Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Prof. Martin Warnke, who is head of our department kindly asks you to excuse that he couldn't
come; he would have been able to deliver his talk in Portuguese. Unfortunately, I am not able to,
in spite of the many occasions to get used to it, since people from Portugal belong to the
streetlife of Hamburg; in the quarter where I live you will not only count several Portuguese
restaurants, bakeries, or a football club; theres also a weekly sunday mass in Portuguese. As a
port city exchanging goods with trade partners from all over the world, it is no surprise that the
city of Hamburg has a old relationship with Portugal.
1. Classical patterns have always attracted artists for they keep the energy of antiquity and
recharge any work of art theyre implanted into. The Renaissance is characterized not only by
the use of these antique patterns, but also by the fact that they can always be distinguished by
both their gestures and their accessories from their environment on the painting (e.g. the hair of
Venus). Applying these antique forms means to surrender to the power of eternal forms that
lead their own life in the new context of the image. Certains forms thus become containers for
what Warburg would later call Pathosformel and moved accessories.
2. Secondly, the "program" of the paintings discussed here, commissioned by Lorenzo de'
Medici, was delivered by the famous poet Poliziano. All structures of the paintings have their
textual correspondence in his poem La giostra as well as in the sources he has used himself.
The works can be explained only by combining philological and visual analysis.
3. Both paintings belong together in that they not only tell the story of Venus but were to
commemorate a most beautiful Florentine woman, Simonetta Vespucci, a painters wife who had
died in her early years and who is depicted here, so Warburg demonstrates, as the Spring
goddess.
But their was one obstacle to this project. At the time of Warburgs promotion, there was no
university in Hamburg; public lectures where organized and held by private individuals and
societies; renowned teachers of this time, like young art historian Erwin Panofsky, were not
exactly professors but served this privately organized "Vorlesungswesen".
When the new library was opened in 1926, it was already a monument for the history of human
thought and the afterlife of antique tradition. From this moment on, Cassirer and his colleagues
were welcomed by an inscription above the inner door of the library where Warburg had placed
the greek word MNEMOSYNE for "memory", maintaining that the institute was devoted to the
study of the "survival of the Antique" (Nachleben).
Warburg applied the concept of exchange and migration not only to different epochs; he also
assumed that the various parts of Europe, the north and south, communicated with each other,
and that there was no supremacy of one over the other. Looking at flemish tapestries (1907), he
described how the energetic patterns of farmers working in the woods, depicted on these
images, echoed classical forms and thus, folklore belonged (as so-called low art) to the same
cosmos of art historical style analysis as high art. As all the others methods of art history, Style
could be integrated into his set of tools. He shows that pamphlets enabled people across
Europe to share a common Leidschatz, the common treasure of elementary passions and
gestures.
Kommilitonen! Die Auflsung eines Bilderrtsels noch dazu wenn man nicht einmal ruhig
beleuchten, sondern nur kinematographisch scheinwerfen kann war selbstverstndlich nicht
Selbstzweck meines Vortrages.
Having studies the exchange of north and south he now turned to the meeting point of east and
west, not looking at melting pots like Jerusalem, Venice, or hellenistic Greece, but at the east
within the west and its products. His plaidoyer for an interdisciplinary psychology of human
expression was not yet the schizophrenic and complicated theory that Gombrich later saw in it,
even though the immense number of references and evidences and the pathetic language of the
author seemed to betray the increasing degree of mental irritation and puzzling. This is the first
article where Warburg turns his results enthusiastically into a political statement on the situation
of art and cultural studies. He argues against a border patrol of disciplines, and he does so two
years before world-war one, an event that would destroy all his optimistic hopes of
acommunication between different worlds. Nevertheless Warburg went on studying his
international subjects, and in the 20s once again presented his results on the International Art
History Congress in Rome, where he once again used photograps, fixed on black boards, to
illustrate his topics. This was the modell for a later project, the famous Mnemosyne Atlas that
nowadays receives the most attention. More about that later.
