Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects 9789057010033

Table of contents :
Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture
kathryn brush ernst gombrich peg katritzky kristen lippincott dorothea mcewan matthew rampley charlotte schoell-glass aby warburg
contents
introduction to the series
opportunity to analyze and re-evaluate the position of those thinkers who have influenced their own practices, or to present responses to the themes and writings that are significant to their own research. In emphasizing dialogue, self-reflective critiques, and exegesis, the Critical Voices series not only acknowledges the deterritorialized nature of our present intellectual environment, but also extends the challenge to the traditional supremacy of the authorial voice by literally relocating it within a discursive network. This approach to text breaks with the current practice of speaking of multiplicity, while continuing to construct a singularly linear vision of discourse that retains the characteristics of dialectics. In an age when subjects are conceived of as acting upon one another, each within the context of its own history and without contradiction, the ideal of a totalizing system does not seem to suffice. I have come to realize that the near collapse of the endeavor to produce homogeneous terms, practices, and histories— once thought to be an essential aspect of defining the practices of art, theory, and culture— reopened each of these subjects to new interpretations and methods. My intent as editor of Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture is to make available to our readers heterogeneous texts that provide a view that looks ahead to new and differing approaches, and back toward those views that make the dialogues and debates developing within the areas of cultural studies, art history, and critical theory possible and necessary. In this manner we hope to contribute to the expanding map not only of the borderlands of modernism, but also of those newly opened territories now identified with postmodernism. Saul Ostrow
introduction aby warburg: culture's image network—
the entry of the idealising classical style in the painting of the early renaissance
The Victory of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge by
Battle of Constantine in the Stanze of the Vatican. It was not completed until after
warburg centenary lecture1
Sartor Resartus. While Paris and Helen could be represented
The Battle of Constantine. Here it is Piero who embodies the sense of distance
instrument for cultural research as he conceived it, is what I want you to remember most at this centenary of his birth. Both in its arrangement and in its holdings the library was to embody W arburgs faith in m ans need to remember his origins and to come to terms with them. It was thus to be an aid in m ans continuous search for enlightenment, reminding him of past triumphs when astronomy emerged from the dark fears of astrology, chem-istry from alchemy, or mathematics from number mysticism. But it is sym-bolic that Warburg always separated the texts from comment in his library, keeping the evidence from its interpretation. Those who reconsider it are not bound by the reading of the past. Yet, if ever there was an institute that bore the name of its founder with justification, it is ours, for what Aby Warburg left us was not money but tools of research and the impulse to ask questions to which the library may well hold the answer. If I may search the collective memory for a formula which can be used rhetorically but can also be charged with fresh meaning let me say with conviction: Si monumentum , circumspice ... Warburg s real m onument is this library. notes
the nineteenth century notion of a pagan revival
La Renaissance et les Médicis we read that the end
Trattato where the device of clinging
aby warburg and the cultural historian karl lamprecht
(das Nachleben der Antike), it is understandable that he would have
Detailforschung).42 As Lamprecht attempted to demonstrate in his own
making a reception for warburg: fritz saxl and warburg's book
"the fateful question"
{96} Leipzig University, where his friends the art historians Alfred Doren and Walter Gotz were working, in March 1917. But this project came, to nothing for two reasons: Doren and Gotz had to join up and in the winter of 1917 lec­ tures had to be cancelled due to the acute fuel shortage. Warburg, who had started researching the topic, contacted Professor Franz Boll, the distin-guised academic and author of books on belief in the stars, and requested information on constellations and dates of eclipses of the sun as he was trying to provide the evidence for his theory that illustrations accompanying the signs of the zodiac went back to a family of twelve gods in Western Asia.10 Warburg wanted to show an instance of survival of classical astrology among Luther’s contemporaries which went so far as to change Luther’s date of birth from 10th November 1483 to 22nd October 1484— an example of ret­ rospective prophecy and the power of belief in stars. After his lecture in Leipzig was cancelled, Warburg decided to present his research in Hamburg and his many letters to friends and colleagues give us an insight into his working method, his ideas, concerns, convictions. Through the correspondence in preparation for his lecture, we know whom he contacted and trusted. Thus, a study of these letters, which furnishes us with the background to and genesis of the wartime lectures in Hamburg and Berlin, also contributes to an understanding of Warburg’s book on Luther published three years later. We first read of Warburg’s research into the topic when he thanked Carl F. Meinhof of the Kolonialinstitut in Hamburg for his observation, that Luther’s beliefs should be positioned halfway between practical magic and abstract symbolism.11 Warburg announced to Boll that he has found “some­ thing interesting” in connection with his Luther research;12 and with Hermann Joachim of the Hamburg State Archive, to whom he wrote that he used the word “ Reformation” in a context wider than just the Lutheran movement, because he understood by that word a transformation having originated from both Christian and non-Christian churches.13 In a letter to Ernst Schwedeler-Meyer, his friend from student days in Strasbourg and director of the Arts and Crafts Museum in Liberec (Reichenberg), Warburg explained that he was researching the relationship between Lutherism and classical cosmological beliefs,14 and he approached Paul Flemming in Pforta with detailed questions on Johann Lichtenberger, Melanchthon and Luther, and the relationship between German Reformation theology and supersti-
Warburg “to return to life.”98 Professor Werner Weisbach suggested to Saxl that he send a copy to Professor Eduard Wechfiler in Berlin. In a covering letter Saxl explained that the focus of the book was the survival of “non-Winckelmann-ist” classical antiquity, the journey of images on the route from Athens to Bagdad and Spain and the eminent importance of South West Europe for the tradition of cukure mediated by the Moors.99 making a reception for the book
private comments
Hamburg Fremdenblatt and not in the Hamburg Correspondent.160 However, in the meantime, Max Warburg was sent a reply Berliner Tageblatt. The editors had agreed to publish an short note,
mimesis and allegory* on aby warburg and waiter benjamin
The process of allegorisation occurs, for Warburg, in the wall paintings in the Palazzo Schifanoja in Ferrara. Uncovered in 1840, there were originally twelve, depicting the months of the year. Each depiction consists of three planes, the lowest depicts mundane events at the court of the Duke Borso, the uppermost represents Olympian gods and the middle includes the astral gods, in the form of the relevant zodiacal signs. The parallel between the astral signs and seasonal activities on earth indicate the persistence of astro­ logical practices in Quattrocento Ferrara, but at the same time the meaning of the zodiacal figures is mediated by the presence of equivalent Olympian deities. Their origin is the same, namely classical antiquity, but they repre­ sent two different conceptions of the pagan world. The first, the Apollonian realm of the Olympian deities, contrasts with the world of astral demons, or decans, whose nature has been informed by their passage through Hellenistic, Indian, Arabic, then finally European medieval astrology. The fresco therefore presents the contradiction between two types of antiquity. Warburg was himself clear as to the central question guiding his inquiry; “To what extent are we to view the onset of stylistic shift in the representa­ tion of the human figure in Italian art as an internationally conditioned process of disengagement from the surviving pictorial conceptions of pagan culture of the eastern Mediterranean peoples?”48 The historical detail of Warburg’s interpretation is open to question. However, this is less important than the general direction of his investiga­ tion. As Warburg himself noted, the provision of a neat solution, the decod­ ing of the symbolism of the frescoes, was less important than the underlying method, in which the frescoes are examined as an example of the loss of mimeticism in astrological imagery. He states, “Astrology is in essence nothing more than a name fetishism projected on to the future,”49 and the allegorization of astral figures drains the fetish of its power. benjamin: allegory and modernity Benjamin refers to the concept of mimesis in a number of texts, most obvi­ ously in his essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” (later reworked as “Doctrine of the Similar” ).50 Here Benjamin interprets the prominence of imitative
Trauerspiel, which predates these essays by several years.57 It
urania redux: a view of aby warburg's writings on astrology and art1
Salone dei Mesi in the Palazzo Schifanoia
Astrolabium planum prosopon” or a “mask”—
Sala di Galatea. From the annotations on the frontispiece, we know that Warburg
"serious issues": the last plates of warburg's picture atlas
Bilderatlasse abound in the 19th and early twen
symbol can have different functions in different cultures. Three possible ways
Tagebuch: “
is in a “new”
Pathos formel), the very concept of
Locarno Diplomacy. Germany and the West, 1925-Jildisches Lexikon. Ein enzyklopàdisches Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens in vier Bànden, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927 (Reprint: Franfurt a.M.: Die religionsgeschichtliche Forschung an der Kulturwissen-
Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organi-schen Geschehens, second improved ed. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1908 Settis, Salvatore, “Pathos und Ethos, Morphologie und Funktion,” in: Vortràge aus dem Warburg-Haus 1 (1997), pp. 31-73 Warburg, Aby M., Ausgewahlte Schriften und WiXrdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke with Carl Georg Heise (Saecula Spiritalia 1), Baden-Baden: Valentin Kórner, 1980 (Warburg ASW) Warnke, Martin, “Der Leidschatz der Menschheit wird humaner Besitz,” in: Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken, Martin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg, Frankfurt a.M.: Europàische Verlagsanstalt, 1980, pp. 113-186 Warnke, Martin, “Vier Stichworte. Ikonologie— Pathosformel— Polaritàt und Ausgleich— Schlagbilder und Bilderfahrzeuge,” in: Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken, M artin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg, Frankfurt a.M.: Europàische Verlagsanstalt, 1980, Bd. 1, pp. 61-68
aby warburg and the florentine
students invited there by the art historian August Schmarsow (in connec­ tion with Schmarsow s campaign for the setting up of a German institute for art history in Florence), returning to Bonn for the start of the summer semester 1889.6 These were particularly productive months for Warburg, who, within weeks of arriving, had both met his future wife, the painter Mary Hertz, and started engaging with the central issues of his intellectual career. To a greater or lesser extent, Warburg shared these with many fin de siecle writers and creative artists, albeit at a profounder level, not least because of his interest in collective psychology, and his recognition that “the tragedy of costume and implement is ultimately the history of human tragedy.”7 Contemporary art historians variously define the essence of Warburg s contribution as his investigation into “the continued vitality of the classical heritage in Western civilization,” the development of iconological analysis as a major art-historical methodology, and an engagement with renaissance images “as a pivotal point in the transition from the symbol to the allegory.”8 It is far from certain whether it is valid to regard these as separate, perhaps even mutually exclusive, issues, or whether they may more usefully be con­ sidered aspects of the same issue. Closely related to this group of issues, and of perhaps equal importance, was Warburg’s drive to investigate the full potential of his chosen discipline, art history. He returned to Florence only after successful completion of his doctoral thesis and a year’s military service, which finished in October 1893.9 This second visit started badly. But Warburg received a temporary respite from recurring bouts of depression through, by his own account, chancing upon a series of archival documents. Their significance was greatly magnified by his ability to associate them with the Medici wedding festivities of 1589, and to recognize the relevance of this court festival to his joint quests for the continuing significance of the classi­ cal heritage, and of the proper study of images.
ii intermedi
intermedio of 1589,34 and
iv warburg's account of the intermedi of 1589
Costumi teatrali, take him
inter
October questionnaire specifically invoked
APPENDICES: non-italian reports of the medici wedding festivities of 1589 APPENDIX la: Bavarian report (transcription)100
[f.248r] Von den stattlichen sachen, so zu Florentz auf der Herzogin von Lottringen, alls Hochzeiterin, einzug, und dann zur Hochzeit, zugericht werden. al prato genannt, ein Thor wie ein theatrum, GranDuca aus Toscana Statt beschriben und abgemalen, sambt
Al Canto de Bischeri ist ein arcus triumphalis von Khonig Philips zug Don Giovan dAustria die schlacht auf dem Meer
prospettiua aber einmal, und gehn 36. Musici heraus,
GranDucchessa copertina würdt von weip tilleta sein, und mit berlen
represented the gods of [f.68v] the pagans with seven clouds which descended onto the stage, in each of which was a great number of musicians and instrumentalists. They all came out of the said clouds. After having sung and danced, they all went back into their clouds, and gradually re-ascended up to the sky, and so skillfully that one lost sight of them, without anyone at all appearing for any of the ropes or other things necessary for this ascent. In order to make this music, the grand-duke had searched out all the cleverest men of Italy, and so the comedy was completed. And it was staged five times: the first time as a rehearsal, the second, at which I was, for the arrival of the grand-duchess. On this day the done of Florence were very strongly represented there, with an infinity of jewelry. The third time for the Florentine and foreign gentlemen who had come for the wedding, the fourth for the common people and the courtiers of Florence. On that day with the Venetian and Genoese ambassadors who had come to congratulate the grand-duke on his marriage (I went there with them); and the fifth time on the arrival of the ambassador of Spain, who arrived after the wedding for the same reason as the other ambassadors. notes
warburg's "method"
Kunstgeschichte aïs Geistesgeschichte, whose major exponent was
Studies in Iconology offered a theorized vision of what a rigorous
British Art and the Mediterranean, on the British debt to the clas
Vôlkische Beobachter which
Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography with a Memoir
alV antica:
Orfeo was as much a fiction as the depiction of the death
Fortuna for his personal impresa. This should not be taken to mean that in his mercantile affairs he “Fortuna ’ was simply available for use when things went wrong, like the
men

Citation preview

a rt history as cultural history

Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture A series edited by Saul Ostrow Now Available Scenic Art as a Philosophical Context

Essays by Stephen Melville. Edited and Introduced by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism

Essays by Thomas McEvilley. Com m entary by G. Roger Denson Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication

Essays by Marshall McLuhan. Edited and with a Com m entary by Michel A. Moos Literature, Media, Information Systems

Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler. Edited and Introduced by John Johnston England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste

Essays by John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Adrian Stokes. Comm entary by David Carrier The Wake o f Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends o f Taste

Essays by A rthur C. Danto Selected and w ith a Critical Introduction by Gregg Horowitz and Tom H uhn Beauty is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design

Edited and Introduced by Richard Roth and Susan King Roth Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic

Edited and Introduced by Adam Krims. C om m entary by Henry K lumpenhouwer Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page

Essays by Douglas D unn, Marjorie Gamso, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kenneth King, Yvonne Meier and Sarah Skaggs Text and C om m entary by Elena Alexander, Foreword by Jill Johnston Difference/Indifference: Meetings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Introduction and Text by Moira Roth. C om m entary by Jonathan D. Katz Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects

Essays by Kathryn Brush, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Peg Katritzky, Kristen Lippincott, D orothea McEwan, M atthew Rampley, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Aby W arburg Edited by Richard Woodfield This book is part o f a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping o f each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.

Forthcoming Titles The Information Subject

Essays by M ark Poster. C om m entary by Stanley Arnowitz Critical Voices: The Myths o f Postmodern Theory

Essays by Nicholas Zurbrugg. C om m entary by Warren Burt Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation

Essays by Stan Allen. C om m entary by Diana Agrest Looking In: The Art o f Viewing

Essays and Afterword by Mieke Bal. Edited and with an Introduction by Norm an Bryson Framing Formalism: Riegl's Work

Essays by Hans Sedlmayr, Julius von Schlosser, Andrew Ballantyne, Joaquin Lorda, Stefan Muthesius, Joseph Masheck, Ivo Hlobin, Franke Laarman, Benjamin Binstock, M atthew Rampley and Giles Peaker. Com m entary by Richard Woodfield Music Inside Out: Going too far in Musical Essays

Essays by John Rahn. Introduction and C om m entary by Benjamin Boretz Looking Back to the Future

Essays by Griselda Pollock. Introduction and Com m entary by Penny Florence

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kathryn brush ernst gombrich peg katritzky kristen lippincott dorothea mcewan matthew rampley charlotte schoellglass aby warburg

art history as cultural history

warburg's projects edited by

richard woodfield

First Published 2001 by Gordon and Breach Publishers Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 USA Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informabusiness

Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis (Overseas PublCopyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-9-057-01003-3 (softcover) ISSN 1025-9325 ISBN 978-1-315-07857-1 (elSBN)

contents

Introduction to the Series

The Entry of the Idealizing

IX

7

Aby Warburg

Warburg Centenary Lecture

33

Ernst H. Gombrich

The Nineteenth Century Notion

55

Ernst H. Gombrich

65

Kathryn Brush

93

Dorothea McEwan

121

Matthew Rampley

151

Kristen Lippincott

Classical Style in the Painting of Early Renaissance

of a Pagan Revival Aby Warburg and the Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht Making a Reception for Warburg: Fritz Saxl and Warburg’s Book Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten Mimesis and Allegory: On Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin Urania redux: A View of Aby Warburg’s Writings on Astrology and Art “Serious Issues”: The Last Plates

183

Charlotte Schoell-Glass

of Warburg’s Picture Atlas Mnemosyne Aby Warburg and the Florentine

209

Peg Katritzky

259

Richard Woodfield

Intermedi of 1859: Extending the Boundaries of Art History Warburg’s “Method”

This page intentionally left blank

introduction to the series

CRITICAL VOICES IN ART, THEORY A N D

Culture is a response to the changing perspectives that have resulted from the continuing application o f struc­ tural and poststructural m ethodolo­ gies and interpretations to the cultural sphere. From the ongoing processes o f deconstruction and reorganization o f the traditional canon, new forms of speculative, intellectual inquiry and academic practices have emerged which are premised on the realization that insights into differing aspects o f the dis­ ciplines that make up this realm are best provided by an interdisciplinary approach that follows a discursive rather than a dialectic model. In recognition o f these changes, and o f the view that the histories and practices that form our present circumstances are in turn transformed by the social, economic, and political requirements o f our lives, this series will publish not only those authors who already are prominent in their field— or those who are now emerging— but also those writers who had previously been acknowledged, then passed over, only now to become relevant once more. This m ultigenerational approach will give many writers an {ix}

{X}

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

opportunity to analyze and re-evaluate the position of those thinkers who have influenced their own practices, or to present responses to the themes and writings that are significant to their own research. In emphasizing dialogue, self-reflective critiques, and exegesis, the Critical Voices series not only acknowledges the deterritorialized nature of our present intellectual environment, but also extends the challenge to the traditional supremacy of the authorial voice by literally relocating it within a discursive network. This approach to text breaks with the current practice of speaking of multiplicity, while continuing to construct a singularly linear vision of discourse that retains the characteristics of dialectics. In an age when subjects are conceived of as acting upon one another, each within the context of its own history and without contradiction, the ideal of a totalizing system does not seem to suffice. I have come to realize that the near collapse of the endeavor to produce homogeneous terms, practices, and histories— once thought to be an essential aspect of defining the practices of art, theory, and culture— reopened each of these subjects to new interpretations and methods. My intent as editor of Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture is to make available to our readers heterogeneous texts that provide a view that looks ahead to new and differing approaches, and back toward those views that make the dialogues and debates developing w ithin the areas of cultural studies, art history, and critical theory possible and necessary. In this manner we hope to contribute to the expanding map not only of the borderlands of modernism, but also of those newly opened territories now identified with postmodernism. Saul Ostrow

introduction aby warburg: culture's image network—

aby warburg ALONG

W IT H

CURRENT

INTEREST

IN

Walter Benjamin in the fields o f art history and cultural studies there has emerged a renewed interest in the art historians he him self admired: Alois Riegl1 and Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Though as the founder o f the presti­ gious Warburg Research Institute and creator o f the near mythic though unfinished Picture Atlas (Mnemosyne) Warburg’s writings, like those o f Riegl, have only recently been made available to the English reader.2 Best known to usthrough his intellectual biography written by Ernst Gombrich3 is Warburg’s attempt at producing a cultural psychology. This approach to cultural history was made peripheral in the mid-20th century when m od­ ernist thought came to be dominated by a positivist methodology. Another reason for this state o f affairs is that Warburg has been dismissed as an eccentric who through his work and research was elaborating a personal (therapeutic) vision. In making available this collection edited by Richard Woodfield4 o f commentaries, exegesis and analyses focusing on Warburgs work— I believe that Critical Voices Series once again finds itself in the posi­ { 1}

{2}

ABY WARBURG

tion o f providing a significant contribution to the discourses that are forming around the problem o f redefining the relationship between our cul­ tural present and its historical past. Although there exists no singular practice or discipline that governs art history, it was the emergence o f the multi-disciplinary approach that has come to be known as Visual and Cultural Studies that has lead to the recu­ peration o f such marginalised and maligned figures as Warburg. These revivals have been initiated with the intent o f establishing methodological as well as a conceptual antecedents for these practices. Such models also appear as if they might serve as correctives for the tendency towards subjectivism, arbitrariness and abstraction that has resulted from the desire to blanketly dismiss the modernist practices o f art history and criticism. This situation has resulted the object or artist under analysis becoming little more than a sign o f its exegesis— and the diverse structure o f references and sources that constitute its contents dissolving into rationalizations are determined either by fashion or ideology. Though Warburg had significant influence on art historians as different as Edgar Wind and Ernst Gombrich, his own work is less concerned with art as a subject than with culture’s psychological dimension. At the heart o f his practice was the desire to reveal the deep seated polarities that order Western society’s cultural and social reality. Europe’s past was a matter o f fact for Warburg, as was the idea that its artistic traditions constituted an image bank— a supra-personal m em ory and a language that could be drawn on by successive generations in accord with their expressive needs. Yet, unlike Carl Ju n gs collective unconscious, W arburgs image world does not consist o f archetypes, but images whose meanings change, yet continue to resonate with their original texts. It has been changes in experience and belief that allow the accumulated “ knowledge” that the signs that make up the image world represent to be ordered and re-ordered. Unlike the prac­ tices o f iconography and iconology— which seek to construct the history o f an im ages changing form, content and meaning— Warburg addressed him self to the meaning o f the economy between a representation’s (the image’s) lived past and its continued sign function. In the process o f con­ structing his genealogy o f the image world o f the Renaissance, Warburg’s approach to deciphering (unlocking) an image’s past content was that o f

culture's im ag e

network

the both the semiotician as well as etymologist, the historian as well as the sociologist. In his writings, Warburg attempts to reproduce the condensation of human experience that inform works o f art and in turn ingrain them with the patterns o f reasoning (thought) by which their reality is constructed. Interestingly, this led him to reject all claims to a Zeitgeist or other such gen­ eralities concerning the psychological dimension o f our being. He viewed such formulations as liquidating the complex and often contradictory forces that are at play in life. What he had learned from his own work was that all such generalities made about time or place dissolve when one seeks to reveal what meanings a given reading might conceal. Yet, what fills the absence created by such negation must itself find its substantiation in the original reasoning that informed the making o f the artifact. Consequently, the task of the researcher is not to seek explanations, fix meanings, or to set up the terms for an artist’s development, but to seek the sources o f its particular content within the lived texts o f their world. Respectively, what needed to be resisted was turning these images into a mere lifeless illustration o f the researchers text. Trained as an art historian, Warburg, while doing research for his disser­ tation on Botticelli, came to propose that the source for the depiction o f all moving bodies in early Renaissance art had their source in pagan (classical) works. Given the apparent conflict between the seemingly sacred content o f Christian imagery and their profane pagan source, he set to the task o f determining the reason for such adaptation. This lead him to research not only the everyday lives o f Renaissance men and women, as well as that of artists and patrons, but also the occurrence o f such images in all manner o f art, literature and craft. The conclusion he came to was that images within their evolution recorded the inner (psychological) as well as the outer (mater­ ial) movement o f life. He came to posit our image world is a consequence of our innate human need to objectify and signify something beyond real pres­ ences. Consequently Warburg became committed to searching in the space between symbolic representation and actual event for the polarities and ambiguities that exist between people and their world. Warburg came to understand that an image’s semiotic and formal aspects could not only displace its mimetic content but could also become a sign o f

{3}

{4}

ABY WARBURG

the inverse o f what it actually portrayed.5 He realized the nature o f this com­ merce between the symbolic and literal function o f an image while research­ ing the sources and iconic content o f the fresco cycle at the Palazzo Schifanoja. Here he traced the role that the residual re-enactment o f the pagan belief in the power o f the mimetic as symbolized by astrology came to be re-presented as an aspect o f the unifying body o f knowledge associated with the rational humanist thought o f the Renaissance. In this transforma­ tion and sublimation o f the Greek gods into the images o f the zodiac, he came to recognize that during the Renaissance that the primitive (unrea­ soned) fears o f “the mental life o f the individual as well as in the web o f culture, threaten ... to disrupt the balance obtained through enlightened humanism.” 6 Given that this fear resonated as a subtext within the secular signs o f reflective thought, Warburg came to understand that a sign i& not reducible to its synchronic, contemporary, state, but factually constitutes a dialogue between its past and present symbolic content. Warburg believed images preserved a remembrance o f our primitive or primal reasoning, which could be puzzled out by means o f discovering the relationships that comes to exist over time between an image and its cul­ tural and social function. Yet neither methodologically, nor conceptually did he intend to propose this as a universal subject or logic for historical account o f art or its development. The work o f the historian from his perspective was to locate in human experience and psychology the sources o f a culture’s representation. The information derived from the study o f images, along with a knowledge o f their development, Warburg thought could inform us about the connection that exists between our contemporary state o f our consciousness (psychology) and its past. Because he conceived o f images as documents and psychic records that portray culture’s conscious and uncon­ scious accounts o f its collective psychological relationship to its world (reality), consequently, it was not in Warburg’s interest to hierarchically dif­ ferentiate between the high and low. All visual texts were viewed as annotat­ ing and supplementing our reality and Art therefore was just another manner o f image making and had no intrinsic worth or greater value due to style or aesthetic. It is important to reiterate, therefore, that the relevancy o f the content o f an image was the manner in which it continued to enact, or reproduce (or

c u lt u r e 's im a g e

network

reference) its earlier content (world view) via the complex network o f rela­ tionships that over time had come to be encoded in its form. In other words, the image world as formulated by Warburg consists o f rhetorical devices that are combined and recombined in manners that both indicate changing mindsets as well as passing fashions. Within this economy the meaning o f an image is at once immanent and deferred— for it is not only made indetermi­ nate because of its original symbolic function and meaning. Seemingly, in this, Warburg joins Hegel’s dialectic of historical change to Nietzsches “gay science.” Such a model, obviously did not correspond to the positivist vision o f a subject’s progressive development toward closure or specificity and in part does explains the eclipse o f W arburgs work. Ernst Gombrich pointed out Warburg s prim ary concern was the interac­ tion o f form and content within the clash o f traditions. In the mid-twenties he undertook his final project, a picture atlas intended to illustrate the history o f human expression and incorporating all his findings and specula­ tions concerning the function o f expressive value o f images. The pinboard stands with their photographic displays that constitute the atlas, present ju x ­ taposed images from diverse sources. In these displays, Warburg attempted to make explicit the powerful nature o f the dialogue that take place between images originating at differing times and having diverse social and cultural origins. It is our present concern for the correspondence between images, past and present, high and low that returns us to Warburg’s soon to be valued contribution to the study o f the cultural field. Saul Ostrow Editor, Critical Voices in Art Theory and Culture

notes 1

O f the ten studies by Riegl that have been published between 1891 and 1966 only four have been translated into English. O f these “The D utch G roup P ortrait” (1992), “Late Roman Art Industry” (1985) and “The M odern Cult o f M onum ents” (1982), are significant examples of his oeuvre while “Late Roman or Oriental?” (1988) is a polemical piece in which Riegl re-asserts his position concerning the nature o f late Roman art.

2 Until the recent publication of Images from the Region o f the Pueblo Indians o f North America, Aby W arburg (trans. Michael R Steinberg) Cornell UP 1995, the

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two exceptions are “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal o f The Warburg Institute, i939> PP· 277-292 and “Italian Art and International Astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,” trans. by Peter W orstman, German Essays in A rt History, edited by Gert Schiff, the Germ an Library, Vol. 79. C ontinuum , NY, 1988. 3

Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, E. H. G om brich, Chicago University Press.

4

Richard Woodfield is also the editor of Framing Formalism: Alois Riegl’s Work,

5

For example Goya’s portrayal o f the irrationality and cruelty o f war coming to be

Critical Voices Series, G+B Arts In tern atio n al. read as a plea for peace and reason. 6 Gert Schiff, German Essays, 1988, p. lix.

the entry o f the idealising classical style in the painting o f the early renaissance

aby warburg1 THE

THEM E

I

HAVE

THE

HONOR

OF

presenting to you today, the Entry o f the Idealising Classical Style in the Painting o f the Early Renaissance, demands such a broad treatment, that an attempt to cover such a central question in the history o f style in the space o f a single lecture can only be justified by imposing a strict limitation on its intellectual, material and chronological scope. For this reason two single monumental works o f art are to serve as the basis o f our excursion through unexplored territory, the only points o f ori­ entation being tracks that veer o ff in all directions. Since they treat the same material, the one a classical sculpture, the other a fresco o f the High Renaissance, these two works, when compared, can allow us to see the essen­ tial nature o f the stylistic change we term the “ Renaissance.” The boundaries o f the field o f investigation are set by the sculpture o f the triumphal arch in Rome commemorating the victory o f the Emperor Constantine, together with the Vatican fresco by Raphael, celebrating the same victory. For these two works, though separated by 1200 years, belong together by virtue o f the {7 }

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fact that, as I shall argue, The Victory of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge by the School o f Raphael owed its innovative heroic dynamism directly to the relief sculpture o f the Arch o f Constantine. The evidence for this connection does not, at first sight, seem to pose any substantial difficulty. We are all too used to regarding the artists o f the High Renaissance, well-versed in classical antiquity, as shrewd archaeologists, who were simply concerned to represent the Emperor with archaeological and historical precision, exactly as he is depicted on his own triumphal arch. For at that time it was not known that part o f the relief does not even originate from the time o f Constantine, but probably relates to Trajan’s wars. M y task today is to demonstrate that the new style o f classicising pathos did not arise simply as a result o f renewed classical learning, but rather that it arose out o f a difficult conflict with the realism o f the Quattrocento, which still appeared to offer stubborn resistance as late as Piero della Francesca’s

Victory o f Constantine over Maxentius. In contrast, the ground was prepared for the entry o f the Roman style in the sculpture o f the Cinquecento in two ways; first, Italian sculpture, above all that o f Donatello, rediscovered the gestural language and formulae used by the ancients for the expression o f tragic pathos. Second, the gods and heroes o f classical antiquity could no longer be painted in the traditional style o f Northern realism; indeed painting was forced to opt for the new classicising style o f endowing them with heightened movement in the manner o f the ancients. We shall see how this leads, in the case o f Antonio Pollaiuolo, to a muscular rhetoric o f almost Baroque proportions. As a lively sculptor, Antonio Pollaiuolo accommodated the extremes of this new gestural language both in terms o f technique and also in terms of emotional engagement. And yet there seems to be no bridge connecting it to the monumental realistic painting, so concerned with the reproduction o f pure motionless appearance, that was produced by the workshop o f Domenico Ghirlandaio, and which exercised a dominant effect on Florentine taste. However, it is precisely when attending to the problem o f the influence o f classical antiquity that one can find evidence that ultimately not even Domenico Ghirlandaio resisted the demands o f this heightened, idealised form o f expression. He too began to make use o f motifs from classical sculp­ ture in order to transform his figures with an intensified, dynamic style.

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In attempting a stylistic analysis o f this kind, we are fortunate that sketch­ books have been preserved with drawings o f ancient works o f art, sketch­ books which were one o f the tools o f Ghirlandaio’s workshop.2 Two books are o f especial interest; one, in Madrid, because it is in the hand o f one o f Ghirlandaio’s collaborators in the workshop, possibly Granacci; the second, the sketchbook o f the classically educated architect Giuliano da Sangallo, who had a close personal relationship with Domenico Ghirlandaio, having worked with him in the decoration o f the Sassetti chapel. If, with these sketchbooks in mind, we examine the generally tranquil and noble world o f Ghirlandaio, we can observe that the anomalous figures which, due to the quite unseemly agitation in their expressions and apparel, do not fit into his oeuvre, are in fact, when their behaviour takes on this air of pathos, actually obeying the authority of a rediscovered classical antiquity. For as the individual examples from the sketchbooks demonstrate, they have learnt their classical style o f heightened expression from classical sarcophagi and triumphal sculpture, which gave sculptural form to the tragic pathos of Greek myth and the pathos o f imperial heroism. If it was therefore possible for the gestural formulae o f this language of pathos to penetrate its opposite, the world o f non-narrative monumental religious painting, then the stronghold o f realism was already being shaken in the Quattrocento, after which the idealising classical style o f the High Renaissance apparently won an easy victory and was sovereign in the artistic world for a long time to come. Since this essay is restricted to the images linked to Constantine from antiquity to the High Renaissance, I shall now turn to the oldest o f them, the Triumphal Arch o f Constantine. The Triumphal Arch stands near the Colosseum in Rome. According to the inscription it celebrates the victory o f Constantine over Maxentius and in terms o f its construction and decoration is completely indebted to the forms o f pagan triumphal architecture. In by far the larger part of its relief and sculptural decoration, it makes use o f older works o f art from pagan imperial times, for it is possible that only the narrow reliefs underneath the roundels are o f the same period as the arch itself. The most imposing reliefs on the inner sides o f the central arch and on the narrow sides o f the attic storey, which you will see in more detail later, consist o f miscellaneous pieces from a monumental frieze o f some 20 metres that most probably celebrated

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the victories o f the emperor Trajan over the Dacians, originally from a build­ ing now lost. In the Quattrocento these reliefs, even those up on the attic storey, could be studied more easily than today, because the arch was still buried deep in the earth, as this drawing from the Ghirlandaio sketchbook shows. I shall concentrate on two o f the eight reliefs spread across the triumphal arch, namely, the depictions o f battle and victory set in the wall o f the central arch. One o f the reliefs shows the emperor in the midst o f the tumult o f battle, jumping over a barbarian who has tumbled to the ground in front o f him, while their leader is throwing himself towards the emperor, begging for mercy. Another barbarian is desperately holding on to the neck o f his horse which has collapsed; behind him, a second barbarian is trying to avoid the fate o f his comrade, whose head has been taken hold o f by an armoured cav­ alryman from the emperor’s retinue which is rushing into battle, in order to give him the coup de grâce. His impending and inevitable fate is indicated by the two decapitated barbarian heads which two legionaries are triumphantly holding up to the emperor. One can see another scene from a battle with the barbarians on the right o f the other relief. One barbarian has already fallen, above him others are begging for mercy, one o f them on their knees, another, vanquished by an armored legionary, is standing. On the left the supreme moment o f triumph is to be seen: the emperor, led by Roma in the guise o f an amazon, is being crowned with the victor’s laurel wreath by the winged figure o f Victory. It is known that to the early Christian church the winged Victory symbolised paganism, with its idolatrous thirst for glory. It was because o f this that the pioneers o f the early Christian church famously took issue with a statue o f the selfsame Victoria that stood on the altar in the Roman senate, a quarrel which eventually led to the banishing o f Victoria. Constantine was the first to have it officially expelled, but it periodically returned. It was only towards the end o f the fourth century that it disappeared as an official cult statue, yet here, by a strange irony o f fate, Victory, who is actually crowning the truly pagan emperor, Trajan, found asylum. In order to demonstrate the continued influence o f triumphal sculpture in the very early middle ages I have focused on one example, and I shall now examine the legend o f Trajan in poetry and art in a little more detail. It addi­

PAINTING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

tionally anticipates and helps to clarify the problem o f the history o f style with which our investigation began, for it signifies the conflict between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Although they have not been preserved to the present day, there must have been other triumphal arches with classical reliefs showing battles and victories, which made an impression on the medieval imagination. An arch o f this kind stood near the Pantheon, called by the medieval guide books the “Arcus Pietatis,” the arch o f piety. Scholarly research has long perceived in this the echo o f a triumphal arch that, just like the Trajanic relief, shows a victorious rider jum ping over a fallen enemy, while another, begging for mercy, throws himself towards him. For in the medieval interpretation o f such a group there arose the legend o f the piety, in other words, the mercy, o f Trajan. This example shows us how typically the church subsequently transformed a brutal world conqueror, attacking in all pomp, into a devout Christian worthy o f the intercession o f Saint Gregory. Briefly, the legend runs as follows: the son o f the emperor Trajan rides over and kills the son o f a widow. The mother throws herself at the feet o f the Emperor, who is preparing to campaign, and demands justice. The Emperor tells her she will receive justice once he has returned. She, however, demands a verdict immediately. Her appeal to Trajan’s self-denying sense of justice is not in vain; the Emperor stops and has to pronounce the death sentence on his own son. It is well known that Dante portrays this scene in the tenth canto o f

Purgatory and, significantly, in the form o f a sculptural relief. I shall show you shortly Botticelli’s illustration from his famous series o f drawings o f the

Divine Comedy. In his illustration o f the legend it was the mass o f riders, pushing forward, that interested Botticelli just as much as the pious and just Emperor coming to a halt. Unlike Dante, Botticelli was sustained by the direct m em ory o f the original dynamic Roman style, for he had already studied the ancient triumphal arch. The problem o f the opposition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance can be rendered transparent in one respect by the status o f Botticelli as a transitional personality, and that is precisely why I chose an earlier period. For the impulse to illustrate faithfully an old text handed down from the Middle Ages meets the new artistic interest in the forms o f

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human expression for their own sake. The artist o f the Early Renaissance is already attempting to reproduce the triumphant style which the medieval conception o f the world had reworked into its opposite. Botticelli thus demonstrates that there was a conflict between the illustra­ tive realism o f the Middle Ages and the idealising classical style, which lasted until his own time. Most immediately therefore, we must look for the Constantine o f the medieval legend in monumental church painting, where he is furthest removed from the Arch o f Constantine. The story o f the victory o f Constantine under the sign o f the Cross was expanded in the course o f the Middle Ages by the legend o f the Empress Helena s discovery o f the true cross, and combined with the story o f the battles between the Emperor Heraclius and Chosroes, the King o f the Persians. Here we are essentially interested in looking just at the representation o f the battle with Maxentius. At the end o f the fourteenth century Agnolo Gaddi, a pupil o f Giotto, illustrated the legend o f the cross in a powerful fresco in the choir o f Santa Croce. Three scenes have been condensed onto one wall; the Emperor, who is asleep in a tent, is shown the cross, under which he will be victorious, by an angel, while on the far right he can be seen unsaddling his opponent as he fights him violently on a bridge. Agnolo Gaddi was a gifted illustrator. He understood how to represent individual natural phenomena, as in, for example, the m otif o f the sleeping Emperor, which is told intuitively and naturally. Yet he lacked the ability to do without the inessential, to subordinate the individual to the whole, in the way that Piero della Francesca, the pupil o f Masaccio and the painter o f per­ spective, uniquely demonstrated. In his fresco cycle at the church o f San Francesco in Arezzo, painted around the middle o f the Quattrocento, Piero della Francesca, the “ monarco dei pintori,” no longer treated the dream of Constantine as one episode amongst many, in contrast to Gaddi. An entire wall is devoted to the mysterious power that sent the vision o f the victorious cross to the sleeping Constantine. Three guards protect their ruler whilst asleep. They are on guard, but remain untouched by the light o f the angelic apparition, which displays only to the dreaming Emperor, sleeping heavily, the cross that will lead him to victory. In the hands o f Piero della Francesca a study in light, which is executed with almost scientific detachment, takes on at the same time the purely spir­

PAI NTI NG OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

itual capacity to symbolise a mental event mysteriously and convincingly. One can see in Piero della Francesca’s use o f light and dark an indication o f the power that in the later Rembrandt will one day take up the fight against this Roman rhetoric and gestural language. I recall that the forerunners o f these Northern painters, so concerned with light, were delighting the artistic world of Italy even at that time with their intimate and delicate painting. In Italy one o f their most influential champions was the royal amateur, René o f Anjou. A miniature from his “ Roman du Coeur d ”Am our Epris” shows how, unexpectedly, the same problematic o f light and dream occupied the attention o f Northern and Italian artists alike. Admittedly this miniature has none o f the spirit o f Masaccio, which enabled Piero to accommodate and uniquely rework outside stimuli, whether from the past or the North o f the present-day. Moreover those Italians who failed to preserve the legacy o f Masaccio with the infallibility o f Piero, a legacy consisting of a sensitivity to both the essen­ tial and the simple, ran the danger of losing the sense o f the monumental and becoming a banal descriptive painter. I shall continue this line o f inquiry in more detail shortly. When he wanted to, Piero could paint scenes o f great liveliness, as in, for example, the fight o f Heracles and the King o f the Persians, where he extends the range o f acts o f human violence and emotion. There combatants are trampled under hoof, struck down, stabbed, but without any excessive man­ nerism, even though classical depictions o f struggle very probably had an influence, inasmuch as they gave the stimulus for Piero’s own version, even if they did not offer the definitive model to be imitated. Nevertheless, Piero’s strength is the individual form, and his Victory o f

Constantine , unfortunately now very damaged, gives an idea o f the way he was able to conjure up the impression o f a mass o f individuals, when in fact there are very few figures. As in The Dream o f Constantine, this image also takes up an entire wall. However the rough collision o f bodies is no longer to be seen here. Maxentius drowns in the Tiber, but not because he has been cast down into it at the point o f a lance. The magical vision of the small cross that, almost dispassionately, Constantine holds with his almost straight, outstretched arm, has put Maxentius and his companions into a panicked fright. Not even the few arm oured riders behind the

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Em peror need to engage in battle; the aura o f the magical sign suffices alone. Although the fresco is so damaged, it is possible to see in the facial expressions something that has not been established until now, namely, a contemporary figure who truly had every right to appear in this picture: the Byzantine Emperor John Palaeologus. He had come to the West at that time, bringing with him the dignitaries o f Eastern Christianity; they and the Emperor were hoping, vainly, to heal the schism in the church at the concilia o f Ferrara and Florence in 1438 and 1439 respectively, in order to persuade the West to become an ally against the overpowerful Turks. We only need to look closely at Pisanello’s medallion portrait o f John Palaeologus in order to recognise in the dress and facial expressions o f Piero’s image the tragic figure o f the Greek Emperor. It is possible that Piero personally saw the Emperor when he stayed in Florence in 1439. This is also suggested by the fact that in the other frescoes o f the legend of the cross one can see men whose remarkable and painstakingly differentiated types o f headgear are no mere matter of playful artistic fantasy, but rather represent the marks o f rank o f the various Eastern bishops and clerics. Vasari saw the fresco o f the Victory o f Constantine when it was still com ­ plete, and he writes specifically o f a wonderfully painted naked Saracen archer, who is fleeing from battle: “ In the same scene he represented a man half-clothed half-naked, like a Saracen, riding barebacked, very remarkable for its display o f anatomy, a thing little known then.” 3 I can show you a picture o f what he roughly looked like, since a German painter, J. A. Ramboux, having made a pious and reverential pilgrimage through Italy at the beginning o f the nineteenth century, left behind hundreds o f water­ colours o f Italian frescoes and paintings. These images, which present an untapped resource for scholarly research, include two scenes from Piero della Francesca’s Legend o f the Cross. We can see here the naked Saracen rider, together with the other figures, being chased off, in the way that Vasari describes it. The fact that a Saracen has turned up in the Battle o f Ponte Molle, when he has no reason to be here, confirms my theory that through the symbolism o f the legend o f the cross, so closely bound up with the Byzantine imperial family, one o f the last Byzantine Emperors was exhorting Roman Christianity to stand by him as an ally. A style o f history painting has

PAINTING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

come into existence in Arezzo, whose monumental heroism, in its mingling o f contemporary life with a sensitivity for the religious content o f the medieval legend, and in its subordination o f the individual to the strict demands for the unity o f the whole, serves not to do away with but rather to transfigure illustrative realism. Around the middle o f the fifteenth century the products o f realistic painting in Florence seek to achieve a certain degree o f freedom from that abstract spatial discipline. The city o f goldsmiths and cloth merchants takes great pleasure above all in the faithful and detailed depiction o f individuals appearing in contemporary dress, their calm facial expressions carefully copied. This realistic portrayal o f dress and physiognomy was strengthened by Burgundian tapestries and Flemish portraiture, which played such a sur­ prisingly important role in the Florence o f the Medici. Admittedly, as an expressive style, this realism was lacking when faced with the newly discov­ ered figures o f classical myth and history; in order to capture their classical character properly, the temperament o f those figures demanded a shift o f emphasis in the language o f bodily gestures together with more animated facial expressions. Although we now have to move beyond the sphere o f the Arch o f Constantine in order to acquaint ourselves with the vocabulary of this new gestural language, Benozzo Gozzoli is indirectly linked to the repre­ sentations o f Constantine, since, as I guessed was the case with Piero della Francesca, he too painted the Byzantine Emperor John Palaeologus on the frescoes o f the Palazzo Medici. Admittedly this was some twenty years after the concilium and it lacked the sense of a tragic mission; he only provided one o f the magi with the physiognomy and the dress o f the Byzantine Emperor because he came from the Orient and because, equally, all three kings had travelled from the East. If one compares the medallion by Pisanello, his facial features have degenerated into being merely charming, but then the way his costume has been depicted is the most appropriate one for a painted tapestry. For in their orders for Flemish tapestries the Medici demanded “coxe allegre e piacevolè” (“ cheerful and agreeable things” ) and expressly permitted the figures to appear “ nella foggia di qua” (“ in the style o f the present day” ); in other words, in contemporary Burgundian fashion, even if they were to illustrate classical stories or Italian poems. If one takes into account that according to

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one estimate, by no means excessive, it is possible to prove that the inventory o f the Medici included some 80 arazzi, with a total length o f around 250 metres, o f which 44 were genuine illustrated tapestries, one can then imagine how easily the pleasant and reassuring realism o f the arazzi com ­ bined with the intimate descriptive art o f Gozzoli. Thus Gozzoli and Burgundian tapestries were natural and robust oppo­ nents to the pathos o f the new style, and reinforcements came to their aid in the form o f furniture painting, such as on wedding chests or on the bowls given to the mothers of newly-born children which, between 1440 and 1470, counted amongst the most active disseminators o f classical mythology. This they illustrated in contemporary dress such that the stimulus o f the fashion magazine and the cultivated pleasure in the reawakening o f antiquity could be enjoyed together without contradiction. Gozzoli also painted such a congratulatory dish (or lid) with a classical theme, and he could undoubtedly be sure o f the praise o f his client when he painted the rape o f Helen as if it was a racy affair drawn from the account o f a contemporary scandal. Admittedly the architecture and the statues o f Venus, together with the cherub racing away like a child o f Medea, make it clear that this is a scene from antiquity. However Paris, who is carrying Helen o ff in the manner o f a piggy-back, looks more like an ecstatic postman than a passionate seducer. And Helen too, in her close-fitting costume, her carefully coiffured head held upright, is perched on the back o f her handsome Greek as if in a box in the theatre, without the slightest sense o f her tragic situation. We have to be wary of regarding such images as simply naive or as mere parodies. To be sure, the contemporary dress was a pleasant addition, but the educated spectator also saw in it an illustration o f the Iliad, which usually keeps much closer to the text, even if not the Greek original, than it appears. In keeping with the text, Paris carries Helen o ff just as she is saying her prayers in the pagan temple. This was how it was told in medieval versions o f the Iliad (such as the Histoire de Troie) and this was how the rape of Helen by Paris was seen on stage in, for example, Jacques Milet’s first French play in 1472. In the Histoire de la Destruction de Troye la Grant Paris and Helen speak to each other as follows;

PAI NTI NG OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

Et Paris se lievera tout soudainm ent et

And Paris suddenly rose and took

prândra Helene par la m ain et dit

Helen by the hand and said

Paris: Sus damee sus venez avant

Paris: Hush, my lady, hush, come

Vous estez celle que iactens

You are the w oman I have been

before me waiting for Délivrez vous appertem ent

Give yourself up appropriately

Hélène: Hélas menez moy doucem ent

Helen: Alas, take me gently

Paris: Vous en vendrez avec moy

Paris: You will come away with me

Se vous estez femme de roy

If you are the wife of a king

Autant serez vous honnoree

You will be suitably honoured

De moy et aussi bien paree

By me and equally well adorned

Et si aurez autant donneur

And since you will have as m uch

Quaviez avec vostre seigneur

As you did w ith your husband

Venez vous en sans resistance

Come, w ithout resisting

honour

Hélène: Je feray vostre plaisance

Helen: I shall do what you desire

Car ie ny puis remedier.4

For my sickness has no cure.

