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Aby Warburg
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Abraham Moritz Warburg, known as Aby Warburg, (Hamburg, June 13, 1866 – Hamburg, October 26, 1929) was an art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Warburg Institute. The subject of his research was the legacy of the Classical world in the most varied areas of western culture through to the Renaissance.
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Encyclopedia
Abraham Moritz Warburg, known as Aby Warburg, (Hamburg, June 13, 1866 – Hamburg, October 26, 1929) was an art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Warburg Institute. The subject of his research was the legacy of the Classical world in the most varied areas of western culture through to the Renaissance. He was responsible for establishing iconology as an independent discipline of art history.
Warburg described himself as:
Amburghese di cuore, ebreo di sangue, d'anima Fiorentino
Life
Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg into a well-to-do family of bankers. His ancestors had come to Germany from Italy in the 17th century and settled in the town of Warburg in Westphalia, taking on the town’s name as their family name. In the 18th century the Warburgs moved to Altona. Two brothers Warburg founded the banking firm M. M. Warburg & Co in Hamburg, which today again has an office in Hamburg. Aby Warburg was the first of seven children born to Moritz Warburg, director of the Hamburg bank, and his wife Charlotte, née Oppenheim. While Aby Warburg showed an early interest in literature and history, his brothers Max Warburg, Paul Warburg and Felix Warburg entered the banking business.
Childhood and youth
Warburg grew up in a conservative Jewish home environment. Early on he demonstrated an unstable, unpredictable and volatile temperament. Warburg as a child reacted against the religious rituals which were punctiliously observed in his family, and rejected the career plans envisaged for him. He wanted to be neither a rabbi, as his grandmother wished, nor a doctor or lawyer. Despite the resistance he met with from his relatives, he forced through his plans to study art history. Aby famously made a deal with his brother Max to forfeit his right, as the eldest son, to take over the family firm, in return for an undertaking on Max’s part to provide his eldest brother with whatever books he should need.
Studies
In 1886 Warburg began his study of art history, history and archaeology in Bonn and attended the lectures on the history of religion by Hermann Usener, those on cultural history by Karl Lamprecht and on art history by Carl Justi. He continued his studies in Munich and with Hubert Janitschek in Strasbourg, completing under him his dissertation on Botticelli’s paintings The Birth of Venus and Primavera.
From 1888 to 1889 he studied the sources of these pictures at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He was now interested in applying the methods of natural science to the human sciences. The dissertation was completed in 1892 and printed in 1893. Warburg’s study introduced into art history a new method, that of iconography or iconology. After receiving his doctorate Warburg studied for two semesters at the Medical Faculty of the University of Berlin, where he attended lectures on psychology. During this period he undertook a further trip to Florence.
Travels in the USA
Paul Warburg married Nina Loeb, daughter of Salomon Loeb in New York late in 1895 and Aby Warburg used the occasion to travel. His long american journey took him to Colorado in winter, to New Mexico and then to Pasadena and Mount Lowe. He met the San Francisco boheme and then went back to the Pueblos in spring, to the Hopi and Zuni. Before going west he met experienced anthropologists James Mooney and Frank Hamilton Cushing at the Smithsonian Institution. Cushing had lived for years with the Zuni in New Mexico and fascinated Warburg wanted to see the Pueblos for himself. First stop in the west was Mesa Verde to see the Anasazi cliff dwellings and then he went from Pueblo town to spanish town, to Cochiti and the Palace Hotel in Santa Fe, to Albuquerque and Acoma, Laguna and San Ildefonso, where he photographed an Antilope dance. In Cochiti Warburg spoke to a priest and his son and received a cosmological drawing with a snake at its center. The Hopi of Arizona were already famous for their snake dance and although april was to early in the year to see this tourist attraction, the time he spent with the Hopi was a most important part of his long journey. Warburg was fascinated with their still secluded culture, their architecture, ritual, their masks and their ages old abstract painting on pottery Nampeyo had recently revived. Mennonite missionary Heinrich R. Voth shared his knowledge of Hopi religion. Voth and Warburg saw a Hemis Kachina dance complete with obscene clowning. Thanks to Voth he could also observe the preparations for this end-of-winter ceremony. The most famous photo of the trip shows Warburg holding a half naked dancer resting. Another snapshot is of Warburg wearing a Kachina dancer' s mask. In New York the social life of the Schiffs and Loebs seemed empty and futile, and Warburg was very impressed with the dead seriousness of Hopi ritual. Writing up his field notes for a now famous lecture at the Kreuzlingen sanatorium Warburg stressed the kinship of reliligious thinking in Athens and Oraibi. Ancient Greece had its animal cults and dangerous rites. It and Italy in the renaissance were not the safe places the complacent Übermensch on holiday in Florence sought. Harmony and perfection only hide terrible conflict and rationality is always in danger of deep seated irrationality.
Florence
In 1897 Warburg married, against his father’s will, the painter and sculptor Mary Hertz, daughter of a Hamburg senator and member of the Synod of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Hamburg. The couple had three children: Marietta (1899–1973), Max Adolph (1902–1974) and Frede C. Warburg (1904–2004). In 1898 Warburg and his wife took up residence in Florence. While Warburg was repeatedly plagued by depression, the couple enjoyed a lively social life. Among their Florentine circle could be counted the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, the writer Isolde Kurz, the English architect and antiquary Herbert Horne, the Dutch Germanist André Jolles and the Belgian art historian Jacques Mesnil. The most famous Renaissance specialist of the time, the American Bernard Berenson, was likewise in Florence at this period. Warburg, for his part, renounced all sentimental aestheticism, and in his writings criticised a vulgarised idealisation of an individualism that had been imputed to the Renaissance in the work of Jacob Burckhardt.