As I have mentioned, Warburg died 3 years after the library had been opened. Another 4
years passed by, and the political change had made it impossible for the Warburg circle to
remain in the city. The assistants Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing as well as young scholars Edgar
Wind or Raymond Klibansky organised the transfer to London, pretending that it was a
temporary loan to the London University. The 60.000 volumes, notes, some 20.000 photographs
as well as all files and furniture never came back to Hamburg. After the war the library was re-
opened in London by Saxl and Bing to be incorporated into the University, now to be called The
Warburg Institute, with Saxl as its first director. Different in size and attitude, it somehow tried to
preserve the interdisciplinary idea and the classification system of Warburg, but was soon forced
to abandon the open structure as it grew to one of the biggest art historical libraries in the world.
MNEMOSYNE now took on a second meaning: the survival of a methodological concept within
a professionalized research and education environment. The original German word for
Mnemosyne, the Nachleben or Afterlife, became a metaphorical term for this always ambivalent
situation.
If you visit the library today you will still
see this inscription; but you have to
keep in mind that youll find a building
that didn't serve the public but for a few
years. In former times the library
consisted of 4 floors with book stacks
plus the contents of the impressive,
oval reading room. The order of the
different floors and the ways the library
was organized has caused some
dispute among scholars since it was
assumed that the KBW was more than
just as storage for books, but that it
had, in a certain sense, envisioned the
idea of a library as a creative place, a
generator that combines objects and concepts of all kinds in a limited space and thus could be
compared to a Kunstkammer rather than to a museum..
Even though they did their best in supporting Warburgs research they could not avoid
standardizing the library, its divisions and contents in order to keep them usable. Even though,
for example, the Warburg Institute in London imitated the original building by erecting a house
with four floors in order to mirror the central issues of Warburg's iconology, Gertrud Bing,
Warburgs second assistant, had to change the order of books into Image Word Orientation-
Practice, turning the classification system into an ontological struture that ascends from the
religious reveration to enlightened practise. Following generations themselves considered
Warburg's discoveries as "bookish", daring and abstract, have altered the notion of what the
KBW was about.
As late as with the director Ernst Gombrich, famous for his easy-
to-read "history of art" and himself being an emigrant from Vienna,
a certain distance to the confusing treasures of Warburg's
collections became apprehensible in the London institute.
Gombrich clearly expressed his doubts in his first comprehensive
biography of the scholar. Still the Warburg Institute is devoted to
Warburgs original fields of research. It investigates the iconologic
relation of word and image; the passage of symbols throughout
history; the revival of antiquity in Renaissance and its presence in
modern life; the role of northern art, especially Drer or Flemish
North, for the lasting success of the Renaissance in the West; but
on the other hand, the Warburg is now identified as a typical art historical institution. To a certain
degree, this is not a proof for a lack of originality, but also a consequence of the fact, that so
many ideas of Warburg have been adopted and popularized as art historical methods.
Mnemosyne
One of Warburg's and Saxl's last and unaccomplished projects was the Mnemosyne Atlas: Even
though I cant go into detail here it is worth outlining its history and drawing some general
conclusions. The Atlas Project is now often quoted in academic lectures, and one might
compare it, in its size, its infinite structure and ambitious intention, to collective projects as
Proust's Recherche de la temp perdue. The title of it as well as the description of its function
was the object of long discussions between Warburg and Bing and took years to develop.
Menmosyne Atlas is thus only an abbreviated title for a much longer description, and the word
Atlas refers to the German meaning of it as Album or printed collection.
[The following paragraphs have not been part of my lecture; they paraphrase a publication by
Dutch Art Historian Peter van Huisstede who has written about the project in 1998.]