In comparison with this woodcut5 one has to admit that even in Gozzoli there is a tendency towards mimetic intensification. Evidently the courtly notion o f antiquity prevalent in late medieval France had a more powerful and longer lasting effect on educated society in Quattrocento Florence than is usually believed. Amongst those goldsmiths o f Florence who came across the products of the newly invented art o f printing from the North, one can notice a striking meeting, hitherto underestimated, between a pleasure in ornamentation “ alia franzese” and an impulse towards dynamic movement “ all’ antica.” The entry o f Paris and Helen in Jacques Milet’s play, the words they use to engage in conversation, are similar to the way they appear in the sketchbook o f a Florentine goldsmith.6 The two figures, dressed fashionably and elegantly, seem to be in no particular hurry to leave the temple o f Venus. However the tumult on the frieze o f putti on the temple cornice makes up for the lack of passion in the representation o f their external actions. Ultimately the suppliers o f these costly items could not resist Donatello’s desire to set the human body free from this rigid and opulent façade in order to endow it with the unhindered expressive rhythm o f classical form. Without worrying

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about artistic consistency, they knew how to combine the two, as was the case with the painters and goldsmiths, the Pollaiuolo brothers. Antonio used to make belts with metal adornments o f the kind that Helen wears, and painted subjects, landscapes, interiors which in their loving depiction o f individual subjects bear comparison with any work from Flanders. And yet this artistic skill at close observation was not his main strength, unlike his brother Piero, whom some clients, with a taste for the good old times, cer­ tainly preferred over the awkward, more innovative Antonio. The Medici have to be credited with the fact that while this pleasant descriptive art pro­ vided them with an agreeable and comforting atmosphere, they were never­ theless also stirred by the demonic pathos o f Pollaiuolo. For from 1460 onwards, at approximately the same time that Gozzoli was painting in the Medici palazzo, Antonio’s three great Deeds o f Heracles could be seen in the Lower Hall on large canvases. They have been lost, but the two small pictures in the Uffizi afford us an indication o f what they looked like (and here enlargement with the Skioptikon comes into its own). Heracles, who is strangling Antaeus and who has defeated the Hydra, has taken on the stirring pathos o f the athletic ideal o f man from ancient sculp­ ture. Indeed he is more classical than Antiquity itself. The plastic form of Antonio’s Heracles and the Antaeus group is so saturated, as it were, with pathos that the rhetoric o f his musculature is on the verge o f the baroque gestural language o f Mannerism. Nevertheless, his energy enabled the gods and heroes to shake off the ephemeral charm o f their costume, and to reflect on their natural humanity. If his task is to depict a rape on a wedding chest, he chooses a wild centaur, not the elegant Paris, as the seducer, and the naked, furious Heracles opposes this elemental symbol o f animal violation, as the counterpart to untrammelled passion. Another Rape by Pollaiuolo has been preserved by means o f a copy by Dürer. Two naked chaps drag o ff their booty similar to the way in which Heracles carries o ff the bull in an antique gem in the possession o f the Medici. Likewise antique battle reliefs (whose origin has yet to be ascer­ tained individually) may have informed this copper engraving which, recall­ ing a drawing by Pollaiuolo, proclaims a muscular battle, for which Heracles is again responsible, since the inscription reads: “ Quomodo Hercules percus­ sit et vicit duodecim Gigantes.” 7

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In this and similar engravings the newly invented art o f printing created a host of easily circulated proclamations o f the new pathetic style, which now placed artistic workshops far beyond Italy in a state o f ferment. Dürer is the most interesting example o f this, which unfortunately I cannot follow any further today. The most convincing example o f what Antonio Pollaiuolo was looking for and found in Antiquity, and which has hitherto been overlooked, is offered by the jousting shield in the National Gallery, Washington, on which David is painted hurling a stone. The giant’s head already lies at his feet; nevertheless the sight is full o f frightening tension; his garment flutters as he walks, his hand is raised as if to ward something off, his face has a terri­ ble look o f arousal. To me it seems undoubtedly8 the case that the figure of the Niobids’ tutor (now in Florence in the Uffizi) served as the immediate original. It has the same positioning o f the legs, the same hand movements, the same individual folds o f the hood o f his flapping coat. Only the head of the young David, more laden with pathos, differs from the original; his hair flaps around his face as if it were formed o f snakes, his face is contorted like the face o f Medusa. Keeping with the antique style, Pollaiuolo’s tempera­ ment leads beyond Antiquity. I recall that the Niobids’ tutor was found without a head.9 Antonio Pollaiuolo was the instructor in deportment, as it were, for the modern culture o f expression amongst those educated in the Classics. Using the sculptural representations o f myth from Antiquity as his model, he taught the figures o f the art world classical comportment within the whole sphere o f human experience. Not only did he teach how to fight manfully and how to mourn tragi­ cally; he also taught how to dance “ all’ antica.” On the frescoes o f Arcetri naked men are dancing a Dionysian round, and even the dancing Salome he drew for the Netherlandish embroiderers is forced to make the effort to move with the flourish o f a nymph from Antiquity, despite her heavy Burgundian garments. In its manner and range, Pollaiuolo’s style o f representing threedimensional movement shows a close affinity with a greater figure, who only sculpted: Donatello. Indeed, he not only gave the intensified sense o f life expression in the form o f a harmless youthful joyousness, as on the putti frieze in the organ chancellery in Florence. From the reliefs for the reliquary o f St. Anthony onwards (circa 1445) he, and above all his pupils, were seized

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ABY WARBURG

by an intensely nervous, tragic sense o f pathos which, in the case o f individ­ ual figures, leads to an orgy o f movement which seeks to excell the em o­ tional ferocity o f the antique reliefs that served as the model. By way o f example, I shall mention just one silver relief from the circle o f Donatello, the mourning for the body o f Christ. Church discipline forbade mourning devoid o f all composure: it demanded humility and self-control in the heights and depths o f human existence. The uncontrolled gestures of mourning, the crying out, the throwing-up o f hands and the self-mutilation on this relief exactly matches the attitudes o f the gathering o f mourners o f the kind we find preserved on relief representations o f the pagan conclama­ tio. The most remarkable thing is that Christ, carried like Meleager, is being laid to rest in a sarcophagus adorned with the image o f Persephone. There is no question o f whether or not the artist knew the legend pre­ cisely. He was sensitive to the essential thing, that ancient grief over a person s death was wrestling to find expression here on this pagan sarcopha­ gus, and that its expression in this moving form signified an invaluable gain for the gestural vocabulary o f humanity. It is this very formula for the pathos o f m ourning, from pagan sar­ cophagi, that appears on the grave monument o f a Florentine citizen, Francesco Sassetti, who had by way o f contrast commissioned Domenico Ghirlandaio to decorate his burial place and to paint the altar-piece and the walls. In the border to the grave niche, Giuliano da Sangallo modelled the mourning o f the death o f Francesco Sassetti, lying on his deathbed and sur­ rounded by mourning relatives, on a genuine antique pagan sarcophagus o f Meleager. On the spandrels o f the wall o f the grave niche scenes from the life o f an emperor are painted en grisaille, borrowed from ancient coins. Inspired by Giuliano’s archaeological schooling, Ghirlandaio probably included these as symbols o f the virtus o f Francesco. In other respects, however, especially in the panel o f the chapel, Ghirlandaio still remains completely under the influence o f Flemish portrait painting, such as that o f Hugo van der Goes, who offered the most impressive support for the antirhetorical style o f descriptive painting with his altar for the Portinari. Even when an antique sarcophagus or ancient column are permitted to appear in this still-life o f reverent busts and animal heads, they are only granted legitimacy (I have discussed this elsewhere) as express evidence for

PAINTING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

the triumph o f Christian faith. Only in the background does an antique sense o f movement rush through the procession o f the three kings who, rushing past, stream through an ancient triumphal arch. The figures rushing by clearly repeat the m otif o f a running man displayed on the base o f the column, and we shall see shortly how on the frescoes o f Sta. Maria Novella, in a later period o f Domenico Ghirlandaio, roman triumphal sculpture will intervene directly, bringing about a change o f style. With this we return to the Arch o f Constantine, for the two grisaille reliefs on the final picture, the Sacrifice o f Zacharias, o f the frescoes o f the Tornabuoni Chapel, which adorn the altar wall o f the temple like a kind o f attica, are faithfully copied reliefs on the Arch o f Constantine. The battle relief with the riders charging forward is taken from the relief on the attica o f the narrow side o f the Arch of Constantine, while the victory crowning exactly reproduces the relief on the inner side already shown, which depicts the crowning o f the victory of Trajan. What are these reliefs meant to signify? They are at least not stylised representations o f the familial congress o f the Tornaquinci-Tornabuoni faction. Perhaps in this concluding picture, which praises the fortunate peace in Florence in 1490 in an inscription above the door, they are meant to be appended as a kind o f festive seal, following the Roman style o f drawing a list o f all those present at a family celebration. However, the stone Victory from the Arch o f Constantine produces an altogether different, lively and purely artistic effect. Immediately above the Sacrifice o f Zacharias is a depiction o f a ceremonial visit to St. Elisabeth. Splendid ladies from the Tornabuoni family offer congratulations in the dignified manner o f noble society, but behind them a serving woman rushes in at a hurried step carrying a flask with her hand and a fruit dish on her head. Despite this prosaic task she is stylised and idealised: she wears a belt around her gown, which flutters briskly, like that o f Victory, and even if the sandals on her feet have to tarry on the ground, her robe, blown out from her shoulders like a sail in the wind, provides her with at least an ornamen­ tal, earthly, substitute for the olympian aerial paraphernalia o f the victory goddess. One difference between the Trajanic victory goddess and the Victoria in the guise o f a Florentine housewife, consists in the fact that the latter appears in profile. But even this positioning was first coined by an ancient

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ABY WARBURG

original, according to the sketchbook o f Ghirlandaio’s workshop. A woman with fluttering robes, even carrying a bowl o f fruit, is to be found on page 51 with the comment: “ in sulla piazza di sancto pietro,” or “on the piazza o f Saint Peter.” The basket may be an addition; the figure as a whole appears exactly the same in the guise o f a nymph on a Bacchic sarcophagus where she is holding cymbals instead o f the basket. However, the archaeology o f the figure is only o f secondary significance; we can think o f this nymph as a symbol o f the affirmation o f life, as the Quattrocento understood it. The medal in the courtyard o f the Palazzo Medici which, following an antique gem, has Bacchus and Ariadne driving in triumph, marks the beginning o f the dithyramb to life that culminated in the carnival song by Lorenzo. Today this poem, written to accompany the lively reappearance o f the gods in the carnival procession, is on everyone’s lips. An engraving based on a drawing by Botticelli, who him self undoubtedly made use o f the m otif from a Bacchic sarcophagus, illustrates the well-known verses; Q u ant’ è bella giovinezza

However beautiful youth is,

Che si fuggia tuttavia;

It vanishes all the same;

Chi vuole esser lieto, sia,

Whoever wishes to be merry, let them,

Di dom an non c’è certezza.

For tom orrow nothing is certain.

Questo è Bacco e Arïanna,

Here are Bacchus and Ariadne,

Belli, e Pun dell’altro ardenti;

Beautiful, b urning for each other.

Perché ‘1 tem po fugge e inganna

Though tim e flies and deceives us

Sempre insieme stan contenti.

They are always content together.

Queste ninfe e altre genti

These nymphs and others

Sono allegri tuttavia.

Are happy all the same.

Chi vuole esser lieto, sia,

Whoever wishes to be merry, let them,

Di dom an non c’è certezza.10

For tom orrow nothing is certain.

Ghirlandaio’s nymph has nothing orgiastic about her, but nevertheless even she typifies, in the world view o f Savonarola, that impudent pagan vanity, whose image was not to be tolerated in church. In his sermons that shook Florence in 1496, he criticises in general, and most immediately, church paintings o f fashionably clothed figures.11 In particular, in his sermon on the cow o f Samaria, that was so dangerous for him, he foresaw it in the fluttering veils o f the w om en.12 Ghirlandaio made far more pro­ nounced use o f the pathos formula o f the Roman Triumphal Arch on his

PAINTING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

fresco o f the slaughter o f the innocents in Bethlehem. Unfortunately the fresco is very damaged, but the essential features can still be made out, with some effort. From the Triumphal Arch there is the violent fighting between the mothers and the m ilitary executioners. Ghirlandaio is working here with borrowed emotions; he is lending the men and women the pathos o f the Triumphal Arch. Remarkably, this is not based the fictitious reliefs from the Triumphal Arch in the background, but in the main on the victory o f Trajan over the barbarians, which is the other relief on the inner side o f the Arch of Constantine. Thus the bearded man embracing the neck o f his horse is simply lifted from the composition, and likewise the positioning o f the sol­ diers fighting the women is determined by the group consisting o f the armored cavalryman about to decapitate the barbarian seen from behind. The facial expressions of the two women in the foreground, o f whom one is pulling the soldier by the hair and the other is running o ff with her child, could be taken from a sarcophagus depicting the myth o f Medea. However, establishing the individual archaeological details is not the main point; what is essential is that the primitive Quattrocento, which we enjoy so much for its “ naive” tranquillity, has here lapsed into an extremely baroque gestural language. And this has occurred, moreover, precisely because o f the pagan art o f his ancestors. One might say, “ colla licenza degli anteriori.” It is significant that Vasari, a genuine Cinquecentist, was an enthusiastic admirer of the “ baruffa bellissima” o f this Slaughter o f the Innocents. He praises in particular one horrible motif: an infant that, while bleeding from a neck wound, is still drinking milk and blood from the breast o f its fleeing mother. We are not used to looking for such a bizarre sensationalism until the Seicento, and a poem on the Slaughter o f the Innocents in Bethlehem by Giovanni Battista Marino serves as an excellent example o f this bombastic baroque style, which expends its energies on the crassest o f painted depic­ tions o f human violence and states o f arousal. Thus his imagination cannot miss a similarly horrible motif. In the third book he sings; Ecco un altro crudel, ch’al prim o figlio

Look, another cruel m an casts

Che il sen le sugge un dardo aw enta

At the eldest son feeding at her

e scocca,

breast

and hurls a spear

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ABY WARBURG

E passa oltre le labbra, onde la poppa,

And pierces his lips and her breast, which

giá di latte, hor di sangue è fatta

Once of milk, is now a vessel of

coppa.13

blood.

To be sure, in 1490 Ghirlandaio could still undertake his attempts at mixing contem porary life and Antiquity without interference; Lorenzo the Magnificent was still alive and Lorenzo Tornabuoni had not yet had to throw in his lot with the party followers o f Savonarola. The central painting o f the altarpiece that Ghirlandaio and his brothers made for the Tornabuoni chapel shows Christ’s Resurrection on the reverse side, and the exemplary pathos formula o f Antiquity penetrates here, even informing the expression o f tragic horror. The Saviour, rising up from the grave, has plunged the three pagan guards in fear and alarm. One o f them, raising his shield over his bearded head as if to defend himself, is fleeing, his robe fluttering in the wind. Ghirlandaio’s sketchbook reveals the model: the fleeing barbarian from Trajan’s Column who, just like the guard in terms o f his physiognomy, his posture and the movement o f his robe, is rushing away from the troops o f Trajan. In terms o f the momentary expression o f fear on his face, with its furrowed eyebrows and open mouth, and even in terms of the ornamental wings on his helmet, the guard rushing off to the left points towards his model, admittedly not quite attained, namely, the head o f the screaming winged Medusa crying out, which he carries with supreme effort on his shield as his coat o f arms. And if one examines more carefully the position and the coarse, m ous­ tachioed face o f the seated warrior with the raised hands, it seems to me that his prototype may well also be found in the Attalid triumphal sculpture celebrating victory over the Gauls. From this perspective it would be possible to demonstrate many more similar cases of emotional intensification through the use o f classical motifs, and yet I think it is unnecessary to amass examples. So much has become clear, that as in the case o f Pollaiuolo, so too in the workshop o f Ghirlandaio, ancient sculpture worked like an illustrated academic textbook on the expression o f intensified human pathos.

PAIN TING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

At this time there was indeed an actual Director o f the Academy in Florence, the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. He taught young artists by acquainting them with the ancient treasures o f the Medici that he adminis­ tered. Only a few o f his works have been preserved, but they prove that like almost no other, Bertoldo, the pupil o f the late Donatello, subscribed to the ancient formula o f pathos with body and soul. Just as a maenad tosses an animal that has been torn apart, so too M ary Magdelene, mourning at the base o f the cross, clenches the hair she has torn out in an orgy o f grief. The extent o f his passionate feeling and imitation o f the warrior pathos o f Roman depictions o f battle is indicated by the bronze relief o f the eques­ trian battle in the Museo Nazionale, in which he adopted and exaggerated motifs from a sarcophagus in Pisa. A victorious triumph has also been preserved on the reverse o f a medallion made by him. A man stands on a triumphal carriage, performing a victory dance. Behind him he leads three naked women, bound up by a rope. They are the provinces o f Trabizond, Greece and Asia and the man being fêted by this medallion is the Turkish Sultan Mohammed II. The contrast between the Early and High Renaissance is symbolised by the difference between Piero della Francesca and this Florentine artist. In his fresco o f the Legend of

Constantine , Piero brought the Christian emperor o f the Greeks, then fleeing the might o f the Turks, to the minds o f his contemporaries without any rhetoric, using the symbolism o f the Christian legend. The latter even placed his gestural eloquence, in the grand style of his ancestors, at the service o f a Turk. The progress o f the culture of expression led to a cult o f form for form s sake, and one can now understand how the problem o f the tumult o f battle emerged from the academy o f Bertoldo as a kind of academic prize competi­ tion. The individual motifs o f the intensified pathos o f life that piled up in his own works and in the collections o f antiquities demanded some resolution. This was where the young Michelangelo received the pedagogical stimu­ lus for the modelling o f his Battle o f the Centaurs , and it is also where Leonardo may have studied the horses on the Phaethon gem o f the Medici, which influenced the composition o f his equestrian battle. As we saw with Botticelli, around 1490 the impulse o f everything from Florence was towards conceiving and reshaping living movement in terms of

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the elevated style o f the great art o f the pagan ancestors. However it was Rome that first harvested the end result o f these attempts, in the Battle of

Constantine in the Stanze o f the Vatican. It was not completed until after Raphael’s death, by his pupils under the supervision o f Giulio Romano. It gives the comforting impression o f a unified, controlled, mass. The times o f oscillating between painting everything as if in the present and the idealising classical style are past. The men on both sides follow all the evolu­ tionary steps set out by the sarcophagus battle scenes, the victory columns and Triumphal Arches. Nevertheless they come across as an anonymous mass that leaves the field open to the actual leader to carry out his victorious action. Mounted on a galloping horse, Constantine, his spear raised, leaps towards the Tiber where Maxentius, clinging to the neck o f his horse, is sinking before his eyes. The battle has been decided in Constantine’s favour. Already, his faithful knights are holding out to him two human heads as trophies o f victory. There is no question; the main tragic scene is played out exactly by the figures on the Trajan relief from the Arch o f Constantine, which we have fol­ lowed this evening as it rose towards its climax as a determinant o f style. The composition and the characters o f this battle drama owe the rhetorically compelling grandeur o f their idealising style to the reactivation o f classical antiquity, as the High Renaissance understood it. To be sure, the Roman triumphal style precisely lacks what we are accus­ tomed, since Winckelmann, to admire as the essential characteristic o f classi­ cal art: the simplicity and still grandeur, which Winckelmann him self recognised in Laocoon, writhing in the agony o f death. I can quote the famous passage; Finally, the universal and predom inant characteristic of the Greek m asterpieces is a noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur, both in posture and expression. Just as the depths of the sea rem ain forever calm, however m uch the surface may rage, so does the expression of the Greek figures, however strong their passions, reveal a great and dignified soul. Such a soul is depicted in the face of Laocoon, and not only in his face, despite his m ost violent torm ents. The pain which is evident in his every muscle and sinew, and which, disregarding his face and other parts of his body, we can almost feel ourselves simply by looking at his painfully contracted abdom en-this pain, I maintain,

PAINTING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

nevertheless causes no violent distortion either to his face or to his general posture. He raises no terrible clamour, as in Virgil’s poetic account o f his fate. His m o uth is n ot wide enough open to allow it, and he emits instead an anxious and oppressed sigh, such as Sadoleto describes. The physical pain and spiritual greatness are diffused w ith equal intensity th ro u g h o u t his entire frame, and held, as it were, in balance. Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles: his misery touches us to the heart, bu t we envy the fortitude with which this great m an endures it.14

You are aware how absolutely this doctrine influenced the eighteenth century, especially our German classics. And Winckelmann’s doctrine still continues to have an effect today. For if one were to attempt to conceive of the influence o f antiquity as a unified current, it is undeniably a governing element in the style o f Early Renaissance architecture. One would necessarily have to base the search for the influence o f an­ tiquity on the lawfulness o f the ideal human type. In other cases, however, precisely because its rational character was held to be essential, antiquity would not be recognised as making any active artistic contribution to the shaping o f the Quattrocento. With the Quattrocento, so complex and his­ torically oriented, artists and art lovers wish to enjoy, at any cost, the prim ­ itive and completely self-reliant individual o f modernity, for whom nothing could be more distant than to repeat the ossified formal language o f past ages. The sculptures in my discussion, o f which I have been able to show you all too sketchy a selection today, ought to have just proved to you how pow­ erfully the artworks o f antiquity penetrated into the heart o f the Early Renaissance on account o f their passionate, outer and inner dynamism. If I have had to speak all too frequently o f “ pathos formulae,” you might cor­ dially take into account that until now these have neither been collected individually, nor seen in context. However, as testimony to the fact that a conception o f antiquity sprang from the spirit o f the Quattrocento, which stands precisely diametrically opposite to that o f Winckelmann, let me cite the words o f Luigi Lotto, who was tracking down antiquities for the Medici in Rome together with our Giovanni Tornabuoni, and who was lucky enough to discover a small copy o f the Laocoon group during night excavations in a vineyard o f Cardinal

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della Rovere in 1488. He was not clear about the mythical content, and was indifferent to it. His enthusiastic admiration was exclusively for its formal pathos: We found three lovely little fauns on a marble base, all three of them entwined by a large serpent. In my judgement they are most beautiful. All they lack is their voice; they appear to breathe, to cry out and to defend themselves with quite marvellous gestures. You see the one in the middle collapsing and expiring.15 We hear nothing more o f this group, whose export from Florence was prob­ ably prevented. The official rediscovery o f the larger Laocoon group, which indeed excited all Rome, was not achieved until 1506. Nevertheless one should not make the influence o f the Laocoon dependent on the fact o f its chance re-appearance. I

am no longer afraid o f being misunderstood when I say: if it had not

discovered it, the Renaissance would have invented the Laocoon, just because o f its moving and eloquent pathos. We are now resolved to regard this classical disquiet as an essential char­ acteristic o f ancient art and culture. Due to research into the religion o f the ancient Greco-Roman world, we are learning more and more to see antiq­ uity as symbolised, as it were, in the two-faced herm o f Apollo and Dionysus. Apollinian ethos together with Dionysian pathos grow like a double branch from one trunk, as it were, rooted in the mysterious depths o f the Greek maternal earth. The Quattrocento knew how to give artistic worth to the two-fold content o f the ancient pagan world. The artists o f the Early Renaissance revered antiquity, now restored, just as much for its lawful beauty as for the mastery with which it lent expression to em otional pathos. The gestural superlatives that had hitherto been scorned were thus the right aids in an age wrestling for greater freedom o f expression, in the literal and figurative sense. We must first recreate this openness to the dual stylistic riches o f antiq­ uity, which is just what I have sought to help to do in the course o f the years, in this somewhat complicated and erudite manner.

PAINTING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

In conclusion I might say, perhaps, that I was led by the words o f my honoured teacher Carl Justi: Scholarship should be the rediscovery o f the point o f view the work was once made for.” 16

Translated by Matthew Rampley

notes 1 Trans. Note. The translation is based on W arburg’s lecture “Der E intritt des antikisierenden Idealstiles in die Malerei der Frührenaissance,” given at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence on 20 April 1914. The Archive o f the W arburg Institute includes both m anuscript and typescript versions of the text, num bered as 88.1 and 88.2 respectively. Thanks are due to Professor Sir Ernst G ombrich for his clarification o f a num ber of queries. I would also like to thank Philippe Solomons and Simone Conboy for their com ments on earlier versions of the translation and to Professor Nicholas M ann for granting permission to publish the text. 2 Codex Escurialensis. Ein Skizzenbuch aus der Werkstatt Dominico Ghirlandaios, eds., H. Egger, C. Flülsen, A. Michaelis (Vienna, 1905). 3 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives o f the Artists, trans. William G aunt (London, 1963) p. 3344 Jacques Milet, Histoire de la Destruction de Troye la Grant, ed. E. Stempel (M arburg and Leipzig, 1883) p. 4 6 ,11. 2522-34. 5 Trans. Note. The 1883 edition to which W arburg refers is a facsimile of the m anu script text o f 1484, in which the passage cited is accom panied by a w ood cut depicting the abduction of Helen. 6 Colvin, who published this book as a Florentine Picture Chronicle (London, 1898), identifies him as Maso Finiguerra. 7 Trans. Note. “How Heracles beat and conquered twelve giants.” 8 Trans. Note. W arburg’s text reads “zweifelhaft,” i.e. “doubtfully.” This does not make sense within the rest of the sentence, and I therefore have taken it to be “unzweifelhaft.” 9 See Walter Amelung, Führer durch die Antiken in Florenz (Munich, 1897) p. 120. 10 Lorenzo de’ Medici, “Canzona di Bacco,” in Opere, ed. T. Zanato (Turin, 1992) pp. 391-92. 11

“W hen the women o f Florence m arry off their young women they parade them and dress them up to appear like nymphs, and first of all take them to Santa

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Liberata. These are your idols, and you have introduced their kind into my world. The images of your gods are the images and likenesses of the figures you have had painted in the churches, so that young people can point and say of this person or that— “look, she is M ary Magdelene,” and “he is John the Baptist”— because you have had holy figures painted in the likeness o f some w om an or other, which is a sinful act that shows contem pt for the holy and divine. You painters are com mitting a sin. If you only knew what I know and saw the ensuing evil you would not paint these likenesses. You fill the churches with these vanities. Do you truly believe that the Virgin Mary went dressed in the m anner you painted her ? I tell you she went clothed like a pauper, simply and covered so that only her face could be seen. Saint Elizabeth dressed in this way. You would be doing a great service by removing these figures so dishonestly painted.” Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche italiane ai Fiorentini, ed. R. Palmarocchi (Florence, n.d.) p. 391. 12 “Women, make sure your young wom en are not cows. Make sure that they go with their chests covered, and that they do not carry their tails like cows; that their horns do not join up like cows; make them keep quiet, these sailing ships. I am not telling you to walk with a crooked and ill-suited veil, but make yourselves orderly, like good and honest w omen.” Savonarola, Prediche italiane ai Fiorentini, pp. 275-76. 13

Giovanbattista Marino, “La Strage degi’ Innocenti’ in Dicerie Sacre e La Strage d eg r Innocenti (Turin, i960) p. 553. Senator Brockes from H am burg translated it in the following way; “Ein anderer Morder wirft von diesem

“Another murderer cast a

kleinen Paar

spear through the mouth of

Dem àltsten Sôhnchen gleich den Wurfspiess

the eldest son o f this little

durch den Mund,

couple such that the mother?s

So, dass der Mutter Brust zugleich mit

breast was

ward verwundt,

while the infant rested gently

An welcher es annoch, sich trânkend, sanfte ruht;

also

wounded,

against it, still feeding. The

Wodurch die Brust, die ihm zuvor ein

breast, which had previously

Milchkrug war,

been a milk jug, thereby Ihm

nunmehr plôtzlich ward ein weisser

suddenly became a white jug

Krug mit Blut ”

with blood.”

Barthold Brockes, Verdeutschter Bethlehemitischer Kindermord [1715] (Hamburg, 1742) p. 187. If we take a look at the engraving by Picart th at accom panied Brockes’s translation of 1715, we are faced w ith a bloodthirsty to do, which at root only exceeds Ghirlandaio’s style in terms of quantity. It is no different. A hundred years before M arini m annerism was already appearing in Ghirlandaio under the sign of a resurrected Antiquity.

PAINTING OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

14 Johann W inckelm ann, “T houghts on the Im itation o f the Painting and Sculpture o f the Greeks,” in H ugh Nisbet, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe (Cambridge, 1985) p. 42. 15

Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio Inedito d ’Artisti dei Secoli 14-16 (Florence, 1839-40) Vol. I, p. 285, n. CXXIII, “Luigi di Andrea Lotti di Barberino a Lorenzo il Magnifico, da Roma, 13 Febbraio 1488.”

16 Carl Justi, Michelangelo (Leipzig, 1902) p. 45.

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warburg centenary lecture1

ernst ti. gotnbrich IN SPEAKING ABOUT THE FOUNDER OF

this Institute on the occasion o f the centenary o f his birth I am very much aware o f an overriding disadvantage. Unlike some members o f this audi­ ence I never knew or even met Aby Warburg. He died in October 1929 in his 64th year, and so when I came to this Institute early in 1936 he had been dead for more than six years. This is a short time, by normal standards, but in this interval his foundation had to be uprooted and transplanted to London, where its accommodation was provisional and its future uncertain. All the more, I think, were Warburg’s successors and heirs determined that no break must occur in the tradition. Two years after Warburg s death the collected edition o f all his published works had been issued by Teubner in a model edition with annotations and indices by Gertrud Bing;2 Fritz Saxl had announced in the Preface that they were to be followed by the publication from the manuscripts and drafts o f a projected work that had occupied him at the time o f his death, and by further volumes containing lectures, apho­ risms and correspondence. But however intensely both Saxl and Bing felt (33}

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that the thread must not be allowed to break after the move, the pressure o f the crisis all around increasingly absorbed their energies. Saxl had to make contact with the world o f learning in this country, Bing was immersed in the work o f mercy for which she was so uniquely gifted, the work o f helping and advising exiled scholars. And so Saxl, impatient o f delay, looked for some young man who could assist Gertrud Bing with the edition o f W arburgs Literary Remains. I am, or rather was that young man who had been rashly recommended to Saxl when he had visited Vienna in 1935 . 1 was initiated into Warburg’s ideas by Gertrud Bing and began to work among his papers. Today, more than thirty years later the work is not yet completed. Gertrud Bing who had been Aby W arburgs assistant, helpmate and com ­ panion during the last five years o f his life died over this work at the age o f 72 without completing that authoritative biography which she alone could have given us. We hope that a selection o f Warburg’s letters will now be pub­ lished by an editor uniquely qualified for this task, by Dr. M ax A dolf Warburg.3 It remains my responsibility to complete a book I drafted 20 years ago on Warburg’s ideas and on his place in the history o f scholarship.4 You will not expect me to sum it up in a single lecture. But even less will you want me to present the same material which Gertrud Bing discussed in her lecture on Warburg which you can read in the current number o f our Journal.5 M y approach must be different, and I think it inevitably will be. For if I mentioned my disadvantage which I feel so keenly when I think of those who knew Warburg, I must console myself with a compensating advantage which I may have as a historian. I do not mean here the dubious advantage o f greater objectivity. Nobody can be really objective. But object­ ivity is not quite the same thing as that detachment that comes from a sense o f distance, and this distance is inevitably given to those o f us who did not know a scholar in our field who was born a hundred years ago. It so happens that this idea o f psychological distance and detachment was one o f Warburg’s own central concerns. You remember the use which, following him, Saxl and Panofsky made o f this notion in their discussion o f the Renaissance, the age when antiquity could be viewed with a sense o f distance and therefore revived. We are undergoing a similar experience just now although on a much smaller scale. The period o f Warburg’s formative years is just appearing over

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the threshold of our historical awareness again. It is no longer old-fashioned, it is history. I am, o f course, referring to the 1880s and 90s with its fashion of

art nouveau o f which we now witness a minor Renaissance. I can think o f no better way therefore o f placing Warburg in his historical setting than by showing you a slide o f his second publication,6 his first after his Ph.D. thesis. It came out in the second year o f Pan, the German rival o f The Yellow Book , in April 1897. For when Warburg at the age o f thirty had journeyed to America he had brought back from this prolonged trip not only his memories and souvenirs o f an excursion to the American Indians o f New Mexico, but also a small collection o f little magazines which had sprung up in Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco. They are still in our library. In his unpretentious article Warburg gave the readers o f Pan a few samples of the type o f fashionable illustrations and literary exercises o f these periodicals. But he did not reveal himself as an uncritical devotee o f the modern fashion. Six years older than Beerbohm or Beardsley he kept his distance. In fact what he liked most in what he read was to find that his American contemporaries did so, too, and that they made fun o f the fin du siècle pose o f languid self-indulgence. “ I think,” he concludes, “ that we owe these gallant fighters in the Far West a friendly cheer for their old fashioned idealism.” Warburg remained an oldfashioned idealist all his life. Yet I would not have ventured to begin with this marginal item in his bibliography if I did not think that it illuminates W arburgs origins in more than one way. It is not difficult to see at this distance o f time that the topic Warburg had chosen for his Ph.D. thesis some eight years earlier in 1888 was connected to the emergent style o f art nouveau by many subterranean pas­ sages. The ostensible subject o f the published version were the two famous mythologies by Botticelli, The Birth o f Venus and The Primavera >but the real problem Warburg had set himself was the explanation o f Botticelli’s peculiar drapery style, those fluttering garments and undulating locks which chimed in so well with the aesthetic preoccupations o f the period, for instance the fashionable art o f Burne Jones. O f course, the choice o f a subject from the late Florentine quattrocento altogether suggests the influence o f Ruskin and o f the Pre-Raphaelite vogue, but here an important distinction o f generations emerges. Warburg s notes

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and his published writings leave no doubt that he found himself increas­ ingly in violent contradiction to that fashionable interpretation which saw in the so-called Italian primitives a paradise o f innocence and naivité. I say increasingly, for we have Warburg’s own words for it that the greatest obsta­ cle he had had to overcome was the conviction he had shared that these painters had been naive. Warburg never threw any o f his notes away, and so we are enabled to watch this process o f emancipation that led to the formulation of his thesis in his jottings that reach back to his student days when he attended a Seminar given by Schmarsow in Florence in 1888. What had arrested the student’s attention was that the artists o f the Florentine quattrocento were not the faithful and dedicated imitators o f natural appearance he had been led to expect. Led to expect by Vasari who represented the rise o f painting as an increase in the skill o f copying nature, and equally so by the PreRaphaelites who singled out this very intention as the quality they wanted to imitate in the masters before Raphael. But if they wanted to be so faithful in their rendering o f nature, why did Filippino Lippi and Botticelli deviate from realism by adding those flourishes o f fluttering folds and curls? What is behind these accretions which tempt the artists increasingly away from things and motifs they can have observed in tranquillity? Warburg’s answer, which became famous, was that these forms or form u­ lae o f billowing drapery came from antiquity, from neo-Attic reliefs or sar­ cophagi. But we are not doing justice to either the originality or to the intricacy o f Warburg’s real hypothesis if we leave it at that. What he tried to show was that antiquity was visualised in these terms not only because artists had seen a few such monuments, but largely because the patrons and poets derived their mental image o f the classical myths from Ovid and other ancient writers who delighted in descriptions o f such graceful movement. It was Poliziano who must have advised Botticelli that no representation o f an ancient myth would look authentic to his patrons unless he added these tell­ tale details which removed the image from humdrum context o f observed reality and lifted it into that realm o f poetic fancy, where the ancient myths had their being. It is true that in attempting circumstantial proo f o f this hypothesis, Warburg’s starting point, the origin o f the whole stylistic trend, was almost

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lost sight of, in a welter o f texts and documents. He must have felt that himself, for he appended to his paper what he called Four Theses o f a general aesthetic nature which were to fit this special hypothesis into a wider psychological framework. What they say, if I understand them correctly, is that these fluttering gar­ ments, these flourishes which Warburg here called dynamizing formal addi­ tions, shapes in other words, which help to create the impression o f movement, ultimately derive from the observation o f things in motion; but that it is easier for the artist to apply them where he is not bound to realistic subject matter, in other words where he must in any case draw on his imagination and memory. Hence it is in the illustration o f such imaginary themes, in allegories for instance, that artists found the language o f idealiza­ tion, which was to become the stylistic idiom o f the High Renaissance. The mem ory image can here prove superior to the immediate imitation o f nature, for a reliance on memory images need not lead to empty manner­ isms, it can lead to true idealization. The careful reader of the paper itself will find a gloss on this theory on its last page. The thoughtless repetition o f external signs o f movement— we there read— should not be attributed to the example o f antiquity; for this example, as we know from Winckelmann, can also be used to create an art of quiet grandeur; it is simply due to the lack of restraint o f certain artists if they were carried away, as it were, by this example. Botticelli himself, we read, was one o f those who was too pliable, he yielded too much, he became mannered. It is easy, I think, to find back from here to the problem o f art nouveau , to the artists who were too pliable, who yield too easily to the mannerisms o f undulating lines. What is more important for me now, however, is to draw your attention to Warburg’s ambition to explain rather than to describe the process o f styl­ istic change and that in strict psychological terms. This ambition and this hope Warburg had derived from his teachers in Bonn and in Strassburg during the late eighties. For Warburg’s formative years fall into that great period towards the end o f the nineteenth century when hopes ran high, that the riddles o f man and history would soon yield to the tools o f scientific analysis. Darwinism or more generally evolutionism seemed to unlock the

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mysteries that had puzzled the past. The great panorama o f progress that Hegel had seen in metaphysical terms and that Comte had presented but not explained, now seemed to call for a theory o f mental mechanism that would account for the rise o f man from animal status to the creator o f art and o f science. There can have been few lectures Warburg attended which did not share this assumption and this hope. Hermann Usener, for instance, whose lec­ tures on Greek m ythology Warburg heard, took it for granted that the origins o f mythology must be explained through such simple psychological mechanisms which all human beings share. Had it not been proved by Tylor that the phenomenon o f animism is universal in primitive cultures and that man has this tendency o f endowing the inanimate with life and with a will? This tendency was due to a kind o f short circuit o f our mental apparatus. Wherever the child or the primitive perceive an effect he posits a living cause; when it thunders there must be a thunderer, and in fact the names of divinities bear witness to this role o f mythology as a primitive form o f explanation. Useners lectures led Warburg to a book by the Italian evolutionist Tito Vignoli who extended this kind o f explanation even to animal behaviour. If a horse is seen to shy when a paper flutters across the road, this must be due to an inborn tendency to react to every unexpected move in the environ­ ment by fear, by the instinctive assumption, as it were, that such movement might be due to a predator or pursuer. Man s own reactions derive from this primitive layer, but he has learned to dominate them, by reflection. The dis­ tinctive human achievement is m ans ability to interpose an interval between the stimulus and the response, an interval in which the immediate phobic reflex is replaced by the search for the cause. The first fruit o f this mental tool is myth, the developed tool is science, for what else is science than the systematic search for the causes o f the unknown, a search that can only succeed by banishing the emotional reflex and replacing it by thought. It is the fruit o f distancing, o f mental poise. The more man is capable o f dominating impulses, the more he can also dominate fear. Years later, if I may anticipate, when Warburg was deeply impressed by the achievement o f Hugo Eckener in crossing the Atlantic in a Zeppelin, he noted in his elliptic manner “ The mercury column as a weapon

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against the Satan phobos,” Eckener had used barometer readings to circum­ vent a storm, science had been triumphant in locating causes and making the threat innocuous. But it is not only science that can be seen from this angle but all manifes­ tations o f culture including expression and art. In this quest a specific theory o f Darwin s was particularly welcomed by Warburg, his book on the

Expression o f Emotions in Men and Animals on which he commented “At last a book that helps me.” For in essence Darwin also sees human expression as a residue o f animal reactions. What was once a purposeful movement serving survival is toned down, as it were, in its human function. The clenched fist o f the angry man once struck a blow, the bared teeth once tore into the flesh. It is again the severing o f the immediate link between impulse and action that allows for the rise o f expression; just as, in one o f Warburg’s favourite formulations, the grasping hand yields to the grasp o f the mind, vom Greifen

zum Begriff.]so the uncontrolled symptom o f emotion turns into the symbol o f gesture and art. Both bear witness to man s triumph over his animal nature, but both owe their dynamism, as it were, to these instinctual forces. Even the visual arts are subsumed in this evolutionist scheme which some of the best minds o f the period were trying to elaborate. I am alluding for instance to Konrad Fiedler who saw in the clarification o f the visual image another such creative act that helped man to achieve a sense o f distance and of orientation in this world o f stress and o f chaos. As a motto for a series o f meditations on what he called a monistic psy­ chology o f art Warburg wrote : “You live and do not harm me,” “Du lebst und

tust mir nichts,” the image the artist creates is endowed with life, but it is sufficiently distanced to be contemplated rather than feared. The preoccupa­ tion with movement in the Botticelli paper is here given another dimension. If evolutionism and a theory o f stimulus and response is one element in this monistic psychology, associationism is the other; and that the particular refinement o f associationism that goes back to the influential philosophy o f Herbart, Kant’s successor on the chair o f Koenigsberg. Herbart’s model o f the mind is ultimately derived from Locke’s associationism; consciousness is a kind o f receptacle for sense impressions which are retained as mental images, Vorstellungen. These mental images either move into the beam o f

