Warburg, Aby

Warburg, Aby (b Hamburg, 13 June 1866; d Hamburg, 26 Oct. 1929). German art historian. He came from a prosperous banking family and his wealth enabled him to pursue his own inclinations as a private scholar. His main field of study was the art of the Florentine quattrocento. Whereas his contemporaries, such as Berenson and Wölfflin, interpreted Renaissance art largely in formal terms, Warburg tried to understand it as part of the intellectual history of the time. In particular he was impressed by the hold that religious loyalties and astrological superstition retained on the minds of patrons, indicating that the subject matter of the works of art they commissioned could be fully explained only by reference to forgotten esoteric lore.

Warburg published little, but his ideas had great influence. The superb library that he built up in his home in Hamburg developed into a research institute, which was transferred to London in 1933 to escape the Nazi regime and in 1944 was incorporated in the University of London as the Warburg Institute. Its field of study is now officially defined as ‘the history of the classical tradition’ (das Nachleben der Antike), but a better idea of the intellectual range of its activities can be gauged from a comment by Panofsky: ‘It stands to reason that an institute like the Warburg…which was founded for the explicit purpose of eliminating the borderlines between the history of art, the history of religion and superstition, the history of science, the history of cultic practices (including pageantry) and the history of literature, could not help being important for the practitioners of all these disciplines.’ Ernst Gombrich, who wrote a biography of Warburg (1970, revised edn. 1986), is one of the many distinguished scholars associated with the Institute.