What is nowadays referred to as the Mnemosyne Atlas in fact consists of the remains of a
project that was unfinished when Warburg died in 1929. As mentioned, the idea came from
using images placed on large screens as instruments for the preparation of lectures and
exhibitions, like in his Roman Schifanoia conference. Only much later, nearly at the end of his
life, somewhere in the summer of 1927, Warburg formulated the idea of producing a systematic
Bilderatlas, based on suggestions made by his assistants, making his lectures and small
exhibitions a spin-off of this larger project in which he sought to present his scientific work, old
and new, methods and results, in a coherent and novel way. It was presumably Saxl once again
who hoped that, if Warburg is no longer able to publish linear texts, this would at least furnish
him with a means to document the width of his focus and his ideas. But once again, Warburg
took his time to move and re-arrange and explain, and so only a few number of photographs has
been taken from the different walls, which are preserved in the archive of the Warburg Institute
in London.While the first series consisted of about 43 screens, the second one, with a slightly
different focus, had grown to already 71 screens. And the experiment went on. Logically there
have been attempts to reconstruct the original structure, in particular by Bing and Gombrich in
the 1930s, in order to demostrate the programme of Warburgian research, but all attempts have
been considered as unsatisfying.
Most of the screens are devoted to Warburgs classical subjects as the relation between
Northern Europe and Italy; the survival of the Pathosformel through the interest of Renaissance
artists; the role of astrology; or the cultural aspects of festivities (Festwesen); Florentine civic
culture etc.
From the beginning, the logic of the Bilderatlas was problematic, as the different screens had
to mediate between problems on different levels: Were they to show chronologically, the
tradition of forms and gestures; or were they to make invisible things, like the function of a given
work of art, visible by relating it to similar or different objects? And how can the relation of
Pathosformel and Astrology be shown in a single exhibition concept? Warburg makes his own
experiments with layouts and headlines, and the complexity of his short languages shows in
how far he overcharges the objects:
Saxls idea to apply movable images as a visual aid proved indeed to be fertile soil for Warburgs
work with images. Warburg was used to work with sets of images and already in 1920 he spoke
generally of a kulturwissenschaftliche Bildgeschichte. Furthermore, throughout Warburgs work
we find storyboards for lectures and articles. There he would draw small rectangles and
squares standing for works of art and use lines and colors noting relations between these
elements. Also very often we find sheets with a textual synopsis on certain topics, and drawings
combined with text that layout the structure of a manuscript.
Several notes from summer 1927 inform us that Warburg contemplated on a printed
collection of images forming an Atlas that contained both research topics, astrology and
Pathosformel, hitherto treated separately. Only some weeks later another one states
optimistically that
[...] der Gesamtrahmen fr den Atlas formuliert sich (kulturwissenschaftliche Beschreibung) Von
berlebenden Prgekraft antiker Ausdruckswerte im europischen Geisteshaushalt (Kulturkreis)
[...] .
At the end of November 1927, Warburg returns from a journey to Italy. During his absence work
must have continued. At the end of 1927, first parts of the publication are presented to visitors of
the KBW. As Bing writes in the following entry of the scientific journal, work goes on without
interruption. Warburg himself was very eager to complete the project and looked out for an ade-
quate title. He discussed it via the diary entries with Getrud Bing, but he is not satisfied with the
first attempts which read: Mnemosyne. Kulturwissenschaftliche Betrachtung ber Stilwandel in
der Menschendarstellung der europischen Renaissance. Now he suggests
After Bings comment to this Warburg, at half past four in the morning, comes up with the
following proposal:
Warburg died on the 26th of October 1929. The journals make clear that texts would constitute
an important part of the publication of the Atlas; to interprete it as Art History without words
would clearly oversubtilize the matter. As we see, the Atlas was a highly dynamic project: it
changed, travelled, was used to design exhibitions, and stayed, until its very end, work in
progress.