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consciousness or are crowded out beyond its threshold by other and stronger impressions. The strength o f a mental image therefore determines its fate. Our thoughts are really the result o f the mutual jostling o f these images and the victory o f the stronger over the weaker ones which would lead, as it were, to a fusion or agglomeration known as “Apperception.” Herbart hoped that these mutual interactions would one day be described in mathematical terms. It was this system, which was by no means as crude as I had to present it for brevity’s sake, which another o f Warburg’s teachers in Bonn, Karl Lamprecht, hoped to utilise for the explanation o f the evolution o f culture. Like the individual mind the collective mentality o f a society was deter­ mined by the character and wealth o f Vorstellungen, mental images, it con­ tained. Art, in particular, reflected these mental images with revealing clarity, and thus the psychological changes o f German culture between the eighth and twelfth century could be read off, as it were, from the changes o f orna­ mented initials in German manuscripts o f that period, an attempt Lamprecht made in a book published in 1884. An art that makes use o f types and conventions testifies to a primitive state, for culture grows through an enrichment o f mental images in number and complexity. I hope that even this rapid sketch o f the promised land into which a student o f art history hoped to enter in the eighteen-eighties will have thrown some additional light on the true topic o f Warburg’s Botticelli paper. Its subtitle reads Eine Untersuchung iiber die Vorstellungen von der Antike in

der italienischen Renaissance, an investigation o f the associations connected with antiquity in the Italian Renaissance. The originality o f Warburg’s approach lay precisely in the attempt to get through art at the mental image behind it, to question not only paintings but also literature, festivals, anything that might reflect the ideas these people had in their minds. It is these mental images with which the artist must wrestle, and the resultant style will be a product o f their strength and his power o f self-assertion, his mental poise in either yielding or dom inat­ ing the impulses with which they are connected. Looking at this interaction thus in psychological terms there is no strict dividing line between aesthet­ ics and ethics. To be carried away as Botticelli was is a sign o f weakness, it betrays a slight lack o f moral fiber. It is a danger that always threatens

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human civilization which rests, as you remember, on the capacity o f distancing impressions. Relevant, as I think these considerations are for our understanding o f Warburg’s paper, I would not have spent so much o f this hour on the exege­ sis o f his first work, if I did not think that this approach had much more far reaching consequences in W arburgs work and life. I am thinking first and foremost o f the foundation o f this library. In many o f the volumes which were brought over from Hamburg you will find the initials Κ. B. W.: Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. That untranslatable word

Kulturwissenschaft, the science o f culture, succinctly and clearly expresses the hopes and ambitions with which Warburg approached the task of analysing the psychological make-up o f a civilization or o f a milieu through any o f its manifestations or what he was to call Auffangspiegel, reflecting mirrors. For this function the decoration o f a marriage chest could be just as relevant as the fresco cycles o f a palace, a temporary structure erected for a pageant as revealing as a cathedral, popular broadsheets, ballads, customs, rituals, amulets, games, anything and everything that formed part o f the life o f a community also deserved to be considered by Kulturwissenschaft as a cue to the mental life o f a civilization. O f course antiquarians had always been interested in such evidence, but they were after the quaint and picturesque curiosity. A science o f culture would have to assess the symptomatic value o f each relic o f the past, and to do so it had to keep in touch with the emergent disciplines o f psychology and anthropology. I have said that in conveying this programme Warburg was certainly influenced by historians such as Karl Lamprecht whose programme for an Institute o f Cultural and Universal History which he founded in Leipzig in 1939 has much in common with ours. Yet if Lamprecht is today rarely remembered while the name o f Warburg has even given rise to the adjective Warburgian this is not only due to fortuitous circumstances. I believe that the psychologists o f culture such as Wundt and Lamprecht extended them­ selves too much. Their systems aimed at embracing the globe, and so they compiled large works in many volumes which will certainly be rediscovered one day, but which are hard to assimilate. Warburg concentrated his energies for more than twenty years on the elucidation o f one particular civilization, indeed on that o f one rather narrowly confined cultural circle, the circle of

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Lorenzo il Magnifico and his business partners, the Portinaris, the Sassettis, the Tornabuonis, all o f whom are famous for works they commissioned during the last decades o f the fifteenth century. He moved to Florence to work in the archives in order to bring these men and their concerns to life; he collected books on their trade relations, on their philosophy and on their religious outlook. He wanted to see them in the round in all their complexity and all their humanity so as to understand their choices and the preferences in life and in art. There is no doubt that when he settled down to this work Warburg considered it a continuation o f Jacob Burckhardt’s researches. He always admired Burckhardt’s masterpiece and never criticized it in public but there are indications in his notes that he felt that the picture Burckhardt had presented o f the man o f the Renaissance was by now a little dated. The new scientific approach to culture could supersede the impressionistic picture Burckhardt had given. I have mentioned Lamprecht as a champion o f this new approach, but, o f course, the European figure in this field was Hippolyte Taine, the protagonist o f the milieu theory. It was Taine who in his Voyage en Italie had commented on the complexity o f the society for which Ghirlandajo worked, a society “ demi-moderney demi-féodale ’ and it was he, I believe, who gave Warburg the cue for the analysis o f these divided loyalties in his description o f Ghirlandajo’s fresco o f The Birth o f St. John. You remember from Gertrud Bing’s paper what fascination the m otif o f the figure in movement exerted on Warburg which he called the nympha. It was in these terms that Taine had described this figure. The Visitor looked to him like a medieval duchess but “ the servant bringing food draped like a statue, with the élan, the gaiety and the force o f a classical nymph brings it about that the two ages and the two beauties join up and unite in this picture.” Taine’s analysis remained crucial for Warburg’s whole approach. The nympha who seems to storm into the opulent interior o f a well-todo banker’s family seemed to him like a messenger from another planet calling upon art to lift itself from the ground and enter into a higher sphere o f existence. If the inmates o f the room found it difficult to respond to this summons it was because they were too earthbound, too much weighed down by their heavy brocade dresses that cramped their very movements. And so, as you may remember, the coming o f the new style became for Warburg in part a question o f costume, eine Kleiderfrage, as he said in allu­

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sion to Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. While Paris and Helen could be represented as they are in the Florentine Picture Chronicle, like fashion dummies, in the manner Warburg called costume realism alia franzese the new idiom had no chance. Art had to learn from the ancients to throw o ff these encumbering fineries in order to reveal the body and its language o f passion, as in the print o f the Bacchantae dancing in front o f the chariot o f Bacchus. It was to understand this decisive change o f attitude that Warburg was probing into the mentality and the taste o f Lorenzo’s circle. I have called it decisive, because without it the classic art o f the High Renaissance could never have matured. After all it was in this milieu that Michelangelo formed his style as an apprentice in Ghirlandajo’s workshop. That this style grew out o f a renewed study o f antiquity needed no demonstration. It was an observ­ ation that had been repeated since Vasari. What puzzled Warburg was rather the evidence he found everywhere that the artistic loyalties o f Lorenzo’s circle were by no means undivided. They collected not only classical gems but also Flemish devotional pictures, their homes were decorated with tapes­ tries from Flanders, and their villas with panni dipinti showing such unclassical subjects as moresques dances. It was against this down to earth taste and the outlook it represented that the classical ideal had to win through. True to his Herbartian upbringing Warburg thought o f this clash o f styles and attitudes in terms o f jostling mental images as a problem o f mutual pressure. He even speaks in his notes o f the need for a manometer to assess their relative strength. In fact, the assertiveness and strength o f the tri­ umphant style all antica appeared to him explicable only as an outcome o f this struggle against strong opposing forces. Without this victory art could not have reached that perfection which Warburg no less than his contempo­ raries saw embodied in Michelangelo and in Raphael. But we have seen from his Botticelli paper that no loss o f balance appeared to Warburg wholly good. Antiquity could be welcomed as an ally where it helped to fight down the tendency towards unthinking shallow realism but woe to the artist or the period who allowed themselves to be carried away by these images o f passion and o f cruelty. Without a counter­ poise, without a sense o f distance these images will swamp and lead to an empty rhetoric more deadly to the poise o f art than the calm realism o f the earlier masters had ever been. For Warburg this contrast was embodied in

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the confrontation o f Piero della Francesca s and Giulio’s paintings o f The

Battle o f Constantine. Here it is Piero who embodies the sense o f distance and Giulio Romano the degradation o f art through the intoxicating influence o f classical antiquity. You see that when Warburg came to form u­ late his question “ was bedeutet das Nachleben der AntikeV\ what is the significance o f the classical elements in Western culture, he wanted to express a genuine doubt. I believe in fact that the original meaning o f this question can only be understood against the background o f a debate that also reaches back into Warburg’s formative years. For Ruskin o f course clas­ sicism was a disaster and many nationalist critics north o f the Alps had taken a similar line. Moreover the whole traditional interpretation o f the Renaissance as a revival o f antiquity had been questioned by influential scholars such as Henry Thode who, following Sabatier, stressed the im port­ ance o f the Franciscan movement for the new sanctification o f nature and the rise o f naturalism. Warburg, too, was ready to interpret, for instance, Ghirlandajo’s realism in the light o f that religious fervour that led his patrons to dedicate realistic life-size wax images o f their own persons to the Church o f Santissima Annunziata. But this awareness o f these counterpres­ sures, as we have seen, made it all the more meaningful to ask what it was that secured such a continued vitality to the surviving pagan images— Was

bedeutet das Nachleben der Antike? We can again hark back to the Botticelli paper to find a first adumbration o f Warburg’s answer. Antiquity detached art from reality, it introduced that sense o f distance that allowed a realist such as Ghirlandajo to learn the lan­ guage o f its heightened movement and to use it with ease. In Warburg’s psy­ chology o f art, you remember, the normal case for the artist is a surrender to the sense impression, a copying o f reality. It is thus not the imitation o f nature which presents the psychological problem to him, but the departure from imitation. Those o f you who may have looked into my book on Art and Illusion will know why I consider this sense data approach o f the nineteenth century to have been a dead alley. I believe indeed that it was this false start that accounts for a feature in Warburg’s writings that has puzzled many o f his admirers, the exclusion from his themes o f medieval or Byzantine art which seems inexplicable in a historian devoted to the study o f the classical tradi­

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tion. We must remember, though, that Berenson was similarly placed, and that Wôlfflin, too, only tackled a medieval subject very late in his life under the mounting influence o f German expressionism. Warburg was a child o f the era o f Impressionism and of its crisis and it is clear once more that this made the approach much more plausible than it seems to us. For it was indeed the problem o f how to get away from photo­ graphic realism that engaged the minds o f artists and critics during this period o f ferment that had thrown up art nouveau. There exists a little sketch for amateur theatricals Warburg wrote in 1896 in which the hero is an impressionist painter who woos the niece o f a typical philistine. The dia­ logue turns on an exhibition o f the etchings by Anders Zorn who had pro­ voked the philistine s wrath for their lack o f detail. The artist tries to explain that the very abbreviations o f Zorn s line constitute the progress o f his style. Finally to placate the uncle the painter gives him one o f his impressionist landscapes but graced with a meticulously painted picnic party. The uncle welcomes this concession to Fiamburg taste as a vast improvement while the artist whispers to his fiancée that this disfigured daub is only a copy. The MS bears a pencil note dedicated to W arburgs own fiancée, his future wife, who was an artist— “ Justice, light and air for the modern move­ ment, progress through abbreviation.” Slight as is this little playlet it thus reminds us o f the issues which had interested Warburg from the outset, the departure from realism in the inter­ est o f rendering movement, the inhibiting character o f literalness which characterised the taste o f the Salons. Indeed it is not hard to apply Warburgs expression o f Trachtenrealismus, the realism o f costume he attributed to the style alia franzese with equal justification to the sentimental history paint­ ings he would have seen in any exhibition, such as the painting o f young Tasso by A. Schroder exhibited in 1886. What is a little harder for us late borns to realise is that the way o f liberation was not seen to lie solely along the line we now draw conventionally towards the rise of modern art. For Warburg and for many o f his contemporaries and compatriots one o f the liberators was Boecklin whose uninhibited sensuality was condemned by the butt o f Warburg’s play as indecent, and whose art came to stand for the rights o f the imagination. Visiting Basle in 1897 Warburg noted in his diary “ Boecklin s najades, like a refreshing bath,” and when Boecklin died in

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Florence in 1901 Warburg who had attended the funeral drafted a moving valedictory article which is also among his papers. If this bias for Boecklin may put a strain on your sense o f detachment, I must beg you to brace your­ self for an even greater effort at historical distance to appreciate W arburgs championship o f another work o f his period, Hugo Lederer’s Bismarck monument in Hamburg o f which the winning model was submitted in 1901. Actually this highly stylised monument was considered a test case at that time o f the artists right to deviate from literal representation. A dolf Hildebrand had claimed this right in his book on The Problem o f Form by once more appealing to the psychology o f sense impressions. There are two ways o f seeing, the close view corresponding to literal realism and the dis­ tanced view in which details are subordinated to the over all form, and it is this view which leads to style. Thus Warburg could once more regard the monument as a blow struck for a proper sense o f distance in every sense o f the term. The public, he writes, must learn to do without the attractions of a circus-pantomime, here the great man is not lowered to their own level o f matiness, but only the lowest stage o f culture regards the work o f art as a means o f gaining possession o f a lost object. Clearly Warburg’s interpretation of the late quattrocento is inseparable from his reading o f his own time and milieu. Coming, as he did, from a con­ servative Jewish family o f bankers in the great merchant city o f Hamburg, he could not but see the Florentine bankers o f Lorenzo’s period in the light of his own experience. He was perfectly aware o f this. There is a b rief but telling note in his hand in which he speaks o f his own efforts to emancipate himself for what he calls the frenchified elegance and the pleasure in posses­ sion on the Alster Embankment. Even Warburg’s emphasis on that question o f costume, the need for the nymph to throw off the confining period dress seems to me coloured by one o f the most debated issues o f the fin du siècle, the need of reform of female dress, to abolish tight lacing and to enable the new woman to move freely and to take part in sports and games unham­ pered by stays and high collars. The reform dress spelt emancipation, freedom, light and air. All history is contemporary history, as Benedetto Croce said, who inci­ dentally was Warburg’s exact contemporary. I am not sure that it is, but I sometimes think it ought to be. Warburg’s sensitivity to the problems o f his

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time may have sometimes led him to project attitudes and ideas into the Renaissance which more properly belonged to the late nineteenth century. He was neither the first nor the last to do so. Moreover, if he was to arrive at a psychology o f culture, a Kulturpsychologie, he could not but use the example he really knew, his own milieu and his own reactions. For I believe that Warburg was right when he observed the inextricable interaction o f aes­ thetics, social and moral issues that contribute to the adoption or rejection o f a style, right also when he therefore stressed the complexity, the almost kaleidoscopic instability o f these symbols and configurations, and right once more when he used his own reaction to probe into these elusive meanings. Indeed, if I may so put it in this centenary lecture, Warburg’s interpretation seems to me most challenging where it is least modern. Like Winckelmann in the eighteenth century and Ruskin in the nineteenth, he held fast to the experience that forms meant something and that they were charged with a significance which was not only aesthetic. In a period where A dolf Loos could preach that ornament is crime this was still understood by everyone. It is only today that we have impoverished the history o f style to a succession of neutral modes. I am particularly anxious here not to be misunderstood. Warburg’s analy­ sis must not be confused with that Geistesgeschichte that uses art as an index of a collective attitude, be it o f a class, a race or an age. Indeed the Hegelian catchword of art being the expression o f the age is so nonsensical, it seems to me, precisely because precisely because those who live at the time experi­ ence their age as a range o f choices, a demand for decisions, a need for taking sides. Warburg felt these tensions so intensely in his own life that he was alerted to the existence o f similar fields o f forces in the past. Though his individual interpretations may be in need o f revision, his effort to recon­ struct such a map o f meanings for a given period may yet prove fruitful to a future historian. For in a sense this effort was obscured by the legend that sees in Warburg the founder of iconography. It is a legend not only because few 19th century art historians had not been interested in meanings but also because the meanings for which Warburg searched were never simply texts that would unriddle a particular symbol. Even where he used texts they only interested him insofar as they helped to place the image within the coordinate system

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o f the period, the physiognomic meaning which we should assign to a given work as a reflecting mirror o f a mental image and attitude. It is easy to see, though, how this misunderstanding arose. The example o f such a tension that pre-occupied Warburg for so long, the physiognomic, social and even moral contrast between the style o f allafranzese and that alV

antica could best be demonstrated by selecting one theme and showing its transformation from one level to the other— for instance the illustration from Ausonius o f the angry woman taking revenge on Cupid as it appears on one o f the Otto prints and in Signorellis version. I

believe that it was in pursuing this line o f research that Warburg came

across the problem that almost dominated the second half o f his career since about 1908 when he was forty-two, I mean o f course astrological imagery. For the renderings o f the Planet deities undergo, o f course, the most dra­ matic changes before they emerge from their medieval disguise and are restored to their pristine Olympian form. Witness the Jupiter on the Florentine Campanile and in Raphael’s frescoes. So Warburg came to approach and to solve the riddle o f the quattrocento frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoja. Venus and Mars which look so much like figures from a medieval Romance are here represented according to the medieval traditions o f mythography. More surprising still, the enigmatic images in the centre zone are literal illustrations o f fictitious constellations, the Decans, which are described in lists that reach the Renaissance through Arabic sources. In dis­ carding these accretions and returning to the ancient form the High Renaissance removes these demons once more into the aesthetic sphere, they are experienced as distanced and as beautiful. You will appreciate why this example became so central to Warburg’s thought. It enabled him to return to the psychological pre-occupations o f his early days. For here was an instance where primitive anxieties were in fact seen to influence man’s mental images. The constellations man projects into the scatter o f stars and identifies with mythical beings may still serve the business o f orientation when they are kept at a distance and left in the sky. In astrology this function can be lost where they are used as amulets to serve man’s selfish aims o f averting danger and dominating fear. The loss o f dis­ tance, o f detachment is the loss o f poise, o f the power o f reflection, and thus

WARBURG CENTENARY LECTURE

the transformation, degradation and restoration o f these images becomes a moving parable o f man s struggle for sanity. I have spoken o f Warburgs involvement with the issues o f his time. I have here to say a word about his involvement in his own psychological prob­ lems. He had been suffering from attacks o f anxiety from his early youth, and there is little doubt that the place he assigned to basic fears and impulses in his philosophy o f culture was coloured by these experiences, and by his struggle to keep them at bay. The anxieties o f the first world war added to the strain and when Germany collapsed in 1918 Warburg’s own mental balance gave way for a time though he still succeeded, with Saxl’s selfdenying assistance, in completing his paper on astrological prophesies in the period o f the German Reformation. There is a brief account o f Warburg’s illness and return in Saxl’s moving lecture entitled Three Florentines,7 but it fails to mention Saxl’s own share in Warburg’s recovery while Bing in her own memoir o f Saxl never revealed what her support and discipleship must have meant to the convalescent scholar. Saxl does mention, though, how Warburg struggled back to clarity by giving that lecture on the Serpent Ritual o f the American Indians to his fellow patients which strangely enough is the only one o f his papers you can read in English in our journal. Saxl also mentions that as the state o f his health improved a new and big project began to take shape which was to gather up his life’s work on the problem o f the classical tradition in a book which he entitled Mnemosyne and which should deal with the ancient images and symbols preserved in the memory o f the European race. For this notion o f a social m em ory which made him write the word Mnemosyne over the door o f the newly built library in the Heilwigstrasse and which you can also find over our new entrance was a new element in Warburg’s system. At least it had only led an underground existence in his earlier notes. Warburg’s source was a book by Richard Semon o f 1908, which followed a tradition started by Hering that sees in heredity a form o f memory. Remember that Warburg has always aimed at what he called a monistic psychology. Semon had postulated that any experience leaves an engram in the nervous system which acts like an energy store, to remember means to tap these energies. Wedded to the ideas o f Herbart about the power

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o f mental images and to the cultural psychology o f Lamprecht which tries to trace their fate within the collective mind Semon s theory provided an extra dimension for the description o f those historical processes that had always pre-occupied Warburg. The greater strength o f the classical image that ousted the impression o f reality in the Renaissance and finally swamped European consciousness in the Baroque could now be attributed to its greater energy charge which it owed to the original experience that gave rise to the engram. This experience must have been closer to the original prim i­ tive impulses that mark man s emotional life, impulses which had indeed gained shape in dionysiac art o f Hellenistic sculpture with its frenzied maenads, its furious struggles, its unforgettable expression o f suffering in the Laokoon and o f brooding inactivity in the Rivergods. With his love for a shorthand formula Warburg came to describe these images that turn up again in the Renaissance to disrupt the calm o f Ghirlandajo s interior as engrams or dynamograms. The contact with these energy charges which, as you remember, could bring either liberation or enslavement he described as polarization. He now had a model for the increase in expressive power that marks the art o f the Renaissance, a model moreover that could even be inte­ grated with Darwin’s theory, for Darwin, too, had equated our expressive gesture with toned down residual impulses that come to us from our primitive animal heritage. Admittedly, to sustain this equation Warburg had to telescope the history o f mankind and to equate Dionysiac antiquity with those primitive layers he thought to have encountered among the American Red Indians. This was indeed his aim. When Warburg s friend Mesnil once described the pro­ gramme o f the library as the study o f the classical tradition Warburg asked him to amend this formulation to include the meaning o f paganism as such for European civilisation. By paganism he meant the forces o f primitive impulse that lay dormant in Western tradition, impulses which alone drive man on to the creation o f art and the exploration o f the universe, but which must be tamed and sublimated if they are not to disrupt and imperil these very creations. Once more the notion o f distance, the need o f keeping memo­ ries at bay provided the key to man’s struggle for progress and sanity. Saxl had welcomed Warburg on his return with a photographic exhibi­ tion on screens displaying the material o f his past researches. It was these screens which Warburg used in his last years to build up a sequence o f

WARBURG CENTENARY LECTURE

images which should tell this epic o f m ans mental pilgrimage almost unaided. It was to be a kind o f symphony o f mental images reflected in art, built round the two themes o f classical gesture, the dynamograms in their clash with realism, and o f the star images, transformed and re-emergent. But by now the theory had become so generalised that Warburg felt free to add whatever engaged his interest at the time when Saxl made him see the fasci­ nation o f Mithras or the significance o f Rembrandt’s so unrhetorical version o f a classical story in the Claudius Civilis, or his friend Pauli rediscovered Manet’s use o f a Raphael composition going back to an ancient engram in his Déjeuner sur Vherbe, that challenge to the debasement o f Salon art. Even pictures o f political events to which Warburg attributed symbolic significance, or the triumph o f Eckener’s Zeppelin were at least provisionally pinned to these screens. I shall know better than to start explaining them now. Vestigia terrent. When Warburg lectured about these ideas in the Hertziana in Rome having the screens with him from Hamburg, the lecture lasted many hours and Steinmann was never forgiven for having tried to cut it short. I do not believe in long lectures any more than I believe in racial memory, but though I know that my hour is up I beg to detain you for another few minutes for its conclusion to link up with its beginning. For, as you must have gathered, it was this very personal work I had been asked to assist in making ready for publication. It may be a curious thing to say in a centenary lecture, but I now think that it was a mistake ever to announce its forthcoming publication, though this generous intention may well have saved my life and certainly determined its course. It has taken me all these thirty years to gain some distance from this extraordinary creation which even Gertrud Bing found increasingly hard to confront. Not that

Mnemosyne is not intensely moving for those who can read its language and expand its references. But it is moving like a poem, indeed, what it resembles most is that kind o f poetry o f the twentieth century, o f Yeats, or Eliot, or perhaps o f Ezra Pound, where every historical or literary allusion hides and reveals a cluster o f private meanings reverberating through layers upon layers. Even the language o f Warburg’s notes from these years fits in with this interpretation. Charged, weighty, rhapsodic and cryptic like prophetic utterances, these fragments have proved utterly untranslatable.

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It was with some relief, but also with profound admiration that I discov­ ered that Warburg was aware o f this private and personal character o f his work on which he was engaged. In a note to his collaborators written in the last year o f his life into the Journal o f the Library he says: “ Sometimes it would seem to me as if I attempted, in my capacity as a psycho-historian, to interpret schizophrenia o f Western Civilisation in an autobiographical reflex; the ecstatic nympha (manic) on the one side, the mourning rivergod (depressive) on the o th e r...” The deeper Warburg had dug into the past in order to understand the fate o f modern civilization, the deeper, he found, he had dug into himself. There is a distych by Novalis that comes to mind here. It refers to the myth o f the veiled statue o f Isis in Thais which nobody must lift for the Truth would destroy him. Einem gelang es, er hob den Schleier der Goettin zu Sais Aber was sah er, er sah— W under der W under— sich selbst. One m an succeeded in lifting the veil of the image o f Sais Tell me then, w hat did he see? wonder o f wonders— himself.

I hope I do not shock you if I return to my conviction that to some extent this will always be the fate o f the historian, the greater the more so. O f course this intense subjectivity that is inseparable from his involvement, from the impulse that drives him to engage with his material, in no way detracts from the possibility o f objective results. The facts he churns up, the evidence he brings to life, the questions he asks remain when the springs that set it all in motion are unwound and stilled. The intensity o f Warburg s search, the passion behind his questioning have inspired others to follow where he first hacked a way through the thick and thorny undergrowth. It was he who first staked out the paths o f the mythographic traditions and o f astrological imagery and thus initiated the iconography o f the Renaissance. Above all it was he who had to ignore what he called the frontierguards o f specialisms, o f departments and fields o f study. He knew that human culture was one, and that to explore it, a specialised library confined to one aspect o f civilisation is never enough. The boldness and vision, the hard work and cir­ cumspection with which he set out to remedy this situation and to forge an

WARBURG CENTENARY LECTURE

instrum ent for cultural research as he conceived it, is what I want you to remember most at this centenary of his birth. Both in its arrangement and in its holdings the library was to embody W arburgs faith in m ans need to remember his origins and to come to terms with them. It was thus to be an aid in m ans continuous search for enlightenment, reminding him of past trium phs when astronomy emerged from the dark fears of astrology, chem istry from alchemy, or mathematics from num ber mysticism. But it is symbolic that Warburg always separated the texts from comment in his library, keeping the evidence from its interpretation. Those who reconsider it are not bound by the reading of the past. Yet, if ever there was an institute that bore the nam e of its founder with justification, it is ours, for what Aby Warburg left us was not money but tools of research and the impulse to ask questions to which the library may well hold the answer. If I may search the collective m em ory for a formula which can be used rhetorically but can also be charged with fresh meaning let me say with conviction: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice ... Warburg s real m onum ent is this library.

notes 1 This text was delivered as a lecture at the Warburg Institute of the University of London in 1966. 1 would like to thank Sir Ernst for allowing its publication in this volume. It was referred to by Carlo Ginzburg in “From Aby W arburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of M ethod” in Myths, Emblems, Clues, London 1990, p. 193: “Thanks to the great courtesy of the author, to w hom I express my heartfelt thanks, I have been able to see the unpublished manuscript o f this talk, as well as o f the other commemorative address and, in a slightly revised version, in London on the centenary of W arburg’s birth. To this day [1966] the latter rem ains the richest and m ost penetrating interpretation o f W arburg.” This and subsequent footnotes are by the editor. I would like to thank Linda M archant for her assistance in producing a word-processed docum ent from the original manuscript. RW. 2 Details along with a further Italian publication by Bing are given in G om brich’s biography (see footnote 3) along with a bibliography of publications by and about Warburg. 3

Dr. W arburg failed to complete this book.

4

Readers will know that this was finally published by the W arburg Institute, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, with a memoir on the history o f the library by F. Saxl, London 1970; reprinted with a preface to the second edition, London 1986.

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5

G ertrud Bing, “A. M. W arburg” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28

(1965). 6 A ppropriate illustrations to this lecture, along with the sources for quotations, may be found in Aby Warburg. 7

F. Saxl, “Three Florentines: H erbert H orne, A. W arburg, Jaques Mesnil,” published in Lectures, W arburg Institute London, 1957.

the nineteenth century notion of a pagan revival

ernst h. gombrich “w a s

bedeutet

das

nachleben

Antike?” This formulation o f problem

der

the

to which Aby Warburg

intended to devote the researches o f his Institute has proved difficult to translate into English.1 It can be rendered approximately, “ How are we to interpret the continued revivals o f elements o f ancient culture in Western civilization?” But however we may wish to formulate his aims, it is clear that the very form o f Warburg’s question implies a doubt. Thus it would seem absurd, at the first glance, to link the name o f Warburg with that o f A. -F. Rio. For Rio, themilitant

Rom an Catholic2 never harboured any

doubt about the significance o f classical survivals into the Christian

era.

He saw the resurrection o f “ Paganism” as a symptom o f decadence and corruption, a negation o f all the values that made the Art o f the Middle Ages so dear to him. Having first uttered this challenge in 1836 in a book which bears the misleading title De la poésie Chrétienne , he elaborated his views in the four (unillustrated) volumes De VArt Chrétien (1861),3 which {55}

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read like the report o f a stern school master rebuking every lapse from the purity o f the école mystique into naturalism or classicism as a fall from grace. Rio thus represents the extreme “ right wing” o f 19th-century interpreters of the Italian Renaissance that looked with nostalgia at the lost values o f the Age o f Faith. The opposite line, o f course, was taken by the spokesmen o f the left wing, the champions o f progress and o f emancipation. For them the revival o f antiquity signalled the victory over the Dark Ages and the birth o f Modern Man. What both schools o f historians had in common was the conviction o f the antithetical nature o f the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The first was “ spiritual,” “ ascetic,” “ otherworldly,” the other sen­ suous, libertine and realistic. A compromise between these contrasts appeared to be impossible. It is well known that Aby Warburg came to oppose these views that were so obviously colored by the conflicts of 19th-century thought between the claims o f religion and those of science. Yet, he too took as his initial starting point this prevailing conviction o f the wholly antithetical character o f the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a conviction that was not even explicitly opposed in Jacob Burckhardt’s masterpiece The Civilization o f the Renaissance. Originally it was indeed this reading o f history that aroused Warburg’s interest in the transition from the one extreme to the other which must have occurred in the 15th-century, more specifically in Quattrocento Florence. Devoting his researches to the age and milieu o f Lorenzo de’ Medici, he came to the conclusion that that generation must have been able to embrace these contradictions and to accept both systems o f values at the same time. The typical representative o f that generation, Warburg wrote “verneint die hemmende Pedanterie des ‘entweder oder’ auf alien Gebieten, nicht etwa, weil er die Gegensàtze nicht in ihrer Schàrfe spiirt, sondern weil er sie fiir vereinbar halt.” (“ Denies the inhibiting pedantry o f ‘either-or’ in all spheres not, surely, because he does not feel these contrasts in all their acuteness, but because he considers them to be capable o f reconciliation.” )4 Warburg had come frequently to describe this capacity o f uniting opposites in the terms of “ Schwingung” or “ Schwingungsweite” (the range o f oscillations).5 Strangely enough it is this diagnosis that appears to be anticipated in a passage from Rio’s De L’A rt Chrétien , albeit with a very different bias. In the

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOTION OF A PAGAN REVIVAL

second o f his chapters on La Renaissance et les Médicis we read that the end o f the 15th century witnessed a strong reaction against the nefarious influence Rio attributes to Lorenzo de’ Medici aiming at the trium ph o f paganism, o f naturalism and o f sensuality, combined with the excessive cult o f antiquity. According to Rio, this revival o f Christian values began with Perugino and culminated in the sermons o f Savonarola. It was this move­ ment that gave rise to remarkable oscillations within the Florentine school:6 The outcome was a mixture, or in other words, works alternatively inspired by the City of God and by the City of the World. The history of the artists who found themselves pulled and buffeted by these two kinds o f inspiration p ro vides an almost dramatic interest and it needs a self-denying ordinance to pass over the redundant details .7

Two painters are singled out by Rio as those whose art would pay more attention in this respect than he was able to give them: Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio, the two painters, in fact, on whose œuvre Warburg was to concentrate during the years o f his Florentine researches. He had, o f course, chosen Botticellis mythologies The Birth o f Venus and the Primavera as subject o f his doctoral thesis which aimed at analyzing the way in which the age liked to visualize classical antiquity.8 Not that this early thesis shows any indication that Warburg had read Rio at that time. It is indeed noteworthy that the term and concept o f paganism (Heidentum) does not occur in Warburg s paper which seeks to explain the style of Botticelli’s mythologies by referring to the ideas (Vorstellungen) which the age had formed o f the classical gods and their world. These ideas had nothing to do with beliefs. Warburg rather sees them embodied in certain flourishes, not to say mannerisms, which Polizianos poetry borrowed from Ovid and other ancient writers and which he is assumed to have recom­ mended to Botticelli in order to make his figures evoke the charm o f classical Greece. The most characteristic embodiment o f this charm Warburg found in the figures o f lightly-clad maidens whose garments and hair are seen fluttering in the wind. While it is obvious that he responded to the sensuality and erotic appeal o f this figure he calls the “ nympha,” he nowhere links it with anti-Christian sentiments or beliefs. He would hardly have been able to do so, since one o f the key passages justifying the designation o f this formula

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as a nymph is a remark in Leonardo’s Trattato where the device o f clinging garments is described as suitable for a nymph or an angel.9 Moreover, the whole tendency of Warburgs paper conflicts with the interpretation o f the Renaissance as a breakthrough o f pagan tendencies. After all, Botticelli is here criticized in conclusion for having been too “pliable,” too prone to yield to modish preferences and thereby compromising his artistic integrity. When Warburg sent his printed thesis to Jacob Burckhardt, the great scholar wished to encourage him to devote further study to “ Botticelli the mystical theologian.” 10 No doubt, the advice went against the grain, but it would not be farfetched to surmise that Warburg turned to the book in which Botticelli is indeed identified with the “ école mystique” and treated (against all historical evidence) among the disciples o f Savonarola.11 Yet, even if Warburg read the uninviting pages o f Rio’s chapter, they are likely to have repelled him because o f their gushing sentimentality, singling out that “ the expression o f a sweet and mysterious melancholy which no other painter could render as well as Botticelli.” 12 In an article o f 1898 which reads like Warburg’s answer to Burckhardt (who had meanwhile died), he speaks of the attraction which the “ dream­ like sentimentality o f the M agnificat with its mysterious ... melancholy” 13 exerts on those o f his contemporaries whom he describes as the modern admirers o f Botticelli’s art and from whom he wishes to dissociate his own approach. Maybe it was different with Ghirlandaio. Here the link may have been formed by another French writer o f the 19th century, Hippolyte Taine, whose Voyage en Italie o f 1866 Warburg certainly had read. In his descrip­ tions o f Ghirlandaio’s frescoes of S. Maria Novella, Taine observes how the artist dresses his figures in a fashion that “ unites opposites ... and harm o­ nizes the antique and the modern.” He sees in them the reflection o f a society “ demimoderne et demi-féodale.” In my book on Warburg14 I have suggested that this passage may well contain the germ cell o f that aborted book Warburg and his friend Jolies intended to write together on precisely the figure in that fresco in which Warburg recognized the “ nympha” o f his doctoral thesis. Taine describes her as The servant who brings the fruits, draped like a statue, w ith the élan, the gaiety and force of a classical nymph, brings it about that the two ages and the two beauties unite in the naivety of the same genuine feeling.15

THE NI NETEENTH CENTURY NOTI ON OF A PAGAN REVIVAL

It is more than likely that Taine saw the two ages through the spectacle of Rio’s account, though in contrast to his reactionary contemporary his bias was o f course all on the side o f the new beauty. Yet it turned out that Warburg also had his reservations about Taine s one-sided interpretation. In one o f his sallies against the current enthusiasms of his time Warburg shows himself distinctly hostile to this kind o f oversimplification. Speaking o f the secular appearance o f Ghirlandaio’s biblical scenes he remarks ironically that “that would be the moment for the northern superman on his Easter holiday to experience the divinely pagan freedom o f the Renaissance individual.” 16 (Das ware der Augenblick, wo der nordische Übermensch in den Osterferien die heidnische gôttliche Freiheit des Renaissanceindividuums empfindet.) And yet, Warburg himself was not able wholly to resist the identification with paganism he had ridiculed. In his summing up he writes that the nympha in her true essence is an elemental sprite, a pagan goddess in exile (ihrem wirklichen Wesen nach, ist sie ein Elementargeist, eine heidnische Gôttin im Exil).17 His meaning becomes clear in his discussion o f another formula, the formula o f conclamatio , that Verrocchio adapted from an antique sarcopha­ gus for the tomb o f a Florentine woman who had died in childbirth.18 Once more Warburg is moved to identify these passions with pagan impulses which remind him o f the ritual o f wailing women. “ Pagan” here assumes the meaning it was to hold for Warburg throughout his life, the antithesis o f that restraint which he associated both with Christian ethics and rational

sophrosyne. Thus what Warburg came to mean by pagan has as little in common with R io’s interpretation as it has with Taine’s. Rather one might think o f Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy with its emphasis on the dionysiac element in ancient religion. Critical as he was o f some aspect o f Nietzsche’s interpreta­ tion,19 it was certainly this view o f paganism that had stimulated Warburg’s interest in the rituals o f the American Indians. “ Pagan” meant less a set of beliefs than the clusters o f primitive impulses and reactions that distin­ guished the savage from the civilized man o f reason. When Warburg came to concern himself with Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in the Cappella Sassetti where he had identified portraits o f the members o f the Medici family,20 he first speaks o f pagan tendencies not in relation to

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classical antiquity but in connection with life-size ex-votos o f wax which crowded the church o f SS. Annunziata, a form o f imagery that the church permitted to the descendants o f the “ pagan-superstitious Etruscans” and which Warburg approximates to Ghirlandaios naturalism.21 Needless to say this view somewhat complicated Warburg’s analysis o f those oscillations Rio found in the œuvre o f Ghirlandaio and which he had regretted not to be able to describe in greater detail. For now it is not so much the dramatic tension between the “ city o f G od” and the “ city o f the world” that Warburg seeks to uncover, but rather that between the city o f the world, the self-satisfied burghers o f Florence, and the memories o f an unruly dionysiac past that breaks through in the nympha and in the turm oil o f Ghirlandaio’s Massacre of the Innocents.22 The originality o f Warburg’s analysis o f Ghirlandaio’s art here rests on his rejection o f the conventional notions o f stylistic developments and his adoption o f that linguistic or rhetorical conception that he had guided his approach to Botticelli’s mythologies. Like the orator or the writer the artist is endeavoring to extend his vocabulary in order to do justice to the subject he is asked to express. It was this need that had lead Botticelli to widen his repertory by borrowing the formulas o f “ accessories in motion” from classi­ cal texts and ancient monuments. Ghirlandaio went further; in his altar painting for the Cappella Sassetti23 in S. Trinita he can be seen to take over the formula for pious devotion which he had learnt from the Portinari altarpiece o f Hugo van der Goes, but also to display his awareness o f classical art in the shape o f the arches and the sarcophagus that served as the cradle o f the Lord. In Warburg’s view this extension o f the range o f expression finds his precise analogy in the psychology o f Ghirlandaio’s patron, the banker Francesco Sassetti. He had devoted an impressive passage to that psychology in his paper o f 1902 from which I have quoted his account o f oscillations above. Yet it was only five years later in his publication on Francesco Sassetti’s last will and testament (1907)24 that he attempted to clinch the equation, as it were. Once more he postulated that the text o f Francesco’s testament can be seen to reflect the same oscillations between “ medieval” trust in God and the self-reliance o f Renaissance m an ... equally removed from monkish-ascetic flight from the world and a boastful affirmation o f

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOTION OF A PAGAN REVIVAL

worldlines” (“ zwischen ‘mittelalterlichem’ Gottvertrauen und dem Selbstvertrauen des Renaissancemenschen... gleich weit entfernt von mônchischweltfliichtiger Askese, wie von weltbejahender Renommage” ).25 The modern reader who tries to find his way through this densely argued paper, may well ask himself in the end whether the evidence Warburg had assembled from legal documents, philosophical texts, personal emblems and, o f course, from works o f art with such patience and erudition, really bears out his thesis? For though one may readily agree that Francesco Sassetti in the document published by Warburg, shows himself a man o f honor, eager to safeguard the reputation o f his family, are these really senti­ ments that mark him as partly “ medieval?” And are his passing references to the whims o f Fortuna really a symptom o f the emergent paganism o f the Renaissance? Was not the wheel o f Fortune one o f the dominant symbols o f the Middle Ages that occurred even on the façades o f Cathedrals?26 In any case, is the capacity to “ oscillate” between apparently contradictory attitudes really confined to representatives o f that particular age o f transition? Was there ever an age that was wholly monolithic? Whether or not Warburg con­ sciously asked himself these questions, he surely came to see increasingly that what he was trying to analyze was not so much the psychology o f a given historical period but rather that o f human civilization as such. In developing this insight he, o f course, left the simplistic reading o f the Renaissance represented by both Rio and Taine far behind. As he was to write to his friend Mesnil in 1926, he wished him to add to the formula “Was bedeutet das Nachleben der Antike?” the words “A problem that later, in the course o f the years, was extended to the attempts to understand the meaning o f the survival o f paganism for the whole o f European civilization” 27 (“ Ein Problem, das sich spàter im Laufe der Jahre zu dem Versuch, die Bedeutung des Nachlebens des Heidentums fiir die europàische Gesamtkultur zu erfassen, erweiterte” ). Dare one suggest in the light o f this remark that the title chosen by the editors o f Warburg’s collected works Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike:

kulturwissenschaftliche Beitràge zur Geschichte der europâischen Renaissance moves his oeuvre somewhat too close to the preoccupations o f his 19th century predecessors such as Rio and Taine?28 For Warburg paganism, that is to say the primitive impulses that threaten, sophrosyne had ceased to be a

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problem peculiar to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance because paganism in that meaning o f the term was never asleep and could therefore not awake. It was up to anyone o f us to come to terms with these impulses as Francesco Sassetti and Ghirlandaio had so triumphantly exemplified.

notes 1 See my Aby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography, London, 1970 (henceforward abbreviated as Gombrich, Warburg), pp. 16,27, and 49. 2 See Sister Mary Camille Bowe, François Rio, sa place dans le renouveau catholique en Europe, 1797-1874, Paris, 1938. Despite its som ewhat hagiographie tone the book is rewarding because of Rio’s many contacts with leading figures in France, Germany, Italy and England. 3 Henceforward quoted as L’A rt Chrétien. 4 Aby W arburg, Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, 1932 (henceforward quoted as Schriften), volume 1, p. 101. 5 Schriften, pp. 110,151,154,158,565. 6 UArt Chrétien, p. 379. 7 Ibid. [Il en résultat des produits mixtes, ou plutôt des produits alternativem ent inspirés par la cité de Dieu et par la cité du m onde. L’histoire des artistes qui se trouvaient ainsi tiraillés et ballottés par ces deux ordres d ’inspirations, offre un intérêt presque dram atique, et il faut une sorte d ’abnégation pour en suprim er même les détails superflus.] 8 “Sandro Botticelli’s G eburt der Venus und Frühling” (1893), Schriften, pp. 5-57. 9 Schriften, p. 52. 10 Schriften, p. 308. 11 UArt Chrétien, volume 2, pp. 466-480. 12 Ibid, pp. 474, 5. [expression de douce et mystérieuse mélancholie que nul autre paintre n’a su rendre aussi bien que Botticelli] 13 Schriften, p. 64. 14 Gombrich, Warburg, p. 106. 15 [la servante qui apporte des fruits, en robe de statue, a l’élan, l’allégresse, la force d ’une nymphe antique, en sorte que les deux âges et les deux beautés se rejoignent et s’unissent dans la naïveté du même sentim ent vrai.] 16 Ibid, p. 118 17 Ibid, p. 124. 18 Ibid, p. 126. 19 Ibid, pp. 12,184/5,191· 20 “Bildniskunst u nd florentinisches B ürgertum ” (1902), Schriften, pp. 89-126.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOTION OF A PAGAN REVIVAL

21 Ibid, p. 99. 22 Schriften , p. 157. 23 Schriften , pp. 155-157, 205. 24 “Francesco Sassettis letzwillige Verfügung” (1907), Schriften, pp. 127-158. 25 Schriften , p. 151. 26 This is not the place to analyze in greater detail W arburg’s interpretation of the changing images of Fortuna , replacing the vision o f Boethius with that of Occasio derived from Ausonius, nor the significance he attributes to the crest of Giovanni Rucellai’s coat of arms. Schriften , pp. 145-151. 27 Gombrich, Warburg , pp. 307. 28 The same applies to the title of the Italian selection o f W arburg’s work, La rinascita del paganesimo antico , Florence, 1966.