During his years in Florence Warburg investigated the living conditions and business transactions of Renaissance artists and their patrons as well as, more specifically, the economic situation in the Florence of the early Renaissance and the problems of the transition from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance. A further product of his Florentine period was his series of lectures on Leonardo da Vinci, held in 1899 at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. In his lectures he discussed Leonardo’s study of medieval bestiaries as well as his engagement with the classical theory of proportion of Vitruvius. He also occupied himself with Botticelli’s engagement with the Ancients evident in the representation of the clothing of figures. Feminine clothing takes on a symbolic meaning in Warburg’s famous essay, inspired by discussions with Jolles, on the nymphs and the figure of the Virgin in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The contrast evident in the painting between the constricting dress of the matrons and the lightly dressed, quick-footed Virgin serves as an illustration of the virulent discussion around 1900 concerning the liberation of female clothing from the standards of propriety imposed by a reactionary bourgeoisie.
Return to Hamburg
In 1902 the family returned to Hamburg, and Warburg presented the findings of his Florentine research in a series of lectures, but at first did not take on a professorship or any other academic position. He rejected a call to a professorship at the University of Halle in 1912. He became a member of the board of the Völkerkundemuseum, with his brother Max sponsored the foundation of the "Hamburger wissenschatflichen Stiftung" (1907) and the foundation of a university in Hamburg, which succeeded in 1919, and at which he took up a professorship. At this period signs of a mental illness were present which affected his activities as a researcher and teacher.
He suffered from depression and symptoms of schizophrenia, and was hospitalized in Ludwig Binswanger's neurological clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in 1921. After his release from Binswanger's clinic in 1924, Warburg held occasional lectures and seminars between 1925 and 1929, which took place in a private circle or in his library.
Warburg died of a heart attack on 26 October 1929.
Bibliography
Writings
- Das Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht. Mit einem Nachwort von Ulrich Raulff. Berlin 1988.
- Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Literatur. Hrsg. von Horst Bredekamp und M. Diers. Bände. [1932]. Berlin 1998.
- Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE. Hrsg. von Marfred Warnke u. C. Brink. Berlin 2000.
- Gesammelte Schriften (Studienausgabe), Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1998–
Literature
Bibliographies
- Dieter Wuttke: Aby-M.-Warburg-Bibliographie 1866 bis 1995. Werk und Wirkung; mit Annotationen. Baden-Baden: Koerner 1998. ISBN 3-87320-163-1
Biographies
- Ernst H. Gombrich: Aby Warburg. Neuausgabe Hamburg 2006. ()
- Bernd Roeck: Der junge Aby Warburg. München 1997.
- Carl Georg Heise: Persönliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg. Hrsg. und kommentiert von Björn Biester und Hans-Michael Schäfer (Gratia. Bamberger Schriften zur Renaissanceforschung 43). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005.
- Karen Michels: Aby Warburg — Im Bannkreis der Ideen. C.H. Beck. München 2007.
Monographs
- S. Ferreti: Cassirer, Panofsky and Warburg: Symbol, Art and History. London, New Haven 1989.
- Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Hrsg.): Aby Warburg. Akten des internat. Symposiums Hamburg 1990. Weinheim 1991.
- P. Schmidt: Aby Warburg und die Ikonologie. Mit e. Anhang unbekannter Quellen zur Geschichte der Internat. Gesellschaft für ikonographische Studien von D. Wuttke. 2. Aufl. Wiesbaden 1993.
- Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus. Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1998. ISBN 3-596-14076-5
- Georges Didi-Huberman, L'image survivante: histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg. Les Éd. de Minuit, Paris 2002. ISBN 2-7073-1772-1
- Hans-Michael Schäfer: Die kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. Geschichte und Persönlichkeit der Bibliothek Warburg mit Berücksichtigung der Bibliothekslandschaft und der Stadtsituation der Freien u. Hansestadt Hamburg zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin 2003.* Ludwig Binswanger: Aby Warburg: La guarigione infinita. Storia clinica di Aby Warburg. A cura di Davide Stimilli. Vicenza 2005 (auf deutsch: , Zürich/Berlin: , 2007, erscheint demnächst).
- Photographs at the Frontier, Nicholas Mann et alii eds., London 1990
- Cora Bender, Thomas Hensel, Erhard Schüttpelz (Hrsg.): Schlangenritual. Der Transfer der Wissensformen vom Tsu'ti'kive der Hopi bis zu Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag. 2007. Akademie Verlag, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-05-004203-9
- Wolfgang Bock: Urbild und magische Hülle.Aby Warburgs Theorie der Astrologie, in: Bock: Astrologie und Aufklärung. Über modernen Aberglauben, Stuttgart: Metzler 1995, pp. 265-254
- Wolfgang Bock: Verborgene Himmelslichter. Sterne als messianische Orientierung. Benjamin, Warburg, in: Bock: Walter Benjamin. Die Rettung der Nacht. Sterne, Melancholie und Messianismus, Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000, pp. 195-218
See also
External links
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