There were other problems that made the work on the Atlas an infinite endeavour. Warburg
was a technophile. He was interested in telecommunication, the press and travelling; all these
new technologies enabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migration
that connected civilizations from the beginning. Technology, for example in the form of
printing,was also the direct link between Drers engravings and the 28 telephones in his avant-
garde library building. He had already
written an article entitled Airship and
submarine in medieval imagination that
suggested that former societies had
anticipated what he called vehicles of
thought and imagination that we
dispose of today. Images were their
vehicles.
During his lifetime, Warburg was well-known among academics, and he also had bigger local
audiences when giving lectures in Hamburg or appearing on international conferences.
Nevertheless, he never became an intellectual star like, for instance, Sigmund Freud or
Friedrich Nietzsche who are so well-known even outside the university. He also did not cultivate
close relations with art critics and artists, for his time was fully devoted to reading, writing, and
travelling.
His own life being a travel of ideas and an attempt to lay his personal map out on the world,
he didnt have the spare time to exchange and mingle with painters or politicians, even though
he sometimes tried. To a certain degree, of course, he didn't need to. But Warburg's character
made it harder for his reputation to persist after his death and survive the effects of emigration,
prosecution, and destruction, or the political tensions of post-war restauration, cold war and
finally the social revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Also in his lifetime not everyone could intrude
his elite cosmos, as Wolfgang Kemp has shown when describing Walter Benjamin's failing
attempts to be admitted to this circle.
The remaining building in Hamburg was abused by Nazi organizations; after the war it was
no longer wanted back by the Warburg Family - the loss of this institution was seemingly a too
open wound to be cured; so the building was transformed into a film studio and occupied by
promotion agencies, even though, from time to time, journalists or writers reminded of the
unsolved problem of neglecting Warburg's heritage.
Shortly before, Martin Warnke, who had contributed to Warburg's memory by publishing a
series of articles about him, was awarded an important research grant that enabled him to
extend his own project called political iconography. This project had tried to apply Warburg's
methodology to a smaller but more actual aspect of artistic production: politics. Warnke tries to
uncover the languages of fine arts in terms of their patronage, political meanings, and public
functions, in order to distinguish it from mere classical or "christian interpretation. Warnkes
approach is less esoteric or complex, but clearly more pragmatic. Disposing of a larger amount
of money, he could create a collection of photographs and books that explicetely followed some
of Warburg's principles, i.e. a) using the "good neighborhood" of objects being brought in
variable contexts and b) using images to visualize abstract processes and ideas. This collection
was considered the proper follower of Warburg's own one and it was thus decided to place it in
the former KBW in 1995. It is today called "Research Department for Political Iconography" and
it formally belongs to the University's Institute of Art History. Other parts are the Warburg Archiv
that contains original and copied documents of his history as well as all his publications, and the
Archive of Scholarly Emigration. When most of the members of the German community and the
Hamburg schoo in particular were expelled, they turned to London, the U.S., Southern America
or Israel. By this, Warburg's method of Iconology became one of the most applied methods in art
history, even though people associated it more with the Warburg Institute and did not read his
writings in detail.
Warburg did not describe the development of the arts or the history of Western culture; he was
looking for the meaning and the functions of art for different societies, their role for different
social classes and the energy of cultural memory they preserve. This is what must be called
iconology (even though the terms is often used in other misleading senses). Warburg used his
"laboratory of the mind" (so he said) to cure the world from the ignorances of its heritage,
making the reader in his lecture room a "patient" to be cured from narrow-mindedness, from the
defects of western culture and psychic dependence. This is the main difference between a
Cultural history (written by contemporary scholars like Karl Lamprecht or Georg Steinhausen)
and a Library for Cultural Studies, searching for the presence of a problem. Defining the
relevance of the Antique was to go beyond modern history back to the roots of culture, where
east meets west. Unlike famous Swiss Historian Jacob Burckhardt, who was admired and
criticized as the "wise man from Basel", history was nothing to be narrated or reported as an
event. "Detail" did not so much mean the details of historical events, but the traces and clues
within an work of art that lead the interpreter beyond its framework. The arrangement of the
library therefore did not attempt to gather a large number of historical documents, but to
combine them in different and multi-dimensional modes. The detail of the image is not only a
sophisticated quotation of contemporary ideas, it is a hyperlink to cultural history.
