Speaking of Lilliput?

: Recollections on the Warburg Institute in the Early 1970s

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 1, Winter 2012, pp. 160-173 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

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SPEAKING OF LILLIPUT?
Recollections on the Warburg Institute in the Early 1970s

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

In 1970 E. H. Gombrichs intellectual biography of Aby Warburg appeared after an extremely long period of gestation. Gombrich had been brought to London to work on Warburgs papers in 1936, and by the time the book saw the light of day he had already served for more than a decade as director of the Warburg Institute. The Institutes publication of a study of its founder by its current director almost seemed to be an ofcial act, perhaps even more than may have originally been intended. Seen in this light, reactions to the work take on greater signicance. Gombrichs book was greeted by a chorus of criticism that has continued to resonate. Whatever the merits of this critique, his approach has not t well with interests in the psychological, anthropological, and irrational aspects of Warburg and his writings that the books critics mentioned and that are also evident in much of the subsequent ood of literature on him and his circle. Although this reaction may in part have been initiated, perhaps provoked, by Gombrichs efforts, his reserved response does not accord with much recent writing about Warburg, which at times has approximated even the hagiographic aura that surrounds Walter Benjamin, one of his erstwhile correspondents. This discrepancy, however, helps introduce some of the differences between the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, as it was in its Hamburg incarnation, and the Warburg Institute in the University of London, the research and teaching institution that I experienced from 1970 to 1972.
Common Knowledge 18:1 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1456953 2012 by Duke University Press

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I The most biting review, which was published anonymously in the TLS, drew a direct contrast between the two. Gombrich himself immediately recognized who its author was Edgar Wind and remarked in passing that he was surprised it had not been even nastier. Wind, a member of the Hamburg group, had worked at the Warburg Institute in London when it rst came to England, had been a rival for the position of director, and had eventually settled at Oxford, where he was the rst professor of the history of art; he was already well known as a critic of the Institutes personnel and direction. Several phrases in Winds review stand out as exemplars of scholarly vituperation. Picking up on the diction of some infelicitous sentences in Gombrichs large tome, Wind said that his words betrayed the existence of a mentality and a milieu that are smaller than Warburgs and called another of his statements Lilliputian (gs. 1 and 2).1 Winds remarks will throw the present essay into stark relief. I have written in reply to an invitation to offer recollections of the Warburg Institute by providing some anecdotes and characterizations of personalities encountered there around 1970. According to Winds characterization, these reminiscences might be regarded as no more than speaking of or even from Lilliput. For in 1970 to 1972, I was a student in the MPhil program at the Warburg Institute, in what was called Combined Historical Studies (the Renaissance), and Gombrich served as my adviser on the thesis completed during the second year of the course.2 However brilliant Wind may have been (and I believe he may have been the most brilliant of the Hamburg circle), his judgment was and remains a matter of taste. It is debatable whether the range of interests and capabilities represented by the group of scholars assembled at the Warburg in London around 1970 was much less than that found in Warburgs Hamburg in the 1920s. Whatever ones opinion may be of this matter, and whatever the merits of Winds critique, it is difcult to believe that a milieu that included, as members of the Institute, not only Gombrich but Frances Yates, Michael Baxandall, D. P. Walker, A. I. Sabra, and Otto Kurz and as frequent presences, Michael Podro, Arnaldo Momigliano, Michael Screech, and Nikolaus Pevsner may in any case be called Lilliputian. Retrospectively, this group might even seem to be representative of a lost golden

1. Unnished Business: Aby Warburg and His Library, TLS, June 25, 1971, 735, printed as Appendix: On a Recent Biography of Warburg, in Edgar Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson with a biographical memoir by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), quotations at 112.

2. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Theories of Light in Renaissance Art and Science (MPhil thesis, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1972), subsequently published in revised and substantially reduced form as The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 258 87 (republished in The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993], 49 78).