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aby warburg and the cultural historian karl lamprecht

kathryn brush IT HAS LONG BEEN RECOGNIZED THAT

Aby Warburg’s study o f Renaissance art and society drew important stim­ ulus from the branch o f historical inquiry known in German-speaking Europe as Kulturwissenschaft or Kulturgeschichte (the science or history of culture). Those who have studied the cultural historical components o f Warburg’s thought have traditionally pointed

to the paradigmatic

significance o f the writings o f Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), the celebrated Swiss cultural historian for whom Warburg professed great adm iration.1 Burckhardt’s richly textured portrayals o f Italian Renaissance history and culture in such books as Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization o f the Renaissance in Italy, first published in i860)2 were seminal in determining the focus o f Warburg’s research, and in encouraging his exploration o f the broader cultural contexts o f art. It is less well known, however, that another important cultural historian also provided Warburg with decisive conceptual and methodological impetus— a cultural historian whom, unlike Burckhardt, Warburg had experienced at first hand during his {65}

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years o f intellectual formation. This was Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915), the most prominent practitioner o f cultural history in late nineteenth-century Germany, and the most imaginative and controversial thinker within the German historical community during that era. Lamprecht’s name is very familiar to historians. He is usually identified with his twelve-volume Deutsche Geschichte (German History; 1891-1909) and three-volume Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (German Economic Life in the Middle Ages; 1885-1886), as well as with a prolonged methodological dispute his work provoked within the German historical profession.3 He has rarely figured, however, within the historiography o f art history. This is remarkable, for abundant evidence shows that Lamprecht’s work had a formative impact on the development o f the art historical disci­ pline during the 1880s and early 1890s— precisely those years when the “ scientific” discipline o f art history was in the process o f being institutional­ ized within German universities.4 Although Lamprecht was greatly influenced by the older generation of cultural historians, including Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897), Anton Springer (1825-1891) and Burckhardt in particular, he recognized that their work was largely unsystematic, especially with regard to investigations o f non-historical areas o f inquiry, and that it was aimed principally towards a humanistic ideal o f education (Bildung ) rather than towards a formalized “ science” ( Wissenschaft) o f culture. During the 1880s Lamprecht undertook to forge an updated conceptual fram ework for cultural history, one that integrated, for the first time, the scientific findings o f newly developed disci­ plines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethnology and art history.5 In the process o f constructing the framework for his cultural his­ torical program , Lamprecht came to assign a central role to art. His modernized conception and practice of cultural history as a genuine inter­ disciplinary enterprise was in the vanguard o f historical research during the mid- and late 1880s. It was at this time that Warburg and other firstgeneration art historians came into direct personal contact with Lamprecht. This essay explores the intriguing issue o f the import o f Lamprecht for W arburgs developing thought, acknowledging Lamprecht as one o f the many critical factors that helped to inform Warburg’s approach to the analy­ sis o f cultural phenomena.6 There are three parts to this discussion. First, it

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

is necessary to portray the principal components o f Lamprecht’s method, drawing special attention to his vision o f an interactive dynamics linking art and other manifestations o f culture. This is followed by an examination o f the evidence for W arburgs critical (and uncritical) grappling with Lamprecht’s ideas both during and after his student years. The third section positions Warburg’s individual responses to Lamprecht in relation to broader intellectual currents within the developing field o f art history at the end o f the nineteenth century. Warburg first became acquainted with Lamprecht’s work during his student years (1886-1889) at the University o f Bonn.7 Lamprecht had been appointed to the History Seminar at Bonn in 1880 after receiving his univer­ sity education between 1874 and 1879 at the universities o f Gottingen, Leipzig and Munich, where his work concentrated on political and economic history. He taught in the History Seminar at Bonn until 1890, when he was transferred to Marburg. The following year he moved to the University o f Leipzig,

where

he

later

founded

the

Institut

fur

Kultur-

und

Universalgeschichte (Institute for Cultural and Universal History). He remained in Leipzig until his death in 1915. From the outset, Lamprecht’s decision to focus his career on cultural history was considered unorthodox by his colleagues. It did not conform to the normative form o f political history, developed by Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) and his followers, which dominated the German historical pro­ fession at the time.8 Instead of narrating the events o f political, military and biographical history, Lamprecht aimed to formulate an histoire totale that would result in a broader, more comprehensive understanding o f the collec­ tive mentality (Mentalitàt , Seelenleben) o f a civilization— German civiliza­ tion in particular— as it evolved and changed over time. His wide-ranging approach and belief that the history o f a particular moment must be studied in all o f its manifestations encouraged him to draw analogies between forms o f material culture, such as political institutions and economic structures, and the manifestions o f “ ideal” or intellectual culture, which in his view embraced artistic and literary phenomena, music, philosophy, religious beliefs and the like. During the 1880s Lamprecht made pathfinding forays into art history and became increasingly convinced o f the symptomatic value o f art as an index o f broader cultural behaviour. In his view, the visual

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arts provided the only clear manifestation, or objectification, o f intellectual culture that could offer access to the mentality and collective psyche o f the era in which the art forms were produced. Lamprecht’s attempt to construct a picture o f a particular historical period through its art was by no means without precedent. Carl Schnaase (1798-1875), Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) and Jacob Burckhardt had earlier posited an essential unity between art and larger historical structures. Their understanding o f how such relationships functioned had, however, rested on generalities and was largely intuitive. Lamprecht, by contrast, set out to provide specific demonstrations o f his hypotheses, introducing data bor­ rowed from the latest scholarship in the social sciences (especially the fields o f sociology, psychology, ethnology and anthropology) to help support his claim that fundamental commonalities linked all dimensions o f human experience at any given moment. According to his scheme, events in the material realm (for example, economics, politics or demographics) provided the catalyst for developments in the ideal or intellectual realm, where aes­ thetic sensibilities, tastes and moral attitudes took shape. Drawing on a system o f analogies, he proceeded to posit the mutual dependency o f the two realms. By virtue of this equation, works o f art were distinctly legible barometers o f the central outlooks and sensibilities o f the society in which they took shape.9 During his years in the Rhineland, Lamprecht attempted to contain the grand scope o f his undertaking by developing a periodization scheme that systematically divided German history into a succession o f cultural epochs ( Kulturzeitalter ) characterized by a stepwise advance o f differentiated psychic states or mental attitudes ( Seelenzustande ) .10 At this time, Lamprecht’s cultural historical work (in contrast to that o f Burckhardt) focused on the Middle Ages. This was not due to a simple chronological preference. In Lamprecht’s view, the Middle Ages was an era that offered vital glimpses into the “youth” o f the collective life o f the German people and nation. Lamprecht’s unconventional intellectual program aroused suspicion among academic historians, who considered cultural history as a field o f endeavor best left to dilettantes rather than serious scholars.11 Because o f deeply entrenched research biases within the German historical profession,

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

Lamprecht’s ambition to comprehend history in all o f its dimensions and his flagrant transgression o f the established conceptual boundaries o f the disci­ pline could only be regarded as disquieting. Nevertheless, during the 1880s, his experimental work met with considerable success and he was widely acknowledged as one o f the most promising figures within the German his­ torical community. This situation changed for the worse, however, with the appearance o f the first five volumes o f his Deutsche Geschichte (1891-1895). Lamprecht’s depiction o f German civilization over the centuries as an orderly progression through successive stages o f consciousness was vehe­ mently attacked by his conservative colleagues, who viewed his bold, crosssectional visions o f history and culture as a direct challenge to their venerable notions o f what “ meaningful” history should be about. Hostilities escalated into full-fledged academic warfare, and during the 1890s Lamprecht’s cultural historical work served as the focus o f a bitter method­ ological

dispute

( Methodenstreit )

within

the

German

historical

community.12 Much o f the criticism o f Lamprecht’s work was justified. The system of analogies on which his intellectual edifice rested was flawed and bore little demonstrable relationship to actual circumstances. As Roger Chickering has recently observed, the historian’s assumptions about the reciprocal impact of the material and ideal realms, as well as his tendency to abstract large visions from the study o f particulars, were grounded in “ audacious speculation.” 13 Lamprecht’s work was also plagued by a number of inconsistencies and doc­ umentary errors, which arose from his tendency to work quickly and often carelessly. Moreover, although he read voraciously, he never fully digested what he read and sent his unedited manuscripts directly to the press. His combative personality, limitless energy and lack o f capacity for self-criticism only contributed to a heightening o f the polemics during the 1890s and beyond. Although Lamprecht was ultimately discredited by his orthodox oppo­ nents, he was undoubtedly the most imaginative thinker within the German historical community during the late nineteenth century. Significantly, the decade o f the 1880s, which he spent at the University o f Bonn, represents the most fertile and creative period in the development of his thought, as well as the period o f his greatest success. At that time, the controversies surrounding

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his work had scarcely begun. Lamprecht’s research and teaching activities in Bonn coincided with the arrival, in the second half o f the decade, o f the first group o f students to concentrate their study on art history at the Rhenish university. Among them were three inquisitive young men who were to go on to important careers in the developing discipline, namely, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), Wilhelm Vôge (1868-1952) and Paul Clemen (1866-1947).14 All three students enrolled in Lamprecht’s courses. Documents from this era demonstrate that Lamprecht’s comprehensive approach to the interpretation of history and culture, which was then on the frontiers o f knowledge, made a deep impression on his young listeners. Although Warburg is the figure of prim ary concern in this essay, the later work o f these three individuals indi­ cates that Lamprecht was instrumental in helping to shape their understand­ ing o f the larger cultural resonances o f artistic creation, as well as o f the scope, nature and purposes o f art historical inquiry. During the late 1880s, when Warburg, Vôge and Clemen were attending Lamprecht’s courses, the historian was putting the finishing touches on his conceptual scheme. He had already completed a number o f weighty publica­ tions and was in the process of launching several other major research initia­ tives. Most o f these projects concentrated on the early Middle Ages, an era for which consistent written documentation was often lacking. Thus, it is not surprising that Lamprecht’s study o f the visual arts focused on illum i­ nated manuscripts which he often encountered in the course o f his archival work. His simultaneous contemplation o f historical and artistic documents must have prompted him to consider how close comparative study o f the individual characteristics o f illuminated manuscripts (e.g., scripts, painting techniques, ornamental features, styles o f representation, the gestures and costumes o f figurai elements), when examined in conjunction with the specifics o f their historical and social contexts, could afford insights into the developing national consciousness ( Volksseele) o f the German people. Lamprecht’s belief that images embodied, and thus could reveal, the full spectrum o f the expressive energies o f their day was already evident in his important article o f 1881 on the Codex Egberti and the Golden Gospels (Codex Aureus) o f Echternach.15 His comparative analysis o f these two Ottonian manuscripts is noteworthy both for its exacting scrutiny o f indi­ vidual elements and for its broad synthetic vision. This article also displayed

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

another distinguishing feature o f Lamprecht’s work during the 1880s: that conceptually and procedurally, he drew no boundaries between his purely historical and art historical practice. This tendency was even more apparent in his book Initial-Ornamentik des VIII. bis XIII. Jahrhunderts (Decorated Initials from the Eighth to Thirteenth Centuries), which appeared the following year.16 In this ground-breaking publication o f 1882 Lamprecht endeavored, through the comparative analysis o f decorated initials, to portray the evolu­ tion o f a specifically Germanic ornamental sensibility from the period o f the tribal wanderings to the era o f the Hohenstaufen. The conception o f this remarkable project, in which he extracted large views o f important cultural, historical and psychological shifts from the study o f seemingly insignificant artistic details (i.e., the ornamentation o f initials in manuscripts o f various eras), was without precedent in either historical or art historical circles of the day.17 Several years later, when Warburg and his peers encountered Lamprecht, he was devising a related project o f even broader scope. This was a collaborative investigation o f the so-called Ada Gospels, a manuscript con­ nected with the court school o f Charlemagne in the years around 800. This comprehensive interrogation o f the manuscript and its historical and intel­ lectual milieu, which appeared in 1889 under the rubric Die Trierer Ada-

Handschrifty was intended to shed new light on a particularly crucial moment in the genesis o f the German nation.18 The theses and results o f these novel projects informed Lamprecht’s teaching at Bonn, as did the research for his three-volume work Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (German Economic Life in the Middle Ages) o f 1885-1886.19 In this m onu­ mental study, which appeared just before the young art history students enrolled in his classes, Lamprecht sought to construct a “ total” view o f the material culture o f the Mosel region by studying the interactive dynamics of topography, demography and economic behaviour, and o f the religious and legal structures in the region. Documents, rather than the deeds of individu­ als, served as the focus o f this study, for which he examined some 30,000 records o f a legal and contractual sort. By the summer o f 1887, when Warburg, Vôge and Clemen began to enroll in Lamprecht’s lectures and tutorials, the historian had assembled a wideranging collection o f interdisciplinary materials and exploratory ideas,

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which he eagerly shared with his students.20 Lamprecht was a gifted speaker and engaging teacher. The memoirs, diaries and correspondence o f his art history students reveal that they were captivated by the young and approach­ able professor, who was at the time only about ten years older than they were.21 We can still imagine what it must have been like to be in the seminar room as he vividly portrayed the multifarious kinds o f historical documents, including art works, that could enable the modern scholar to gain access to the fundamental mind-sets and cultural behaviour o f past civilizations. Vôge repeatedly declared that he found Lamprecht’s cross-sectional view o f history “ fresh” and “ invigorating” for his own work in art history, while Warburg registered his obvious enthusiasm for Lamprecht’s teachings in his diaries.22 At this time, university enrollments were very small, a situation which further encouraged lively intellectual and social exchanges between professor and students. Clemen’s unpublished memoirs convey a sense of the intimate atmosphere o f a tutorial on German economic history which Lamprecht held at his home during the winter semester o f 1887-1888. All four students were art historians, and Clemen reports that he, Vôge and Warburg were fascinated by Lamprecht’s first-hand demonstrations o f how the study o f everyday archival records could help provide a key to under­ standing a society’s Seelenleben or Seelenzustànde (mental life or psychic conditions).23 His lectures and tutorials also included excursions on week­ ends to museums in Cologne and Bonn and to other relevant historical and artistic monuments in the region. Warburg’s matriculation records show that he took a total o f four courses with Lamprecht during his stay in Bonn. His notebooks from three o f the classes survive and offer valuable records o f the sorts o f ideas and method­ ological perspectives Lamprecht imparted to his students.24 Warburg’s notes from Lamprecht’s lectures on Rhenish art history (summer 1887) and the development o f German culture in the Middle Ages (winter 1887-1888) are particularly informative in this regard. The course on Rhenish art drew largely on concepts explored in the historian’s studies o f medieval m anu­ scripts, and emphasized the reciprocity between artistic expression and broader historical and intellectual phenomena. These ideas were incorpo­ rated into Lamprecht’s broader examination o f German cultural history, a lecture course in which he expounded his principal theses and which there­ fore merits particularly close consideration.

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

The 95 densely written pages o f W arburgs notebook indicate that the young man followed his professor’s exposé o f the development o f German medieval culture with great attentiveness. Warburg underlined a number o f sections o f special interest to him and also made numerous annotations in the margins, suggesting that he repeatedly re-read and contemplated his lecture notes.25 Lamprecht began the course by surveying “ antiquarian” understandings o f Kulturgeschichte formulated by figures such as Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, Taine, Buckle and Darwin, and then proceeded to elaborate the theoretical foundations and methodological perspectives requisite for the modern practice o f cultural history. Drawing on an extensive biblio­ graphy, Lamprecht emphasized that it was only through the investigation of all human action and thought that the cultural historian could comprehend a past society’s accomplishments, beliefs and aspirations.26 To achieve this goal, Lamprecht advocated the study o f the scientific findings o f comple­ mentary disciplines (he termed them kulturgeschichtliche Hilfsdisziplinen ), which in his view embraced such diverse fields as constitutional history, lin­ guistics, philology, art history, economics, anthropology and social psycho­ logy (Vôlkerpsychologié) ,27 The bibliography alone, which he communicated to his students, was extraordinary. To Warburg and the other young art history students, Lamprecht’s consideration o f the “ total” aspects o f the social and cultural behaviour o f a given era— ranging from literature and economics to religious beliefs and rituals— must have seemed to be not only excitingly modern, but also to offer a rich and challenging interdisciplinary framework for the study o f artistic monuments. Warburg’s notes show that Lamprecht devoted the remainder o f the course to exploring the various phases he perceived in the unfolding o f the German national consciousness; they also demonstrate that the historian’s morphological scheme for the Kulturzeitalter was well developed by this time.28 According to Lamprecht, three principal phases could be distin­ guished in German medieval civilization: “ Symbolism” (to ca. 350 A.D.), “ Typism” (350-1050) and “ Conventionalism” (1050-1450).29 In characterizing each o f these eras, he gave special priority to the visual arts as outward expressions o f the dominant mentalities o f their day. Lamprecht projected the “ Symbolic” period as representing the earliest or “primitive” stage in the rise o f the German Volk.30 In view o f Warburg’s growing concern with the diverse resonances o f classical antiquity in later

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eras (das Nachleben der Antike), it is understandable that he would have taken considerable interest in this northern European counterpart (i.e., Germanic antiquity).31 His notes show that Lamprecht drew on the latest archaeological and ethnological research in order to analyze the tribal organization and social, legal and economic institutions o f the early Germanic peoples.32 During this phase, when human beings were conscious only o f belonging to a collective unit (the tribe or clan), the essential mental­ ity behind legal procedures, religious rituals, artistic expression and social customs, so argued Lamprecht, was “ sym bolic” in character. By this he meant that such “primitive” societies processed and externalized experience in abstract and immediate sensory terms (e.g., via magic, myth and simple artistic ornamentation such as bands, dots, lines, spirals or zigzags) rather than via concretely defined thoughts or “ realistic” portrayals o f the natural world. It is highly interesting in this regard that Lamprecht’s evocation of this early state o f Germanic civilization approximated that o f the Pueblo Indian culture that Warburg was to witness at first hand in 1895-1896 during his trip to New Mexico.33 Indeed it is clear that Lamprecht’s teachings and publications ought to be factored into the intellectual background o f Warburg’s engagement with the rituals and art forms o f this “primitive” New World society.34 According to Warburg’s notes, Lamprecht proceeded from this discussion o f “ Symbolism” to the “ Typism” o f the ensuing epoch, which saw the estab­ lishment o f the tribal states ( Stammeszeit ).35 Lamprecht noted some progress towards the emergence o f a conception o f individual personality, but argued that all human actions, thought and artistic expression displayed “ typical” or formulaic characteristics. Thus, although the portrayal o f objects (animals in particular) was introduced into the Germanic artistic vocabulary, such depictions o f the external world were chiefly limited to the outlining o f the object’s contours and to the delineation o f other such essen­ tial or typical features. Drawing on ideas explored in his earlier book on

Initial-Ornamentik , Lamprecht moved on to a consideration o f the wider ramifications of social and political change as reflected in the aesthetics o f ornamentation during the latter part o f the “ Typical” period and the follow­ ing “ Conventional” era. In brief, he depicted a myriad o f shifts and transfor­ mations in Germanic political, economic and social structures in the years

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

between ca. 900 and 1450 (e.g., the loosening o f clan and family ties, the gradual growth o f urban culture and the emergence o f a money-based economy), which had profound and varied consequences for the populace’s relation to and perception o f the external world. Maintaining that such shifts were traceable in the pictorial arts, Lamprecht pointed to an increased emphasis on organic or vegetable ornament ( Pflanzenornamentik ) and also to certain changes in the rendition o f the human figure.36 He called for com­ parative study o f differing modes o f figurai representation (e.g., adherence to conventions versus more naturalistic renderings), emphasizing that close consideration o f variances in the details o f gesture, costume and movement could help scholars comprehend the prevailing mental attitudes or

Anschauungen o f German civilization at particular moments in the later Middle Ages.37 Although this is not the place to critique Lamprecht’s complex (and often confused) analytical apparatus, it is important to remember that his com­ prehensive psychologizing approach to cultural history was at the time inno­ vative. His “ scientific” demonstration o f the interdependence o f all spheres of activity during a given historical era appears to have greatly impressed not only Warburg, but also his fellow students Vôge and Clemen. Their pro­ fessor’s sweeping vistas o f German medieval culture must have prompted them to reflect upon how art was permeated by the habits, social attitudes and mentality o f its time. Most importantly, however, Lamprecht compelled his students to confront and address foundational questions about the methodology, scope and nature o f their own scholarly inquiries. His particular Fragestellungy or formulation and foregrounding, o f the problematics o f historical research during the 1880s had far-reaching impli­ cations, especially for his three aspiring art history students. Indeed their experience o f Lamprecht occurred at an important crossroads in the definition o f art historical practice.38 During the late 1880s and 1890s, the growing autonomy o f the discipline o f art history was accompanied by a drawing o f territorial boundaries between art history and neighboring fields o f inquiry, including cultural history. Heinrich Wôlfflin (1864-1945), for instance, who had studied under Burckhardt in the early 1880s, consciously turned away from the broad cultural perspectives o f his teacher in the years around 1890, and focused instead on the study o f the internal dynamics of

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art, especially as they related to stylistic properties. This assumption of an autonomous visual tradition, and the concomitant belief that the special­ ized study o f art works should be separated from the study of other cultural phenomena, came to dominate the developing profession and contributed to a narrowing o f art historical practice and methodology during the 1890s and later. By contrast, Warburg, Vôge and Clemen were directly and forcefully exposed to the opposite point o f view in Bonn during the late 1880s. Lamprecht insisted that the study and interpretation o f art works should not occur in isolation, but rather with acute regard for the diverse contexts in which they took shape. This gave his three young scholars a broad frame in which to embed their art historical investigations. In short, although the cul­ tural historian Lamprecht was by no means the only influential figure in the intellectual backgrounds o f these first-generation art historians, there is ample evidence to suggest that he played a key role as provocateur during their years o f university study and beyond. In the case of Warburg, Lamprecht’s influence was exerted conceptually and methodologically and not in terms o f subject matter.39 Given his prim ary focus on the art and culture o f the Italian Renaissance, it is not sur­ prising that the writings o f Burckhardt, more than those o f Lamprecht, should have provided an enduring model for Warburg’s inquiries into that era. Nevertheless, the impact o f his personal encounter with Lamprecht can be detected in Warburg’s concern with the psychological dimensions o f art and culture.40 His later investigations into artistic forms (e.g., changes in the representation o f gestures, costume, drapery over time) as manifestations of much deeper cultural and spiritual values owed a fundamental intellectual debt to Lamprecht.41 Both men campaigned for a larger and differentiated picture o f an epoch than could have been afforded by the conventional acad­ emic methods o f their day (e.g., the linear narratives o f political history, and connoisseurship or stylistic analysis in art history). They also shared a fasci­ nation with periods o f transition when encounters between new or changed political, economic and social forces generated fundamental cultural trans­ formations and corresponding shifts in mental attitudes. Central to their study was their conviction in the symptomatic value o f art. Lamprecht also seems to have been largely responsible for stimulating Warburg’s belief in the importance o f archival research and in the necessity

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

o f studying the most mundane and minute facets o f everyday conduct ( Detailforschung ).42 As Lamprecht attempted to demonstrate in his own work, it was often unremarkable documents such as tax registers or notarial records, or insignificant details like the decoration o f initials or the portrayal o f gesture in the visual arts, that could yield the largest views o f the cultural behaviour o f a given period. These and other components o f Lamprecht’s approach continued to be present in the later work o f Warburg. Warburg maintained contact with Lamprecht following his initial period o f study at Bonn. After spending a semester at the University o f Munich and another in Florence, Warburg returned to Bonn for the summer term of 1889.43 There he enrolled in another course with Lamprecht.44 Significantly, it was Lamprecht who urged Warburg, as well as Voge and Clemen, to write their dissertations under the supervision o f Hubert Janitschek (1846-1893), professor o f art history at the University o f Strasbourg.45 Janitschek had earlier produced studies o f Italian Renaissance art and culture in the Burckhardtian mode, and during the 1880s became a close colleague o f Lamprecht in medieval manuscript studies.46 In 1892 Warburg defended his dissertation on Botticelli’s mythological paintings The Birth o f Venus and

Primavera.47 His inquiry was interdisciplinary and archivally based, and explored the wide range o f historical forces that determined Botticelli’s cre­ ative engagement with the forms and expression o f antiquity. This project announced many o f the research themes Warburg was to address for the remainder o f his career. As soon as the dissertation was printed, he sent copies to both Burckhardt and Lamprecht. Although

Burckhardt’s

favourable assessment has long been discussed in analyses o f Warburg’s cul­ tural historical approach, Lamprecht’s equally positive response to W arburg’s achievement appears to have gone unnoticed by scholars to date.48 In his letter to his former student, the historian praised the “ excel­ lence” of the thesis and commented in particular on aspects o f Warburg’ s analyses o f proportions and bodily movement that he had found particu­ larly provocative. He also asked Warburg to keep in touch with him.49 Warburg’s papers show that he corresponded with Lamprecht on a number o f matters until Lamprecht’s death in 1915. In August o f 1895, prior to his trip to the United States, for example, Warburg solicited the names o f American scholarly contacts from Lamprecht.50 The two men shared a

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common interest in the workings o f “ prim itive” mentalities, and in 1905 Warburg sent

Lamprecht

drawings

made by the

Moki

Indians.51

Throughout the years the two men also exchanged their publications. But most importantly, Warburg’s index cards, random notes and collection of offprints demonstrate that he keenly followed the debate over Lamprecht’s cultural historical method that arose, as discussed above, within the German historical profession from the mid-i890s onwards.52 The Methodenstreit clearly had considerable implications for Warburg’s contemplation of the methods and theories that underlay his own practice o f Kulturwissenschaft. At the same time, the highly divisive dispute among academic historians, which

ultimately

ended

in

Lamprecht’s

defeat,

had

far-reaching

ramifications for the development o f art historical discourse at large. Indeed the refinement and championing of stylistic analysis as a neutral, scientific method o f art history— one capable o f constructing autonomous and object-centred art historical narratives comparable to those o f “mainstream” political history— intensified from the mid-i890s onwards, suggesting that the methodological conflict may have encouraged art historians to distance themselves from history and cultural history in favour o f formalism. The style history o f Wôlfflin, Riegl and their followers in fact gained the upper hand in art historical inquiry during these years. Yet, the scholarship o f Warburg, Vôge and others indicates that despite their agreement with many o f the criticisms levelled at Lamprecht, they remained convinced o f the value o f his broad vision o f the importance o f art.53 Warburg continued to engage with Lamprecht’s ideas. This is evident in the fact that he took the Institute for Cultural and Universal History, which Lamprecht established at the University o f Leipzig in 1909, as one o f the p rim ary models for his own private research library, the celebrated

Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg.54 In 1915 Warburg described his library as an “ Institute for the Crossing o f Methodological Frontiers” (in his words, Institut fü r metho dologis che Grenziiberschreitung).55 Warburg’s description o f his library not only pointed to the guiding philosophy behind his study and practice o f Kulturwissenschaft, but also announced his unmistakable debt to Lamprecht’s teachings. It is highly significant for our understanding o f Warburg’s continuing interest in Lamprecht’s work that he maintained a direct link to the historian and his Leipzig Institute

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HI STORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

via his close personal friend Alfred Doren (1869-1934), an economic histo­ rian whose work focused on Renaissance Italy, and who was also a colleague o f Lamprecht in Leipzig.56 Although Doren’s name has often appeared in studies o f Warburg, the precise nature o f his relations with both Warburg and Lamprecht has not yet been considered.57 In view o f Doren’s many years o f interaction with both scholars and their intellectual program s, however, it seems particularly im portant to note that in an assessment o f Warburg’s achievement penned following his friend’s death, he called attention to the fact that Lamprecht had served as a m ajor stimulus.58 The material presented here contends that Warburg’s direct exposure to Lamprecht was decisive and wide-ranging. Without diminishing the significance o f Burckhardt’s writings as an ongoing model and source of inspiration for Warburg’s work, particularly in terms o f subject matter and research themes, it can be argued nonetheless that certain aspects o f Lamprecht’s approach were perhaps more relevant methodologically and conceptually. Although further investigation into this topic remains to be undertaken, the notion that understanding Lamprecht is vital to under­ standing Warburg can be illustrated by a single, trenchant example. In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the relationships between Warburg’s thought and the concerns o f the Anuales school of history.59 What they have apparently not realized, however, is that both shared a common stimulus in the work o f Karl Lamprecht.60

notes Research grants from the Social Sciences and H um anities Research Council of Canada and the Alexander von H um boldt-Stiftung enabled me to write this article. Professor Nicholas M ann and his colleagues at the Warburg Institute, University of London, deserve special thanks for graciously facilitating my access to the archival materials cited in this essay. I am also very grateful to Professors Roger Chickering, Bryce Lyon, John Shearm an and Joanna Ziegler for serving as critical sounding boards for my work on Lamprecht in recent years. 1 See, for example, D ieter W uttke, “Aby M. W arburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift 256 (1993), pp. 1-30 (with references to the earlier bibliography); this article is reprinted in Dieter Wuttke, Dazwischen. Kulturwissenschaft

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a u f Warburgs Spuren, Vol. 2 (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1996), pp. 737-61. My citations follow the 1996 reprint. 2 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighauser), i860. 3 Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, 12 volumes (Berlin: R. G aertner), 1891-1909; idem, Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter.

Untersuchungen iiber die

Entwicklung der materiellen Kultur des platten Landes a u f Grund der Quellen zunachst des Mosellandes, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Alphons Diirr, 1885-86). For the m ost im portant recent analysis of Lam precht’s life and career, see Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856- 1915) (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: H um anities Press International, 1993); Luise Schorn-Schütte, Karl Lamprecht. Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik, Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 22 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1984) is another m ajor historical study. 4 D uring the 1880s Lamprecht was actively involved in art historical research and publication. For a critical assessment of his various contributions to the developing field of art history, see K athryn Brush, “The C ultural H istorian Karl Lamprecht: Practitioner and Progenitor of Art History,” Central European History 26 (1993), pp. 139-64 [a G erm an version of this article has also appeared: “Der Kulturhistoriker Karl Lamprecht: W irkungen und Einfliisse auf die Entwicklung der Kunstgeschichte,” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblatter 60 (1996), pp. 205-32]. L am precht’s influence is also discussed in idem, The Shaping o f A rt History: Wilhelm Vôge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval A rt (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 35-45, 76-77,127-28. 5 For a comparative discussion o f the disciplines that Burckhardt and Lam precht’s w ork embraced, see Schorn-Schütte, Karl Lamprecht, part A, sections 1-3, esp. pp. 36-37. For the significant intellectual influence of Burckhardt on Lamprecht, see Chickering, Karl Lamprecht, pp. 52-53. 6 To my knowledge, Sir Ernst Gombrich was the first interpreter of W arburg (i.e., Gombrich did not have personal knowledge of his subject) who raised the issue of the im port of Lamprecht for W arburg’s work. See esp. Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The W arburg Institute, 1970; rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 [same pagination]), pp. 30-37. Since then, Lam precht has often been m entioned in studies of W arburg; see m ost recently B ernd Roeck, Der junge Aby Warburg (M unich: C. H. Beck, 1997), pp. 49-51. Dieter Wuttke, “Aby M. Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” esp. pp. 757-58, has argued against the influence o f Lamprecht’s work on W arburg’s conception and practice of Kulturwissenschaft. For W uttke’s argum ents (with my alternative readings), see note 53 below.

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

7 W arburg enrolled at Bonn in the winter semester of 1886-1887; he rem ained there through the winter semester of 1887-1888. After spending a semester in M unich and one in Florence, he returned to Bonn for the sum m er semester of 1889. For im portant discussions of W arburg’s student years in Bonn and his teachers there (they included the archaeologist Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz, the philologist and mythologist H erm ann Usener, the philosopher Theodor Lipps, and the art historians Carl Justi and Henry Thode), see Gombrich, Aby Warburg, pp. 25-42; Roeck, Der j unge Aby Warburg, pp. 25-53, 65-66. A detailed consideration of the thought of these Bonn professors in relation to that of Lamprecht (and Warburg) is beyond the scope of the present article. 8 For the paradigm s of historical research in nineteenth-century Germany, see Georg Iggers, The German Conception o f History: The National Tradition o f Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (M iddletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); in relation to Lam precht’s work, Chickering, Karl Lamprecht, pp. 27-44. 9 See Chickering, ibid., pp. 53-55, 79-80, 118-21, for a critical evaluation of the assumptions underlying the historian’s use of analogies; esp. pp. 119-22 for the diverse (and often conflicting) philosophical currents that inform ed Lamprecht’s search for historical unities. 10 To summarize briefly, Lamprecht’s Kulturzeitalter scheme reflected his belief that the German Volk had moved away from a prim ary identification with its founding tribal groups (or Stamme) towards an ever-increasing individualism and “subjectivism.” The historian modified this scheme several times in the course of preparing his Deutsche Geschichte, but by the late 1880s it had more or less acquired the following shape: the “Symbolic” era (to 350 A.D.), the “Typical” (350-1050), the “Conventional” (1050-1450), the “Individualistic” (1450-ca. 1750), and the “Subjectivistic” period (ca. 1750 to his own day). 11 Chickering, Karl Lamprecht, Chapters 2 and 3, pp. 22-105, assesses Lamprecht’s intellectual positioning in relation to the reigning paradigm s of the historical profession in nineteenth-century Germany. 12 See ibid., Part II, “The Destruction of the Historian,” pp. 108-283, for a critical analysis of the methodological dispute within the historical discipline, as well as its broader ramifications. 13 Ibid., p. 119; pp. 119-39, for an outline of some of the diverse philosophical currents that coexisted in Lamprecht’s Deutsche Geschichte. Chickering, pp. 109-11, discusses ways in which the historian’s sloppy and imprecise language contributed to the confusion generated by his work. 14 For Lamprecht’s teaching and its reception by history and art history students during the 1880s, see Brush, “The Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht,” pp. 153-62;

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idem, The Shaping o f A rt History (as in note 4). The latter discussion includes photographs of Lamprecht and the three young art history students. 15 Karl Lamprecht, “Der Bilderschmuck des Cod. Egberti zu Trier und des Cod. Epternacensis zu G o th a ” Jahrbücher des Vereins von Alterthumsfreunden im Rheinlande 70 (1881), pp. 56-112. 16 Karl Lamprecht, Initial-Ornamentik des VIH. bis XIII. lahrhunderts (Leipzig: Alphons Diirr, 1882). 17 For the larger context of this book and its positive reception by leading art historians, see Brush, “The Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht,” pp. 148-50. 18 Karl Lamprecht, ed., Die Trierer Ada-Handschrift, Publikationen der Gesellschaft fiir Rheinische Geschichtskunde, 6 (Leipzig: Alphons Dürr, 1889). Lamprecht o u tlined the goals of the project in the introduction, pp. vii-viii. He collaborated with five other art historians and historians in order to reach the most com prehensive understanding of the m anuscript possible. For this large-scale, luxury publication, which represented a new genre of m anuscript studies, see Brush, “The Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht,” pp. 152-53. 19 Karl Lamprecht, Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (as in note 3). See Chickering, Karl Lamprecht, pp. 80-83, for an account of the significance of this book. 20 W arburg and Vôge first enrolled in courses with Lamprecht during the sum m er semester of 1887; Clemen joined them during the winter semester of 1887-1888. In addition to his own research, Lam precht had launched an interdisciplinary journal of history and art, the Westdeutsche Zeitschrift fiir Geschichte und Kunst in 1882; he was responsible for coediting the first ten volumes during his years in the Rhineland. Thus, he was very well inform ed about recent archaeological finds, art exhibitions and m useum catalogues and frequently drew from this source for his lectures and class excursions. 21 For Lamprecht’s teaching skills and docum entation concerning the enthusiastic reaction of his students, see Brush (as in note 14). 22 For Vôge, see Brush, The Shaping o f Art History, pp. 174-75, n. 100; for Warburg, Roeck, Der junge Aby Warburg, p. 48. Roeck cites W arburg’s entries in his diary (Archives o f the W arburg Institute, 9) for 3 November 1887 [“Kolleg bei Lamprecht ff!!”] and 29 February 1888 [“Lamprecht (sehr gut)”]. A comparison of W arburg’s diary and his notebooks shows that the November entry referred to Lamprecht’s first lecture in his course on the development of G erm an culture in the Middle Ages (winter semester 1887-1888); the second entry appears to have been made in reference to Lamprecht’s tutorial on German economic history held during the same semester. 23 For Clem en’s report, see Brush, The Shaping o f A rt History, p. 175, n. 102. The fourth art history student in the course was Ernst Burmeister (b. 1867), who later

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

wrote a dissertation under August Schmarsow (1853-1936) at the University of Breslau. This student comrade of Warburg, Vôge and Clemen died, however, by the mid-i890s. It is clear from the various accounts by L amprecht’s students that the historian presented his broad ideas in his lectures and concentrated on individual problems (for example, the first-hand study of docum ents) in his tutorials. 24 W arburgs lecture notes from Lamprecht’s courses on “Ausgewàhlte Kapitel aus der rheinischen Kunstgeschichte” (13 pages, sum m er semester 1887), “Grundziige der deutschen Kulturentwickelung im M ittelalter” (95 pages, w inter semester 1887-1888) and “Deutsche Geschichte vom Ausgang der Staufer bis auf Kaiser Maximilian” (146 pages, sum m er semester 1889) are preserved in the Archives of the Warburg Institute, University of London (32.1.1., 32.1.2. and 31.1.3., respectively; the first two notebooks are bound together). W arburg does not appear to have kept notes from the tutorial on econom ic history held at Lam precht’s hom e during the winter semester of 1887-1888. 25 This pertains in particular to the notes from the early part of the course (though underlining also occurs elsewhere). W arburg underlined the main points in red and the subsections in blue (his notes are otherwise written in a dark brownish ink). In the margins he com m ented on and made additions to the bibliography which Lamprecht presented to his students. 26 W arburg’s notes show that Lamprecht’s introduction to the theme and contexts of the course extended for five lectures from 3 to 11 November 1887 (PP· 1-13 in his notebook). 27 Lectures of 4 and 5 November 1887 (pp. 4-7 in the notebook); p. 4 (4 November 1887) for “culturgeschichtliche Hilfsdisciplinen.” 28 Lecture of 16 December 1887 (pp. 42-43 of W arburg’s notebook display a chart of the various Kulturzeitalter, he m ust have copied down the scheme as Lamprecht presented it on a blackboard or by another means). There are slight deviations from Lamprecht’s final scheme (see the following note). 29 Here I employ the “final” version of the scheme; W arburg’s notebooks show that Lamprecht was still fine-tuning his term inology during December 1887 and January 1888. For example, the “Typical” phase extending from 350-1050 was at that tim e term ed the “O rnam ental” or “O rnam ental-Typical” era (chart of 16 D ecember 1887, as cited above, and lecture of 14 January 1888, p. 51 in the notebook). 30 Lamprecht frequently jum ped from era to era in order to make specific points; thus, references to das symbolische Zeitalter appear throughout W arburg’s notebook. Lamprecht’s lectures of 14,19 and 20 January 1888 were largely dedicated to this subject (pp. 52-55 in the notebook). In these lectures (as was also the case in his descriptions of other Zeitalter)y Lamprecht drew attention to the survival and transform ation of certain elements of symbolic form in later eras; for example, he

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KATHRYN BRUSH

saw the use of alliteration in the ninth-century Hildebrandslied as bearing certain relationships with the earlier “Symbolic” era. 31 Lam precht’s discussions of Germania antiqua engaged with issues th at would have been of particular interest to Warburg, for example, the confrontation o f the Germanic Naturvôlker with classical culture (i.e., via the Roman empire) and the various forms o f its reception. Indeed W arburg’s notebooks dem onstrate that Lamprecht repeatedly addressed the topic of the continuity and transform ation of classical culture during the Middle Ages (i.e., not only in relation to his consideration o f the “Carolingian Renaissance”). Already in an introductory lecture of 11 November 1887, Lamprecht had raised the issue of “foreign influences,” posing the following question: “Welcher C harakter hat die klassische Überlieferung?” (pp. 11-12 o f the notebook). 32 Lamprecht gave his students supplem entary bibliography (i.e., in addition to the works cited at the outset of the course) for the “Symbolic” era in his lecture of 14 January 1888 (p. 52 of the notebook). The titles listed in W arburg’s notebook include Sophus Müller, Die Thier-Ornamentik im Norden. Ursprung, Entwicklung und Verhâltniss derselben zu gleichzeitigen Stilarten , trans. J. M estorf (Hamburg:

O. Meissner, 1881); Lamprecht’s own Initial-Ornamentik of 1882; the latest edition o f Jacob G rim m, Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer , 3 ed. (Gottingen: Dieterich, 1881); the first volum e o f Andreas Heusler, Institutionen des deutschen Privatrechts. Systematisches Handbuch der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft , 2 vols. (Leipzig:

D uncker un d H um blot, 1885-86), and works by the philologists Karl Viktor M üllenhoff and Richard Heinzel (both were scholars o f Old G erm anic languages). For the anthropological scholarship, see note 34 below. 32 W arburg’s field trip to this “primitive” New World culture during the winter of 1895-1896 provided the material for a lecture he gave almost thirty years later (in 1923) on “serpent ritual” during his stay at the psychiatric clinic in Kreuzlingen. The original German text of this lecture (which W arburg did not plan for publication) has recently been made available, together with many photographs dating from W arburg’s trip to New Mexico. See Aby W arburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht (Berlin: K. Wagenbach, 1988 & 1996). The im portant “Nachwort” by

Ulrich Raulff, pp. 59-95, examines the broader contexts of W arburg’s encounter w ith the Pueblo Indians and his 1923 lecture with references to the earlier literature. 34 Except for a passing reference to Lamprecht’s thought made by Gombrich in Aby Warburg., pp. 91-92, Lamprecht has not figured to date within discussions of the

intellectual background o f W arburg’s encounter with the Pueblo Indians. Yet, W arburg’s notes indicate that Lamprecht’s teachings on the “Symbolic” era and early part o f the “Typical” era, especially w ith regard to the study o f artistic expression (e.g., the abstract or “symbolic” ornam entation on pottery and other

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

everyday objects) as a way of com prehending the workings o f a “prim itive” society’s mentality or “soul” (Seele), deeply inform ed W arburgs trip. Lamprecht had already evoked the “primitive” im agination in his descriptions of Germanic antiquity in Initial-Ornamentik; he elaborated these arguments in the first volume of Deutsche Geschichte, which he was conceiving and writing during W arburg’s stay in Bonn (this volume Urzeit und Mittelalter. Zeitalter des symholischen, typischen und konventionellen Seelenlebens appeared in 1891). For a provocative recent discussion of Warburg’s comparative study of the “primitive” m ind (i.e., that of the Pueblo Indian society and that of ancient Greece), see Salvatore Settis, “Kunstgeschichte als vergleichende Kulturwissenschaft: Aby Warburg, die PuebloIndianer und das Nachleben der Antike,” Kiinstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange. Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses fiir Kunstgeschichte Berlin, 15- 20. Juli 1992, 1, ed. Thom as W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), pp. 139-53. This article also includes illustrations of some of the Indian pottery W arburg took back to H am burg with him; the artistic ornam entation of the pottery acquires great interest in relation to Lam precht’s 1880s work. Indeed Lamprecht’s publications and W arburg’s notes from Lamprecht’s classes strongly suggest that W arburg would have made cross-cultural comparisons between the symbolic art, rituals and mentalities of “primitive” Indo-America, ancient Greece and Germanic antiquity. In the “N achw ort” to W arburg’s Schlangenritual (as in the preceding note), PP· 74~75> Ulrich Raulff discusses some of the anthropological scholarship that may have helped to inspire W arburg’s understanding of the genesis of “primitive” thought, drawing particular attention to the work of Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903), who edited the Zeitschrift fiir Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft between i860 and 1890. Raulff points out, with reference to Hans Liebeschütz, “Aby W arburg (1866-1929) as Interpreter of Civilization,” Year Book o f the Leo Baeck Institute 16 (1971), p. 233, that W arburg owned three volumes of this journal (1887-1889). W arburg’s notebook from Lamprecht’s course suggests that it was likely Lamprecht who stimulated W arburg’s interest in Lazarus’ work. Indeed, at the beginning o f his course, Lam precht exam ined Lazarus’ definition of the Volksseele (lecture of 5 November 1887, p. 6-7 in the notebook). For a recent evaluation of the foundations for anthropological study laid by Lazarus and his collaborator, Heymann Steinthal, see Ivan Kalmar, “The Volkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the M odern Concept of Culture,” Journal o f the History o f Ideas 47 (1987), pp. 671-90. References to this era are scattered through out the notebook; Lamprecht presented his most concentrated discussion in his lectures of 20 and 21 January 1888 (pp. 56-60 in the notebook). I summarize some of Lamprecht’s main arguments in the following paragraph. Although Lamprecht was by all accounts an exciting