In 1997 when the funds of our research department were nearly consumed, a new project was
given to the institute, and it was called "Warburg Electronic Library". The WEL is mainly based
on the collections of the research department and tries to digitize and classify its contents in a
new way. Librarians in the audience may know that the term "Electronic Library" is a technical
one, that means, it does not only stand for books on the shelf, but it means an information
system where all objects can be individually arranged and resorted, turning the public library of
a database into the personalized, the reference library of an individual.
Also the WEL is not a library in the traditional sense, but a multimedia information system
containing images, texts, an other files, classified according to a flexible web of indexes. It is
entirely built on Internet technology and can be consulted through the www. Like in Warburgs
or in Martin Warnkes card box, all cards are classified thematically, i. e., not by names of kings
or artists but exclusively by keywords like "Piece" or Arrival; this is a merely comparative
access in Warburgs tradition. This is only possible when connecting all entries by hypertext in a
quasi three-dimensional way. Since we know Warburg's fascination for technology, we assumed
that he would have applied the computer in precisely this way and felt therefore legitimized to
name the project after him.
Peter van Huisstede has produced electronic versions of the Bilderatlas in oder to prove their
complexity as well as their history; this is an alternative of what could be done with Warburg's
heritage. Another one is the project I have been responsible for during the last couple of years
and which intends to preserve some of Warburgs ideas not materially, but in litteris, by
establishing a digital information system and to set up a flexible tool for art historical research
that not only stores and provides objects but also documents the use of these objects.
It is interesting to see that Warburg's person and his ideas, after having been neglected for a
certain period, have become recepted once again and even stronger than while he was alive.
Even though most art historians in the U.S. have somehow been influenced by what we call the
Hamburg School, that is the emigrated and expelled members of our local institute and their
direct descendants in America, the name Warburg was usually combined with a different
institution, the Warburg Institute in London that keeps up his tradition as well as it houses all his
former collections of books, photographs etc. The discussion of his works in France and their
recent translation into English have changed the situation dramatically. There is no conference
where his name wouldn't be mentioned at least once. When I attended a meeting in the U.S.
some weeks ago, almost every speaker quoted him.
When the interest in his work remained restricted to a small community, it had various
reasons: His refined and creative style of writing (which is, indeed much easier to read than
sometinmes pretended, but you have to read him very slowly); the limited number of
publications in relation to the lenght and intensity of his studies; and finally the complexity of his
method that he developed and refined during his lifetime and that provoked other scholars -
even friends - to draw the conclusion it may sometimes be advisable not to follow and not to
believe the author in spite of the fact that he was right, due to the intensity and scrutiny of his
being a detective of cultural history in all its details (Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail). In the end,
Warburg became one of those tragic names of academic life that are always mentioned with
reveration, but no longer really read.
This situation changed when, maybe by accident, scholars and biographers in the United
States, in England, France and Germany, started re-reading his texts after the war and realized
how much it had to to with all of their single disciplines. The Holocaust memory made the idea of
collective memory that Maurice Halbwachs had expressed a general metaphor for the global
catastrophe of modernity and the suffering of a whole generation. His memory was never lost
among scholars like Jean Seznec (Survival of the pagan gods), Pierre Bourdieu (On the
symbolic forms), Francis Yates, and through them it became known among artists, journalists,
and filmmakers. Artists like Richter, Kabakov, or Boltanski themselves used the idea and
concept of 'Mnemosyne' to express the inexpressable catastrophe of a collapsed european
memory and its self-destruction.
By re-reading Warburg, it was realized that every page of his printed articles corresponds to
500 pages of manuscript, thousands of notes and hundreds of books. Slowly people became
aware that Warburg must have produced one of the most fascinating archives and complex
libraries ever done; and that his work in total was an unparalleled survey of collective memory
and its various media.