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Figure 1. Sir Ernst H. Gombrich, OM, fourth director of the Warburg Institute (197690), in front of the Woburn Square Institute building, London. Courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London

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age: issues discussed in the academy still maintained a broader public interest, many bright young students in English and American universities still chose to follow pursuits that did not lead to great remuneration, and within the academy itself the humanities were still respected, often as highly as were other elds of study. All comparisons aside, several of the gures mentioned (Gombrich, Yates, Baxandall, Momigliano) have certainly had a great impact on scholarship, even if others (Pevsner, Podro, Sabra) may have had a more limited, though denite, effect on particular elds. To be sure, this vision of a golden age may be an effect of the golden haze that seems to settle over memory as the years advance. But then, would this observation be any less true of Wind, who penned his review in his seventy-rst year, more than forty years after Warburgs death (and who himself died in the year his review was published)? And would these recollections of mine be any less valid than those stemming from the familiarity claimed by Wind and on which he relied in part as the basis for his critique?

Figure 2. Edgar Wind. Courtesy of the Warburg Institute, London. With Rudolph Wittkower, Wind cofounded The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in 1937. In 1955 Wind was elected to the rst professorship of art history in Oxford.

II As director of the Warburg Institute, Gombrich presented its public face. He was probably its best known gure at the time. He had been and continued to be honored in many ways (including with a knighthood in 1972), which no doubt lent the institution a certain public prominence, nationally and internationally. Although the Warburg Institute has gained a rm place in the annals of academic history and was also important locally for the cultural history of Hamburg until 1933, it is unlikely that the institution had obtained such broad public recognition before Gombrichs tenure or indeed that it has enjoyed anything comparable since his departure. Gombrich was doubtless a formidable figure, a person of many facets. Whatever others may have experienced, I found him generous and helpful with ideas and suggestions; indeed he pointed to the direction (the investigation of light rather than space in painting) that I should take in my research at the Institute. In later years, I also witnessed his kinder side.3 It has frequently been
3. One moment worth recording occurred a decade and a half later, when my then ve-year-old daughter asked him if he knew German and, while playing on the oor of his ofce, sang German nursery songs with him. We had other pleasant encounters at his house when I later took her there.

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remarked, moreover, that Gombrich was not interested in contemporary art, but that was not my experience of him: he did write on some twentieth-century artists (evident throughout his copious bibliography) and was on friendly terms with others. For example, he introduced me to the artist/writer/curator Lawrence Gowing, perhaps because of Gowings interest in Vermeer, and we three certainly talked about paintings when we met. Regardless of ones judgment of what kind of modern art Gombrich liked, the range from Kokoschka to Gowing must be recognized as rather broad. Still, though Gombrich was much involved at the time, in conversation and in classes, with the articulation of his own view of cultural history subsequently elaborated in several essays it cannot be said that he represented the full diversity of approaches, attitudes, and interests found in his time at the Warburg, for these were as wide as the Librarys founder had envisioned.4 Gombrich was a prominent presence at the public lectures, seminars, and other events connected with the Institute, but he by no means directed all that went on in the building. In particular, he did not seem to dominate the academic program. His involvement in teaching the MPhil course was limited to conducting the seminar in which students in the doctoral and MPhil programs presented their research. (The PhD was entirely a research degree.) I recall being his only advisee during my years there, which was fortunate for me, and he otherwise supervised just a few doctoral candidates Tellingly, the only course that Gombrich did choose actively to teach (over a period of two terms) was an introduction to iconography. In this class, Gombrich expressed his differences with Warburg and his circle, most immediately Erwin Panofsky, for whom Gombrich always voiced respect, even when their interpretations differed.5 Warburg had coined the term iconology in its modern usage,6 and among other books Panofsky had written was his inuential Studies in Iconology.7 The decade of the 1960s had been a high point for iconography, as is evident in the pages of the Art Bulletin; Gombrich expressed the opinion that iconological interpretations had got out of hand.8 In 1970 and 1971, he was