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and engaging lecturer, W arburg’s notebook indicates that his professor did not always follow a clear line of thought and often (and quickly) juxtaposed ideas and evidence borrowed from diverse sources. This concurs with assessments of the character of many of Lamprecht’s publications. 36 W arburg’s notes of 15 December 1887 are particularly interesting in relation to Lamprecht’s theories concerning the sym ptom atic value of art. On this day the professor explored how study of the differing representations of trees (and their foliage) in medieval manuscripts and other works of art could help scholars to com prehend a given era’s relationship to nature and to the external world at large. Lamprecht evidently brought along illustrations (i.e., in books or tracings) to his class, for W arburg sketched some of them in two pages of his notebook (both pages are labelled p. 39). 37 For example, lecture of 9 D ecem ber 1887, pp. 34-36 in the notebook. Here Lamprecht indicated some of broader conclusions to be drawn about a given era’s social and psychic m ake-up through study of the representation of bodily movem ent, the clothed body, the naked body, facial expressions, gesture and so on. Lamprecht reiterated this idea (and related themes) throughout his course. 38 For the major currents in art historical methodology during the late nineteenth century, see Brush, The Shaping o f A rt History. 39 Both Vôge and Clemen concentrated their careers in art history on the Middle Ages. The influence of Lamprecht was particularly strong in the case of Vôge, who is best known today as the dissertation advisor o f Erwin Panofsky (Vôge founded the art history institute at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau). Clemen becam e Provincial C onservator for the Rhineland and also professor of art history at the University o f Bonn. For Vôge’s career, see Brush, ibid. (the genesis o f Vôge’s thought is a m ajor focus of the book); for Clemen’s professional activities, Brush, ibid., esp. pp. 170 n. 68,199 n. 24. 40 The philologist and mythologist H erm ann Usener (1834-1905), another teacher of W arburg in Bonn (see note 7 above), also shared Lam precht’s interest in a psychologizing approach to history. For Usener, see G om brich, Aby Warburgs pp. 28-30; Roeck, Der junge Aby Warburg, pp. 51-53. Lam precht’s teachings m ust also have been reinforced by those o f August Schmarsow, professor of art history at Breslau, w hom W arburg encountered during the w inter semester of 1888-1889 in Florence. Like Lamprecht, Schmarsow’s study of art was influenced by the experimental psychology of the day; see Gombrich, Aby Warburg, pp. 40-42. 41 C om pare G om brich, Aby Warburg, p. 36; his statem ents were also based on a study o f W arburg’s notebooks from Lam precht’s courses. 42 Certainly B urckhardt was not the inspiration for W arburg’s archival work. W arburg in fact pointed to certain differences between his approach and that of Burckhardt (noting archival work and the use of photography in particular) in

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

the preface to his Bildniskunst und Florentinisches Bürgertum, 1. Domenico Ghirlandajo in Santa Trinita. Die Bildnisse des Lorenzo de’Medici und seiner Angehôrigen (Leipzig: H. Seemann, 1902), p. 5. The various reports of Lamprecht’s lectures and tutorials by his students suggest that it was Lam precht who convinced W arburg (and the other students) of the im portance of archival work in constructing a picture o f an era. For related com m ents on W arburgs concern w ith archival study, see W uttke, “Aby M. W arburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” pp. 754- 55· 43 For W arburg’s activities during these semesters, see G om brich, Aby Warburg, pp. 38-42; Roeck, Der junge Aby Warburg, 55-62. 44 It was a lecture course on G erm an history from the end of the H ohenstaufen to Kaiser Maximilian. In his notebook for this course (see above note 24), Warburg did two quick sketches of his teacher (Lamprecht), one in ink and the other in pencil (both are located on p. 141 of his 146-page notebook). W arburg did not norm ally doodle in his notebooks for Lamprecht’s courses (though he did in the case of other professors), suggesting that he paid close attention to Lamprecht’s teachings. It is interesting in this regard that the page with the sketches is located close to the end of the notebook (and the end o f the semester; the accompanying lecture notes are dated 25 July 1889). 45 Brush, “The C ultural H istorian Karl Lamprecht,” p. 156 n. 61, for the archival evidence. 46 For Janitschek, see Brush, The Shaping o f Art History, pp. 45-49. 47 Aby W arburg, Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus'’ und “F r ii h li n g E in e Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen FriXhrenaissance (H am burg and Leipzig: L. Voss, 1893). 48 W uttke, “Aby M. W arburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” p. 752, gives the text of Burckhardt’s letter of 27 December 1892, stating that the nature of Lamprecht’s response to W arburg’s dissertation was unknow n (i.e., in 1993 at the time W uttke’s article was published). In the m eantime, a systematic inventory of W arburg’s correspondence in the Archives of the Warburg Institute has been undertaken under the direction of Dr. D orothea McEwan. The inventory, which is currently un derway, is helping scholars to construct a more accurate picture of W arburg’s intellectual and personal associations. A letter of 25 December 1892 from Lamprecht to Warburg, which docum ents the historian’s response to the dissertation, is am ong the materials which have been uncovered. 49 Archives of the W arburg Institute, letter of 25 December 1892 from Lamprecht to Warburg. Lamprecht termed the dissertation “excellent” (“vortrefflich”), declaring that W arburg’s study of proportions (“Proportionsuntersuchungen”) had made him “curious for m ore” (“sehr wissbegierig”). He indicated his overall acceptance of Warburg’s theses, noting in particular his agreement with W arburg’s interpretation

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of Primavera. Lamprecht then com m ented on W arburg’s treatm ent of the theme o f bodily m ovem ent (“kôrperliche Bewegtheit”) in relation to W inckelm ann’s interpretations. 50 Letter of 12 August 1895 from W arburg to Lamprecht. The end o f the letter is missing, but its content is confirm ed by Lamprecht’s reply (letter to W arburg of 14 August 1895), in which Lamprecht stated that he would supply W arburg with the names and addresses of American scholars in the coming weeks. 51 Letter o f 9 December 1905 from W arburg to Lamprecht. 52 C ompare Wuttke, “Aby M. Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” pp. 757-58. W arburg’s papers, collection of offprints and celebrated Notizkasten show that he closely followed not only the Methodenstreit, but also the discussions that led to the founding o f Lamprecht’s Institute for Cultural and Universal H istory at Leipzig in 1909 (see below). W arburg devoted Box 2 of his Notizkasten (Archives of the W arburg Institute, 1) to the subject o f “Geschichtsauffassung” (conceptions o f history); the box contains num erous subsections, including ones devoted to such topics as “Kulturgeschichte— Einzelne Zeitalter,” “Kulturgeschichtliche M ethode,” and “Lamprecht.” The index cards in the section labelled “Lamprecht” contain references to the historian’s writings as well as to various critical assessments o f his cultural historical m ethod. The latter date from the Methodenstreit as well as from the years following L am precht’s death in 1915; this event evidently prom pted fu rther evaluations of the significance of Lam precht’s career and his Leipzig Institute. 53 It is understandable, in the case of W arburg and the other art history students, that their increasing scholarly m aturity and experience (and the events of the Methodenstreit) would have encouraged them to adopt a m ore critical stance visà-vis certain elements of Lam precht’s thought over the years. Wuttke, “Aby M. Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” pp. 757-58, has concluded from two letters w ritten by W arburg in 1915 (in which he stated that Lamprecht had become “degenerate”) that W arburg always had great reservations about Lamprecht and was therefore less influenced by Lamprecht than Burckhardt for the entirety of his career. As further support for this position (“Die trotz aller Reserve Burckhardt entgegengebrachte Achtung konnte Karl Lamprecht im Leben W arburgs nie gewinnen, im Gegenteil,” p. 757), Wuttke notes that W arburg m entioned Lamprecht in the curriculum vitae he presented for his doctoral degree at the University o f Strasbourg (there W arburg credited Lam precht w ith introducing him to the study o f history), but not thereafter in his scholarship and autobiographical writings. In my judgm ent, W uttke’s argum ent does not take account of the broader contexts. First o f all, we cannot derive W arburg’s opinion o f Lamprecht during his years of intellectual form ation from his descriptions o f the historian in 1915; by that time, the em otional strains of the Methodenstreit had taken their toll on Lamprecht and

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

his judgm ent and behaviour displayed increasingly irrational elements. Moreover, Lamprecht’s public endorsement o f the military and political objectives o f the imperial government in 1914 (i.e., that Germany’s sacred mission of expanding civilization justified the war effort) dissolved any sympathy he and his work still had in intellectual circles in Germany and elsewhere. Indeed not just Warburg, b u t many other prom inent intellectuals, including the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935), who had supported Lamprecht’s cause from the early 1880s onwards, altered their attitudes towards the historian at this time. For Pirenne’s reassessment o f Lamprecht (with extended references), see Bryce Lyon, “H enri Pirenne’s Réflexions d'un solitaire and his Re-evaluation of History,” Journal o f Medieval History 23 (1997), pp. 285-99. The notion that Lamprecht’s influence on young W arburg was m inim al because W arburg did not make specific reference to him in later years is misleading; W arburg’s comrades Vôge and Clemen also did n ot tend to cite Lamprecht in their later publications, especially during the Methodenstreit. Owing to the gradual discrediting o f Lamprecht, there may even have been certain professional risks involved in endorsing his work within art historical publications (see Brush, The Shaping o f A rt History, pp. 127-28, for related com ments). Furtherm ore, W arburg’s scholarship focused on the Italian Renaissance, an area that would not have caused him to refer to Lamprecht. As argued here, archival materials from the late 1880s and later indicate that Lam precht exerted considerable influence on these three young m en during their period of study in Bonn; it appears that they absorbed their professor’s teachings in diverse (and n o t always clearly docum entable) ways into their thought. It is also im portant to point out that these m en were already aware of some o f the shortcomings of Lamprecht’s work (for example, mechanical errors) during their student years. See Brush, “The Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht,” p. 162 n. 82, for criticisms concerning the historian’s w ork voiced by Vôge to Clemen in 1889. 54 The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence also provided stim ulus for the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, which now forms the nucleus o f the Warburg Institute at the University o f London. For a discussion of Lamprecht’s Institute and its influence on W arburg’s research library, see Dieter Wuttke, “Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek W arburg und die Anfange des Universitàtsfaches Kunstgeschichte in Grofibritannien,” Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, Schriften des Warburg-Archivs im Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminar der Universitàt Hamburg, 1, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: VCH, Acta H umaniora, 1991), pp. 141-63, esp. 145-49; this article has been reprinted with bibliographical additions in Wuttke, Dazwischen (as in note 1), pp. 695-720. My citations follow the 1996 reprint.

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55 Wuttke, “Aby M. Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” p. 759. W arburg also described his library as an Institut fü r Ausdruckskunde, which might be inadequately tran slated into English as “Institute for the Knowledge (or Study) of Expression.” 56 The close friendship between W arburg and Doren began during the 1890s when b oth were conducting research in the Florentine archives (W arburg travelled repeatedly to Florence in the 1890s and spent the large part o f the years 1898-1902 in that city; Doren was also in Florence for lengthy stays from 1894 onwards). Doren dedicated his book Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1 (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1901) to W arburg (“Dr. Aby W arburg in Florenz, dem treuen Genossen meiner Florentiner Studien in alter Freundschaft”) and also thanked his colleague in the in tro du ction to his Habilitationsschrift, or post-doctoral thesis, Deutsche Handwerker und Handwerkerbruderschaften im mittelalterlichen Italien (Berlin: R.L Prager, 1903). In 1903 Doren was appointed to a post in history at the University o f Leipzig; he was prom oted to extraordinary professor ( ausserordentlicher Professor) in 1909 and taught in Lam precht’s Institute for C ultural and Universal History. Lamprecht and Doren had a great deal in com mon; both men, for example, had been supported by the influential economic historian Gustav Schmoller (1838-1917) during the early years of their careers, and they also published simultaneously in the fields o f history and art history [see, for example, D oren’s “Zum Bau der Florentiner Domkuppel,” Repertorium fü r Kunstwissenschaft 21 (1898), pp. 249-62; 22 (1899), pp. 220-21, or his “Deutsche Kiinstler im mittelalterlichen Italien,” A tti del X congresso internazionale di storia delVarte in Roma. Vitalia e Varte straniera (Rome: Maglione and Strini, 1922), pp. 158-69; as W arburg’s correspondence with D oren shows (see the following note), the latter article was instigated by Warburg, who had served as the unofficial head of the 1912 International Congress of the History o f Art in Rome]. Following the death of Lamprecht in 1915, D oren p u b lished an assessment of his colleague’s cultural historical program , in which he carefully weighed its structural and conceptual weaknesses against the value of Lam precht’s attem pt to broaden the conceptual param eters o f historical study [“Karl Lamprechts G eschichtstheorie un d die Kunstgeschichte,” Zeitschrift fü r Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11 (1916), pp. 353-89]. Like Warburg, D oren was Jewish, and thus in 1933 he was dismissed from the University of Leipzig. Owing to the larger political context, his death the following year was largely ignored in the G erm an historical periodicals; the only im portant notice appeared in Italy [Armando Sapori, “Alfredo Doren,” Archivio storico italiano, 7 ser., 22 (1934), pp. 333-46]. The fact that D oren and his work disappeared from the G erm an academic landscape after 1933 may help to explain why he has only been m entioned, rather than discussed, in studies of W arburg to

ABY WARBURG AND THE CULTURAL HISTORIAN KARL LAMPRECHT

date. Similarly, historians have only recently begun to assess the im portance of D oren’s research and teaching at Lam precht’s Leipzig Institute. See Gerald Diesener and Jaroslav Kudrna, “Alfred D oren— ein H istoriker am Institut für Kultur- u nd Universalgeschichte,” Karl Lamprecht weiterdenken. Universal- und Kulturgeschichte heute, Beitráge zur Universalgeschichte u nd vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, 3 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitàtsverlag, 1993), pp. 60-85. 57 W arburg’s correspondence in the Archives of the W arburg Institute, the inventory of which is currently in progress (see note 48 above), indicates that Doren helped to keep Warburg abreast o f Lamprecht’s projects. In a letter of 6 December 1906, for example, D oren told his friend that Lamprecht had asked him to write a volume on the Renaissance in a series that Lamprecht was editing on the history of the European states [in the end the book did not come to fruition]; he also discussed Lam precht’s project for a Seminar (i.e., Institute) of world history. O n 10 February 1910 he reported that he was enjoying his work in Lamprecht’s new Institute. Following L am precht’s death, D oren sent W arburg com m em orative publications and articles in which the historian’s work was assessed (29 October 1915; 12 O ctober 1918). D oren also kept in touch with Fritz Saxl, the director of W arburg’s library, during W arburg’s lengthy period of illness (1918-1924); Saxl’s assistant, G ertrud Bing, was sent to Leipzig to study the library o f the Institute of Cultural and Universal History (letter of 4 July 1923 to Saxl from Bing in Leipzig). 58 Alfred Doren, “Aby W arburg und sein Werk,” Archiv fü r Kulturgeschichte 21 (1931), p. 3 (“zu Karl Lamprecht tritt er in Bonn in àufierlich nur lockere, innerlich für seine weitere Entwicklung von der Kunst- zur Kulturgeschichte sehr bedeutsame Beziehungen. D enn von Anfang an war ihm Kunstgeschichte nicht Stil- und Formgeschichte an sich und dam it n ur Selbstzweck; die Probleme der Stilkritik und der ásthetischen W ertung traten ihm vôllig zurück gegenüber der anderen Auffassung, die in der Kunst einer Periode nur einen, w enn auch den sichtbarsten und greifbarsten A usdruck ihres innersten geistigen Wesens erkennen will und so das Kunstwerk symbolisch, nicht ásthetisch deutet”). G ombrich, Aby Warburg, p. 37, suggested some o f the ways in which Lamprecht m ight be considered as “W arburg’s real teacher.” 59 For example, Ulrich Raulff, “Parallel gelesen: Die Schriften von Aby W arburg und Marc Bloch zwischen 1914 und 1924,” Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990 (as in note 54), pp. 167-78; Bernd Roeck, “Psychohistorie im Zeichen Saturns. Aby W arburgs Denksystem und die m oderne Kulturgeschichte,” Kulturgeschichte Heute, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Sonderheft 16, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig and H ans-Ulrich Wehler (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996), p. 248; Wuttke, “Aby M. Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft,” p. 761. 60 The Belgian historian H enri Pirenne, who was a great adm irer (and defender) of Lamprecht’s approach from the early 1880s until the outbreak of the First World

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War (see above note 53), was an interm ediary between Lamprecht and the Annales school. For Lamprecht’s influence on Pirenne and through him on Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, see Bryce Lyon, “H enri Pirenne and the Origins o f Annales History,” Annals o f Scholarship: Metastudies o f the Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (1980), pp. 69-84, and Bryce and M ary Lyon, The Birth o f Annales History: The Letters o f Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921- 1935) (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, Comm ission Royale d ’Histoire, 1991). For further references, see also Steffen Sammler, “ ‘H istoire nouvelle’ un d deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft. Der Einfluss deutscher Historiker auf die H erausbildung der Geschichtskonzeption von Marc Bloch,” Karl Lamprecht weiterdenken (as in note 56), pp. 258-71.

making a reception for warburg: fritz saxl and warburg's book heidnisch— antike weissagung in w ort und bild zu luthers zeiten

dorothea mcewan introduction “n o w , t h a t t h e

new

book

h a s been

published, which is in many respects a synthesis o f the life’s work o f this man, I am doing my best to interest those, for whom it was written, in the problem raised in it.” 1 The synthesis is the book “ Heidnisch-antike Weissagungen in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten” which at long last was published in M ay 1921 in the volumes o f the Academy o f Science o f Heidelberg University.2 The writer, Fritz Saxl, was the Director o f the Warburg library in Hamburg in Warburg’s absence. Aby Warburg, who would spend the years from 1920 to 1924 in a sanatorium in Jena and then in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, had found in Saxl a devoted friend, collaborator and assistant. The addressee was the young philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who only some six months previously had visited the Warburg library for the first time3 and had become a friend o f Saxl. The letter was one of many written by Saxl with the aim o f arousing the interest o f Warburg’s friends and (9 3 }

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DOROTHEA MCEWAN

colleagues in this new publication: he hoped thereby to reach a wider reader­ ship for the book by persuading them to review it, whether in academic journals or daily papers. More than this, the response thus created would be a “comfort” to Warburg, “ who is only half alive and already half dead, ... to see that at least his work lives on.” 4 The help and support which Saxl gave to Warburg in these critically important years o f Warburg’s illness have often been mentioned.5 The story o f this help and support can be highlighted by an examination o f Saxl’s endeavors to spread the news o f this new work by his employer among the art-historical constituency o f Germany and abroad, among Warburg’s friends and family, colleagues and users o f his library, the general public and readers o f academic journals o f related disciplines. Saxe’s intention was that by informing the world that Warburg, despite his illness, had produced an eminently important piece o f research its reception would ultimately help Warburg and bring him back to his home and his work. The story o f Saxl’s concerted efforts is based on the correspondence in the archive of The Warburg Institute. Saxl, who as a young art historian met Aby Warburg in 1910, impressed Warburg with his enthusiasm for arthistorical problems, which, at this time, coincided with Warburg’s own research into the survival o f astrology as a vehicle o f belief systems derived from classical antiquity. A period o f close cooperation followed, only to be brutally interrupted by World War I. Fritz Saxl had to serve on the Italian front, which nevertheless gave him time to proofread, to read and to con­ tinue with his correspondence with Warburg.6 When, at the end o f the war, Warburg broke down and needed hospitalization, the family rallied round and ensured that the library would continue to exist by appointing Saxl assistant to Warburg and acting director o f the library. Saxl started as librar­ ian on April 1, 1920, replacing Wilhelm Printz, W arburg’s assistant since before World War I. Printz took up a university post at Frankfurt University, but both Printz and Saxl were asked by Μ. M. Warburg & Co, the family bank in Hamburg, to assist Warburg with seeing the Luther book through publication. Both would discharge their duty diligently and more— Saxl created a response with friends and colleagues which went far beyond that of previous publications o f Warburg’s.7

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

"the fateful question" What had started as a lecture in Hamburg in November 1917, expanded for the lecture in Berlin in April 1918 and further developed for an article in a learned journal, finished up as a book published by the Heidelberg Academy o f Sciences in May 1921. The long genesis o f the book mirrors the time and circumstances o f its creation, the political catastrophe o f World War I and Warburg’s drive to contribute to an understanding o f its underlying causes. In a letter to Friedrich von Bezold in Bonn in February 1918, Warburg wrote that it was important to assess Melanchthon’s understanding o f classical antiquity as this would “prepare the ground well to answer the fateful ques­ tion how Germanism and Romanism reacted to each other and further, how they will have to react in future.” 8 The reality o f wartime propaganda gave Warburg ample scope to explore the role played by prophecies and other pagan religious practices which the Christian church was supposed to have stamped out. Prophecies and belief in the predictability o f a person’s fate as mirrored by movements o f the stars were and still are means o f manipulation. A world in flux, the emergence of new ways o f looking at life, discoveries in science, and above all the brutal­ ities o f modern warfare: how did they impact on people’s beliefs? Warburg’s lifelong interest in “ the journey o f the m ind” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Northern and Southern Europe, and in the intellectual movements o f the Renaissance and the Reformation, drew him to an investigation into pagan superstitions juxtaposed to the power o f the individual. Living through a cruel war, that is, a time replete with prophecies, the ability to read portents and propaganda and the topic o f the heroic individual gripped his mind. His work of creating a “ war archive,” a collection o f newspaper cuttings to tell the truth o f the war after the war, led him to study political propaganda in Luther’s day, a time equally riven by strife and war as Warburg’s own.9

the lectures in Hamburg in 1917 and in Berlin in 1918 Warburg had planned to lecture on “ Superstition and the Perception of History at the End o f the Middle Ages” in the “ Kulturhistorische Institut” in

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Leipzig University, where his friends the art historians Alfred Doren and Walter Gotz were working, in March 1917. But this project came, to nothing for two reasons: Doren and Gotz had to join up and in the winter of 1917 lec­ tures had to be cancelled due to the acute fuel shortage. Warburg, who had started researching the topic, contacted Professor Franz Boll, the distinguised academic and author of books on belief in the stars, and requested information on constellations and dates of eclipses of the sun as he was trying to provide the evidence for his theory that illustrations accompanying the signs of the zodiac went back to a family of twelve gods in Western Asia.10 Warburg wanted to show an instance of survival of classical astrology among Luther’s contemporaries which went so far as to change Luther’s date of birth from 10th November 1483 to 22nd October 1484— an example of ret­ rospective prophecy and the power of belief in stars. After his lecture in Leipzig was cancelled, Warburg decided to present his research in Hamburg and his many letters to friends and colleagues give us an insight into his working method, his ideas, concerns, convictions. Through the correspondence in preparation for his lecture, we know whom he contacted and trusted. Thus, a study of these letters, which furnishes us with the background to and genesis of the wartime lectures in Hamburg and Berlin, also contributes to an understanding of Warburg’s book on Luther published three years later. We first read of Warburg’s research into the topic when he thanked Carl F. Meinhof of the Kolonialinstitut in Hamburg for his observation, that Luther’s beliefs should be positioned halfway between practical magic and abstract symbolism.11 Warburg announced to Boll that he has found “ some­ thing interesting” in connection with his Luther research;12 and with Hermann Joachim of the Hamburg State Archive, to whom he wrote that he used the word “ Reformation” in a context wider than just the Lutheran movement, because he understood by that word a transformation having originated from both Christian and non-Christian churches.13 In a letter to Ernst Schwedeler-Meyer, his friend from student days in Strasbourg and director of the Arts and Crafts Museum in Liberec (Reichenberg), Warburg explained that he was researching the relationship between Lutherism and classical cosmological beliefs,14 and he approached Paul Flemming in Pforta with detailed questions on Johann Lichtenberger, Melanchthon and Luther, and the relationship between German Reformation theology and supersti-

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

tion in classical antiquity based on cosmology.15 Hubert Stierling o f the Altona Museum offered a photograph o f a satirical illustration by Peter Vischer the Younger for Warburg’s lecture on Luther and prophecies;16 Warburg requested from Karl Schaefer of the Museum o f Arts and Crafts in Liibeck information on a Reformation woodcut in the collection o f the M useum;17 and he discussed Luther’s view o f the date o f birth o f Christ with Ernst Kroker o f the City Library in Leipzig.18 But already before his lecture in the Verein für hamburgische Geschichte in Hamburg, on 12th November 1917, Warburg had started to explore various publication avenues. He wrote to Karl Singer o f the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin, asking whether it would be possible to publish an article on Luther and cosmological superstition o f his time as a supplement to the Vossische

Zeitung}9 Immediately after Warburg’s Luther lecture in Hamburg, Arthur Obst o f the Verein für hamburgische Geschichte requested from him a short sum m ary for publication in the Zeitschrift des Vereins fü r hamburgische

Geschichte.20 Warburg, however, was not interested in a short note except to announce that the lecture would be published in full in a future volume.21 The next day he approached his friend Hans Nirrnheim, who worked in the Hamburg State Archive, to explore further the possibility o f publishing his lecture in full in the Zeitschrift.22 He lost no time in reporting on his lecture to Wilhelm Printz23 and to Anna Warburg, his cousin in Stockholm. He owed Luther a great debt, he wrote, for his protest against Jewish orthodoxy which wanted to enslave him with its “ silly notion” o f sanctification through works. Warburg valued Luther’s fearlessness.24 Alfred “Alfresco” Doren was sent a copy o f a newspaper cutting25 o f his lecture;26 so too were Ernst SchwedelerMeyer27 and finally Fritz Saxl, at that time in Hungary, to whom Warburg wrote that his lecture on Luther was his “ most mature academic achievement”.28 Warburg now offered to repeat his lecture in Berlin as guest o f the Religionswissenschaftliche Vereinigung in the spring o f 1918.29 His proposal was accepted,30 and he continued with his research, writing to ask Paul Kehr, formerly o f the Prussian Historical Institute in Rome but since the outbreak o f war employed in the City Archive in Berlin, whether there were letters by Johannes Carion in the City Archive.31 He also asked Rudolf Hoecker, o f the Royal Library in Berlin, for literature on the prophecy that Luther would be

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burnt at the stake.32 Ernst Schwedeler-Meyer drew his attention to H om ers writings on planets33 and the classicist and orientalist Franz Dornseiff sup­ plied him with bibliography on Luther and popular superstition.34 Warburg turned again to Rudolf Hoecker; he asked him to check a letter by Luther, offered for sale by the rare book dealer Carl Ernst Henrici,35 and explained to Paul Flemming his lifelong research on the influence of the classical tradi­ tion: Rousseau and Winckelmann had touched on the intellectual enlighten­ ment, but not on the “demonic” influences, he wrote; these, however, were present when astrology was invested with historical power, and one example was the falsification o f Luther’s date o f birth, “ the collision o f a Christian mythical and a Hellenistic scientific world view”.36 He invited Gustav Hellmann, director o f the Meteorological Institute in Berlin, to his lecture, and requested permission for Rudolf Hoecker to look through Hellmann s works on comets;37 he invited the archivist Hermann Krabbo, and requested his assistance with locating Carion papers.38 After the lecture on April 23, 1918, Warburg continued his extensive correspon­ dence on this topic. Georg Stuhlfauth, curator o f Christian antiquities in Berlin, requested replies to four questions arising out o f his lecture,39 equally Warburg requested help from art historian Paul Clemen in Bonn on a woodcut o f 1522, printed in Zwickau by Wolfgang Stôckel.40 Clemen thanked him for his report on the lecture and forwarded the photograph requested.41 Warburg also asked the assistance o f the Germanist in Kiel, Eugen Wolff, to document the 16th-century belief that Luther’s birth was the birth o f a prophet, forecast by constellations o f the stars;42 Wolff confirmed Warburg’s hypothesis that Luther’s date o f birth had been revised by protagonists of this belief to coincide with that of the Great Conjunction. In order to verify it Warburg should contact the planetarium in Pulkowa near Petersburg, as the “ Juditium Astronomicum” by Johannes Copus was kept there 43 Three days later Warburg replied that he had written to Pulkowa— something he could not have done had the war in the East still continued.44

efforts to publicize the lectures At the same time, Warburg was again engaged on the question o f seeing the lecture in print. He discussed this in a letter to the classicist and historian o f

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

religion Ernst Samter, in Berlin, stressing that he wanted to expand the text and add many illustrations for a publication. This was necessary as Warburg was convinced that without an investigation into beliefs in monsters, the role o f horror stories vilifying the enemy in wartimes was incomprehensible.45 But before the full text was published, Paul Hildebrandt, the classicist, had published an article about it in the Vossische Zeitung on June 18,19 18: “ Im Zeichen des Saturn. Aberglaube im Zeitalter der Reformation” (In the Sign o f Saturn. Superstition in the Age o f the Reformation). Warburg thanked Professor Paul and Else Hildebrandt for their “report” on his Luther lecture. The article would assist him greatly when he had to write to librarians with detailed questions relating to his further research.46 Warburg purchased some 200 copies o f this article and forwarded them to friends and colleagues within the space o f a few weeks.47 He had received dozens o f letters o f acknowledgement and appreciation, from amongst others Hubert Stierling in Altona,48 Moritz Fiirst in Hamburg,49 his GP Dr. Heinrich Embden in Hamburg,50 Paul Schuster in Berlin,51 Wilhelm Printz “ in the field”,52 Carl Melchior in Hamburg,53 Erich Brandenburg in Leipzig,54 Robert Davidsohn in Munich,55 the (unnamed) director o f the University Library in Erlangen,56 P. J. Meier in Braunschweig,57 Carl Albrecht in Berlin,58 J. A. F. Orbaan in Chateau d’Oex in Switzerland,59 Kurt Karl Eberlein in Baden Baden,60 Conrad August Johann Carl Borchling in Hamburg,61 Paulus Ruben in Hamburg,62 Lichtwitz in Altona,63 Ernst Kroker in Leizig,64 Robert Kautzsch in Frankfurt am Main65 and Albert Kôster in Leipzig.66 All this correspondence, however, turned around the “ report” by Paul Hildebrandt and still not around the whole text o f the lecture. In July, Warburg had written to Professor Alfred Vierkandt in Berlin, enquiring about the cost o f printing the whole text in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung.67 But Vierkandt did not reply, so on 11 September Warburg turned to Ernst Samter in Berlin, proposing to co-finance the publication by paying for the printing o f illustrations.68 By September 27, the arrangements were com ­ plete and Warburg wrote to Richard Bôhme o f the Deutsche Literaturzeitung formally confirming that the entire Luther article would be published in the journal, that he and the Religionswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft would supply the photographic plates for the illustrations free o f charge, and that he requested 250 offprints.69

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The publication date had been set for November 10, 1918 as Warburg mentioned to Franz Boll in a letter o f 21 October.70 In a second letter to Boll he provided a sum m ary o f his research on “ Luthers second astrological birthday” and on the tension between creating space for thought, i.e. logic, and destroying space for thought, i.e. magic.71 But by this time such a publi­ cation date had become— even in Warburg’s own understanding— increas­ ingly unlikely.

from article to book By the winter o f 1918-1919 the whole project o f publishing the lecture had come to a standstill. Warburg, severely depressed and agitated, was admitted to a treatment centre where he stayed for months. There was no hope any longer o f publishing the article in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung. But there were moves to publish it in the series of the Heidelberg Academy o f Science. Warburg formally agreed to a proposal, sent to him via Carl Bezold, orientalist in Heidelberg, that the Luther article would be printed as a separate volume in the Sitzungsberichte and that additional costs would be borne by the author.72 In January 1920, Warburg informed Franz Boll that Fritz Saxl would take over the running o f the library from April 1920, as Wilhelm Printz had been offered a university post in Frankfurt am Main. Saxl would therefore assist Warburg with the publication o f the Luther book. He forwarded detailed instructions on publishing the text and on the printing o f illustrations, despite the fact that by this time he was severely ill.73 Saxl lost no time; in his first week in post he took up the correspondence with Boll, supplying information on illustrations;74 in his second week he informed Boll that Warburg s health had deteriorated and that he was pre­ pared to pay for the entire printing costs, not just the printing o f the illustra­ tions, if this would speed up the process.75 Three months later, in July, Saxl required a progress report on the print­ ing o f plates from Carl Winters, the university publishers in Heidelberg.76 In August Warburg him self wrote to Boll enquiring about the progress. He asked him whether he would agree that even “ in Wittenberg, where Christian paganism as practised in Rome was passionately opposed, the Babylonian-Hellenistic astrologer and the Roman augur had gained admis-

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

sion and strangely limited approval?.” 77 Warburg found the publishers Carl Winter very slow. The following month he wrote twice to Boll, asking him to come to Hamburg for a few days to work with him, as he had to be admitted to another treatment centre shortly. Neither he nor Saxl, he wrote, could finish the article without Boll. They needed Boll’s “competent astrological view,” as Saxl wrote, in one very important aspect: “ the link o f Luther’s nativity by Gauricus to the prophecy by Lichtenberger. Does Gauricus go back directly to Lichtenberger?.” Saxl enclosed the copy o f the Gauricus nativity, showing “ Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Sol all (in the ninth house) together with Scorpion, Mars in the second house in Aries” and the Lichtenberger text and raised the question o f the position o f Mars: “ He is in a ruling house. Can this be Aries? But above all, can Mars be ruler of this conjunction without even standing in a conjunction with Jupiter and Saturn or to be on the ascendant (he is in the second house!)? The answer to these questions is important for the whole history of the trajectory of astrological ideas”.78 Warburg offered Boll hospitality in Mrs. Schramm’s house and offered to reimburse him for travel expenses.79 However, these feverish letters in the last few days before his departure to the sanatorium in Jena did not have the required effect. It was left to Saxl to prepare the manuscript for publica­ tion. In a letter to Warburg’s brother Paul, in New York, Saxl confirmed that work on the Luther book was progressing and expressed his hope that the book would be met with the high regard which was its due.80 By way o f sig­ nalling to Warburg that his work was very much appreciated, he wrote to him that his son, M ax Adolph, was reading the Luther manuscript and that Ernst Cassirer had visited the library for the first time.81 At the same time, Saxl was in close contact with the publishers in Heidelberg, admonishing them at W arburg’s request, to pay more attention to the quality o f the reproductions.82 At the end o f February 1921, Saxl returned the main part o f the index o f Warburg’s book and hoped to receive Warburg’s permission to print in the next few days— Saxl had to forward proofs and corrections after corrections to Warburg in Jena and Kreuzlingen.83 A month earlier, Warburg had already forwarded a list o f names o f people who were to receive complimentary copies o f his book— he clearly found it very difficult to wait.84

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Saxl had objected to Warburg’s request for mentioning Erwin Panofsky’s help with thanks in the introduction to the book, as Panofsky had not con­ tributed extensively to the research.85 Warburg, however, advised that the acknowledgement should remain86 and so the final preparations for printing were cleared. “At last!” wrote Saxl to Boll, informing him that Warburg hacl· passed the last set o f proofs for press.87 At the end o f March Saxl sent page proofs to Andrea Moschetti o f the Museo Civico in Padua, making clear that he would be very pleased if Moschetti would review the book in the periodical Arte.ss This was the first o f many letters with the same request. When Saxl was able to report to Warburg that the book had been printed, he asked him for a final list o f names of people who should be sent a copy,89 no doubt with the intention o f asking them the same question. In his letter to Robert C. Witt in London, he hoped that the “extraordinary” insights in the book, based on solid scholar­ ship, would be o f some interest to him.90 At this time numerous letters from Warburg, Saxl and Printz mentioned names o f people, who have been or ought to be sent copies o f the book, sometimes following recommendations from other scholars. Printz, for example, suggested that Saxl add the names o f theologians and church historians to the list o f people who should be sent a copy.91 Warburg reminded Saxl to forward a copy to the Fremdenblatt in Hamburg and told o f his joy on receiving a very complimentary letter from Heinz Sieveking in Zurich.92 Sieveking was enthusiastic about the book: “A whole life is in it! What a journey from the monstrous pig o f the Assyrian to Dürer! And how large Luther stands again in front o f us.” 93 The letters o f thanks started to come in. Carl Georg Heise asked Saxl whether he ought to thank Warburg directly;94 Paul Flemming thanked Warburg for a copy with a kind dedication;95 Gustav Pauli sent a letter o f thanks to Saxl and promised to write “ to my friend” in greater detail;96 Rudolf Tschudi apologized for not having thanked him earlier as he wanted to have time for studying it in detail.97 Saxl forwarded a copy to Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin, remarking that the publication o f the book seemed to have improved Warburg’s situation, and: “ I would have high hopes if the book found approval with others.” He also invited Goldschmidt to give a lecture in the library in the winter and stressed that the lectures together with the publication o f the book might provide the necessary incentive for

MAKING A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

Warburg “to return to life.”98 Professor Werner Weisbach suggested to Saxl that he send a copy to Professor Eduard Wechfiler in Berlin. In a covering letter Saxl explained that the focus of the book was the survival of “nonW inckelm ann-ist” classical antiquity, the journey of images on the route from Athens to Bagdad and Spain and the em inent im portance of South West Europe for the tradition of cukure mediated by the Moors.99

making a reception for the book As Saxl sent out a num ber of books on behalf of Warburg, many letters of appreciation were sent to him rather than to the author. Erwin Panofsky expressed his thanks and m entioned that Professor Eugen Wolff had spoken enthusiastically about the work;100 Professor Julius von Schlosser in Vienna wrote that “W arburg’s book interests me as does everything he writes”.101 But Saxl had gone one step further than simply sending out books on behalf of his employer. He entered into or followed up a correspondence with requests for reviews. The first such after the publication of the book was his letter to Ernst Cassirer, quoted at the beginning of this article. As this letter demonstrates Saxl’s care and concern for Warburg, I wish to quote it in full: “Dear Professor, The other day I neglected to ask you about something which is dear to me. You m ight know that it is the destiny of W arburg’s books to be only highly esteemed, but rarely read, let alone consulted. The reason for this would not be difficult to establish, but this is not what I want to write about. Now that the new book, which is in many respects a synthesis of the life’s work of this man, has been published, I am doing my best to interest those for whom it was written in the problem raised in it. I very m uch want to ask you whether it would be possible for you to publish a short note on the treatise from the standpoint of the philosopher, in Logos or a similar journal. For Warburg, who is only half alive and already half dead, it would be a comfort to see that at least his work lives on. Please forgive this imposition”.102 This request to write a review was followed by many more. Wilhelm Waetzoldt, W arburg’s trusted former library assistant, declared by return of post that he could not write a review for some time as he was busy.103 Saxl

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had no truck with such a reply. He took him up immediately, told him how “ sad” (“ traurig” ) he was, because Waetzoldt, as the former librarian, who still commanded W arburgs esteem, could have written something personal and something showing more intensive understanding than could be expected from a journalist o f the Frankfurter Zeitung.104 Waetzoldt relented, and wrote a note for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Saxl thanked him effusively, stressing that Warburg would be extraordinarily happy with it: “You see, with the logical half Warburg has remained his old self, infinitely grateful if somebody can use and value what he wrested from him self”.105 Meanwhile Saxl wrote to Warburg that he was very happy that Waetzoldt had written a short review, “ because the man is so incredibly busy in his post, but he is so indebted to you that he made time to write a note during the night”.106 Saxl forwarded five copies to the Protestant theologian and editor o f the

Zeitschrift fiir Kirchengeschichte Leopold Zscharnack in Berlin, and asked him to hand one to Karl Holl, as a review by Holl would be very welcome.107 He sent five copies to Rudolf Hoecker in Berlin and asked him to write a review for the Münchener Neueste,>telling him that Waetzoldt would publish something in the Frankfurter Zeitung and Rudolf Bernoulli in the Berliner

Tageblatt. If Hoecker could think o f other important papers, he urged him to approach them him self and just drop him a line.108 Two days later he returned Bernoulli’s draft with his corrections and urged him: “ Please try everything to get the stuff accepted by the ‘Tage-Blatt’ [sic], and published in the not-too-distant future.” Should there be any difficulties, he advised Bernoulli to contact Hoecker, who “ then has to wangle the matter via his Press Service.” 109 Rudolf Bernoulli ran into the same problem which M einhof was later on to encounter: his draft review was too long when he submitted it to the Berliner Tageblatt. He therefore shortened it and submit­ ted it again to Saxl, suggesting the longer version might be published in Die

Psychischen Studien .110 Saxl agreed to both suggestions.111 He sent a copy to Walther Kohler in Zurich with the request to review it,112 and one each to Bernhard Schmeidler in Leipzig and Hermann Gunkel in Halle, with identical wording, “ perhaps it would even be possible for you to review it in a suitable journal so that its extraordinary material is brought to the attention also o f those circles o f the research community so far still uninterested in it.” 113

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

Percy Schramm, a young friend of Warburg’s, in the middle o f his final exams at university, was pressganged to write a review and to get Otto Westphal to write one too.114 Aby Warburg’s wife, Mary, informed Saxl that Peter Petersen was willing to write a review in the Fremdenblatt in July.115 But as Warburg’s brother Fritz had told Saxl that the Fremdenblatt had already promised to publish a review, he wrote to Petersen asking him to find another journal, “ something more pedagogical,” in which to place a review.116 The book was four years in the making but once published Warburg was very keen to receive many responses, be they letters or reviews. M ary Warburg repeated to Saxl that Warburg was waiting impatiently for letters in response to his book,117 but Saxl had already been doing his best to encour­ age friends to respond and to review. It was hard work, as he wrote to a number o f scholars trying to fit the book by Warburg into their specific fields o f research, to give them a reason why they should want to write a review. In his letter to Oskar Maurus Fontana he explained that Warburg’s research, which “ at first glance must appear very alien to you,” was a discus­ sion o f magic and logic— logic created a space for itself in astronomy and magic destroyed this space by conceding that stars influenced human life.118 Saxl suggested to Georg Stuhlfauth in Berlin that he review the book in the Zeitschrift fü r Bûcherfreunde119 and Stuhlfauth duly asked the editor, Georg Witkowski in Leipzig, who agreed only to publish a short note. Stuhlfauth found this “ a pity” as he would have liked to write a detailed appraisal.120 This was not good enough for Saxl: “ it would be really a shame if your note on Warburg’s book could not be published in extenso, as it would be beneficial to all scholars.” He therefore suggested that it be sent to Karl Koetschau, the editor o f the Repertorium fü r Kunstwissenschaft in Düsseldorf, who would surely publish anything which came from Stuhlfauth.121 Stuhlfauth agreed and promised to write a review for the

Repertorium , though he thought that “ in any case” a short note should be published in the Zeitschrift fü r Bücherfreunde and offered to write one at a later time.122 Two weeks later, Saxl forwarded a copy o f the book to Karl Koetschau and asked him whether he would publish a review by Stuhlfauth in the