Recently, the understanding of Warburg's method has once again undergone several
revisions; two of them may be mentioned, one by Frankfurt Art Historian Klaus Herding, who
connected him to Freud's concept of "Psychohistory", and one by Charlotte Schoell-Glass from
Hamburg; she is editor of Warburgs Diaries. She also demonstrated in how far antisemitism and
the attempts to extinguish it by unveiling the history of cultural misunderstandings were a motor
for Aby Warburg's ambitious and self-exploiting work. Warburg, a scholar from Hamburg and a
cosmopolitan who called himself a Jew by blood, a Hamburger by heart and a Florentine in his
soul. Schoell-Glass shows in how far Warburg's work was devoted not only to the history of
culture but also to their present relevance in society; she assumes that antisemitism in particular
was the motor, the hidden thread or motive for a research that tried to analyze processes of
western culture in order to understand and extinct the roots of superstition, of antisemitism, or
political radicalism.
Research is thus more than just objective and
empirical exploration that is legitimized in itself by
its unforseen discoveries. Research has to trace
the social meaning of cultural and natural
phenomena and contribute to a "Second
Enlightenment" as Warburg called it. While Freud
tried to formulate a "psychohistory" that defines
man as a being that is caught in a web of
subindividual forces and superindividual
demands, Warburg wrote a history of images that
teaches us the function of images in general, i.e.:
as an organ to express social expectations and needs, and thus as a means of religious or
political communication.
I would concede that anti-semitism has increased Warburg's fears and his pessimism, adding
that his personal disposition made it easier for the disease to break out, being a symptomatic
expression of the difficult cultural transition of his time.
Robert Galitz, Brita Reimers (ed.): Aby M Warburg. "Ekstatische Nymphe... trauernder Flugott".
Portrait eines Gelehrten, Hamburg 1995 (unfortunately out of print)
Aby Warburg: The renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the
European Renaissance, Introduction by Kurt W. Forster, Translation by David Britt, Los Angeles,
CA (Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities) 1999
Martin Warnke, coll. Claudia Brink (ed.): Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Berlin 2000
Marc Baratin (ed.): Le pouvoir des bibliothques: la mmoire des livres en Occident, Paris 1996
Expo. Cat. Il cosmo incantato di Schifanoia. Aby Warburg e la storia delle immagini astrologiche,
ed. Cinzia Fratucello and Christina Knorr, Ferrara 1997
Michael Diers (ed.): Portrt aus Bchern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg -
1933 - London [Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung in der Staats- und Universittsbibliothek
Hamburg - Carl von Ossietzky, vom 3. - 23. November 1993], Hamburg 1993
Michael Diers: Von der Ideologie- zur Ikonologiekritik: die Warburg-Renaissancen, in:
Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte [beruht auf Referaten des Symposiums Frankfurter
Schule und Kunstgeschichte Ende Juni 1991 im Museum fr Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am
Main] Berlin 1992, S. 19-39
Horst Bredekamp / Michael Diers / Charlotte Schoell-Glass (ed.): Aby Warburg: Akten des
internationalen Symposions [Hamburg 1990], Weinheim 1991
Matthew Rampley: The Remembrance of Things Past. On Aby M. Warburg and Walter
Benjamin, Wiesbaden 2000
Marianne Koos (ed.): Begleitmaterial zur Ausstellung "Aby M. Warburg. Mnemosyne", Hamburg
1994
Expo. Cat. Aby M. Warburg: Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde
im Hamburger Planetarium (Katalog zu den Ausstellungen 25.1.1993 - 13.3.1993: "Aby
Warburg. Mnemosyne"), hrsg. von Uwe Fleckner, Hamburg 1993
L'art et les Rvolutions, Akten des 17. Intern. Kunsthistorikerkongresses, CIHA, Straburg 1992,
Sektion 5