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4 . Ernst Hans Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); for subsequent elaboration, see, for example, the essays collected in Gombrich, The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon, 1999). 5. This respect was expressed in his reaction to Panofskys The Iconography of Correggios Camera di San Paolo (London: Warburg Institute, 1961). Playing the role of Condent Integrity, one of the personications that Panofsky had identied in the fresco, Gombrich wrote to Panofsky, addressing him with his nickname Pan and saying that, though he was honored to publish the book with the Warburg Institutes imprimatur, he did not believe a word of

it. Gombrich said he meant to soften the blow by writing to Panofsky in Latin. 6. See W. S. Heckscher, Genesis of Iconology, in Stil und berliefung in der Kunst des Abendlandes. Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses fr Kunstgeschichte, Bonn, 1964, 3 vols. (Berlin: Gebrder Mann, 1967), 3:239 62. 7. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). 8. The opinion as I report it here is what I wrote down in my notes; the words may be mine, but the thought was Gombrichs, at least as I interpreted it.

preparing the response that is incorporated in his book of essays on iconography: its revisionist introduction was subtitled The Aims and Limits of Iconology, which was the spirit in which he taught the course.9 That spirit has had further repercussions for the stafng and eventually the future direction of the Warburg Institute.10 On the other hand, Gombrich reacted afrmatively to research directions that Warburg and his cohort had suggested but that had not evoked much interest at the time (indeed would not do so until fairly recently). Gombrich offered a brief introduction to astrological iconography that induced such positive student responses that he then agreed to teach a class on Renaissance astrology.11 This memorable class, which he conducted together with Otto Kurz, presented what I now realize was a comprehensive and accessible summary of Ptolemy and Manilius and their reception. Kurz and Gombrich also spent a fascinating session casting Gombrichs horoscope. Kurz provided the perfect complement to his old friend in this seminar, and elsewhere as well. They were the two scholars who then possessed professorial rank at the Warburg. While Gombrich had ideas about everything, Kurz knew about everything. If Kurz nodded off at lectures, Gombrich apologized, Dont mind him, hes just an old-fashioned polymath. But Kurz would also wake up suddenly with an apposite remark or comment, often arcane but completely accurate, in one instance a quotation from an Egyptian Book of the Dead. A perfect moment occurred when Kurz interjected a comment about esoteric Buddhist practices in reference to a discussion of European religion; when asked by Gombrich where he had obtained his information, Kurz replied, from your son (Richard Gombrich, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1976 to 2004). As one admiring student wag wrote on a bulletin board, Die Kunst ist lang, doch Kurz ist unser Leben. Kurz had been Librarian of the Warburg Institute and obviously knew the contents of its stacks exceedingly well. He was probably more familiar with the Librarys holdings than anyone else at the time, including Wind. Kurz is otherwise closely to be identied with the fabric of the building: he had drawn up the admonitory mottoes that still adorn the walls on Woburn Square (including such legends I remember as Otiosis locus hic non est. Discede
9. Ernst Hans Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), see 1 25. 10. Although a full account would require another extensive discussion, I believe that Gombrichs sympathies helped lead to the initial appointment of Charles Hope (over David Freedberg, long before he had written The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989]) to a position at the Warburg. Hope ultimately succeeded Gombrich as director.

11. The reaction of Michael Baxandall appears in his contribution to this issue of Common Knowledge, as well as in Episodes: A Memorybook (London: Frances Lincoln, 2010), 120. There, he professes little interest in astrology (although he knew it to be the rst classic subject matter of the institute), an attitude contrasting with that of Gombrich and Kurz, who in this regard were truer to Warburg.

