for the first time
many of the works that would dominate his scholarly thinking over the subsequent
decades. Here, too, he hit upon one of his primary insights concerning the bewegtes
Beiwerk [animated accessory] that he found repeatedly in Italian Renaissance painting.
As Warburg recounts in an autobiographical text written in 1927:

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[B]y the end of my Italian semester . . . it became clear to me that the adornment of the
figurestheir hair and garmentswhich had been carefully discounted as the artist's
decorative vagaries, must, all the same, originate in antiquity. A discovery (which,
moreover, I made by virtue of how such images were translated in a German
advertisement), namely, that the pursuit of Zephyr and Flora in Botticelli's Spring
certainly must be a direct imitation of Ovid's Fasti, was thus decisive for me in
choosing for my doctorate the theme of external, heightened movement beneath the
sign of antiquity.
During this time, too, he read Charles Darwins The Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals a book that at last helps me, he writes in his diary. Returning then to
Germany, Warburg from 1889 to 1891 studied with Hubert Janitschek, at the University
of Strasbourg. There, apparently, he also read Robert Vischers essay, On the Optical
Sense of Form (1873), whose treatment of the concept of Einfhlung [empathy]
would shape Warburgs thinking throughout his career. More importantly, perhaps, he
also enthusiastically read Friedrich Vischers The Symbol (1876), which as Edgar Wind
was later to comment, offers the best approach to the study of Warburgs conceptual
system as a whole.
In 1891, Warburg completed his dissertation on Botticellis Birth of Venus and
Spring. An Examination of the Representations of Antiquity in the Early Italian
Renaissance. Printed in 1893, it contains the genesis of what would come to be called,
rightly or wrongly, the iconographic and iconologic methods in art history; for here
Warburg systematically interprets Botticellis painting by adducing classical and
Renaissance texts that inform and contextualize them.
In the years immediately following the completion of the dissertation, Warburg seemed
to be at a loss in regard to his career path, though he did publish The Theatrical
Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589 (1895), which would prove to be something of a
landmark in cultural studies. In a retrospective essay, his assistant and later Director of
the Warburg Institute in London, Gertrud Bing, even mentions an abortive attempt to
study medicine during this period. Alternately, in 1895-86, Warburg undertook a trip to
the American Southwest (with other stops in New York, Washington D.C., and Los
Angeles) to study the Hopi Indians and their serpent ritual. Wishing to understand the
vitality of mythic thought, he immersed himself in ethnographic studies of the Pueblo
cultures. That this journey would only bear scholarly (and, by Warburgs own account,
misshapen) fruit decades later is also emblematic of his meandering, often abortive
intellectual career.
In 1897 Warburg married, despite the opposition of both their families, the sculptor
Mary Hertz. They lived in Florence from 1897-1904, where Warburg was deeply engaged
with the monuments and documents of the Italian Renaissance. During these years,
Warburg began to elaborate in notebooks and manuscripts the theme of the Nympha
that he had found in Renaissance painting and elsewhere, a theme that critics as
diverse as Gombrich and Agamben see as central to Warburgs vision of artistic
expression, historical change, and the psychological forces that drive both. In 1902,
Warburg published The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoise, which along
with its companion, the 1907 essay, Francesco Sassettis Last Injunction to his Sons,
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traces how the cultural and artistic milieu of late quattrocento Florence, produced a
man who, in an age of transformed self-awareness, strove for a positive balance of his
own. Yet this man, arguably, is not just Sassetti, a Florentine Banker, but he is also
Domenico Ghirlandaio, the painter, whose frescoes adorn the Sassetti Chapel in
Florence, and Warburg himself who also throughout his life strove to attain
psychological balance. Indeed, as Matthew Rampley notes in a recent essay: Warburg
clearly endorsed the intertwining of bourgeois enterprise and learning, and in so doing
he articulated a central trope of liberal thinking of the time.
In 1904, Warburg returned to Hamburg where he was to spend the rest of his life, save
for his sojourn in Rome in the last year of his life. In 1905, he published Drer and
Italian Antiquity where his cardinal notion of the pathos formula first appears in print.
Similarly, in "Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries" (1907), Warburg finds in
Northern Europe the same "language of gestures," albeit in "degraded form," that he
celebrates in quattrocento Florentine art.
Warburgs thinking then took a decidedly cosmographical turn around 1912, with his
lecture (published later in 1922), Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo
Schifanoia, Ferrera. Inspired in part by Franz Bolls Sphaera (1903), a study of Ancient
Greek astrology and astronomy and its effects on subsequent Western thought and
imagery, Warburg here investigates the significance of astrology in the stylistic
evolution of Italian painting. Another chapter in the history of what he came to call the
Nachleben der Antike [afterlife (or survival) of Antiquity], here, too, Warburg points to
his own predicament: It is with this desire to restore the ancient world that the good
European began his battle for enlightenment, in that age of internationally migrating
images that wea shade too mysticallycall the Age of the Renaissance.
By 1913, Fritz Saxl, who had written a dissertation on Rembrandt, but was working then
on a book about medieval astrological and mythological imagery, had become Warburgs
assistant. Among Saxls tasks was the daunting one of organizing Warburgs books into
a working library. Meanwhile, the savagery and chaos of WWI and its aftermath had a
traumatic effect on Warburgs mental health. Diagnosed now with schizophrenia, now
with manic depression, Warburg stayed in various sanatoria from November 1918 to
October 1920, and then for over three years in a clinic at Kreuzlingen, Switzerland under
Dr. Ludwig Binswanger's care. As he describes the factors leading to his breakdown in a
1923 letter to his family: The goal of my work was then knowledge, enlightenment,
[and the] law of cultural-historical development, through inclusion of the irrational
drives in the investigation of historical development . . . Per mo[n]stra ad astra: the
gods have placed the monster on the path to the Idea. The 1914-1918 War had unveiled
to me the devastating truth that unchained, elemental man is this world's
unconquerable ruler.
And yet by Spring 1923, Warburg, with the help of Binswanger, Saxl, and Ernst Cassirer
(who was now teaching at the University of Hamburg, had become a dedicated user of
the Warburg library as he labored on his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and who visited
Warburg at Kreuzlingen to discuss Kepler and other matters of common interest that
might help his new friend regain his mental footing), had devised for himself and others
a test of his sanity: a lecture given to staff and fellow patients about the decades-old
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materials (including photographs he had taken) on Hopi rituals from his trip to the
American southwest. While excusing his talk's provisional character, Warburg does not
hesitate to juxtapose his own psychological struggles with the the psychic life of the
Indians: To us, this synchrony of fantastic magic and sober purposiveness appears as
a symptom of a cleavage; for the Indians this is not schizoid but, rather, a liberating
experience of the boundless communicability between man and environment. Indeed,
as the peroration of the so-called Snake-ritual talk confirms, Warburg had already
discovered such synchrony in European Renaissance culture. In one of his longest and
most complex published essays, Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the
Age of Luther (originally given as a talk in 1918, but published with supplementary
material in 1920, largely due to the efforts of Saxl and Boll), Warburg not only paints a
vivid picture of sixteenth-century German as the age of Faust, in which the modern
scientistcaught between magic practice and cosmic mathematicswas trying to
insert the conceptual space of rationality between himself and the object, but he also
prepares the way, now boldly, now with disarming modesty, for the work of future
Kulturwissenschaftlern ["cultural scientists"]:

May the history of art and the study of religionbetween which lies nothing at present
but wasteland overgrown with verbiagemeet together one day in learned and lucid
minds (minds destined, let us hope, to achieve more than the present writer); and may
they share a workbench in the laboratory of the iconological science of civilization.
Back in Hamburg, during the last five years of his life, Warburg fervently experimented in
the laboratory that he, Saxl, Bing, and others constructed to study and promote the
Nachleben der Antike. To begin with, in physical and material terms, there was the KBW
itself, which opened in 1926, and served as the engine behind a public research
institute. This organon, now greatly expanded, and organized conceptually and
metonymically to foster the law of good neighborliness, that is, to enable the
researcher to find not only the book that he wants, but also the one that he needs,
has rightly been seen by many as Warburgs greatest achievement and legacy (see the
recent issue of Common Knowledge cited in Selected Readings
(https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/readings#selected) for essays on the Librarys
genesis in Hamburg and vibrant afterlife in London). And with its oval reading room
modeled after the Keplerian ellipsea figure that Warburg regarded as mediating
between an astrological-magical worldview and an astronomical-rational oneit also
served as a lecture hall where scholars like Cassirer and the young Erwin Panofsky
could present their work. As Cassirer asserts in dedicating his 1926 book, The Individual
and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, to Warburg:

. . . I could not have completed the work, had I not been able to enjoy the constant
stimulation and encouragement of that group of scholars whose intellectual centre is
your library. Therefore, I am speaking today not in my name alone, but in the name of
this group of scholars, and in the name of all those who have long honoured you as a
leader in the field of intellectual history . . . With a forcefulness that is rare, [the Library]
has held up before us the principles that must govern such research. In its organization
and in its intellectual structure, the Library embodies the idea of the methodological
unity of all fields and all currents of intellectual history . . . May the organon of
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intellectual-historical studies which you have created continue to ask us questions for
a long time. And may you continue to show us new ways to answer them, as you have in
the past.
During these years, Warburg also taught at the University of Hamburg, offering a
seminar there on Burckhardt in the summer semester of 1927 and the winter semester
of 1927/1928. Also, tellingly, though Warburg had previously declined offers to assume
a full-time academic position, he did increasingly charge himself with the task of
promoting and popularizinginsofar as this was possiblethe ideas and methods
associated with the KBW. Thus to honor the memory of his friend, Franz Boll, Warburg
gave a lecture in 1925 (whose text has recently been published) on The Influence of
the Sphaera barbarica on Western Attempts at Cosmic Orientation. Here also, subject
matter aside, Warburg inaugurated his Bilderreihe method, whereby he would deploy a
sequence of images mounted on panels to accompany his discourse. Likewise, his use
of Bilderreihen for his 1926 lecture on Italian Antiquity in the Age of Rembrandt and his
1927 talk for an exhibition of illustrated Renaissance editions of Ovid inspired him to
refine his ideas about how to reconcile words and images in the presentation of arthistorical and literary material.
All these efforts culminated in the Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburgs last, greatest, and
typically imperfect intellectual project, a summa of sorts that compelled a large share
of his intellectual and spiritual energy from 1926 to 1929 (though, as Claudia Wedepohl
and others have shown, the genesis of the project lies much further in the past). The
Mnemosyne Atlas, with its immediate visual and psychological appeal, Warburg saw at
once as a pedagogical instrument (he was greatly pleased when Einstein acclaimed its
methodology) and as a solution to his own conceptual and scholarly difficulties,
particularly with putting his broader, theoretical ideas about the nature of historical
change, repetition, and reception into finished, publishable form. (As Bing wryly notes:
The circumstances of Warburgs life do not account for his having left so much
unfinished.) By metonymically arranging sequences of symbolic images on a series of
large panels, Warburg hoped the make immanent, palpable the pathos formulas that
he saw as riddling Antiquity and its myriad afterlives in the West and the East, in Rome,
in Alexandrian Greece, in ninth-century Baghdad, in quattrocento Florence, in
Reformation Germany, in Baroque Amsterdam, and, ultimately, in his own Weimar-era
Germany.
Yet even as Warburg labored on the Mnemosyne Atlas, he filled pages of notebooks with
reading notes, sketches for new projects, aphorisms, diagrams, etc. He also, along with
Bing and Saxl, regularly made now mundane, now portentous (if also frequently
elliptical) entries in the Tagebuch [diary/logbook ] of the KBW (see Writings by Warburg
(https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/readings#writings)). Meanwhile, in 1928, Warburg
began mulling a return visit to the United States, but dissuaded by his doctors, he went
instead to Italy, where accompanied by Bing, he stayed (mainly in Rome) from
September 1928 to June 1929. There he worked on the Mnemosyne Atlas, but he also
became obsessed by the thought and imagery of Giordano Bruno. Indeed, he eventually
dubbed their journey the Bruno-Reise. During his stay in Rome, he also gave a lecture
at the Hertziana Library, entitled Antiquity in Ghirlandaios Workshop, which, despite
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its title, was by all accounts a capacious, wide-ranging talk, and which accompanied by
a series of panels closely related to the Mnemosyne Atlas, provided its attendees like
Kenneth Clark and E. R. Curtius a decisive experience of Warburgs interests and
method.
Warburg died of a heart attack on October 26, 1929, only some five months after
returning to Hamburg. Soon thereafter, Cassirer gave a speech memorializing his friend
at the University of Hamburg:

[Warburg] had in himself lived and experienced what he saw in front of himand he
was only able to see truthfully what he could grasp and understand from the center of
his own being and his own life. . . . The Orpheus-motif, the motif of the rape of
Proserpina, the motif of Medea's murder of her childrenall this signaled to him just
the last and highest extremes of human pain and human suffering. He saw in all this
only a symbol, a symbol for those unnamable, demonic powers, to which our existence
is made vulnerable.
And yet, Cassirer goes on, Warburg heroically found ways to mediate and redeem these
such symbols. One such way, he insists, was how Warburg, even in last hours, was
contemplating new, large comprehensive plans, which were supposed to constitute his
work's crowning conclusion, that is, his last studies were aimed at understanding
Giordano Bruno's personality and writings. And so, after quoting a poem from one of
Brunos syncretic texts, Cassirer concludes:

As Giordano Bruno pronounces it in these words, thus did Warburg live, and thus did he
die. And thus will his image live on in us: not as the image of a mere scholar and
researcher, who was allowed to die in peace, after he had brought his life's harvest
home, rather as the image of a fighter and a hero, whose weapons, as death stole them
from him, were not dented or broken, but remained equally strong, equally sharp, and
equally pure from beginning to end of his life-long intellectual and spiritual battle.
More recently, if no less exorbitantly, Georges Didi-Huberman writes in a monograph on
Warburg and the survivance of Renaissance images: "Warburg is our haunting; he is to
art history that which an unredeemed ghosta dibboukmight be to the place where
we live." Warburg himself, in one of the last entries in the Tagebuch writes: "Nietzsche
speaks once of the (intellectual), 'diabolical courage of the Jews.' Yesterday evening I
really felt that one must already be possessed by it in order to engage with these
problems of the spirit's wandering. White Necromancy = historical perspective. Thus
even if his intellectual legacy is the main reason why Warburg still haunts us, surely,
given such sentiments, his biography furnishes other reasons as well.
Yes, as Michael Ann Holly eloquently asserts in a recent book, art history for Warburg
was the melancholy art. But it was also for him an ecstatic, redemptive one. As can be
discerned in panel 79 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg urgently, if navely sought to
reconcile what he called polarities. This panel is dominated by photographs of the
signing of the Lateran Treaty in Rome on February 11, 1929, wherein the Holy See
renounced claims of temporal power in recognition of its sovereignty. This was an event
that Warburg witnessed with great fascination. In On Pagans, Jews, and Christians,
Arnaldo Momigliano paraphrases a story often told by Bing:

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There were in Rome tremendous popular demonstrations . . . Mussolini became

overnight the 'man of providence,' and in such an inconvenient position he remained for
many years. Circulation in the streets of Rome was not very easy on that day, and it so
happened that Warburg disappeared from the sight of his companions. They anxiously
waited for him back in the Hotel Eden, but there was no sign of him for dinner. Bing and
others even telephoned the police. But Warburg reappeared in the hotel before midnight,
and when he was reproached he soberly replied something like this in his picturesque
German: 'You know that throughout my life I have been interested in the revival of
paganism and pagan festivals. Today I had the chance of my life to be present at the repaganization of Rome, and you complain that I remained to watch it.
Alternately, in one of his very last entries in the Tagebuch, Warburg plaintively wonders:
"Who will compose for me the anti-Saturnian paean on the late-ripening apple tree?
This literally refers to an old apple tree in the garden of his house, which everyone save
Warburg thought was moribund. Warburg resisted having it uprooted and in the late
summer of 1929 it unexpectedly began to bear fruit. Transformed here into an
ambiguous symbol of his inventive intellectual efforts to reap the fruits of pagan
antiquity, the apple tree seems tied to the fate of its saviour, who still seeks allies in
his spiritual and psychic battles against Saturnian forces. But Warburg's question
summons, too, the specter of myth, as northern European superstition maintained that
a late-blooming fruit tree was a sign of impending death. In this manner, even in his last
hours Warburg metaphorically marries North and South, past and present, to express
the hope that his fears would be redeemed.

Christopher D. Johnson

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