Repertorium. The next day, Koetschau replied in the affirmative.123

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To Marc Rosenberg in Karlsruhe Saxl wrote that he should thank Warburg for the copy o f the book and promise him to react to it in greater detail at a later date: “ For he is excitedly waiting for comments on his work.” 124 To Paul Flemming Saxl repeated that Warburg would be very happy if he could write a review. Fie would not need to summarize the astro­ logical contents, as Warburg used the astrological material only to explain the psychology o f people in the Reformation. Saxl would be happy to receive Flemming’s draft; he would then take it upon himself to find a journal in which to publish it.125 Saxl’s approaches and requests for reviews were tailor-made in order to suit the particular research interests o f the addressee. From daily newspapers to academic journals in theology, literary criticism and art history, from local Hamburg papers to papers abroad, Saxl did not leave a stone unturned to have the book reviewed, or at the very least to have people send their appreci­ ation of the book to Warburg. But then as now, the problem was one o f time: before reviews appeared in print months and sometimes even years went by. Saxl rightly believed that a large correspondence would cheer Warburg up and that a large number o f reviews would lift him out o f his depression. The whole summer o f 1921 was given over to encouraging friends and colleagues to react in writing to the work. O f the dozens o f letters Saxl wrote from the middle o f May to October 1921, nearly all contained mentions o f the Luther book and requests for reviews. Although he had arrived in Hamburg only in 1920, by the summer o f 1921 Saxl was already very well known in academic circles as Warburg’s assistant and director o f the library. Saxl’s Viennese contacts paid o ff as well. He sent a copy to Hans Tietze in Vienna, stressing that the book was not easily readable and “ at first glance, its importance is difficult to appraise, because the material which he used and his way o f thinking are very far removed from those o f the art historian”. It was painful to Warburg that he was no longer able to involve himself in aca­ demic work: except for checking the proofs o f his book, he had had no further opportunity to produce a scholarly work. He would therefore be immensely happy to see that his work was o f benefit to others: this above all, might one day lead him back to his own research.126 Tietze found the book “ extraordinarily interesting” and immediately agreed to review it in two journals, in Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt and Graphische KiXnste}27

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

Saxl used a variety o f methods to achieve results which were based on critical comments and not flattery.128 He wrote polite letters to solicit reviews, and he used emotional blackmail, by stressing that Warburg had not heard for a long time from a particular colleague (for example Otto Franke) and that he was very keen to have his reaction.129 To some people he made requests for short notes in a newspaper (for example Paul Hiibner o f the Prussian M inistry o f Finance, an erstwhile employee in the Warburg library) with heavy hints that other scholars (in his case “ former librarians” like W. Waetzoldt) were writing reviews.130 In the cases o f colleagues with whom Warburg had corresponded on the Luther topic, Saxl asked them to write scholarly articles from their particular angle, for example Karl Ludwig Schmidt o f Giefien University who hoped to publish something in the

Theologische Blatter.131 He approached scholars for review articles, he approached editors with the request to publish reviews which were already written and above all, he had to keep Warburg informed o f who was writing in which journal. In a five page letter he mentioned how disappointed he was in Hoecker as he had promised to write a review but had not done so, that Rudolf Bernoulli had published a review in the Berliner Tageblatt and a note in Psychische Studien and that Robert Eisler wanted to review it in the English journal The Quest.132 Saxl responded to requests by colleagues to send a copy o f the book to other colleagues, something which Saxl always took up with the by now familiar request, for example to Otto Eififeldt in Berlin on Karl Ludwig Schmidt’s request, helpfully suggesting the Preufiische

Jahrbiicher as a suitable publication.133 Wilhelm Printz, who was still working in the library during university holidays, urged Robert Kautzsch to send a letter to Warburg with an appraisal of his book. He mentioned that Saxl had asked many colleagues to write reviews. The echo Warburg had received so far and the appointment as Honorary Professor o f Hamburg University— Saxl sent him the good news on 9.8.1921— had made him very happy.134 As late as October 1921 the requests were still going out; Saxl asked Paul Tillich in Berlin135 and offers o f reviews came in; in February 1922, Franz Kampers in Breslau/Wroclaw informed Saxl that he had written a review as he found the book a most valuable contribution to his fields o f research.136 Saxl acknowledged this letter: “ Thank you very much for your kind letter, which I forwarded to

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Professor Warburg right away; he is very ill and will be very happy indeed to receive praise from you.” 137

private comments The private comments emerging from the correspondence offer insights o f a different kind. Julius Derenberg, Aby W arburgs brother-in-law, found the book very interesting, a service to scholarship, a new way o f seeing “ men o f action” and “ men o f art.” However, he found the review in the Vossische

Zeitung well intentioned, but “dull and colourless.” 138 His brother M ax wrote that it was a great pleasure to read words o f appreciation on the Luther book “ everywhere.” He averred that Aby, the scholar, was more suc­ cessful than Max, the banker.139 Saxl forwarded Waetzoldt’s review in the

Frankfurter Zeitung — which M ax Warburg was probably alluding to— to another brother, Fritz Warburg, praising Waetzoldt’s devotion “ to our library.” 140 Saxl himself wrote to Waetzoldt and told him that Warburg had been very pleased with his review. He also informed him that Warburg had been appointed Honorary Professor o f Hamburg University, “ in gratitude for his support in establishing the university”. Whilst this appointment was a rather “ unimportant” matter, it was important as it made Warburg happy for a day - he was “ for a moment reconciled with life.” 141 Warburg was pleased that reactions to his book “ flowed surprisingly strong.” He found Cassirer’s letter very “ interesting” and asked Saxl to tell him that he was waiting excitedly for Cassirer’s book on symbolism. He also enjoyed Tietze’s, W itkowski’s and Stuhlfauth’s letters and heard that Schmeidler and Gunkel wanted to write reviews. He wondered why Saxl had asked them as there were “enough other” art historians and Reformation his­ torians. He was agitated that his brother M ax has not reacted so far, G. Thilenius and O. J. Franke likewise.142 In many letters Warburg expressed his total satisfaction with Saxl’s work, how well he carried on the work in the library etc. What is almost impossible to assess is whether he really understood how much work it meant for Saxl to send out the books, to enclose individual letters, to follow them up with requests for reviews, to enter into correspondence with editors o f news­ papers and journals, to send reminders to authors and editors. Sometimes

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

Saxl had to write again to those he had approached initially with a review request, saying that he had heard from third parties, that a review had been published but he had not received a copy yet, e.g. to Rudolf Hoecker in Berlin, whose review was published in the Münchener Neueste.U3 There was one comment which was not favorable. It came from Ludwig Rudolph in Osterode, who disagreed with the main direction o f Warburg’s thoughts, as reported in Paul Hildebrandt’s review under the title “ Die Weisheit der Sterne.” 144 In his letter to Warburg he confessed that he had not yet read the book, but understood from the review that Warburg saw “ astrology as nothing else but the totally unsuccessful attempt for creating an attitude to life.” He conceded that Warburg could probably deduce such a view from sources available to him but he wanted to point to facts which can only be ascertained by practice: “ He who thinks that astrology preaches fatalism, errs. It will supply practical wisdom to him who understands it well. I am prepared to prove this at any time.” 145 He hoped for a reply, but there is no mention o f him later on. Heinz Sieveking forwarded his review in the Neue ZiXrcher Zeitung and thanked Warburg for a book by Franz Boll with a personal dedication by Warburg.146 Saxl thanked Hans Tietze for his announcement o f Warburg’s book in the Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fü r Vervielfâltigende Kunst, which he forwarded to Warburg right away: “ I am sure that such an announcement will please him despite and precisely because o f his desperate mood.” 147 As the months wore on, the reviews no longer “ flowed.” Warburg inquired why Paul Tillich had not written a review,148 Saxl inquired whether Leopold Zscharnack had published a review149 and Saxl reminded Paul Hinneberg that Professor Dibelius had promised a review in the Deutsche

Literaturzeitung. “ May I ask whether it will be published soon? Professor Warburg, whose condition has unfortunately not improved, has asked me about it.” 150 Saxl also engaged in a discussion o f the Luther book with various schol­ ars. He agreed with Kurt Rathe in Vienna that the Madonna o f the Ear o f Corn derived from astrology and encouraged him to send his article to Warburg.151 He informed Warburg that Rathe had referred to his book in his book on the Madonna o f the Ear o f C orn.152 In another instance, Saxl commented on and corrected a draft o f a review by Carl Fr. Meinhof,

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professor for African languages at Hamburg University. M einhof’s main crit­ icism turned on Warburg’s description o f Babylon as the cradle o f astrology. Whilst this was surely the case for the classical world, it was not the case for the other continents, as exemplified by the system o f astrology in Mexico. Saxl retorted that Warburg had not researched Babylonian astrology as such, he had only been interested in the “Wanderung,” the journey o f oriental astrology, o f the processes o f being adapted to and adopted by new circum­ stances encountered. Whether or not Luther believed in astrology and div­ ination was “ very difficult” to ascertain. “ In order to characterize Luther fully, one would really have to say that it was not simply that he did not believe in all these things.” 153 Once, we read o f a request to be released from the promise to write a review. Saxl was asked by Professor Karl Ludwig Schmidt in Berlin to send Otto Hermann Eififeldt, professor o f Old Testament Studies in Berlin, a copy o f W arburg’s book and to ask him to review it in the “ Preufiische Jahrbiicher” in July 1921. Whilst he thanked him for the book, he had not time to write a review. He quoted first holidays, then the aftermath o f inten­ sive work on publications o f his own, then his appointment in Jena University as reasons why he was unable to write an appreciation o f W arburg’s research and form ally requested Saxl to release him from the moral duty laid on him .154 Undaunted, Saxl kept up his work on both fronts, on his correspondence with Warburg and on his correspondence with colleagues near and far. A note on the Luther book had appeared in the Hamburg Fremdenblatt, written by A. Malte Wagner, which Saxl called “certainly bad, but not as bad as it might have been.” Zscharnack’s review he found “ meagre.” 155 Warburg requested to see these reviews as he took a lively interest not only in the reception o f his book, but in every aspect o f Saxl’s work for the library.156 To place the Carl Fr. M einhof review in a journal proved quite a difficult task for Saxl. M einhof forwarded it adding that Saxl should send it to “ any” newspaper since the Hamburg Fremdenblatt had published a review by Malte Wagner.157 Saxl therefore discussed with M ax Warburg whether to approach the Hamburg Correspondent and suggested that it would be better to send it to the Berliner Tageblatt which had not reviewed the book so far.158 Three days earlier Saxl had sent the review to Fritz Warburg, asking him to forward it to the Hamburg Correspondent.159 M ax W arburg for his part wanted it

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

published in the Hamburg Fremdenblatt and not in the Hamburg

Correspondent.160 However, in the meantime, M ax Warburg was sent a reply from the Berliner Tageblatt. The editors had agreed to publish an short note, but not more than ten lines o f print. Max Warburg thought that the book by his brother merited more than ten lines and asked Saxl whether he should forward the review to the Hamburg Correspondent ,161 This letter crossed with one to him from Saxl: Mr. Engel o f the Berliner Tageblatt wished to print a review o f forty lines o f print, not just ten lines and recommended to Saxl that M einhof abbreviated his review accordingly.162 M ax Warburg agreed163 and it was left to Saxl to go back to M einhof and explain the twists and turns on the way to get a declaration o f intent from the editors o f the

Berliner Tageblatt to print a review, but not more than forty lines o f print. Saxl actually asked him to abridge his review to “ forty printed pages” -a very telling mistake. He apologized for requesting this work but did so knowing full well “that it was in the interest o f the one man who should be helped with this essay.” 164 It was a full year after the publication o f the Luther book that M einhof’s review was published, which Saxl found “ more well meaning than less well written.” 165 Reviews o f the book by Warburg, with a genesis o f more than four years, spanning the most difficult years in the political situation o f Germany as much as in the health situation of Aby Warburg, were published in sixteen newspapers and journals. We know from the correspondence that Carl F. M einhof had confirmed that his review had appeared in the Reichsbote in July 1922. Nothing is known about it as well as Bruno Adler’s in the

Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft and Franz Boll’s in the Neue Jahrbücher.166 Since the Monatshefte fü r Kunstwissenschaft stopped publication in 1922 and started up again under the title Jahrbuch fü r Kunstwissenschaft in 1923, it is conceivable that copy left over from the Monatshefte was not published in the Jahrbuch. A similar fate might have been the reason why the review is not featured when the Neue Jahrbücher started up only in 1925. The approaches by Saxl to Ernst Cassirer, Bernhard Schmeidler, Hermann Gunkel, Percy Schramm, Otto Westphal, Oskar Maurus Fontana, Paul Hiibner, Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Paul Tillich and Wilhelm Dibelius did not come to fruition. Even so, the task undertaken by Saxl was impressive. The largest part in the review process was due to Saxl’s unstinting efforts, coaxing, invit­ ing, reminding friends and colleagues to write reviews, not just to bring

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Warburg’s research to a wider audience, but much more to help Warburg on his way to recovery. In the summer o f 1921, when the book appeared, this was far from certain, but Saxl believed in it. In 1923, after the pivotal lecture by Warburg on the Serpent Ritual on 21 April in Kreuzlingen, Saxl put it simply in a letter to Dagobert Frey, a friend and colleague in Vienna: “You can imagine how important it would be on a personal and academic level, if we succeeded in helping him to take up his scholarly work again.” 167 Warburg knew what he had in Saxl. He finished a letter full o f business questions and answers with “ the main thing: my most heartfelt thanks for your friendship and congratulations [on W arburgs birthday June on 13]. I can do with congratulations. I am in the most dreadful m ood”. He sent greetings to Mrs. Saxl and the children “ from the unknown, miserable, sick uncle in Switzerland, who has many books and who reads so little.” 168 His brothers M ax in Hamburg and Felix and Paul in New York also knew and valued Saxl’s commitment. When M ax acknowledged receipt o f a copy of Warburg’s book, he added: “ I am happy that you have executed the work in such a respectful way and that you put the research o f my brother into the right light.” 169 And when years afterwards Felix Warburg acknowledged Saxl’s long report on the development o f the library, “during the years when my brother’s health did not permit him to be personally at your side,” he stressed that they all had reason “ to be most happy with what has been achieved, and a great deal o f credit is due to you who in those terrible years kept the affairs o f the library in such shape that it was both tempting and possible for brother Aby to take up the building-up o f his beloved institution as soon as his health improved. How much patience and tact your position at the library required during that time, we are well aware of, and I appreci­ ate the more what you have been able to do.” 170

list of reviews: 1 A nonymous: A nnouncem ent of the Aby W arburg lecture in the “Verein für H amburgische Geschichte,” 12.11.1917, in: Hamburgischer Correspondent, 11.11.1917, M orning edition, p. 2. 2 Anonymous: Report on the Aby Warburg lecture in the “Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte,” 12.11.1917, in: Hamburgischer Correspondent, no. 582, 15.11.1917, M orning edition, p. 3.

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

3 Paul H ildebrandt “Im Zeichen des Saturn. Aberglaube im Zeitalter der Reformation,” in: Vossische Zeitung, no. 167,18.6.1918, M orning Edition A. 4 A rnold E. Berger discussed the book in his review article “Deutsche Kulturgeschichte,” in: Zeitschrift fü r Deutschkunde, 48, (1921), 487-488. 5 Rudolf Bernoulli “Heidnisch-antike Wahrsagung zu Luthers Zeiten,” in: Psychische Studien, 48 (1921), 518-521. 6 Hugo Gressmann “W arburg, A.: Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in W ort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” in: Theologische Literaturzeitung, 46 (1921), 234. 7 Paul Hildebrandt “Die Weisheit der Sterne,” in: Literarische Umschau, Supplement 4 to Vossische Zeitung, no. 260,5.6.1921. 8 R udolf Hoecker discussed the book in the review of Flugblatt und Zeitung by Karl Schottenloher, Berlin 1922, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 44 (1923), 236 and Miinchner Neue Nachrichten, 6./7.8.1921. 9 H einrich Sieveking “Sternen- u nd W underglaube,” in Neue Ziircher Zeitung, no. 1597,9.11.1921, First M orning Edition. 10 Hans Tietze, in Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fiir vervielfàltigende Kunst, 1921,51. 11 Erica Tietze-Conrat “A.Warburg, Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in W ort u nd Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” in Kunstchronik, N.F. 31 (1920-21), 843-844. 12 W ilhelm W aetzoldt “Kunstwissenschaftliche Sterndeutung,” in Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 504,10.7.1921. 13 Franz Kampers “W arburg, A., Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in W ort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” in Historisches Jahrbuch der Gorres-Gesellschaft, 42 (1922), 355. 14 Walter Kohler “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung zu Luthers Zeiten,” in Sonntagsblatt der Easier Nachrichten, 15.10.1922. 15 O tto Scheel “A. W arburg, H eidnisch-antike Weissagung in W ort u nd Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” in Zeitschrift fiir Kirchengeschichte, 40 (1922), 261-262. 16 Malte Wagner “Der Glaube an die Sterne,” in Hamburger Fremdenblatt, no. 116, 9.3.1922, Evening edition, title page. 17 Leopold Zscharnack, in Volkskirche, 4 (1922), no. 1,1.1.1922, p. 10. 18 Georg Stuhlfauth “A. W arburg, Heidnisch-antike Weissaung in W ort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” in Zeitschrift der Biicherfreunde, N.F. 15 (1923), 34-35. 19 Robert Eisler discussed the book in a review article “New Books on the History of Astrology,” in Quest, July 1925, 553-555.

notes 1 W arburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence, abbr. to WIA, GC, F. Saxl to E. Cassirer, 25.5.1921. 2 Aby W arburg Gesammelte Schriften, //, Leipzig/Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932, pp. 487-558 and notes pp. 647-656. The book was published as a separate volume

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in Sitzungesberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse, dated 1920, 26. Abhandlung, Heidelberg 1920, but, in fact, was published only in May of the following year. 3 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. W arburg, 28.11.1920, m entioning that Cassirer had visited the library and was impressed by the collection, the arrangem ent and the spirit behind it. 4 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to E. Cassirer, 25.5.1921. 5 His “devoted” (“au fo pfern d”) care and concern for the fatherly friend and scholar, was to help W arburg to such a degree that he could leave the sanatorium and return to H am burg and his beloved library in 1924. Cf. E. H. Gom brich “Festvortrag”, in: Aby Warburg zum Gedachtnis, Gedenkfeier anlafilich der 100. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages, K arl-Heinz Schafer, Ernst H. Gom brich, Carl Georg Heise (eds). Ham burg: Im Selbstverlag der Universitàt, 1966, p. 29. 6 For this correspondence see Dorothea McEwan Das Ausreiten der Ecken. Die Aby Warburg—Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz von 1910 bis 1919, Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz Verlag, 1998. 7 WIA, GC, Μ. M. W arburg & Co. to W. Printz, 30.1.1920. 8 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 359, A. W arburg to F. von Bezold, 23.2.1918. 9 For further reading consult E. Gombrich Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, esp. C hapter X, “The H aunted Reformation.” 10 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to F. Boll, 8.3.1917. 11 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 264, A. W arburg to C. F. Meinhof, 13.11.1916. 12 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 300,301, A. W arburg to F. Boll, 24.4.1917. 13 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 303, A. W arburg to H. Joachim, 14.6.1917. 14 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E. Schwedeler-Meyer, 29.6.1917. 15 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 307, A. W arburg to P. Flemming, 7.7.1917. 16 WIA, GC, H. Stierling to A. Warburg, 9.10.1917. 17 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to K. Schaefer, 12.10.1917. 18 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E. Kroker, 31.10.1917. 19 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to K. Singer, 26.8.1917. 20 WIA, GC, A. Obst to A. W arburg, 15.11.1917. 21 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to A. Obst, 18.11.1917. 22 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to H. N irrnheim , 19.11.1917. 23 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to W. Printz, 17.11.1917. 24 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 336, 337, A. W arburg to Anna Warburg, 18.11.1917. “Meine Beziehungen zu Luther sind ja nicht von heute: so wenig ich als buchstabenglàubiger Lutheraner zu brauchen bin, als Protest gegen die jiidische O rthodoxie, die mich m it ihrer dum m en Werkheiligkeit versklaven wollte, verdanke ich ihm

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

unendlich viel”. Anna Beata W arburg was m arried to Aby’s brother Fritz, her second cousin. 25 There were two notes on W arburg’s lecture published in the Hamburger Correspondent, an announcem ent on 11 November 1917 and a short sum m ary on 15 November 1917. 26 WIA, GC, A. Warburg to A. Doren, 4.1.1918. 27 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E. Schwedeler-Meyer, 11.1.1918. 28 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to F. Saxl, 11.1.1918. W arburg requested him to bring “Hungarian flour,” as Saxl had planned a visit to Hamburg. 29 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to A. Vierkandt, 9.12.1917. 30 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to A. Vierkandt, 17.12.1917. 31 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 343, A. W arburg to E. Kehr, 3.12.1917. Johannes Carion, 1499-1537?, historian, m athem atician, court astrologer to Joachim I, Elector of Brandenburg. 32 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to R. Hoecker, 5.12.1917. 33 WIA, GC, E. Schwedeler-Meyer to A. W arburg, 2.1.1918. 34 WIA, GC, F. D ornseiff to A. Warburg, 11.1.1918. 35 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to R. Hoecker, 22.2.1918. 36 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 360, 361, A. W arburg to R Flemming, 24.2.1918. He urged Flem ming to publish a second edition of his book Geschichte der deutschen Reformation, but this tim e with full bibliographical indices. Already before the war W arburg had wanted to write a book Index der indexlosen Bûcher because “the lack of indices impedes the way to the hearts of books.” 37 WIA, GC, A. Warburg to G. Hellmann, 15.3.1918. 38 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to H. Krabbo, 5.4.1918. 39 WIA, GC, G. Stuhlfauth to A. W arburg, 30.4.1918. 40 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 367, A. W arburg to R Clemen, 13.5.1918. 41 WIA, GC, R Clemen to A. W arburg, 22.5.1918. 42 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E. Wolff, 14.6.1918. 43 WIA, GC, E. Wolff to A. Warburg, 10.7.1918. 44 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 377, A. W arburg to E. Wolff, 13.7.1918. 45 WIA, Kopierbuch VI, 369, A. W arburg to E. Samter, 19.5.1918. 46 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to Paul and Else Hildebrandt, 22.6.1918. 47 WIA, Merkbuch W 25, lists 178 names of people who were sent the H ildebrandt “Report” in June and July 1918. 48 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to H. Stierling, 18.6.1918. 49 WIA, GC, A. Warburg to M. Fürst, 20.6.1918. 50 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to H. Embden, 20.6.1918. 51 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to P. Schuster, 21.6.1918. 52 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to W. Printz, 22.6.1918.

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53 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to C. Melchior, 23.6.1918. Carl M elchior’s brother Georges m arried Elsa Warburg, a cousin of Aby Warburg. 54 WIA, GC, E. Brandenburg to A. W arburg, 25.6.1918. 55 WIA, GC, R. Davidsohn to A. W arburg, 27.6.1918. 56 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to the University Library, Erlangen, 29.6.1918. 57 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to P. J. Meier, 2.7.1918. 58 WIA, GC, C. Albrecht to A. Warburg, 4.7.1918. 59 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to J. A. E O rbaan, 7.7.1918. 60 WIA, GC, Κ. K. Eberlein to A. Warburg, 8.7.1918. 61 WIA, GC, C. A. J. C. Borchling to A. W arburg, 14.7.1918. 62 WIA, GC, P. Ruben to A. W arburg, 17.7.1918. 63 WIA, GC, Lichtwitz to A. W arburg, 19.7.1918. 64 WIA, GC, E. Kroker to A. Warburg, 24.7.1918. 65 WIA, GC, R. Kautzsch to A. W arburg, 3.8.1918. 66 WIA, GC, A. Kôster to A. Warburg, 14.9.1918. 67 WIA, GC, A. Vierkandt to A. W arburg, 5.7.1918. 68 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E. Samter, 11.09.1918. 69 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to R. Bohrne, 27.9.1918; see also WIA, GC, A. W arburg to Albert Kôster, 16.09.1918, that he will send him the published text of the Luther lecture shortly. 70 WIA, GC, A. Warburg to E Boll, 21.10.1918. 71 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E Boll, n ot dated, possibly enclosed w ith letter of 21.10.1918. 72 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to W. Bezold, 4.11.1919. 73 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E Boll, 27.1.1920. 74 WIA, GC, E Saxl to E Boll, 8.4.1920. 75 WIA, GC, E Saxl to E Boll, 16.4.1920. 76 WIA, GC, E Saxl to C. Winter, 6.7.1920. 77 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E Boll, 5.8.1920. 78 UB Heidelberg, Heid.Hs. 2109, E Saxl to E Boll, 13.09.1920. 79 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to E Boll, 12.9.1920 and 24.9.1920. 80 WIA, GC, E Saxl to P. W arburg, 1.10.1920. 81 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. Warburg, 28.11.1920. 82 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to C. Winter, 6.1.1921. 83 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to C. Winter, 24.2.1921. 84 WIA, GC, A. Warburg to F. Saxl, 24.1.1921. 85 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. Warburg, 28.2.1921. 86 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to F. Saxl, 2.3.1921. 87 UB Heidelberg, Heid.Hs. 2109, F. Saxl to F. Boll, 21.3.1921. 88 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. Moschetti, 28.3.1921.

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

89 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. W arburg, 18.5.1921. 90 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to R. C. W itt, 18.5.1921. O ther recipients were H. Embden, 25.5.1921; Fritz W arburg, 6.6.1921; Max W arburg, 6.6.1921; H. Gressm ann, 6.6.1921; R. Reitzenstein, 6.6.1921; Marc Rosenberg, 23.6.1921. 91 WIA, GC, W. Printz to F. Saxl, 7.6.1921. Printz added helpfully, that Saxl needed only to position him self in front of the bookshelf with books on Luther. He then could simply read off the names of those authors who should be sent a free copy. 92 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to F. Saxl, 8.6.1921. 93 WIA, GC, H. Sieveking to A. Warburg, 5.6.1921. 94 WIA, GC, C. G. Heise to F. Saxl, 9.6.1921. 95 WIA, GC, P. Flemming to A. W arburg 12.6.1921. 96 WIA, GC, G. Pauli to F. Saxl, 15.6.1921. 97 WIA, GC, R. Tschudi to A. W arburg, 24.6.1921. 98 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. Goldschmidt, 16.6.1921.

. .ins Leben zurückzukehren...”

99 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to E. WechEler, 6.6.1921. 100 WIA, GC, E. Panofsky and F. Saxl to A. Warburg, 30.6.1921. 101 WIA, GC, J.v. Schlosser to F. Saxl, 3.7.1921. “W arburgs Schrift interessiert mich, wie alies von ihm !”. 102 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to E. Cassirer, 25.5.1921. 103 WIA, GC, W. Waetzoldt to F. Saxl, 5.6.1921. 104 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to W. Waetzoldt, 7.6.1921. 105 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to W. Waetzoldt, 13.6.1921. cf. Review no. 12. 106 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. W arburg, 13.6.1921. 107 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to L. Zscharnack, 6.6.1921. cf. Review no. 17. 108 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to R. Hoecker, 6.6.1921. cf. Review no. 8. 109 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to R. Bernoulli, 8.6.1921. 110 WIA, GC, R. Bernoulli to F. Saxl, 12.7.1921. cf. Review, no. 5. 111 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to R. Bernoulli, 15.7.1921. It is noteworthy that Saxl agreed to a review in a journal called “Theosophische Studien” and not “Die psychischen Studien”. 112

WIA, GC, F. Saxl to W. Kohler, 7.6.1921. cf. Review no. 14.

113 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to B. Schmeidler, 7.6.1921 and F. Saxl to H. Gunkel, 7.6.1921. 114 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to P. Schramm, 13.6.1921. 115 WIA, GC, M ary W arburg to F. Saxl, 14.6.1921. 116 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to P. Petersen, 20.6.1921. 117 WIA, GC, Mary W arburg to F. Saxl, 17.6.1921. 118 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to O. M. Fontana, 14.6.1921. 119 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to G. Stuhlfauth, 20.6.1921. 120 WIA, GC, G. Stuhlfauth to F. Saxl, 27.6.1921. cf. Review no. 18.

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121 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to G. Stuhlfauth, 29.6.1921. 122 WIA, GC, G. Stuhlfauth to F. Saxl, 1.7.1921. 123 WIA, GC, K. Koetschau to F. Saxl, 14.7.1921. 124 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to M. Rosenberg, 29.6.1921. 125 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to R Flemming, 21.6.1921. 126 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to H. Tietze, not dated, before 22.6.1921. 127 WIA, GC, H. Tietze to F. Saxl, 22.6.1921. cf. Reviews no. 10 and 11. 128 WIA, GC. It is interesting here to compare a run of correspondence in a different context, when Saxl found him self asked to w rite a review. Saxl w rote to Dr. Raim ond van Marie on 13 November 1923that he had heard of M aries m o n um ental work on the history of Italian painting, The Development o f the Italian Schools o f Painting, 1923-1938, 18 volumes. As the exchange rate between the D eutschm ark and the D utch Guilder was very unfavourable, Saxl requested either to be allowed to borrow a set o f proofs for a short time or to purchase a copy at a reduced price. Marie replied on 23 November 1923 that Saxl should either write to the p u b lishers directly for a copy at a reduced price or, if he was prepared to write a review “in a pre-em inent journal,” to request a review copy for free. Saxl’s reply is not extant, b u t M arie’s reply on 3 D ecem ber 1923 m ade Saxl’s objections to such a scenario transparent: “I really find no reason to ask my publishers to sell you a copy of my work at a reduced price; if you think so, you can ask them yourself. I see that you have n ot understood that the only reason for me to suggest a review copy was to m eet w ith your request. I am completely unclear why you cannot square it with your academ ic conscience to prom ise to write a review o f my work, especially since it is the m ost com prehensive in its field and I did n o t make the condition, that your review had to be favourable.” The correspondence ended there, the accession books of the library listed the purchase of the first volume on 17 January 1924. 129 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to O. Franke, 14.7.1921. 130 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to R Hübner, 15.7.1921. 131 WIA, GC, K. L. Schmidt to F. Saxl, 19.7.1921. In his letter of 22.10.1921, ibid., Saxl sent him an invitation for a lecture in the W arburg library and at the same time asked him to write a review of the Luther book. 132 WIA, GC, F. Saxl, C. H ertz and M. W arburg to A. W arburg, 21.7.1921. cf. Reviews no. 5 and 19. 133 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to O. Eififeldt, 22.7.1921. 134 WIA, GC, W. Printz to R. Kautzsch, 7.9.1921. 135 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to P. Tillich, 12.10.1921. 136 WIA, GC, F. Kampers to F. Saxl, dated “middle of February 1922.”

MAKI NG A RECEPTION FOR WARBURG

137 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to F. Kampers, 17.2.1922. However, in November 1922, Franz Kampers wrote to Saxl that he had sent the review a long tim e ago, but the m iserable situation in the publishing world might prevent a publication. F. Kampers to F. Saxl, 8.11.1922, cf. Review no. 13. 138 WIA, GC, J. Derenberg to A. Warburg, 27.6.1921. cf.

Review no. 7.

139 WIA, GC, M. W arburg to A. Warburg, 12.7.1921. 140 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to F. W arburg, 13.7.1921. 141 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to W. Waetzoldt, 9.8.1921. In the letter he also inform ed him that Paul Tillich had offered to write a review in the Internationale Monatshefte. 142 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to F. Saxl, 1.7.1921. E. Cassirer w rote

w arm ly to

A. W arburg, WIA, Zettelkasten 71, 071/041616, 26.6.1921. He avowed that reading his book was a pleasure, which opened his eyes to the general problem of the intellectual structure of astrology, som ething which he had been researching for some time in his pursuit of cognitive questions. 143 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to R. Hoecker, 13.8.1921. 144 In: Literarische Umschau, 4. Beilage zur Vossischen Zeitung, No. 260 v, 5.6.1921. 145 WIA, GC, L. Rudolph to A. Warburg, 28.6.1921. 146 WIA, GC, H. Sieveking to A. W arburg, 9.11.1921. cf. Review no. 9. 147 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to H. Tietze, 10.12.1921. 148 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to F. Saxl, 6.1.1922. 149 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to L. Zscharnack, 13.1.1922. 150 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to P. Hinneberg, 13.1.1922. 151 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to K. Rathe, 10.7.1922. 152 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. Warburg, 28.7.1922. Ein unbeschriebener Einblattdruck und das Thema der “Àhrenmadonna”. O ffprint from Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fü r vervielfaltigende Kunst, 1922. 153 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to C. Fr. Meinhof, 18.2.1922. 154 WIA, GC, Ο. H. Eififeldt to F. Saxl, 4.1.1922. 155 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to A. Warburg, 10.3.1922. cf. Review no. 16. 156 WIA, GC, A.Warburg to F. Saxl, 20.3.1922. To show the breadth and detail of W arburg’s interest in w hat was going on in his library, I sum marize the topics: he com m ented on the lecture series in the library, newly established by Saxl; he found the program m e very interesting, asked Saxl to invite Boll to givelectures and asked him about the budget for the series; he wrote about illustrations in his article “Italienische Kunst und Internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara,” published later in the year in the “Atti del X. Congresso internazionale di Storia dell’Arte”— it was the text of his lecture at the art historical congress in Rome in 1912-, and ordered five copies from the editor of the “Atti,” Moschini, in Rome; he discussed library administrative matters, requested a list of books by Pfleiderer in his library and a publication featuring lists o f lectures

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in G erm an universities; he inquired about work on the Arabic publication of Picatrix; he asked about his son Max Adolph and requested a photograph of him , as “mulus,” in front of his library. “Mulus,” “donkey,” was the term used for young people who experienced the longest holiday of their life, who were in the enviable in-between stage of their career just having passed their school leaving exam inations and waiting to start university. 157 WIA, GC, C. F. M einhof to F. Saxl, 5.4.1922. 158 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to M. Warburg, dated 26.4.1922, should be 26.5.1922. 159 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to F. Warburg, 22.5.1922. 160 WIA, GC, M. W arburg to F. Saxl, 24.5.1922. 161 WIA, GC, M. W arburg to F. Saxl, 1.6.1922. 162 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to M. W arburg, 2.6.1922. 163 WIA, GC, M. W arburg to F. Saxl, 5.6.1922. 164 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to C. F. Meinhof, 12.6.1922. 165 WIA, GC, F. Saxl· to A. Warburg, 22.7.1922. 166 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to B. Adler, 24.5.1921 and F. Saxl to F. Boll, 8.6.1921. 167 WIA, GC, F. Saxl to D. Frey, 2.5.1923. 168 WIA, GC, A. W arburg to F. Saxl, 19.6.1922. 169 WIA, GC, M. W arburg to F. Saxl, 18.5.1921. 170 WIA, GC, Felix W arburg to F. Saxl, 30.8.1926, in the original English. Similarly Paul W arburg to F. Saxl, 9.9.1926: “It m ust be a great satisfaction to you that you have been able in contributing to the dual task of building the library and to the recovery of its creator so successfully and so faithfully!”

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number o f affinities exist between the thought o f Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Not only are they both interested in cultural memory, in addition, parallels can also be drawn between Benjamin’s dialectical method and Warburg’s dialectical iconology, which he referred to as the “ iconology o f the interval.” 1 Indeed, in many respects the reactivation o f interest in Warburg owes much to the ever increasing importance o f Benjamin as a cul­ tural critic. This stands in inverse relation to the situation o f some 70 years ago, when Benjamin, having realised the impossibility o f an orthodox acade­ mic career, sought access to the well-established circle o f scholars associated with the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. Benjamin’s unsuccess­ ful attempt was not only motivated by the potential opportunities o f a private institution, but also because o f a sense o f certain shared aims. There are many ways in which parallels between the two scholars can be drawn, and consequently I intend to focus on one particular aspect o f their thought, namely, their analysis o f modernity, and in particular the role o f the concept { 121}

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o f the mimetic in their accounts. As I shall demonstrate, their accounts of modernity throw up important similarities, not least in their considerable ambivalence towards the putative “progress” achieved in the modern era. For both authors the source o f the parallels can be traced back to the nine­ teenth-century interest in empathy and in mimeticism. It is to this topic, therefore, that I shall first turn, before then analysing its role in Warburg and Benjamin.

mimicry and empathy, anthropology and aesthetics Although the concept o f mimesis can be traced back to Plato’s Republic and earlier, it is only in the emerging discourse o f anthropology in the nine­ teenth century that it takes on a wider meaning as a category o f experience.2 In particular the idea o f mimesis which, for Plato, had described assimila­ tion to another in dramatic performance and later in all art, becomes, in the nineteenth century, a central structuring principle for describing the prim i­ tive mind. Most immediately one might think o f Edward Tylor’s Primitive

Culture or Fierbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, both o f which were widely read in Britain and in Germany.3 Spencer remarks, for example, that “Among the partially civilised races we find imitativeness a marked trait ... according to Mouat the Andamanese show high imitative powers.” 4 For Tylor, primitive magic is sustained by the belief that “association o f thought must involve a similar connexion in reality,” 5 a conflation that mirrors the lack o f reflective distance characteristic o f the more obvious imitativeness observed by Spencer. As Tylor argues, “ Man, in a low stage o f culture, very commonly believes that between the object and the image o f it there is a real connexion, which does not arise from a mere subjective process in the mind o f the observer, and that it is accordingly possible to communicate an impression to the original through the copy.” 6 From this stems the magical logic o f occult sympathies that survives into the “old medical theory known as the ‘Doctrine o f Signatures,’ which supposed that plants and minerals indicated by their external characters the diseases for which nature has intended them as remedies.” 7 For Spencer, too, magic derives its legitimacy from the belief in occult affinities. In particular he notes that even in his own time there are those for

MIMESIS AND ALLEGORY. ON ABY WARBURG AND WALTER BENJAMIN

whom “ some intrinsic connexion exists between word and thing.” 8 This primitive belief is a projection o f the notion o f the proximity o f self and other onto the world o f objects. Hence a name is held to be more than an arbitrary linguistic designation. Instead it is a part o f the person, and because it is inseparable from its owner great weight is frequently given to keeping it secret. Spells, therefore, which use the person s name are held to function even in the physical absence o f the persons, since they “ originate in the belief that a representation is physically connected with the thing con­ nected.” 9 Evidence o f this can be seen, too, in the frequent reliance o f sorcer­ ers and magicians on possession o f a part o f the victim’s body (e.g. hair or nails) or o f an object closely associated with them. In both such cases there is an evident inability to conceive o f relations between objects and persons as anything but immediate, concrete and particular. Such a theory o f primitive thought persisted until well into the twentieth century. For example, Frazer’s magnum opus The Golden Bough interprets magic according to precisely the same schema. Although it is analysed using a taxonomy that distinguishes between, for example, contagious and homeo­ pathic magic, and between practical and theoretical magic, all classes o f magic are still governed by the same mimetic logic, represented either by the “ Law o f Similarity” or the “ Law of Contact.” 10 And a similar interpretation underpins the work both o f Frazer’s younger contemporary Lucien LévyBruhl and also a more recent writer such as M ary Douglas. Primitive think­ ing is governed by the “prelogical,” as Lévy-Bruhl terms it, which follows the “ rule o f participation.” 11 Accordingly, logical division is replaced with prel­ ogical integration, which underpins the law o f participation. “ For example, why are an image or a portrait a completely different thing for primitives than they are for u s ... Evidently from the fact that every image, every repro­ duction participates’ in the nature, the properties and the life o f whatever it is an image o f . .. .The primitive mentality has no difficulty with the idea that this life, these properties are at the same time in the model and the image.” 12 Similarly M ary Douglas, writing in 1966, argues that “ ... a primitive world view looks out on a universe which is personal in several different senses. Physical forces are thought o f as interwoven with the lives o f persons. Things are not completely distinguished from persons and persons are not com ­ pletely distinguished from their external environment.” 13

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The prominence o f the mimetic in anthropological discourse can be placed alongside the growth o f interest in empathy in late nineteenthcentury aesthetic theory. In particular, Robert Vischer’s essay on “ The Optical Sense o f Form” was to prove highly influential on contemporary aes­ thetic thinking.14 The argument o f Vischer’s essay rests on the basic distinc­ tion between “ seeing” and “ looking.” This distinction draws on an opposition between simple passive “ seeing” as a physiological process o f stimulus reception, where the “ impression received is still undifferent­ iated” 15 and “ looking,” which, Vischer argues, “ sets out to analyze the forms dialectically ... and to bring them into a mechanical relationship ... the impression o f seeing is repeated on a higher level.” 16 However, “ looking” involves more than simply giving the phenomenon greater conceptual determinacy, which the above description might suggest; the dialectical analysis to which Vischer refers is an active engagement with the experiential world, involving both tactile and visual perception. As a consequence the world becomes invested with value. As Vischer notes, “ I have an enclosed, complete image, but one developed and filled with emotion.” 17 Significantly, too, the basis o f this “penetrating into the phenomenon” 18 is a mimetic impulse, for “ the criterion o f sensation lies ... in the concept o f similarity ... not so much a harmony within the object as a harmony between the object and the subject.” 19 The influence o f Vischer’s essay on contemporary art historical discourse can be felt most immediately in Heinrich W ôlfflin’s doctoral thesis, “ Prolegomena to a Psychology o f Architecture,” 20 which uses empathy theory to account for the experience o f architectural space and mass. Underpinning this experience is the analogy with the body. Drawing on the general assumption that “ Forms become meaningful to us only because we recognise in them the expression o f a sentient soul. Instinctively we animate each object,” 21 Wolfflin proceeds to argue that the human body gives the measure to architectural design o f all periods. In short, he concludes that “ any architectural style reflects the attitude and movement o f people in the period concerned. How people like to move and carry themselves ... ” 22 The empathy theory o f Vischer and Wolfflin stands in close proximity to the mimetic discourse o f anthropology; specifically, the notion o f a tactile engagement with the world, in which certain corporeal experiences are given

MIMESIS AND ALLEGORY. ON ABY WARBURG AND WALTER BENJAMIN

objective form, invites comparison with the anthropological notion o f the primitive inability to disengage from immersion in immediate sense experi­ ence. Consequently the mimetic, from being a stage in human development, becomes a perpetual psychological disposition that plays a constant role in determining the form o f cultural activities. The idea o f empathy is first sys­ tematically historicised by Alois Riegl, who regards the history o f the visual arts as the expression o f the varying configurations o f tactile and optical engagement with the world. However it is only Riegl’s student Willhelm Worringer that makes the connection between empathy theory and anthro­ pology explicit. In his discussion o f Abstraction and Empathy Worringer aligns the definition o f modernity and, more specifically, modern art, along two axes, the first measuring the relative distance or proximity to the phe­ nomenal world, and the second the state o f (cultural and mental) progres­ sion and regression.23 This joining o f anthropological and psychological themes forms the background to the thought o f both Warburg and Benjamin, and inasmuch as empathy theory presents the perpetual possibil­ ity o f a “ regression” to a primitive mimetic state, so too Warburg and Benjamin display a considerable ambivalence towards the apparent progress o f modernity.24

pueblo indians and quattrocento Florence Warburg explores anthropological and psychological themes explicitly in two texts. The first is his notes on a visit to the Pueblo Indians o f 1896, later given as a lecture on the “ Serpent Ritual,” 25 and the second is the collection of notes and aphorisms with the alternative titles o f “ Basic Fragments towards a (monistic) Psychology o f Art” or “ Basic Fragments towards a Pragmatic Science o f Expression.” 26 His interest in the Pueblo Indians, no doubt partly affected by the widespread interest in the indigenous peoples o f the New World, focuses on their status as “ an enclave o f primitive pagan humanity ... with an unshakeable adherence to magical practices that we are accustomed to condemning as a mere symptom o f a completely backward humanity.” 27 The object o f enquiry is the principle marker o f the Indians’ primitive state, namely, their animistic religion. A crucial part o f Warburg’s reading o f the

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Pueblo Indians is to see in them a prior stage in the genesis o f human culture, and to establish the extent to which their religious beliefs and prac­ tices “give us a yardstick for the development from primitive paganism through the paganism o f classical antiquity to modern man.” 28 Two specific features attract Warburg’s attention. The first is the prevalence o f animal dances, in which the dancers don masks and imitate the appearance o f what­ ever the dance is intended to obtain, for example, antelopes or corn. The meaning o f this imitation is quite clear: “When the hunter or tiller o f the soil masks himself, transforms himself into an imitation of his booty— be that animal or corn— he believes that through mysterious mimic transformation he will be able to procure in advance what he coterminously strives to achieve through his sober vigilant work as tiller and hunter.” 29 This interpre­ tation quite clearly draws on anthropological accounts o f magic, and one is tempted to draw parallels with Spencer and Tylor accounts o f sympathetic magic. Underlying this mimetic practice, argues Warburg, is a “ culture o f symbolic connection,” 30 whereby objects are connected through intrinsic affinities, to be awakened by imitative ritual. The use o f masks is also note­ worthy in this regard, for it signifies the erasure o f the dancer’s subjectivity, and invites comparison with Benjamin’s insistence on the intentionless basis o f mimetic truth. Warburg makes the necessity o f this loss of self explicit when he notes that “When the Indian in his mimetic costume imitates, for instance, the expressions and movements o f an animal, he insinuates himself into an animal form ... to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation o f his person, something he cannot attain by means o f his unextended and unchanged personality.” 31 Another dance Warburg wit­ nesses, the humiskachina dance, is a weather magic dance, intended to bring the rains and thus ensure the corn harvest. Again the mask is o f central importance; Warburg notes there is a taboo on seeing the dancers who, while resting, may have taken o ff their mask. The focus o f this dance is a temple, actually a tree, which serves as the symbolic mediator between the Indians and nature. Here Warburg sees one more example o f the mimetic impulse, though this time it is founded on the impulse to assimilate inanimate rather than animate nature. It is instructive to compare one o f Warburg’s notes in the Fragments , made during his visit to America, which repeats this fascina-