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morator). As a scholar Kurz is perhaps best known for his collaboration with the art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris.12 On his own, Kurz wrote on a wide variety of subjects: in one volume of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes he published articles on tapestries after Bosch and on Mogul miniatures. In another year, he published in various places essays on Koran stands, Turkish dress, ancient Mexican amulets, and the Alexandrian world chronicle (among other topics). His grasp of the literature of art history is illustrated by his additions and commentaries to the second and third Italian editions of the standard survey and bibliography compiled by Julius von Schlosser, who had been the teacher not only of Kurz but of Gombrich and Kris as well.13 It was thus appropriate that Kurz taught the seminar on research tools. Designed to provide a foundation for Renaissance studies, the course ranged from practical suggestions to discussions of the basis for such research in the accomplishments of Cassiodorus. The nal meeting of this class demonstrated that Kurzs name was completely inappropriate as a description of his competence. In the penultimate session, Kurz had requested that students ask him about any research problem they might have, and he returned a week later with answers to all queries, with full bibliography. His geographical and linguistic range was further on display in a course titled Geographical Discoveries and Their Impact. Long before global or world history, let alone world art history, had gained in popularity William McNeill was one of the few proponents of world history at the time Kurz offered students a cultural history of the world, albeit from a European perspective.14 His approach was hardly Eurocentric, however. In addition to reading Arabic and Chinese and many other Eurasian languages, he demonstrated that he was familiar as well with Amerindian tongues: at one point, he identied a text as a Nahuatl codex and read some of it aloud. Another gure at the Warburg who stands out in my memory for various reasons was Michael Baxandall. Although he afterward gained great renown, Baxandall was a junior member of the staff in 1970 and had not yet published any of the books for which he would become famous. He had been assigned to be my adviser, so I had more personal contact with him than other students did. I remember Baxandall then, and in subsequent encounters, as sublimely difdent.

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12. Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). The English translation has an introduction by Gombrich, who later assisted Kris, and is thanked as a friend in the original introduction by Kurz and Kris. 13. Julius von Schlosser, La letteratura artistica: Manuale delle fonti della storia dellarte moderna, trans. Filippo Rossi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1956 [2nd ed.], 1964 [3rd ed.]). Kurzs own bibliography appears in a pamphlet (Otto Kurz, 1908 1975) published on the occasion of his

funeral, September 18, 1975. See also Ernst Hans Gombrich, Otto Kurz, 1908 1975, Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979): 719 35, reprinted as The Exploration of Culture Contacts: The Service to Scholarship of Otto Kurz (1908 1975), in Tributes: Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984), 235 49. 14. William Hardy McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

When asked for some direct advice, he would most often reply, I cant say. When asked for direct information, he would reply, I know nothing about that. I recall distinctly that in one case this reply came as an answer for information on a subject on which I noticed not much later that he had already assembled an entire le of data.15 He taught only one class in the program, but, in retrospect, what a class it was! a seminar titled Rhetoric, Language, and Criticism. Baxandalls rst two substantial books were then in preparation and were published during the years I was at the Warburg. The course adumbrated the argument of Giotto and the Orators, which I regard as his best book, and also anticipated his famous Painting and Experience.16 The subtitle of the latter specically calls it a primer; Baxandall described it also as a potboiler, by which he meant that he wrote it just to keep things going while he was working on what he regarded as his magnum opus, his book on German limewood sculpture. Looking again at class notes, I can see now that this attitude was probably not just a matter of modesty but that the ideas he was trying out in Painting and Experience were being developed more thoroughly into a larger discussion of questions of style in the sculpture book.17 Although, as I learned later, his approach to rhetoric and painting was not new it had been anticipated, as Baxandall acknowledged, by the great Swedish scholar Allan Ellenius, who himself had worked at the Warburg it was applied in fruitful and original ways to the development of what Baxandall later called inferential criticism.18 My analysis of these relationships is, as I say, retrospective: they were, as I recall, but dimly comprehensible in the seminar. Baxandalls classes were excruciatingly dry, presenting what often seemed to be obscure material without much contextualization. A paragon of reticence, Baxandall would lecture without personal affect or accentuation, or he would have us write (rhetorical) periods, or he would analyze some photocopied texts in a cursory manner I recall discussion of some pages from an edition of progymnasmata, which seemed to be pulled out at random. Only a decade later did I realize what he was driving at, and how

15. I cannot recall if this data le was on cast shadows, on which I wrote my MPhil thesis and an article (see note 2 above) and on which, two decades later, Baxandall published a book, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Ernst Hans Gombrich simultaneously published a book on the same subject Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art (London: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995) which, though a much slimmer volume than Baxandalls, was both more generous and broad in its response. 16. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350 1450 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Paint-

ing and Experience in Fifteenth- Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 17. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, 1475 1525: Images and Circumstances (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). 18. Allan Ellenius, De arte pingendi: Latin Art Literature in Seventeenth- Century Sweden and Its International Background (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell, 1960). Rensselaer Wright Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967), also appeared before Baxandalls work on the topic. (Lees essay had been published originally in Art Bulletin 22. 4 [December 1940]: 197 269.)

