Warburg, Aby

Warburg, Aby (1866–1929). German art historian. His main field of study was the art of the Florentine quattrocento, which he tried to understand 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 Renaissance merchants and princes, indicating that the subject matter of the paintings they commissioned was no mere pretext for the display of artistic fancies. 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 its intellectual range encompasses, in Panofsky's words, ‘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’. Ernst Gombrich, who wrote a biography of Warburg (1970; rev. edn. 1986), is one of the many distinguished scholars associated with the Institute.