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tion with the impulse towards assimilation characteristic o f the Pueblo culture. Warburg writes: The essential character of the causal relation of the “primitive” (i.e. incapable of subjective differentiation) hum an to the external world is revealed in the religious acts of the Pueblo Indians. The incorporation o f sense impressions II Corporeal introjection (Animal imitation) III Corporeal annexation (Symbolism o f tools) I Incorporation (Medical magic) IV Corporeal addition (ornamental pottery, actually belongs to III ).32

Warburg is here outlining a primitive physics familiar from theories we have seen elsewhere. As in Spencer or Tylor, the principle form o f causal connec­ tion is one o f touch and direct corporeal contact, and this informs all con­ ceptions o f causal relations, even between physically distant objects. The greater part o f Warburg’s interest is directed towards the snake dance, and here we come to the second feature o f the Indian cultures that the lecture focuses on: their symbolic cosmology and its means o f expres­ sion. Early in the lecture Warburg observes the prevalence o f the serpent m otif as a symbol o f lightning, an indication that their cosmology remains tied to mythic forms o f expression, rather than conceptual abstraction. Famously, he states that the Indians “ stand on the middle ground between magic and logos ... Between a culture o f touch and a culture o f thought.” 33 In other words, complex meteorological phenomena such as lightning are still expressed in the form o f concrete symbols. In the m ythology o f the Walpi, one o f the Pueblo tribes, the snake, and specifically the rattle-snake, is regarded as a weather deity, and the function o f the snake dance, argues Warburg, is to force the snake to invoke lightning and to induce rain. Again the snake dance involves imitation; the dancers wear rattles and stone-filled shells on their knees. At the end o f the dance the snake is despatched into the desert so that its soul will return in the form o f lightning. Warburg devotes considerable attention to the serpent ritual for two reasons. First, he detects in it an indication that the Pueblo Indians have passed beyond mere imita­ tion, hitherto regarded as the sign o f the most primitive stage o f human development. He argues, “ The serpent ceremony at Walpi thus stands

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between simulated, mimic empathy and bloody sacrifice. It involves not the imitation o f the animal— but the bluntest engagement with it as a ritual par­ ticipant.” 34 In other words the Indians no longer seek merely to assimilate themselves to the serpent, in an act o f sympathetic magic, but rather make

use o f the serpent, which introduces a relation closer to the instrumental reason o f modernity. Second, Warburg is struck by the prevalence o f the serpent m otif in other cultures, for example, in the Greek myth o f Laocoon or the cult o f Dionysus, or in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. At the same time, however, he notes that it undergoes various transformations in meaning, which themselves signify a functional shift. It is the symbol o f Satanic evil in the Genesis story, or the figure o f idolatry in the Old Testament story o f the brazen serpent cast down by King Hezekiah. However, when used as the emblem o f Asclepius it is drained o f its demo­ niac power and instead transformed into a hieroglyph to be interpreted allegorically. Warburg states; “If religion signifies bonding, then the sym ptom o f evolution away from this prim al state is the spiritualization o f the b on d between hum ans and alien beings, so that m an no longer identifies directly with the masked symbol but, rather, generates that bond through thought alone ... In the process we call cultural progress, the being exacting this devotion gradually loses its m o n strous concreteness and, in the end, becomes a spiritualized, invisible symbol.”35

Hence cultural evolution consists o f a shift away from direct mimetic identification with the symbol towards a mediated relation, whereby the symbol becomes a spiritualised allegory a theme that recurs in the

Fragments. In one from July 1896 he writes, “ The acquisition o f a sense o f distance between subject and object the task o f so-called cultivation and the criterion o f the development o f the human species. The proper object o f cultural history would be to describe the prevalent state o f reflectivity.” 36 This view is spelled out most forcefully in the introduction to Mnemosyne that I cited earlier, and it is amplified slightly later with the assertion that “ this awareness o f distance can become a lasting social function which, through the rhythmical change between identification with the object and return to detachment signifies the oscillation between a cosmology o f images and one o f signs.” 37

MIMESIS AND ALLEGORY. ON ABY WARBURG AND WALTER BENJAMIN

It has sometimes been assumed that Warburg subscribed unquestioningly to a form o f Darwinism, in which the process towards ever greater rational­ ity was welcomed as an unambiguously progressive evolution.38 This view has to be qualified by recognition that Warburg expresses reservations about the extent to which the process o f modernisation could be regarded as “progress.” It is notable that he detaches himself from any judgement regard­ ing the primitive status o f the Indians; it is introduced as the judgement of others, as the general consensus, an indication that Warburg himself only partially subscribes to such views. More striking still is Warburg’s response to modernity when he argues that “ The evolution o f culture toward the age o f reason occurs in the same measure as the tangible, coarse texture o f life fades into mathematical abstraction.” 39 Here one finds no triumphalist belief in progress; instead the achievements o f Enlightenment are accompanied by a sense o f loss. In a similar manner, the lecture concludes with an unremit­ tingly pessimistic account o f modernity. While civilisation is based on the creation o f a space between the self and the world, Warburg foresees that modern technologies such as the aeroplane, the telephone and electricity threaten to reintroduce barbarism by the destruction o f the sense o f space; “the culture o f the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously achieved: the space for devotion, which evolved in tu rn into the space required for reflection. The m odern Prom etheus and the m odern Icarus, Franklin and the W right brothers, who invented the dirigible airplane, are precisely those om inous destroyers of the sense of distance, who threaten to lead the planet back into chaos.”40

Warburg’s analysis o f modernity indicates, too, the connection to his studies o f the otherwise unrelated field of the Florentine Renaissance. For if it is the case that the technologies o f modernity have destroyed the sense o f space, thus heralding a new barbarism, so the Renaissance stands at the origin of the process. With the Renaissance one witnesses the emergence o f a culture o f self-reflective distance, but one where the distance created is in constant conflict with mimetic impulses which attempt to negate it. This concern can be seen to underpin W arburg’s doctoral thesis on Botticelli, completed shortly before his excursion to America. The focus o f the study is the inter­ pretation o f classical antiquity presented in Birth o f Venus and Primavera. Although it had been challenged by authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, the

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dominant notion o f ancient Greece in late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury Germany was still largely informed by W inckelmann’s famous description o f its “ noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur.” 41 Against this Warburg detects in Botticelli’s paintings a considerable stress on movement, agitation and dynamism, elements which are alien to the idea o f tranquillity fostered by Winckelmann.

In

consciously distancing him self from

Winckelmann, Warburg is partly influenced by Nietzsche’s Birth o f Tragedy, with its stress on the Dionysian current o f classical Greek culture. Given my earlier remarks, it should be clear that for Warburg the representation o f intense bodily movement constitutes a primitive impulse where the painter (and the spectator) are empathically drawn into the narrative event. O f par­ ticular interest was the cult o f Dionysus, as an exemplar o f such ecstatic self­ negation. As Warburg writes considerably later, “ The untrammelled release o f expressive bodily gestures, especially as it occurred amongst the adherents o f the intoxicating gods o f Asia Minor, circumscribes the entire range o f dynamic expression o f the life o f a humanity shaken by fear, from helpless absorption to murderous frenzy, and all mimetic actions lie between these two.” 42 Warburg is thus not interested in the archaeological correctness o f Botticelli’s reference to the Dionysian, but rather in the significance o f its presence in the Quattrocento. For while in both Primavera and in The Birth

of Venus one can detect the tranquil grace of which Winckelmann wrote, the agitation o f the clothes and hair o f the figures in both paintings signifies the presence o f a more primitive impulse, indeed Warburg argues that one o f the sources for Botticelli’s work was a sarcophagus portraying Achilles in the same agitated, emotionally intensified manner. Warburg is not necessarily stating that Botticelli was a more attentive observer o f antiquity than Winckelmann, but rather that his paintings form a locus for the expression o f those same mimetic impulses exemplified by the Dionysian ecstasy o f antiquity. These impulses have admittedly been sublimated into the graceful elegance o f the two paintings in question, but they are nevertheless still there, and as Warburg stresses, Botticelli’s contemporaries, especially Angelo Poliziano, were also open to the Dionysian current o f Greek culture. Hence, Warburg is emphasizing the heterogeneous nature o f early Renaissance culture, the Renaissance as a locus o f conflict. The recovery o f Classical Antiquity is not an event signifying uninterrupted cultural progress, but

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rather a struggle, in which residues o f more primitive behavioral experience constantly reassert themselves. A more explicit formulation occurs in his lecture on “ The Entry o f the Idealising Classical Style into the Painting o f the Early Renaissance.” 43 O f the various works discussed, one in particular merits attention. It concerns the discovery in 1488 o f a copy o f the Laocoon group in Rome, 18 years before the discovery o f the original. Again W arburg’s object o f criticism is W inckelmann, and the choice o f this example is highly significant, for W inckelmann had based his famous form ulation o f the classical aesthetic on a reading o f the Laocoon. Drawing on the account o f Luigi Lotti who actually dug up the copy, Warburg points towards a completely different understanding o f the meaning o f the group in the Renaissance: In order to prove that a conception o f antiquity diametrically opposed to that of W inckelmann actually originated in the spirit of the Quattrocento, let me cite the words of Luigi Lotti who, together with our Giovanni Tornabuoni, sought antiquities for the Medici in Rome and who, in 1488, was lucky enough to uncover a small copy of the Laocoon group during night excavations in a vineyard of Cardinal della Rovere. Its mythical content was unclear to him and of no great interest; his enthusiastic adm iration was exclusively reserved for its formal pathos: “D uring excavations at night we found three lovely small fauns on a marble base, all three encircled by a large serpent. To my m ind they are quite beautiful. All they are lacking is a voice; they appear to be breathing, shouting out and defending themselves with quite extraordinary gestures. The one in the middle has evidently collapsed and is expiring.” We hear nothing more of this group, whose export to Florence was almost certainly prevented; the official discovery of the full-scale Laocoon group, which caused a stir throughout Rome, didn’t occur until 1506. Nevertheless one should not make the influence of the Laocoon dependent merely on the fact of its chance re-emergence. I am no longer in fear o f being m isunderstood if I say: even if the sorrowful Laocoon group had not been discovered, the Renaissance would have had to invent it, precisely because of its moving rhetoric and pathos.44

In the Renaissance, therefore, the response to the group focused on and specifically admired the sense o f struggle in the Laocoon group, and this

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pathos was only perceived, according to Warburg, because o f an existing pre­ disposition to the representation o f dynamic conflict. Again the aim is not to 4correct” Winckelmann’s reading o f the Laocoon group, but to argue that the Renaissance responded in a completely different way, and to investigate the meaning o f that difference. Warburg observes this elsewhere. In his essay on “ Dürer and Italian Antiquity” o f 1906, he argues that “ already in the second half of the fifteenth century Italian artists looked in the rediscovered treasury o f forms from antiquity just as eagerly for models o f intensified mimetic pathos as they did for models o f idealising classical tranquillity,” 45 and the specific example he chooses is the reappearance o f the classical m otif o f Orpheus being beaten to death by maenads in, for example, a drawing by Dürer or a contemporary engraving from Northern Italy. Warburg’s interest in mimeticism also underpins his study o f astrology and astrological allegory. In an early draft for the Mnemosyne introduction, Warburg speaks o f his project as an “ Iconology o f the Interval. Art historical material for a developmental psychology o f the oscillation between a theory o f causation based on images and one based on signs.” 46 The basis o f the shift from image to sign is thus a change in the metaphysical picture o f the world, in which relations between phenomena are constructed according to ever more abstract formulae. In Warburg’s analysis o f this cognitive shift, astrology becomes an important object o f inquiry. The cosmological and astrological orientation o f classical and pre-classical culture form the topic o f the first three plates o f the Mnemosyne , suggesting its pivotal role in his thought. As he notes in an unpublished fragment for the project, “ I shall begin with astrology because nowhere does the problem o f the cycle o f con­ crete fantasy and mathematical abstraction reveal its fatal agility in moving from one pole to the other more convincingly than in the metaphor o f the heavenly bodies. It effects both a quite unreflective and self-negating subjec­ tive confusion with the monstrous apparatus o f the astrological bodies, and also an assured subjective certitude which, oriented toward the future, calcu­ lates from a distance and with mathematical precision the rising and the setting o f the phenomena o f the skies.”47 In astrology, therefore, Warburg sees both mimeticism and also its opposite, scientific objectivism, at work, and between these two extremes, the reduction o f astral deities to mere allegories.

M IM E SIS AND ALLEGO RY. ON ABY W A R BU R G AND W A LTER BE N JA M IN

The process of allegorisation occurs, for Warburg, in the wall paintings in the Palazzo Schifanoja in Ferrara. Uncovered in 1840, there were originally twelve, depicting the months of the year. Each depiction consists of three planes, the lowest depicts mundane events at the court of the Duke Borso, the uppermost represents Olympian gods and the middle includes the astral gods, in the form of the relevant zodiacal signs. The parallel between the astral signs and seasonal activities on earth indicate the persistence of astro­ logical practices in Quattrocento Ferrara, but at the same time the meaning of the zodiacal figures is mediated by the presence of equivalent Olympian deities. Their origin is the same, namely classical antiquity, but they repre­ sent two different conceptions of the pagan world. The first, the Apollonian realm of the Olympian deities, contrasts with the world of astral demons, or decans, whose nature has been informed by their passage through Hellenistic, Indian, Arabic, then finally European medieval astrology. The fresco therefore presents the contradiction between two types of antiquity. Warburg was himself clear as to the central question guiding his inquiry; “ To what extent are we to view the onset of stylistic shift in the representa­ tion of the human figure in Italian art as an internationally conditioned process of disengagement from the surviving pictorial conceptions of pagan culture of the eastern Mediterranean peoples?”48 The historical detail of Warburg’s interpretation is open to question. However, this is less important than the general direction of his investiga­ tion. As Warburg himself noted, the provision of a neat solution, the decod­ ing of the symbolism of the frescoes, was less important than the underlying method, in which the frescoes are examined as an example of the loss of mimeticism in astrological imagery. He states, “Astrology is in essence nothing more than a name fetishism projected on to the future,”49 and the allegorization of astral figures drains the fetish of its power.

benjamin: allegory and modernity Benjamin refers to the concept of mimesis in a number of texts, most obvi­ ously in his essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” (later reworked as “ Doctrine of the Similar” ).50 Here Benjamin interprets the prominence of imitative

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Figure 6.1

Albrecht D ürer— The Death of Orpheus. Ham burger Kunsthalle (Photo:

W arburg Institute).

Figure 6.2

Anonymous North Italian Engraving—The Death of Orpheus (Photo: Warburg Institute).

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behavior in children s play as the reflection o f a much more general impulse not only to mimic, as children do, but to conceive the entire world as gov­ erned by a system o f similarities and correspondences, o f which astrology is an important survival. Language plays a central role in this primitive meta­ physics; the system o f correspondences consists o f non-sensuous similari­ ties rooted in the primal form o f language: the name. Benjamin is relying on a theory o f language first explored in his early essay “ On Language as such on Human Language,” 51 which sees language as originally o no­ matopoeic. This conception o f language has been linked with Jewish mysti­ cism, and Benjam in’s early writings seen in the light o f Kabbalistic doctrine. However, it can also be fitted into what Gérard Genette has referred to as the “ m im ological” tradition o f language philosophy which, stemming from Plato’s Cratylus, traces the basis o f linguistic signification to m im etic roots.52 Thus, for Benjam in, “ language can be seen as the highest level o f mimetic behaviour and the most complete archive o f nonsensuous similarity.” 53 Significantly, modernity disrupts this primitive state o f affairs. Benjamin notes that “clearly the observable world o f modern man contains only minimal residues o f the magical correspondences and analogies that were fam iliar to ancient peoples.” 54 While the mimetic impulse has nearly vanished, its residue can be traced in language and in writing, both o f which function as its archives. The precedent o f anthro­ pology is relevant here, inasmuch as Tylor was the first to introduce the notion of residues or primitive survivals. Consequently, while the mimetic basis o f language has been supplanted by language as a system o f signs, it has left its traces and hence, too, the traces o f the vanished faculty o f which it was the medium. In the “ Doctrine o f the Similar” the anthropological perspective is made more explicit, with a corresponding diminution o f ref­ erence to the mystical language o f his earliest language theory. Using the example o f astrology, Benjamin argues that the “ possibility o f human im i­ tation, that is, the mimetic faculty which human beings possess, may have to be regarded, for the time being, as the sole basis for astrology’s experien­ tial character.” 55 Astrology appears as an outmoded superstition because “ in our perception we no longer possess what once made it possible to speak o f a similarity which might exist between a constellation o f stars and a human being.” 56

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The idea o f mimesis is also central to Benjamin’s study o f the Baroque tragedy, or Trauerspiel, which predates these essays by several years.57 It informs both his method and also his interpretation o f the meaning o f Baroque allegory. In the prologue to his study Benjamin asserts that “mathe­ matics demonstrate that the total elimination o f the problem o f representa­ tion ... is the sign o f genuine knowledge,” 58 adding later that the “proper” approach to truth consists o f “ a total immersion and absorption in it.” 59 Conceptual mediation is an obstruction to “ true” knowledge, and conse­ quently Benjamin’s method o f historical investigation is founded on an intentionless laying out o f opposites alongside each other, since “ ideas are not represented in themselves but solely and exclusively in an arrangement o f concrete elements in the concept: as the configuration o f these ele­ ments.” 60 This idea is repeated in The Arcades Project , o f which Benjamin notes, “ Method o f this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say, only to show.” 61 Benjamin’s insistence on lack o f intention is central to his concep­ tion o f the dialectical method, for in contrast to Hegel, it implies the lack of governing conscious movement which would sublate all oppositions. Instead Benjamin insists on the importance o f allowing contradictions to remain unresolved, and a reason for this is his continued use o f the idea o f the residue. Specifically drawing on Leibniz’s idea of the monad, Benjamin con­ tinues the anthropological interest in resemblance and correspondence as the basic principle o f primitive metaphysics. Ideas are monads, they contain “an indistinct abbreviation o f the rest o f the world o f ideas ... every single monad contains, in an indistinct way, all the others.” 62 Although not explicit, one can detect in this the idea, explored more fully in his essay on language, that although the growth o f abstraction and logic has alienated humanity from the world, language has retained a residue o f its former state. While language has become prim arily a vehicle o f semiotic communication and conceptual judgement, it has a symbolic core that preserves the “ noncommunicable.” 63 This dialectic o f symbol and sign, o f mimeticism and alienation recurs most forcefully in Benjamin’s account o f allegory and its difference from the classical sign, pivotal to which is the role o f Baroque “arbitrariness.” 64 Benjamin’s study is perhaps best known for its rehabilitation o f allegory and its repudiation o f Romantic theories o f symbolism, most notably that o f

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Friedrich Creuzer, which denigrate allegory in favour the symbol. Benjamin criticises the traditional opposition between the symbol, where there exists a congruence o f meaning and form, and the allegory which, through its tem­ poral basis, purportedly lacks the totality integral to the symbol. Instead of regarding the allegory as a debased form o f symbolism Benjamin stresses that allegory has a separate internal logic grounded in the alienation o f lan­ guage from nature. Consequently, the sense both that language has lost that intimate bond with nature still present in the symbol and also that the alle­ gory is founded on the m ourning o f historical time become central. Regarding the first, Benjamin notes that in allegory “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” ;65 amongst the authors o f the Baroque Trauerspiel, “ word, syllable, and sound are emancipated from any context o f traditional meaning and are flaunted as objects which can be exploited for allegorical purposes.” 66 Allegory brings to an extreme the recognition o f the arbitrary nature o f language and o f linguistic reference, and this arbitrariness is linked to fragmentation. As Benjamin argues, in the allegory “ the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light o f divine learning falls upon it. The false appearance of total­ ity is extinguished.” 67 In allegory the mystical instant o f the symbol has given way to the immersion in historical time, in which everything bears the mark o f the transitory. Hence the ruin takes on a double meaning, both as a fragmentary emblem o f the gulf between language and nature and as the most visible indication o f the effects o f historical time. However, just as lan­ guage bears the traces of its primordial onomatopoeism, so allegory, through the topoi o f mourning and melancholy, preserves the memory o f symbolic totality, and the Trauerspiel gains its dramatic force from the tension between these two. The tension between mimeticism and allegory underpins Benjam in’s reading o f Baudelaire and nineteenth-century Paris in several ways. First, in his reading, Baudelaire is the last (isolated) allegorical poet; second, Benjamin sees close parallels between allegory and com modity fetishism, and, third, he argues that underlying both is a destructive transformation o f experience. There is an intimate connection with the Trauerspiel, indicated by various comments by Benjamin about Baudelaire. In “ Central Park” Benjamin argues that “ Melanchthon s term Melencholia illa heroica charac-

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terises Baudelaire’s gift most perfectly,” 68 having earlier spoken o f “ shock as poetic principle in Baudelaire,” 69 a comment that echoes his recognition o f the central role o f shock in the Baroque allegory. With regard to mimesis, a point o f central focus is Benjam in’s interest in aura and the m otif o f the correspondances in Baudelaire. For Baudelaire the correspond­

ances, a notion drawn from mystics such as Swedenborg, “ record a concept o f experience which includes ritual elements ... something irretrievably lost.” 70 Nature is more than a mute object o f scientific curiosity, as exemplified in Baudelaire’s poem “ Correspondances,” in which it is con­ ceived as reciprocating the human glance.71 Nature thus take on a specific aura, and in “ Central Park” Benjamin writes o f “ Derivation o f the aura as a projection o f a social experience o f people onto nature: the gaze is returned.” 72 In this he detects a residue o f the doctrine o f occult sympa­ thies and hidden affinities, where symbols bind Man and nature together. Hence “ The correspondances are the data o f remembrance— not historical data, but data o f prehistory,” 73 a prehistory which recalls the notion o f primitive origins. As in allegory, the correspondances are inscribed with the trace o f the past, though rather than m ourning the loss o f affinity, the

correspondances are reinstating it. Benjamin’s essay on “ Some Motifs in Baudelaire” analyses the decline of pre-modern experience, Erfahrung , into the ErlebniSy or lived experience, o f the modern metropolis, and the analysis draws on three principal intellec­ tual sources, M arx and Engels, Freud, and Bergson. Following Freud, Benjamin sees consciousness as a defence formation against the shock o f outer stimuli. All experience is mediated, but Benjamin argues that the shock o f modern life, in particular the experience o f the metropolitan crowd, has intensified this process o f screening. “ The greater the share o f the shock factor, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it functions, the less do these impres­ sions enter Erfahrungy remaining rather in the sphere o f Erlebnis .” 74 Baudelaire’s poetry becomes significant as an articulation o f this modern condition o f shock. Benjamin regards the conscious mediation o f stimuli as a necessary condition for their being appropriated as elements o f poetic experience, and hence Baudelairean allegory represents a poetic reworking o f the Erlebnis o f modernity.

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A central element in Benjamin s reading o f Baudelaire and in his use o f mimesis is the idea o f aura. Benjamin’s first definition o f aura appears in his essay “A Small History o f Photography,” where it is defined as “A strange weave o f space and time: the unique appearance or semblance o f distance, no matter how close the object may be.” 75 This definition occurs within a discussion o f Eugène Atget, and it is important to note that for Benjamin photographs serve to dispel aura. To repeat his now famous phrase, they “ pump aura out o f reality like water out o f a sinking ship.” 76 Much attention is devoted to the relation o f photography and aura, which is developed at length in the essay on reproductive technologies, but Benjamin attributes the loss o f aura to other circumstances too, including the shock effect o f modernity. Writing o f Baudelaire’s prose piece entitled “ Loss o f Halo” (“ Perte d’Auréole” ) he notes that Baudelaire ‘indicated the price for which the sensation o f the modern age may be had: the disintegration of aura in the experience o f shock.” 77 And rather than attempting to reinstate aura, which, Benjamin argues, is the task for “ fifth-rate poets” 78 Baudelaire’s poetry consists o f the registering o f the loss o f aura primarily through the allegorical form .79 As Benjamin notes, “ The absence o f illusory appearance and the decline o f aura are identical phenomena. Baudelaire places the artis­ tic means o f allegory at their service,” 80 and in this the com modity form occupies a prominent place as the “ social content o f the allegorical form of vision.” 81 Elsewhere in the Arcades Project Benjamin argues that “ Mass pro­ duction is the economic cause and the class struggle the social cause for the decline o f aura.” 82 Much o f this is familiar from M arx and Engels. In partic­ ular one can compare Benjamin’s comments on the destruction of aura with their claim in The Communist Manifesto that The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has pu t an end to all feudal, patriarchal idyllic relations ... and has left rem aining no other nexus between m an and m an than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drow ned the m ost heavenly ecstasies o f religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm , o f philistine sentim entalism , in the icy w ater o f egotistical calculation.83

Benjamin differs from M arx and Engels, however, and from other wellknown theorists o f modernity such as M ax Weber or Georg Simmel, in his

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contention that the disintegration o f aura through the rationalisation o f modernity and the development o f the commodity form is accompanied by a simultaneous reactivation o f a “ false” aura, indeed is dependent on it, through the process o f commodity fetishism. This is largely generated by the apparatus of commodity culture. The mass-produced good, which Benjamin had seen as antithetical to auratic experience, reinstates aura in the magic of the reified commodity. It was the promotion o f com m odity fetishism to which the Parisian arcades, the subject o f the Arcades Project, were originally devoted. Benjamin notes, “ Trade and traffic are the two elements o f the street. In the arcades the latter has become extinct; traffic in them is rudi­ mentary. It is just a fertile street o f merchandise, merely set up to awaken ones desires.” 84 Central to fetishisms awakening o f desire is the reawakening o f primal impulses. Benjamin refers to the arcades as the “primal landscape o f consumption.” 85 This same process o f re-enchantment, o f the ré­ inscription o f aura is central to advertising, too, which, Benjamin sets against allegory. “ The purpose o f the advertisement is to blur over the com­ modity character o f things. Allegory struggles against this deceptive transfiguring o f the commodity world by disfiguring it.” 86 While the com­ modity undergoes the same logic as allegory, namely the surrender o f any notion o f intrinsic or use value and its replacement with the infinite exchangeability o f meaning and value, commodity fetishism masks this, and grants to the commodity the illusory aura o f uniqueness. This essential ambiguity of modernity recalls the concluding remarks of Warburg in his lecture on the serpent ritual o f the Pueblo Indians. The processes o f modernisation, which for Warburg were visible in the evolution o f rational and abstract thought, coupled with overwhelming technological “ progress,” threatened to collapse back into the most terrifying form o f bar­ barism. It is this parallel between Warburg and Benjamin which I shall explore in my concluding remarks.

conclusion The thought o f both Warburg and Benjamin is underpinned by the dis­ course o f a primitive mimetic origin which has gradually been supplanted by an anti-mimetic, allegorical experience. This model, which bears so much

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likeness to other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century theories o f modernity, such as those o f Karl M arx, Georg Simmel, M ax Weber or Ferdinand Tônnies, is qualified by the notion that the process o f rationaliza­ tion bears with it the potential relapse into the “ enchanted” and mimetic world o f the primitive. In the writing o f Benjamin, this sense o f the ambiva­ lence o f modernity is most apparent in the analysis o f nineteenth-century Paris. Following Marx, Benjamin explores the reduction o f auratic quality to the quantitative rationality o f capitalism. However, capitalism has to be fed by the production o f commodities, and the success o f commodity culture is dependent on the possibility o f their re-enchantment, the recreation o f a fetishised commodity aura. For Warburg, the “civilizing” process which first creates a reflective mental distance can again collapse in on itself through its technological creations. Further, the establishing o f a distance between sign and referent, although a precondition to the overcoming o f representational mimeticism, can also lead to a complete disconnection between the two, a hyper-inflation o f allegorical semiosis, which Warburg believed could be detected emerging in Baroque art. Warburg writes o f the formal excess o f the Baroque as a “ cutting o ff o f expressive value from the mint o f actual dynamic life” 87 in which “ the superlative dynamogram becomes the official currency.” 88 This absolute autonomy o f allegory leads to the collapse o f any meaningful distinctions between rationality and its opposite, between culture and nature. One can perhaps recall in this context Benjam in’s comment in his study of the Trauerspiel, that in Baroque allegory anything can represent anything else, and hence the very meaning o f representation becomes unstable through a process o f infinite substitutions. It is, o f course, highly significant that Warburg and Benjamin both choose the Baroque as marking a turning point in the history of European culture. It is no doubt due to his reading o f M arx that Benjamin subsequently turned to the more recent history o f the nineteenth century in his archaeology o f modernity. And yet the idea o f allegory remains pivotal even here. There is a further way in which the relapse into the primitive remains a permanent possibility for both Benjamin and Warburg, and this focuses on the critical role o f memory. A recurrent aspect o f Benjamin’s discussion o f the mimetic is his attention to the existence o f residues o f primal experi­ ence, as in the example o f astrology. He is here drawing on the notion o f

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primitive survivals first explored by Tylor. This idea informs his account of the re-enchantment of the commodity aura. A predominant trope is that o f the dream, o f awakening, which reinforces the connection between modern Paris and an unspecified primal twilight o f consciousness. Benjamin refers to the nineteenth-century as a “ time-space (a time-dream) in which ... the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep,” 89 and shortly after adds that “ Capitalism was a phenomenon o f nature with which a new dream came over Europe and, with it a reactivation of mythic powers.” 90 In con­ trast, knowledge is characterised as awakening; as Benjamin notes, “ The now o f recognition is the moment o f awakening.” 91 Capitalism, therefore, reactivates primal memories. This idea is already prefigured in an early fragment entitled “ Capitalism as Religion” in which Benjamin, through a reading o f Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, notes the numerous parallels between capitalism and religion, concluding with the recommendation that “one should begin by investigating the links between myth and money throughout the course o f history, to the point where money had drawn so many elements from Christianity that it could establish its own myth.” 92 Capitalism is thus marked by a regression back into myth, rather than necessarily a continuation o f the process o f rationalization. Parallel to Benjamin, Warburg accords a central place to memory as an active determinant o f cultural practices. At the heart o f Warburg’s ideas o f memory is Richard Semon’s book on Die Mneme , which describes memory with the metaphor of writing.93 Stimuli, for Semon, inscribe themselves on the memory, and remain as traces, or “ engrams,” that can be reactivated under certain circumstances. Warburg’s specific adaptation o f Semon is to equate the engram with the visual symbol which, in keeping with his contin­ uing interest in empathy theory and bodily movement, he terms the “dynamogram.” The dynamogram is a visual inscription o f primal experi­ ences; in keeping with nineteenth-century discourses o f the primitive, par­ ticularly Tito V ignoli’s M yth and Science,94 Warburg regards these as essentially traumatic and laden with fear. The symbol constitutes a visual imprint o f these primal trauma, and as such also preserves the experience which gave rise to them. Warburg notes in the Introduction to Mnemosyne that “ It is in the area o f orgiastic mass seizure that one should look for the mint that stamps the expression o f extreme emotional seizure on the

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memory with such intensity that the engrams of the experience o f suffering live on, an inheritance preserved in the memory.” 95 It is notable that Warburg uses economic metaphors; the prim ary experience is the “ m int” (“ Pràgewerk” ), and the experiences imprinted on the memory are described as an “ inheritance.” Second, Warburg regards the primal orgiastic experience as essentially a collective experience.96 An interesting parallel can be found with Benjamin s description of primal intoxication as a collective experience, in contrast to the isolation o f the modern subject; “ Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods ... The ancients’ inter­ course with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [Rausch ] ... This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error o f modern men to regard this experience as unimportant ... and to consign it to the individual . . . ” 97 Warburg’s notion o f the possible reactivation o f primitive memories has also to be linked with his employment o f empathy theory which, to recall, permits mimeticism to be regarded as an atemporal aspect human subjectiv­ ity, and not merely a feature belonging to the distant past o f humanity. It is undoubtedly the case that Benjam ins and Warburg’s use o f anthro­ pological concepts is open to a series o f criticisms. In particular, as G. E. R. Lloyd has recently argued, the very viability o f a mimetic “mentality” is problematic, even though the idea was common currency throughout the nineteenth century and for much o f the twentieth.98 Further, the question has to be raised as to the precise mechanism whereby primitive mimetic residues are reactivated. Benjamin’s and Warburg’s use o f empathy theory and anthropology results in an oscillation between viewing the mimetic as a half-submerged memory and seeing it as a perpetual feature o f human psy­ chology. In this regard recent work by Jan Assmann, drawing partly on Warburg’s contemporary Maurice Halbwachs, has indicated the necessity o f exploring the social institutions that provide the mechanisms for the preservation o f collective memory.99 Although such questions thus remain to be explored further, I believe the comparison o f Warburg and Benjamin has achieved two goals. The first is to have laid out an intellectual framework that encompasses the thought o f

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both. It is common for Benjamin to be placed in this framework, but less so for Warburg. I hope to have indicated that for all his celebrated love o f eso­ teric subjects, Warburg’s intellectual interests occupy an important place in contemporary philosophical and cultural-theoretical analyses o f modernity. The second is to have suggested that the legacy o f W arburgs work does not merely consist in the introduction o f a particular method, namely, iconology, which was then taken up by students and followers such as Erwin Panofsky or William Heckscher.100 Undoubtedly there are important methodological similarities between Warburg and Benjamin, but these are eclipsed in importance by the greater affinities in the substance o f their research, which focus on modernity, disenchantment, re-enchantment and the critical role o f memory. It is through attention to these wider substantive issues that Warburg’s oeuvre still merits critical engagement, rather than as the first stage in the development o f an iconological method systematised by a subsequent generation o f scholars. The current essay outlines some o f the ways in which such an engagement can be undertaken.101

notes 1 Aby W arburg, “Introduction to Mnemosyne ’ (draft), W arburg Archive, W arburg Institute, No. 102.1.2, p. 6 2 See Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee (H arm ondsw orth, 1955) 393c. 3 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1871); H erbert Spencer, Principles o f Sociology, [1876], (London, 3rd.ed. 1904). The latter was translated as Die Prinzipien der Sociologie (Stuttgart, 1897). 4 Spencer, Principles o f Sociology, Vol. I, p. 81. 5 Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, p. 116. 6 Sir Edward Tylor, Researches into the Early History o f Mankind, [1865], 3 ed. (London, 1878), p. 117. 7 Ibid., p. 123. 8 Spencer, Principles o f Sociology, Vol. I, p. 242. 9 Ibid., p. 243. 10 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough [1922], (London, 1993), p. 11. 11 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions mentales dans les Sociétés inférieures (Paris, 1910), p. 76. 12 Ibid., p. 80. 13 M ary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1966), p. 88.

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14 Robert Vischer, “The Optical Sense of Form,” in H arry Mallgrave & Eleftherios Ikonom ou, eds., Empathy, Form and Space. Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica, 1994), p. 89-123. 15 Ibid., p. 93. 16 Ibid., p. 94. 17 Ibid. 18 Vischer, “The Optical Sense of Form,” p. 101. 19 Ibid. 20 H einrich Wôlfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Mallgrave & Ikonom ou, pp. 149-190. 21 Ibid., p. 152. 22 Ibid., p. 182. 23 Willhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Munich, 1908). 24 The anthropological background to both Benjamin and W arburg has been recognized before; however, these discussions have tended to be very general in nature, in contrast to my own, which focuses on a specific anthropological them e. See Peter Burke, “Aby W arburg as H istorical A nthropologist,” in Aby Warburg. Akten des Internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, ed. H orst Bredekamp et al. (Weinheim, 1991), pp. 39-44; Axel H onneth, “A Communicative Disclosure o f the Past: O n the Relation between A nthropology and Philosophy o f H istory in Walter Benjamin,” in New Formations, Vol. 20 (1993) pp. 83-94. See too Jan Kraniauskas, “Beware Mexican Ruins ! O n e Way Street’ and the Colonial Unconscious,” in Walter Benjam ins Philosophy. Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London, 1994), pp. 139-154. 25 Aby W arburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht, ed. Ulrich Raulff (Berlin, 1988); W arburg, Images from the Region o f the Pueblo Indians o f North America , trans. Michael Steinberg (Ithaca, 1995). Both editions replace an earlier, incomplete, version of the lecture, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” in Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. II (1938/39), pp. 277-92. 26 Aby

W arburg,

“G rundlegende

Bruchstücke

zu

einer

(m onistischen)

Kunstpsychologie” or “G rundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer pragm atischen Ausdruckskunde.” The collection consists of two notebooks, num bered 43.1 and 43.2 of the W arburg Archive in the W arburg Institute. 27 Warburg, Images, p. 2. 28 Ibid., p. 4. 29 Ibid., p. 16-17. 30 Ibid., p. 17. 31 Ibid., p. 18-19. 32 W arburg, Bruchstücke, § 299. 33 Warburg, Images, p. 17.

MIMESIS AND ALLEGORY. ON ABY WARBURG AND WALTER BENJAMI N

34 Ibid., p. 36. 35 Ibid., p. 48-49. 36 Bruchstücke, § 328. 37 Ibid. 38 The m ost prom inent advocate of this reading is Gombrich. See Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1986), 214-15, and Gombrich, “Aby W arburg und der Evolutionismus des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Robert Gallitz and Brita Reimers, eds., Aby M. Warburg. “Ekstatische N ym phe ... trauernder Flufigott.” Portràt eines Gelehrten (H am burg, 1995), pp. 52-73. 39 Warburg, Images, p. 44, translation slightly modified. 40 Ibid., p. 54. 41 Johann W inckelm ann, “T houghts on the Im itation o f the Painting and Sculpture o f the Greeks,” in Hugh Nisbet, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann., Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe (Cambridge, 1985), p. 42. 42 Warburg, “Introduction to Mnemosyne,” W arburg Archive, No. 102.1.1, pp. 9-10. 43 W arburg, “Der Eintritt des antikisierenden Idealstils in die Malerei der Frührenaissance,” in W arburg Archive, No. 88.1. Translated in this volume, PP· 7-31.

44 Ibid., p. 28. 45 W arburg, “D ürer u nd die italienische A ntike,” in Ausgewâhlte Schriften und W ürdigungen, ed. D. Wuttke (Baden-Baden, 1992), p. 125. 46 W arburg Archive, No. 102.1.2, p. 6. 47 Ibid., p. 5. 48 Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoja in Ferrara,” trans. Peter W ortsm an, in Gert Schiff, ed., German Essays on A rt History (New York, 1988), p. 252. 49 Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology,” p. 238. 50 Walter Benjamin, “O n the M im etic Faculty,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (London, Ï979), pp. 160-163; “D octrine of the Similar,” in New German Critique, Vol. 17 (1979) pp. 65-69. 51 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London, 1996), Vol. 1: 1913-1926, pp. 62-74. 52 Gérard Genette, Mimologics, trans. T. M organ (Lincoln, 1995). 53 One Way Street, p. 163. 54 Ibid., p. 161. 55 Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 66. 56 Ibid., p. 66. 57 Walter Benjamin, The Origin o f the German Tragic Drama, trans. J. O sborne (London, 1977).

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58 Ibid., p. 27. 59 Ibid., p. 36. 60 Ibid., p. 34. 61 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften , ed. R. Tiedem ann and H. Schweppenhàuser (Frankfurt a.M., 1972-1989), Vol. V, p. 574. 62 Benjamin, The Origin o f the German Tragic Drama, p. 47. 63 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. I, p. 74. 64 Benjamin, The Origin o f the German Tragic Drama, 55. 65 Ibid., p. 175. 66 Ibid., p. 207. 67 Ibid., p. 177. 68 Benjamin, “C entral Park,” trans. L. Spencer in New German Critique, Vol. 34 (1985) p. 54. 69 Ibid., p. 42. 70 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the era o f High Capitalism, trans. H. Zohn (London, 1983), 139. 71 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris, 1972), p. 38. 72 “Central Park,” p. 41. 73 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaiue, p. 141. 74 Ibid., p. 117 (translation slightly altered). 75 Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 250. 76 Ibid. 77 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 154. Cf. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, pp. 474-5. 78 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, p. 475. 79 “Baudelaire’s spleen is the decline o f aura. ‘Le Printem ps adorable a perdu son odeur’.” Gesammelte Schriften, V 61. V, p. 433. 80 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 670. 81 Ibid., Vol. V, p. 422. 82 Ibid., Vol. V, p. 433. 83 Karl M arx and Friedrich Engels, “The C om m unist Manifesto,” in Jon Elster, Karl Marx. A Reader (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 226-27. 84 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, p. 93. 85 Ibid., Vol. V, p. 993. 86 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 670. 87 Warburg, “Valois Tapestries,” in the W arburg Archive, No. 96.3, “Conclusion,” p. 2. 88 Warburg, “Notes,” W arburg Archive, No. 102.1.4, p. 23. 89 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, p. 491. 90 Ibid., Vol. V, p. 494. 91 Ibid., Vol. V, p. 608.

MIMESIS AND ALLEGORY. ON ABY WARBURG AND WALTER BENJAMI N

92 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. I, p. 290. 93 Richard Semon, Die M neme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens (Leipzig, 1904). 94 Tito Vignoli, Mythus und Wissenschaft, eine Studie (Leipzig, 1880). 95 W arburg Archive, No. 102.1.1, 6. 96 D orothée Bauerle, Gespenstergeschichten fü r ganz Erwachsene (M ünster, 1988) p. 38. 97 Benjamin, Selected W r itin g s^ ol. I, p. 486. 98 G. E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge, 1990). A concise survey of debates concerning primitive mentalities, particularly with regard to the issue of primitive magic, can be found in Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope o f Rationality (Cambridge, 1990). 99 Jan Assmann, “Collective M em ory and C ultural Identity,” in New German Critique, Vol. 65 (1995) pp. 125-133; Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedachtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitat in friihen Hochkulturen, 2nd. ed. (Munich, 1997). See, too, Aleida Assmann and Dietrich H arth, ed., Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erinnerung (Frankfurt a. M., 1991). 100 This of course contradicts the position of Dieter Wuttke, for w hom W arburg’s m ain achievement was his contribution to art historical m ethod. See Wuttke, Aby Warburgs Methode als Anregung und Aufgabe, [1977] (Wiesbaden, 1990). 101 My thanks are due to D orothea McEwan for her kind com ments on ^n earlier draft of this paper.

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urania redux: a view of aby warburg's writings on astrology and art1

kristen lippincott “A then will eben im m er wieder neu aus A lexandrien zuruckerobert sein

— Aby Warburg

AS

DAUNTING

AS

AN Y

ATTEMPT

TO

summarize Warburg’s thoughts and writings on astrological iconography might seem, the preliminary chal­ lenge lies in trying to disentangle Warburg’s own ideas, motivations and conclusions from those scholars whom, if not following in his footsteps exactly, were led towards their own explorations o f astrological images by Warburg’s example. For better or worse, our understanding o f Warburg’s oeuvre has been highly coloured by the interests and research methods o f later art historians who were inspired by Warburg’s vision. Scholars such as Saxl, Panofsky, Seznec, Wittkower and Wind all owe an enormous debt to Warburg, but what is was— exactly— about Warburg or his work that led these men into a particular line o f academic inquiry is hard to uncover.