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important, and useful for my own work, Baxandalls class and insights had been. I was pleased to be able to tell him so when he lectured at Princeton in the 1990s; he said that he had recognized the inuence.19 Although Gombrich, Kurz, and Baxandall were nominally all art historians their classes were as close as one could come to art history in the program even Baxandalls approach to art history was presented in a way that could be called oblique at best. I recall that he would talk in private about our common interests in art history almost as if I were a coconspirator. While students were encouraged (required, really) to take paleography with Julian Brown (and were urged to study languages as they had been used in the Renaissance, such as NeoLatin I chose on my own to learn Dutch and Hebrew), no such requirement led to the study of visual imagery and even the iconography class was not strictly visual in content. I do not mean that the study of art history and artworks was being actively discouraged: Gombrich indeed urged me to look at as many paintings as I could while preparing my thesis, which was as heavily an exercise in science and art theory as in actual artistic practice. But, since I had come with degrees in history and in a program called History, the Arts, and Letters from Yale and wished to learn more details about art history per se, I had to audit classes offered by Birkbeck College, University College, and the Courtauld Institute. Despite the myth of interdisciplinarity at the Warburg and the purported aim of the Library, these distinctions denitely meant something, at least as far as the basic preparation of students was concerned. Baxandalls close friend Michael Podro came down (or as one says in England, up) from Essex to give a seminar, titled Problems in Cultural History, that established another kind of atmosphere, though no more welcoming. Although Podro was then completing his own insightful book on aesthetics and art theory, he effectively offered little taste of it.20 His seminar presentations were extraordinary: he would speak in a grand, histrionic style as if he were giving the Slade Lectures at Cambridge, whereas he was talking to six or seven students in a seminar, with whom he did not seem much interested in communicating. In any case, without warning, explanation, or any further communication from him or anyone else, then or later, Podro just simply stopped coming to class in the middle of term. A. I. Sabra exhibited a much different attitude toward teaching, the acquisition of knowledge, and indeed philosophy. An amiable man, Sabra had received his earlier education in Alexandria, Egypt, and was an expert in Arabic science.

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19. Since I have elsewhere been critical of Baxandall and especially of his treatment of German art, I am again happy here to acknowledge how important his class was for my own work.

20. Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).

He had come to London where he studied philosophy of science with Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. Sabras dissertation, later a book, was on seventeenth-century optical theory.21 At the Warburg, he taught a marvelous seminar on science and cosmology. This course started with classical antiquity and pursued the path of astronomical studies in the Greek, Roman, and Islamic traditions up through their descendants in the seventeenth century. Because of positive student response, Sabra continued his class into a second term, and thereafter for several terms offered an extracurricular course on the history of optics, which pursued a similar trajectory to that followed in his class on astronomy and cosmology. Sabra offered more than a rich and nuanced view of perennial questions in the history of science; he provided insights into key questions of epistemology, as seen through the philosophy of science. Pierre Duhem and Alexandre Koyr were not the only gures with whom one had to reckon, but also Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Thomas Kuhn, among others. Even if the philosophical writings of these three important thinkers were not specically assigned, I felt compelled to read them. Not only did their work represent an alternative to the neo-Kantian approach of the earlier Warburg circle and in Poppers case, an approach that was obviously more in keeping with Gombrichs sympathies but also their way of thinking had implications for the philosophy of history and for questions of periodization that clearly affected the framing of teaching and research at the Warburg. Sabra taught that, in the world of Islam, scientists had received, adapted, and changed views inherited from antiquity. He specically argued (in a perhaps Kuhnian rather than Popperian way, though in any case not a way owing much to Aby Warburg) that a break had occurred in views of cosmology and optics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that optical and astronomical theories needed to be explained in terms of changes in epistemology as well. Although Sabra left London for Harvard in 1972 (as I also did), his stay at the Warburg seems important for several reasons. First, he started a tradition of instruction in the history of science (and not just the occult sciences or astrology) that has been continued at the Warburg Institute through Charles Schmitt and Charles Burnett (in the latter case also with a distinctive interest in Arabic science) and that does seem to mark a difference from the earlier Warburg ethos. Second, Sabras conjectural rationalism is noteworthy because, like Gombrichs, it suggests a break with the earlier Warburg group. Finally, although others had demanded close textual analysis, Sabra also personied a reasoned empirical approach, which t well with the atmosphere of the Institute around 1970. All of these points deserve more extensive discussion than is allowable here.

21. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, Theories of Light: From Descartes to Newton (London: Oldbourne, 1967).

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D. P. Walker dealt with a much different area of interest, as I learned when I presented a report on Ficinos views of light to a somewhat puzzled Sabra in the seminar on optics. More in keeping with an older Warburg subject, but again approached in a personal manner, Walker conducted a stirring, if difcult, class on Florentine Platonism, based on close readings of texts. As might have been expected, given both the content and the instructor who was the author of an important book on spiritual and demonic magic the seminar had much to do with such matters as Orphica and the transmigration of the soul.22 Deeply esoteric at times (and replete with references to Iamblichus on mysteries), Walkers Florentine Platonism class was followed by a wonderful seminar originally advertised as French Platonism but realized as French Reformation. This class hardly concentrated exclusively on religious controversies. Its distinctive literary bias came in part because the great Rabelais scholar M. A. Screech took over the seminar for a few weeks. Beyond Rabelais and several (to me) obscure authors, Marguerite de Navarre and Marot became topics of discussion for Screech and Walker. Screech adumbrated his basic interpretation of Rabelais in a formula (laughter at the foot of the Cross) that he would come to use in a book published twenty-ve years later.23 Walker presented similar readings of Rabelais as a serious joke, while delving for profundities in other authors. (This represented a radically different tack than the direction that was to be taken following the inspiration of Mikhail Bakhtins work on Rabelais, which had just been translated.)24 Only in reviewing my notes for this class have I realized that its approach to serious jokes has become important for my own recent work on Arcimboldo.25 Closely related to Walkers readings were those of Frances Yates, an inspiring gure. Walker was reputed to play violin duets with Yates, and they surely had a sympathy of approach. A great scholar herself, Yates frequently acknowledged her reliance on Walkers deep scholarship. Dame Frances, as she later became, had, alas, just stopped teaching the year I arrived in London. Nonetheless, she remained very much a personality around the Warburg, much a topic of conversation, and a gure at tea. Reported to wear yellow socks on Platos birthday, she otherwise contributed to the air of Neoplatonic (or Hermetic) enthusiasm that inspired certain spirits of the place. While I did not have much opportunity to converse with her, I must have read most of what she had written in those years. It certainly inspired my own work, as is shown by the approach I took to a much

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22. Daniel Pickering Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958). 23. M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Penguin, 1997). 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

25. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

different geographical area in my own dissertation.26 When I did have the chance a few years later to talk with her, she seemed to agree with my interpretation but had overlooked Giuseppe Arcimboldo, on whom I had begun writing. I was described as oating out of the room. There were many other gures at or around the Warburg who did not provoke such reactions, not in me at least. My reservations may have to do with my interests, as much as with theirs. In any event, either they did not leave as much of an impression on me or I did not have substantial contact with them. In the former category were the librarian J. B. Trapp a conversation with whom at Yale had fortied my interest in the Warburg but who was busy in London with Library business and D. S. Chambers, who perhaps mattered more to students, since he offered as many as three courses: on the Renaissance papacy, on Venetian society and government, and also one called Social and Political Ideas, which focused on the somewhat unexpected topic (for a eld then dominated by the paradigm of the bourgeois Renaissance) of aristocracy. Of these empirically based classes, the most stimulating perhaps was the one on aristocracy. The second category of personalities around the Warburg whom I cannot really claim to have known includes scholars such as Rudolf Wittkower, who, in the year of his death, I merely glimpsed across the card catalog; Pevsner, who introduced himself to me; and Momigliano, whose Piedmontese accented English I could hardly understand. In my ignorance (before I learned Slavic languages, and before I knew who he was), I thought Momigliano might even have been of Eastern European origin, as was the very learned Christopher Ligota, a senior librarian who helped me with some Polish texts. As for what this instruction had to do with the Library itself, I can say only that the resources of the building provided a marvelous basis for research. There may be much appearing in these pages about the organization of books on the shelves. In practice, what I found most useful was the presence of offprints and occasional papers intermingled with books. Their continuation may be threatened regardless of what happens to the Library. I also found the librarians especially John Perkins, along with Ligota to be immensely helpful. Since leaving the Warburg, I have only occasionally returned. My interests have led in other geographical directions and away from the resources concentrated there. I have given but one lecture in the building. When Vivian Nutton invited me to a conference he had organized on the history of medicine for the Wellcome Institute, now
26. My doctoral dissertation, completed in 1976 (degree awarded from Harvard in 1977) and published as Variations on the Imperial Theme in the Age of Maximilian II and Rudolf II (New York: Garland, 1978), directly acknowledges the inspiration of Yates, specically that of the essays collected in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

