Warburgs 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.

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

Aby Warburg 1866-1929

by 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 Botticellis 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.
Warburgs 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 Library classification system, set up by Warburg with the assistance

of Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, and refined by their successors,
organises the librarys 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 humans awareness (Image),
to language (Word) and then to religion, science and philosophy,
all of them products of humanitys search for Orientation which
influences patterns of behaviour and actions, the subject matter of
history (Action).

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 Einfhlung 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 Darwins 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. Darwins
insights also drew Warburgs 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 Warburgs approach to the transmission of images
and symbols from Antiquity to modern times. From Semons
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.

Now over 8000 titles are freely available for download while the entire
catalogue can be consulted using the Librarys unique classification
system.
Read more at: warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/digital-collections/

The Warburg Institute Library

warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/

n 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 Warburgs 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 Universitys 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.

Iconographic database

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

he Photographic Collection was mounted by Aby Warburg in

the late 1880s, and includes tens of thousands of late nineteenthand 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 Institutes Iconographic
Database contains digitised images from both the Photographic
Collection and the Library. It currently houses one of the worlds
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 Warburgs
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.sas.ac.uk
Texts and graphics Franois Quiviger
The Warburg Institute