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transformed, I asked to speak at the Warburg, which was nominally a cosponsor. Nevertheless, much that I learned at the Warburg in those years has stuck with me and has informed my interests in many ways. I imagine that this may also be true for other students who were there at, or closely after, the time that I was, either in the MPhil course or doing their dissertations or doctoral research. Just to mention art historians whom I remember, this group includes Elizabeth Cropper, Helen Langdon, Alex Potts, Andrew Saint, Sarah Stevenson, Peter Parshall, and Keith Moxey; I met Valerie Fraser later. This is a varied group, all of whom have had distinguished careers.

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III Edgar Winds critique raises another challenge. Personal recollections or personal familiarity may have merit, as may institutional memory, at least as a corrective in historiography.27 But our opinions and experiences may differ, and so may our memories.28 What, then, is the use of eyewitness accounts in history? What is the value of personal memory or institutional memory, or even the cultural memory, that Aby Warburg called Mnemosyne? A Warburgian aftermath suggests some of the problems involved. Soon after I came to Princeton in the later 1970s, I was allowed to rent a universityowned house at 116 Prospect Avenue. R. W. Lee, cited above, who had a prodigious memory, especially for literature, and was a good friend of Panofskys, assured me that this was also the rst house in which Panofsky resided when he settled in Princeton after leaving Hamburg. Lee came over one evening and related how he had rst met Panofsky in the very living room where we were then sitting, and how they had discussed Spensers treatment of the Three Graces. W. S. Heckscher, who had been one of Panfoskys last students, conrmed the identication of the house when he too came for a visit. Like Rens Lee, Heckscher became a good friend and was endowed with a phenomenal memory for details that at least equaled Lees. Heckscher said that he had spent his rst night in Princeton, fresh from his own arrival from Hamburg, in a guest room on the third oor of the same house, then occupied by Panofsky. The problem is that Panofskys correspondence reveals that he lived at 114

27. See Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, American Voices: Remarks on the Earlier History of Art History in the United States and the Reception of Germanic Art Historians, Ars 42.1 (2009): 128 52; also in Journal of Art Historiography 2 (June 2010): www.gla.ac.uk/arthistoriog raphy. 28 . For example, Baxandalls caustic comments (in his memoir Episodes: A Memorybook) about John Pope-

Hennessey do not correspond with my sense of the man. I was friendly with Pope-Hennessey while I was a student in London, and I found him both then and later to be cordial. I observed no game-playing in his behavior toward me, or toward my spouse when I introduced her to him. The difference between Baxandalls reections on PopeHennessey and mine may be a matter of temperament.

29. Wind, appendix to Eloquence of Symbols.

Kauf mann

Prospect Avenue. Unless the street numbers had been changed in Princeton, Heckscher and Lees very precise memories were both wrong in at least one particular detail. They had visited Panofsky in the house next door. One wonders what to make of this mistake, especially given that the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg had been located next door to Aby Warburgs own house, one located at 114 Helwigstrasse, and the other at 116 Helwigstrasse. One point of contention in Winds review of Gombrich is the origin of Warburgs famous adage, Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail.29 What details are right in all these recollections is for the reader to determine.

S p e a k in g o f L i l l ip u t ?

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