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As early as 1957, Gertrud Bing pointed out that the term “Warburgian studies” was being used as “ a descriptive label” for the “the achievements of a group o f scholars, rather than those o f the person whose name served them.” 2 In Bings mind, then, it seemed that there was already a general m is­ understanding about who Aby Warburg was, what he had achieved person­ ally and what was his connection to the group o f iconographers who were being described as practising the “ Warburgian method.” Indeed, today— perhaps even more so than in Bing’s time— there is a general tendency amongst art historians to label any aspect o f academic writing on the iconography o f works o f art as “Warburgian” art history. It is a concept which is misleading on three counts. First, there was never a Warburg school. There were those young scholars who availed themselves o f the resources o f Warburg’s library: an act which, in itself, probably influenced the manner in which they tended to address art historical problems, but it falls quite short o f any claim that Warburg’s ideas had permeated their thinking or beliefs. Second, although Warburg’s writings cover many topics, he could never, strictly speaking, be considered an iconographer. Third, the brood o f iconographers who did and do attach themselves to the Warburg Institute tend not to have been influenced by Warburg’s own writings, but by those o f the second generation o f scholars, such as Saxl, Panofsky or Wind. By a curious series o f circumstances, Warburg seems to have entered that no-man’s land o f the celebrity academic with its concomitant curse o f his persona being so “ well-known” that most art historians feel no need to read his work. To expand a bit, among the most common errors made by those less familiar with Warburg’s published and unpublished work is the assumption that he was primarily an iconographer or a decipherer o f the significance or textual genealogy of specific details portrayed within a work o f art. Whereas, in fact, Warburg him self was probably less interested in the specific significance o f images within a painting or manuscript than in how those details might be interpreted if set within the context o f the larger philosoph­ ical and sociological issues that he him self was attempting to address. Warburg likened the purely scholarly pursuit o f tracing the textual and pic­ torial histories o f iconographic details to being similar to “ the services o f a pig in rooting up truffles.” 3 He was primarily interested in ideas; facts were

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG’ S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

merely a means by which one proved ideas. O f his many followers, the only scholar to have attempted to recreate this pursuit— the searching out o f details to prove a larger, sociological point— was Panofsky, with his writings on ideas and aesthetics.4 But even here, the distance between mentor and pupil widened as the years passed. When dealing with Warburg’s writings on astrological iconography, however, the scholar with whom one finds the closest link is Fritz Saxl. If one considers, for example, the collection o f Warburg’s photographs that was displayed as part o f the Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und

Sternkunde in the Fiamburg Planetarium a year after his death, one can easily recognise Warburg’s own intelligence and personality behind the col­ lecting and grouping o f these images.5 In particular, one finds the familiar grouping o f the first decan-god o f Aries from the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara with images from the Tabula Bianchini and the Picatrix ;6 the com­ parison between the so-called “ Finiguerra planet-gods” and the planet-gods taken from the set o f Netherlandish Hausbuch woodcuts;7 and between the so-called “ Tarocchi” o f Mantegna and Arndes’s Nyge Kalender.s All o f these are topics upon which Warburg lectured and published.9 But, with the exception o f the figure of the Schifanoia decan-god (to which we shall return later), these are also all images and topics upon which Saxl published, repeatedly and copiously. If one compares the content o f Warburg’s

Bildersammlung with the illustrations one finds accompanying Saxl’s col­ lected works, such as in the volume o f his Lectures, orginally published by Bing in 1957, or in the Italian selection o f Saxl’s writings published in 1985, the level o f coincidence is extremely high.10 From the visual evidence, it would seem that both men shared not only a common, but similar, interest in and outlook on astrological iconography. Indeed, as Bing herself claimed, it was a common interest in astrology “ that sealed the synastria' between Warburg and Saxl.11 Nevertheless, if one examines the writings o f each scholar a bit more closely, it does seem that there might be more to this

“sy n a stria than meets the eye. First and foremost, it must be recognized that for a scholar who seems to have made such an impact on succeeding generations o f scholars and who, today, is apparently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, Warburg actually published very little. As Gombrich relates, Warburg had great difficulty in

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writing— an inference with which one immediately sympathises when trying to wade through (let alone translate into English) Warburg’s renowned “ Aalsuppenstil”12 It is quite clear from W arburgs notes, however, that he possessed a tremendous visual memory. Moreover, as he was looking specifically for recurring patterns and pointers, it is not surprising to note that he seems to have viewed art with two different sorts o f lenses: one which saw the larger, formal structures o f a work o f art and the second which zoomed past .the surface aesthetics to focus on the minutiae o f a specific figure or detail. If one were looking for a word to describe this process or its intent, it would not be “ iconography.” Warburg was only fleetingly interested in the “ graphos” or “ written marks” o f painting, sculpture and manuscript illumination. Instead, if one were to attach a term to it, one might borrow Panofsky’s own “ iconology.” Scholars have described W arburgs attention to detail as related to the age-old adage that “Der liebe

Gott steckt im D e t a i l It is a telling phrase that Warburg used once himself as the preface to his first public lecture.13 But, whereas it is true that Warburg was obsessive in his combing o f sources, it is easy to forget that, in these details, he was always searching for something larger. One might go so far as to suggest that he was, as the saying tells us, looking for “ God.” Warburg used the stuff o f art historical detail to weave his larger vision, his “logos,” o f the im agery o f mankind as it relates to the verities o f the human condition. Warburg was a visionary. Moreover, he was an intellectual evangelist. Art history was the means towards realizing and communicating that vision to others.14 Saxl, on the other hand, demonstrates a different temperament alto­ gether. In Bing’s words, Saxl was happiest when he was steeped in “ the massive, anonymous record o f material on which others might afterwards exercise their wits ... the small precise detail which is not open to doubt.” 15 He was a man who mistrusted the philosophical and recoiled from the wellinformed guess.16 To make a comparison o f the effect that the two men had on their pupils and followers, Saxl says o f Warburg: “Warburg educated his pupils and successors to an absolute and unconditional submission o f their whole existence to the demands o f scholarship.” 17 Bing says o f Saxl: “ the result [of Saxl’s attention] was a positive gain to those who submitted them­ selves to his influence.” 18 The sentiments are similar, but the differences o f

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

emphasis are important to remember and may provide one small clue as to why there was no “Warburg school,” but why there is still a small, yet thriv­ ing, Warburg Institute.19 When considering the work and working methods o f the two men, one only needs to compare W arburgs rapid-fire citations and broad, sweeping conclusions in his works, such as the well-known paper on the Palazzo Schifanoia, with SaxPs careful discussion o f the changing form o f the con­ stellations o f Hercules, Perseus and Eridanus in his articles on Diirer’s stellar maps o f 1515, in the essays which formed the introductions to the first and second volumes o f his

Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer

Handschrifien ... , or in the article published jointly with Panofsky in 1933 on “ Classical M ythology in Medieval Art,” to see that each scholar approaches the topic with a very different intent.20 Moreover, one could cite similar differences between W arburgs work on the so-called “planet-children” and Saxl s later work on the same topic.21 The former burbles with big thoughts and phrases like “ m it ihrem ... olympischen Pathos,” “in diesem gravitâtischen

Gewande\ or “ unter der Schwelle naiver autochthoner Heiterkeit?22 The latter notes “philological evidence to support this thesis,” “ systematic information” and “ unsystematic scraps o f information.” 23 Warburg apparently referred to Saxl as “ Saxl à vapeur.” One recent bio­ grapher of Warburg has translated this phrase as “ the Saxl steam-engine.” A closer approximation might be “ Saxl, Full-Steam Ahead,” with both assum­ ing that it was meant to characterise Saxl’s restless energy.24 Perhaps the nickname was meant to be appreciative, but one cannot help but sense traces o f a certain categorization o f Saxl as somewhat insubstantial and too rest­ less, perhaps, to be a thinker of any great depth— which, one suspects, from W arburgs point o f view, he may well have seemed.25 At the same time, Saxl seems to have been intoxicated by W arburgs grander vision, but it was not a state o f mind that comforted him or a state which he was able to sustain. To make a perhaps unfair analogy, it does seem that Saxl’s first encounter was a

coup de foudre., but that this intensity was dissipated— perhaps owing to the stress which W arburgs illness placed on both of them or, possibly, due to something else— but, as even the ever-faithful Bing relates, very early in his career, Saxl described his work with Warburg as sharing “ the burden which he imposed”.26

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It is somewhere within this apparent paradox that one begins to under­ stand the difficulties surrounding any study o f Warburg’s writings and, in particular, his writings on astrological iconography. On the one hand, there is Warburg— a man with prodigious talents— mining for all sorts o f material which he tries to model into a coherent world-view. The material he uncov­ ers, however, is mere fodder for a larger beast and as ultimately unservice­ able to him as the truffle is to the “ Trüffelschwein” On the other hand, there is Saxl, who is amazed and delighted by the material Warburg discards— indeed, he and at least two generations o f scholars built their careers on the material Warburg unearthed and failed to pursue27. But, even though both men were committed to academic research, it would seem that neither understood (or, perhaps, accepted) the underlying motives o f the other. Such situations are not uncommon, but this apparent disjunction between Warburg’s purpose and Saxl’s scholarship takes on new significance when one considers the fact that it was Saxl who was left to carry on W arburgs mission; Saxl who saved Warburg s precious library for future generations of scholars; and Saxl who, along with Bing, devoted his life to sustaining the Warburg heritage— that “ burden which he imposed.” It is not difficult for those aware o f the financial problems facing many academic institutions in the late twentieth century to empathise with Saxl s task o f securing a future for the Warburg Institute in London; but what one might overlook is the extent to which the transplantation from Germany to England demanded a huge cultural adjustment as well. For whereas the principles according to which the Library was structured might have seemed slightly unusual to German-speaking academics, they would have recognized these ideas as pertaining to one o f the intellectual currents circulating through a number o f related disciplines on the Continent during the late nineteenth century. In Germany, Austria or, for that matter, in Italy, an inspired lecturer, such as Warburg, could be understood and appreciated both for the traditional and the innovative manner in which he approached his subject. In England, however, with its great traditions o f pragmatism and positivism, such Germanic weavings would have seemed distinctly romantic and symptomatic o f a way o f thinking with which most English were decid­ edly uneasy.28 In this context, then, one o f Saxl’s first tasks was to find a means by which he could demystify the workings o f the Warburg Institute—

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

by helping to train young English scholars to widen their perspectives on art, but also in finding a way in which the Institute could prove useful to the sorts o f research in which the English themselves were engaged.29 Oddly, even though Saxl and his colleagues originally explored several areas in which they thought the Institute might prove useful— offering lectures and seminars on the history o f religion and so on— it was only in the area o f art history and, in particular, the iconography o f artistic images where they met with immediate success. Here was an area in which the English felt com fort­ able and even though this had not been Saxl’s original intention, the early slant o f the Institute towards art history was made as a specific response to the demands o f its new home.30 In addition to this clash o f cultures, however, Saxl faced the very real challenge o f trying to find a way to make the work and thought o f Warburg himself more accessible. Saxl saw this task very clearly. He felt he needed to simplify what now existed as the “ Warburg Institute”— in the sense that both W arburg-the-M an and W arburg-the-Library had become encapsu­ lated within a single persona.31 Bing and Wind had begun this process in Hamburg, when they established a permanent cataloguing system for the Library. Up until that point, Warburg had constantly shifted books between loosely-organized sets o f topics as his perspective on the topics upon which he was working changed. In the same way he constantly re­ organized his notes and his filing systems, Warburg had no concept o f a library as a static structure to which one might add new books.32 Bing, Wind and Saxl brought structure to the Library and Saxl did his best to bring order to the persona o f Warburg himself.33 The problem with all this, however, is that one begins to question whether it is at all possible to uncover “ the real Warburg” or if, perhaps, the image we have come to re­ cognize as Warburg was put together in such a way that it completely obscures the original. As far as Warburg’s vision is concerned, the best study remains Gom brich’s study, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography , published in 1970.34 In particular, Gombrich’s chapter on “ The Stars (1908-1914)” helps to set Warburg’s writings on astrological iconography into a convincing intel­ lectual framework.35 Nevertheless Gombrich’s own work was the product o f a specific time and a quite specific set o f circumstances. In particular, a deep

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and abiding respect for Gertrud Bing no doubt inflected, if not influenced, some o f the decisions he must have made about the manner in which he chose to portray “ the Great Man.” As he relates in the introduction, Gombrich had first been asked to London to edit Warburg's great miscellany or “Atlas,” entitled “ M n e m o s y n e During the next decade, however, it became increasingly clear that any distillation o f Warburg’s thought from the massive jumble o f notes and jottings he had left behind was impossible. He proposed, instead, to use the prim ary material in the Warburg Archive as the basis o f a more distanced “ intellectual biography.” In one telling passage, Gom brich records that Bing “ was not always happy to notice the critical detachment” in his early drafts. “ It was in the nature o f things that I could not share the identification with Warburg’s outlook and research which for her was a matter o f course.” 36 In fairness, could it have been any different? Gombrich himself had never met Warburg. He did, however, work alongside Saxl for several years. Is it possible that Gom brich’s “detachment” was heightened by his sensitivity to what must have been at least one o f the underlying moods o f the Warburg Institute at the time? Namely, that in the ongoing contest between a need to sustain the notion o f Warburg’s intellec­ tual supremacy and the obvious and tangible merit o f Saxl’s solid scholar­ ship, the former was showing signs o f coming close to exhaustion. Perhaps Warburg’s great vision was not sufficiently strong or its message was not sufficiently clear; or perhaps Warburg’s vision no longer seemed relevant or convincing to a younger generation o f scholars. Or, perhaps, Saxl had felt that it was essential to the success o f the newly transplanted Warburg Institute that its foundations were set upon something more solid than “unsystematic scraps o f information.” In this context, it might be telling to re-examine two examples o f Warburg’s writings about astrological iconography with the benefit, as it were, o f academic hindsight. What were the issues? What insights are sus­ tainable and which aspects o f Warburg’s work leave him most open to criti­ cism? Is it really Warburg’s work that endows him with the stature o f a great cultural historian? Or does Warburg’s greatness lie in the pointers he left for successive generations to follow and in the richness o f the Library he assem­ bled to enable them to carry out that process?

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The first example is taken from Aby Warburg s paper delivered in 1912 on the fifteenth-century frescoes of the Salone dei Mesi in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara.37 As Gombrich describes the event: By all accounts, W arburg’s appearance at the Rome Congress, where he presented his interpretation of the mysterious frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoja [sic], was the climax of that meeting and of W arburgs public career. For these frescoes suited his purpose of driving hom e once more his view of the true meaning of the Italian Renaissance.38

Arguing that the reintegration o f classical form and content was a defining feature o f the Renaissance, Warburg championed the appearance o f the Olympian gods in the upper zone o f the frescoes as a signal o f coming enlightenment. In the middle zone o f the frescoes, Warburg focused his attention on the first decan-god in the panel devoted to the month o f March and the sign o f Aries.39 Warburg argued that, despite a few minor formal differences, there was a direct link between the Schifanoia decan-god and— working backwards in time— the representation o f the first decan o f Aries in the Astrolabium Planum o f Johannes Angelus;40 the talisman for the first decan o f Aries in the Alfonsine Primer lapidario ;41 and the decan-god depicted on the second-century Tabula Bianchini.42 According to Warburg, all o f these images were distorted copies o f a Hellenistic prototype depicting the constellation of Perseus, better preserved in a the ninth-century manu­ script o f Germ anicuss translation o f the Phaenomena o f Aratus.43 This image, he argued, had been contaminated at an early stage by the Egyptian constellations— the so-called sphaera barbarica— recorded by Teukros and illustrated in the “ round zodiac” taken from the Temple o f Hathor at Dendera;44 and it is only with the Schifanoia frescoes that one sees the classi­ cal Perseus beginning to re-emerge from its “ medieval” deformation. Were this true, the Schifanoia decan-god would possess a remarkable pedigree. Unfortunately, it is not. W arburgs assumptions reflect three errors in judgement. The first error is the most minor o f the three. For, whereas there is a traceable iconographic lineage between the striding man with a hatchet in the Tabula Bianchini , (Fig. 7.1) the angry man with the sword in the Astrolabium planum (Fig. 7.2) and the Schifanoia decan, none o f these,

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Figure 7.1 Reproduction of the Tabula Bianchini. Taken from Franz Boll, Sphaera. Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchunger zur Geschichte der Sternbilder, (Leipzig 1903) (Photo: Courtesy of The W arburg Institute)

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

Figure 7.2

The three decans of Aries. From Johannes Angeles, Astrolabium planum

in tabulis ascendens, (Angsburg: Ratdolt, 1488) (Photo: Courtesy of The W arburg Institute)

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strictly speaking, is a decan-god. The figure in the Astrolabium planum , for example, represents an aspect— a “ prosopon ” or a “ mask”— o f the planetary ruler o f the first ten days o f the month, Mars. This fact is made clear by the text which accompanies the image: “Prima facies arietis est martis et est

facies audaciey fortitudinis , altitudinis et inverecundia ” (“ The first face of Aries is Mars, and it is a face which is bold, strong, tall and imm odest” ). The association here between planet-god and facies is quite clear: the facies is a mask behind which the planet acts. This figure is not a decan-god in its own right.45 This point is made clearer, perhaps, when one is reminded that the fact that the Primer lapidario o f Alfonso X el Sabio is a textbook for magicians. The dark man with an axe is an image that is to be carved on a specific stone in order to bring the powers o f the planet M ars to bear.46 Warburgs second error is more major and lies in his interpretation o f the Schifanoia decan as the iconographic remnant o f the constellation o f

Perseus. This idea appears to be derived from a misreading or misunder­ standing o f Boll’s study o f the Greek texts o f the sphaera barbarica, a book which Warburg repeatedly cited in his lecture. Boll had noted one or two isolated incidents in the Dendera “ round zodiac” where the Egyptian con­ stellations seem to have been affected or contaminated by the more familiar Graeco-Roman ones. The fact that the Dendera zodiac is bordered by depic­ tions o f the thirty-six Egyptian decan-gods led Warburg to believe that there was a connection between Greek constellations and Egyptian decanimagery. But, rather than being an attempt to show a continuity o f tradition, Boll’s express purpose in this study was to show how little the two systems had in common. For example, if one considers those Egyptian constellations that are the astronomical equivalents to the classical constellations o f

Perseus, Andromeda and Cassiopeia, one finds the distinctly non-classical depictions o f an eye set within a disc and a squatting ape with a sparrowhawk on his head seated back to back with a dog-like creature.47 In addition, had Warburg read the text more closely, he would have noticed that the Graeco-Rom an or Ptolemaic constellations rising with the first decan o f Aries are Cepheus and Eridanus , and not Perseus. There is no classical or medieval source which associates the constellation o f Perseus with the first degrees o f Aries.

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Third, Warburg cited the Latin translations o f the Arabic astrologer, Abû M achar, and the illustrated abridgements o f these translations attributed to Georgius Zotori Zapari Fenduli to claim yet another link in the chain o f decan-images from antiquity to Ferrara.48 Whereas it is true that the Schifanoia decan-gods are based on a variant o f the Abû M achar tradition, the classical heritage o f these figures is dubious. In Abû M a‘shar’s text, the decans are described according to three different cultural traditions: the Greek, the Persian and the Indian. The iconography o f the so-called “ Greek” tradition (“post Graecos” ) is clearly compiled o f bits and pieces o f the wellknown Ptolemaic extra-zodiacal constellations which are known to rise alongside the first io° o f the sign o f Aries. Amongst the so-called Persian decans, one sees similar parts o f constellations that appear to have become slightly muddled owing to their contamination by the mythologies o f Persian astrology. The images described “iuxta Indos,” however, have absolutely no connection to a classical antecedent. They are a wholly Indian invention, developed from strictly local astro-mythological traditions. The phrase from Abû M a‘shar s text, that Warburg so cleverly uncovered, actually describes one o f these Indian astral-deities. In one way, then, Warburg was correct: the Latin translations o f Abû M a‘shar do form the textual source for the representation o f the first decan-god in the Schifanoia frescoes. At a more fundamental level, however, Warburg was mistaken: this figure bears absolutely no claim to an exalted classical past. There is no doubt that Warburg s research skills led him to the right book, if not the right passage. His intuition was well-honed. His general ideas about the heritage o f these Schifanoia images were not far wrong. The iconography o f the Schifanoia decan-god does have a long and tortuous iconographie history. It can be traced through an astro-mythological chain back to a classical appearance in the Tabula Bianchini; but when one tries to break through the barrier between astro-magical mythology to astronomy proper, the arguments begin to fray. The appearance o f a decan-god in the Schifanoia frescoes is a miracle o f sorts— but it is not the sort which Warburg described. Warburg considered the decan-god to be a much-mutilated but triumphant recollection (an “engram,” as he would later call it) o f the classi­ cal hero Perseus. He presented the figure as an emblem o f science and enlightenment, on the very verge o f casting o ff its medieval garb and the

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remnants o f magic and superstition. The ultimate sadness o f Warburg’s con­ viction in the classical heritage o f this figure, though, lies in the fact that, in later years, it took on additional personal connotations. It symbolized the potential for triumph over dehumanization by irrational fears; and we know, for example, that when Warburg was recovering from his first serious illness, he kept a large photograph o f the decan-god on his desk— almost like a talis­ man that might help him to regain his strength and his sanity. Very early on, it seems, Saxl recognised that Warburg’s analysis o f the Schifanoia decan-god was seriously flawed. In his published writings, he only mentions the Schifanoia decan-god twice: once, somewhat critically, in an early article in the Repertorium fü r Kunstwissenschaft o f 1922 and then in a lecture delivered in 1936, which, one supposes, he never intended to publish, where he merely repeats the standard Warburgian description o f its icono­ graphie descent from the sphaera barbarica.49 Gombrich, in his biography o f Warburg, remains somewhat oblique in his narration o f this episode, stating simply that “the ingenious arguments that [Warburg] used in support o f this theory have not convinced specialists.” 50 But, in a more recent essay, his por­ trayal o f the Nachleben o f this figure is very different. In describing Warburg’s belief that the Schifanoia decan-god was Perseus-reborn, he says: “ In that theory, the wish was father to the thought; but Saxl told me that he found it impossible to convince Warburg o f his error.” 51 Saxl may well have recognised that Warburg was fallible, but it still remains unclear to what extent or in what manner this knowledge might have coloured his apprecia­ tion o f or belief in Warburg’s talents and skills. One who possessed a harsh disposition might see Warburg’s failings as unforgiveable. The circumspect, however, might be able to turn a blind eye towards the error in both method and conclusion and see it as a freak misadventure. One suspects that, as far as Warburg was concerned, Saxl was probabaly a bit harsh and that Bing remained forever circumspect. It was into this arena that a young Gombrich came into the Warburg Institute. How could he not have inherited a certain “critical detachment” about aspects o f Warburg’s published work when it must have been clear that something as fundamental to Warburg’s vision as the iconology o f the Schifanoia decan-god was based on flawed research and misguided aspira­ tions? As Gombrich him self recently remarked in conversation “ ... my

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

position at the Warburg was not to be envied because I was between the devil and the deep sea.” With the case o f the Schifanoia decan-god, Warburg is shown to be the weaker vessel, but in a second case where Saxl’s research skills met Warburg’s innate talents, it is Warburg who comes out having demonstrated a clearer understanding o f how works o f art are formed. During a period o f research on Peruzzi’s astrological frescoes in the Sala di Galatea in the Villa Farnesina, I discovered some notes written in Aby Warburgs hand in the margins o f his copy o f a book rarely cited in the critical literature on the Villa Farnesina: Ernst Maass’s Aus der Farnesina , published in 1902.52 What makes these notes particularly interesting is that they demonstrate how Warburg had successfully recognized the major structural premise o f Peruzzi’s ceiling and how Saxl, so convinced o f his own abilities in this arena, failed to appreciate the true importance o f the lead that Warburg had offered him. The ceiling o f the Sala di Galatea presents one o f the most intriguing iconographic problems o f Renaissance art. Painted by Baldassare Peruzzi around 1511, it is composed o f twenty-six frescoed compartments, each o f which contains one or more mythologized representations o f the planetgods, zodiacal signs or extra-zodiacal constellations. The least problematic aspect o f the ceiling is the identification o f the subject matter o f the ten spandrels or peducci containing the zodiacal signs and planet-gods.53 As early as 1912, Warburg had realized that the relationship between planetgods and zodiacal signs was neither uniform nor haphazard;54 and several years later, in publications from 1920 and 1927, Warburg suggested that the organization o f the Sala di Galatea ceiling reflected the natal chart o f the building’s patron, the wealthy Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, who, he thought, may have been born in December 1465 while the Sun was transiting Sagittarius.55 In 1932— three years after W arburg’s death— Fritz Saxl delivered a lecture in Rome which contained his own findings on the Sala di Galatea vault.56 Saxl proposed that the arrangement o f the planets in the ceiling demonstrated that Agostino Chigi had been born in 1466 between 8 a m on 30 Novem ber and 11

am

on 11 December. A birth-tim e o f 7 PM on

December 1,14 6 6 was offered as an acceptable mean. Saxl’s only allusion to W arburg’s previous study was to dismiss the way in which the

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astronom er whom Warburg had consulted had calculated the breadth o f each zodiacal sign.57 Subsequent research on the Sala di Galatea vault has shown that the cal­ culations Saxl had used were also inaccurate and that Chigi most probably had been born on 29 or 30 November.58 This suggestion has been confirmed recently by the discovery o f C higi’s baptismal record which states that: “Agostino Andrea son o f Mariano Chigi was baptized on the thirtieth day o f November 1466 and was born on the twenty-ninth day o f the said month at the hour 21 1/2 and Giovanni Salvani was godfather.” 59 The discovery o f Agostino Chigi’s baptismal record should have answered most questions con­ cerning the astrological iconography o f Peruzzi’s ceiling. If the vault records Chigi’s birthdate in a summary way— indicating his birth by means o f the location o f the planets alone— the baptismal record merely confirms what had already been deduced. But the presence o f the extra-zodiacal constellations in the central compartment o f the vault and in the fourteen tri­ angular vele, suggests that Peruzzi intended his vault to convey more than just the zodiacal coordinates o f the planets on November 29, 1466. As a proper natal chart records a rather specific picture o f the relationship between the celestial sphere and a given point on the surface o f the earth, it seemed likely that it was this aim that lies behind the overall plan o f the ceiling. Indeed, among his jottings in the back o f his copy o f Maass’s Aus der Farnesina, Warburg reconstructed his impression o f the Galatea vault as a natal chart with Taurus at the Ascendant and Aquarius at Mid-heaven (Figs 7.3 and 7.4). To all intents and purposes, Warburg’s sketch coincides with the information contained in baptismal records, matching Chigi’s natal chart exactly.60 Warburg made another note which escaped his followers. One astrologically important point in a Renaissance horoscopic chart is the Pars

fortunae , or the Part o f Fortune. This point is used by astrologers as an indi­ cation o f beneficent power. Ptolemy states that, along with the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant, the Part o f Fortune is one o f the four “great authorities” o f the natal chart.61 It was generally associated with inherited wealth and good fortune. Chigi’s Part o f Fortune falls within the zodiacal sign o f Aquarius. As we have seen, Warburg had noted that the goddess “ Fortuna” was placed next to Aquarius in Peruzzi’s vault. It seems likely, then, that “ Fortuna” appears here as an indication o f Chigi’s own Pars fortunae.

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

Figure 7.3

W a rb u rg ’s notes in his copy o f E. Maass, A us der Farnesina ... (M arburg.

i.H, 1902) (Photo: C ou rtesy o f T he W arb u rg Institue)

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Figure 7.4

W arb u rg ’s notes in his copy o f E. Maass, A us der Farnesina ... (M arburg.

i.H, 1902) (Photo: C ou rtesy o f T he W arburg Institue)

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

At this point, one may return to the issue o f Warburg’s notes on the Sala

di Galatea. From the annotations on the frontispiece, we know that Warburg bought Maass’s book in 1908.62 He did not read it, however, until 8 September 1912.63 This information not only coincides with Saxl s charac­ terization o f Warburg when the two first met in the late autumn o f 1911 as “ hardly familiar” with the content o f the numerous astrology books in his possession;64 it also tells us within which context Warburg read Maass’s book. As we know, Warburg had been working on a number o f problems gener­ ated by the iconography o f the Palazzo Schifanoia since 1909.65 It seems that he may even have read Maass’s book as he was travelling on the train down to Rome to deliver his lecture on the Salone dei Mesi before the Tenth Annual Congress o f Art Historians in October o f that year.66 As his later allusions to the Sala di Galatea suggest, the decoration o f the room inter­ ested Warburg primarily for three reasons. First, the ceiling provided him with another example o f “ Perseus-regained,” which, as we have seen, formed an integral part o f Warburg’s lecture on the Ferrarese frescoes centred on the figure o f the first decan o f Aries. Second, the presence o f pagan deities— astral demons— in a cycle connected with the circle o f Raphael provided Warburg with a perfect example with which to argue his thesis o f concilia­ tion: his belief that it was the “ state o f balance itself that represents the highest human value” and that a “psychology o f compromise” underlies the greatest moments o f civilization.67 Finally, Warburg spotted the figure o f

Fortuna in the Sala di Galatea. She, too, symbolized a conciliation o f oppo­ sites; a key by which the modern scholar might better understand how Renaissance man could reconcile in his own mind the apparent conflict between Christian belief and intellectual yearnings toward the art, literature and ideals o f pagan antiquity. As a result o f his previous research on the late fifteenth-century Florentine merchants, Sassetti and Rucellai, Warburg saw this figure o f Fortuna as a kind o f benign totem— a sort o f talisman that helped Renaissance man to bridge the uncertain gap between predetermina­ tion and free will.68 It is surprising that Warburg never published his findings on the Sala di

Galatea; particularly since, in many ways, it could have served to support his theories with much greater force than, say, his work on the Palazzo

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Schifanoia proved to be able to do. But Warburg seems to have been most tantalised by the intellectual half-light o f the Quattrocento rather than by the full glare o f the High Renaissance. To find the gods having regained their glory was, it seems, not as interesting as seeing them emerge newly-born and partially deformed.69 For Saxl, however, it was not the compositional premise o f the painting that was paramount. To him, the exact time o f Chigi’s birth was all that mat­ tered. As far as Saxl was concerned, the fact that Warburg had got the date wrong nullified his insights. With damning precision, he records: “ma il

calcolo ... non condusse alla conferma che il Warburg aveva intuito .” 70 There is a certain sadness in all this. Warburg’s talent in uncovering the central premise o f a work o f art from its structure was a rare gift. Had anyone been listening, it would have been noted that he pointed the way towards an understanding o f the iconographical premise o f the Sala di

Galatea. Gombrich has suggested that Warburg’s discovery o f the icono­ graphic source for the Schifanoia decan-god came from a similar impulse. While reading Boll’s Sphaera , Warburg noticed the tripartite structure o f many o f Boll’s descriptions.71 This led him to see the tripartite structure in the title-page o f each month o f the Astrolabium planum , and, perhaps, in the layered structure o f the outer zones o f the Tabula Bianchini itself. For someone as visually conscious o f patterns as Warburg seems to have been, such similarities in structure would have rung all the right bells. That is not to say, however, that such an approach was not without its pitfalls. Indeed, this knack for recognizing patterns ran awry when Warburg made the next step and tried to tie this specific tradition to that recorded in the illustrated Latin translations o f Abû M a‘shar and when he saw further associations in the imagery o f the Denderah zodiac. One has lingered with these examples longer than, perhaps, either war­ rants. Similarly, one has focused attention on an intellectual relationship between two highly intelligent men with a more glaring light than even the best friendships would be able to withstand. Furthermore, the alleged purpose o f this paper— to summarise Warburg’s thoughts and writings on astrological iconography— has only fleetingly been addressed. What one hopes has been clarified, however, is that if one is looking for an excellent summary, one need look no further than Gombrich’s study which is and,

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

one sees no reason to doubt, should remain the definitive work on the subject. I f one is looking for a deeper understanding o f Warburg’s own thought processes, there are two alternatives. One avenue is to consult the Warburg Archive— the “drafts, jottings, formulations, and fragments aban­ doned on the way to the finished work” 72— although it would seem an enterprise into which any sane angel would hesitate to tread. The second alternative, however, is equally filled with the potential for misadventure. The clearest reflections o f Warburg’s influence remain the work o f his disci­ ples. But, as with all reflections, the wary reader should be conscious o f both the inherent distortions and the reversals characteristic o f any mirror. A fuller appreciation o f Saxl and his contribution to the scholarly literature on astrological iconography may be an essential first step towards an under­ standing o f Warburg’s own work; but, then, one should hasten to add that it would be impossible to say if this would be a step in the right direction ... or not.

notes 1 This paper has benefited enorm ously from the inform ation and advice I have received from a num ber o f scholars who know and understand the history of the Warburg Institute and its personalities m uch better than I. In particular, I would like to thank P rof Sir Ernst G om brich for all his tim e and patience spent on behalf of my text and ideas. Also, I would like to thank Miss Anne Marie Meyer and Prof Nicolai and Mrs Ruth Rubinstein for their insights and b oth Prof J. B. Trapp and M r John Perkins for their help in searching out particularly vexing references. 2 See G. Bing, “Fritz Saxl (1890-1948): A M em oir” in Fritz Saxl 1890-1948. A Volume o f Memorial Essays from his Friends in England, ed. D. J. Gordon, London 1957, pp. 1-46, esp. p. 28. 3 Q uoted from W arburgs diary, 8 April 1907: “ ... zum Herausbuddeln der bisher unbekannten Einzeltatsachen ... Triijfelschw eindienstePassage and translation taken from E. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography (with a Memoir on the History o f the Library by F. Saxl), London 1970, p. 140. See also G ombrich’s suggestion that this m isunderstanding of W arburg as an iconographer may have dated as far back as the delivery of his lecture on the Palazzo Schifanoia in 1912: “But in certain respects W arburg’s trium phal dem onstration of these connections at the Art Historical Congress in Rome of 1912 has actually obscured his principal concerns. He was now considered the learned iconographer, the polym ath who

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had

succeeded

in

discovering

an

out-of-the-w ay

source.” Cited

from

E. H. G om brich, “The Ambivalence o f the Classical Tradition. The C ultural Psychology of Aby W arburg” (an address given at H am burg University on 13 June 1966 on the centenary of Aby W arburg’s birth), in Tributes. Interpreters o f our Cultural Tradition, Oxford 1984, pp. 117-37, esp. Ρ· 131. 4 See, for example, E. Panofsky, Idea. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie [Studien der Bibliothek W arburg, V], Leipzig 1924 (English translation by J. J. S. Peake as Idea. A Concept in A rt Theory, New York 1968); E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the A rt o f the Renaissance, New York 1939; and E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western A rt, Stockholm i960. 5 For an excellent study of the project and a full set of photographs of the installation, see Aby M. Warburg. Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde im Hamburger Planetarium, eds. U. Fleckner, R. Galitz, C. Naber and H.

Nôldeke, H am burg 1993.

6 See Bildersammlung ..., as in n. 5 above, pp. 272-75 and pl. XI. For additional discussion of these images w ith bibliography. 7 See Bildersammlung ..., as in n. 5 above, pp. 280-83 and pl. XIII. 8 See Bildersam mlung..., as in n. 5 above, pp. 290-95 and pl. XV. 9 For complete references and bibliography on W arburg’s writings and lectures on astrology, see Gombrich, Aby W arburg...., as in n. 3 above, pp. 186-205. 10 See F. Saxl, Lectures, ed. G. Bing [2 vols., W arburg Institute], London 1957 and F. Saxl, La Fede negli astri. DalVantichità al Rinascimento, ed. S. Settis, Turin 1985. Eight o f the lectures edited by Bing were republished as A Heritage o f Images. A Selection o f Lectures by Fritz Saxl, edited by H. H onour and J. Fleming, London 1970. An Italian selection, La Storia delle immagine, w ith an in trod uctio n by E. Garin, was published by Laterza (Bari 1965). 11 See Bing, “Fritz Saxl...,” as in n. 2 above, p. 6. 12 See G om brich, Aby Warburg..., as in n. 3 above, passim. For the reference to W arburg s w riting style, see pp. 14-18. 13 For a discussion of this formula, see Gombrich, Aby Warburg..., as in n. 3 above, p. 13. Professor Gombrich, who notes the reappearance of the phrase in French, once offered me five pence if I could trace its origin. I can only report that I have heard it rum ored that the phrase can be found in Augustine, but have no t yet found the opportunity to track it down. More recently, G om brich has m entioned that he now believes that the phrase might be an inversion of of another popular saying, “Der Teufel steckt im Detail”, and that the inversion is W arburg’s own invention. A. M Sassi has suggested that the phrase can be more closely tied to W arburg’s contem porary intellectual milieu and cites parallel evocations of the idea, if not the form ula, in the writings of both Usener and Dilthey. See

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

A. M. Sassi, “Dalla Scienza delle religioni di Usener ad Aby Warburg,” in Aspetti di H ermann Usener filologo della religione, eds. G. Arrighetti, et. al., Pisa 1982, pp. 65-91, esp. pp. 86-91. 14 See Gombrich, “The Ambivalence to the Classical T r a d i ti o n ...a s in n. 3 above, p. 135: “Like W inckelmann in the eighteenth century and Ruskin in the nineteenth he impressed his contemporaries not only as a scholar bu t above all as a prophetic figure.” 15 See Bing, “Fritz Saxl..

as in n. 2 above, p. 14.

16 See Bing, “Fritz S axl...,” as in n. 2 above, pp. 39-40. In the opening lines of a lecture that Saxl delivered in Reading in 1947, he stated: “I am not a philosopher, n or am I able to talk about the philosophy of history. It is concrete historical material that has always attracted me in the field of literature, o f art, or of religion” (see Saxl, Lectures ..., as in n. 10 above, p. 1). It is interesting that Saxl felt that he had to proclaim himself in such a m anner at the outset of a public lecture. O ne cannot help b ut feel that w hat he was really saying was: “If you have come expecting a lecture by Aby W arburg, you might as well leave now.” Nevertheless, that Saxl began his lecture thus— m ore than fifteen years after W arburg’s death— is telling. 17 See Saxl,”The H istory of W arburg’s Library” in Gombrich, Aby W arburg...., as in n. 3 above, p. 335. The sentim ent is echoed in G om brich’s description of the m ann er in which both Bing and Saxl devoted themselves to W arburg and his library: "... I had the opportunity to get to know the guardians o f his heritage during the hardest times of its [the Library’s] crisis and to witness how Fritz Saxl, the D irector of the exiled library, and G ertrud Bing, his faithful helpmate, rem ained determ ined to accomplish the founder’s mission regardless o f w hat might happen to their personal lives. For Fritz Saxl and G ertrud Bing, W arburg was in no way part of history, he was their mentor, their colleague, the exacting and caring head of a private institute of research to whom, they had surrendered body and soul.” Cited from “The Ambivalence of the Classical Tradition . . . ” as in n. 3 above, esp. pp. 117-18. 18 Bing, “Fritz Saxl . . . ” as in n. 2 above, p. 43. In a recent conversation, G ombrich pointed ou t how Saxl’s influence was particularly keenly felt by a num b er of scholars with w hom one m ight not, today, first associate Saxl. He stressed the extent to which art history, as a university subject, did not really exist in England during the years when the Institute was first finding its feet here; and how, for many, Saxl seems to have been a means towards the establishment of a m ethod by which a num ber of bright young m en were able to structure their thinking and research methods. See, in particular, Pope-Hennessy’s descriptions of the debt b oth he and Blunt owed Saxl in J. Pope-Hennessy, Learning to Look. An Autobiography, London 1991, esp. pp. 71-72 and 138. For example: “The arrival in

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London of the W arburg Institute in the 1930s had been a turning point in the development of art history in England. That this was so was due not so m uch to the W arburg library, fine as that was, as to the personality of its director, Saxl” (ibid., p. 71). 19 The debt which the W arburg Institute owes to Saxl for its survival during the 1930s and 1940s has been well-documented; b ut few seem to appreciate the fact that it was Saxl who conceived the idea of turning W arburg’s more or less private library into a scholarly institution. The point is well-made by Gombrich, in “The Ambivalence to the Classical Tradition . . . ” (as in n. 3 above, p. 133), where he points out the extent to which the “W arburg Institute” is, in fact, the brain-child of Saxl: “The actual foundation of the “W arburg library on the Science of Culture” as a research institute, with its series of public lectures and studies, is the work of Fritz Saxl, w hom Aby W arburg’s brothers provided with funds.” The idea to open the Library to scholars seems to have m atured during the years when W arburg was confined in Kreuzlingen: “Thus when W arburg had recovered, he found him self in a wholly changed environm ent ... [and] was now the adm ired creator o f a respected research institute, which bore his name.” 20 For W arburg’s w riting on the first decan-god, see A. W arburg, “Italienische Kunst u nd internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara,” Vitalia e VArte Straniera. A tti del X Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte in Roma, 1912, Rome 1922, pp. 180-93. Repr. in A. W arburg, Gesammelte Schriften. [Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike.

Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitrage zur

Geschichte der europâishen Renaissance], ed. G. Bing, Leipzig-Berlin 1932, PP· 459-81 and 627-44. See also the Italian translations of this essay, by E. C antim ori in A. W arburg, La Rinascità del paganesimo antico. Contributi alla storia della cultura, ed. G. Bing, Florence 1966, pp. 249-72; and M. Bertozzi, in La Tirannia degli astri. Aby Warburg e Vastrologia di Palazzo Schifanoia, Bologna 1985, pp. 81-112. For Saxl’s articles, see F. Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters in rômischen Bibliotheken, H eidelberg

1915,

pp.

v-xvii

(see

also

the

Italian

translation

by

F. Cuniberto, “Im m agini degli astri dal Medioevo al Q uattrocento,” in Saxl, La Fede negli astri ...., as in n. 10 above, pp. 155-61 and 467); F. Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters der National-Bibliothek in Wien, Heidelberg 1927, pp. 7-53, esp. pp. 19-40 (see also the Italian translation by F. Cuniberto in F. Saxl, “La carta del cielo: Dürer, gli arabi e la tradizione classica,” in Saxl, La Fede negli astri ... (op. cit.), pp. 413-20 and 483-85); and E. Panosksy and F. Saxl, “Classical M ythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan M useum Studies, IV, 1932-33, pp. 228-80, esp. p. 237-41.

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21 The content of W arburg’s lecture is sum m arised in A. W arburg, “Die antike Gôtterwelt und die Friihrenaissance im Süden u n d im Norden,” Verein fü r Hamburgische Geschichte, XIV, December 1908 and “Über Planetengôtterbilder im niederdeutschen Kalender von 1519,” in Erster Bericht der Gesellschaft der Bücherfreunde zu Hamburg, Hamburg 1910 (both reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften ..., II, pp. 451-54 and 626; and pp. 483-86 and 645-46). The focus of both lectures is discussed in Gombrich, Aby Warburg ..., as in n. 3 above, pp. 186-91. For Saxl’s argum ents, see F. Saxl, “Beitráge zu einer Geschichte der Planetendarstellungen im O rient un d im Occident,” Islam. Zeitschrift fü r Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients, III, 1912, pp. 151-77 (Italian transi, by F. C uniberto, “La raffigurazione dei pianeti in O riente e in Occidente,” in F. Saxl, La Fede negli a s tr i... (as in n. 10 above), pp. 63-146 and 455-66); F. Saxl, “Probleme der Planetenkinderbilder,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt, LIV (N.F. XXX), 1919, pp. 1013-21 (Italian transi, by F. Cuniberto, “I figli dei pianeti,” in F. Saxl, La Fede negli astri ... (as in n. 10 above), pp. 274-79 and 473-74); and F. Saxl, “The Literary Sources of the ‘Finiguerra Planets’,” Journal o f the Warburg Institute, II, 1938, pp. 72-74. 22 Passages taken from “Die antike Gôtterwelt u nd die Friihrenaissance . . . ” as in n. 21 above, as cited by Gombrich, Aby W arburg..., as in n. 3 above, pp. 188-89. 23 See Saxl, “Finiguerra Planets.. . as in n. 21 above, pp. 73-4. 24 The translation comes from R. Chernow, The Warburgs. A 20th-century Odyssey o f a Remarkable Family, New York 1993, p. 246, citing from Max Adolf W arburg’s “Speech at the W arburg Institute after the death of G ertrud Bing.” Gombrich, however, feels that the “à vapeur” m oniker might be tied more closely to the m ercurial nature o f Saxl’s actions and the fact that he, often to the desperation of his friends and colleagues, could never be pinned down, never be made to stand still and always seemed to be slipping round corners and out o f rooms. 25 Related to this, in a recent conversation, Gombrich echoed Bing’s view, suggesting that there was no real ideological th ru st to Saxl’s researches, “Saxl just found things interesting.” W hen asked if he thought that W arburg m ight have been disappointed in Saxl, G ombrich related a story told to him about W arburg by Bing. W hen Bing asked him why he had not yet finished a paper for the Schmarsow festscrift, W arburg replied that “the level of the underground water has not yet risen sufficiently.” The idea was (quoting G om brich) th at “ [Warburg] sort of drilled a hole and the water— which carried the relevant facts— had, in the end, to come out of this particular font. He wanted all the facts ( wasser) to come out of one font or, to point to one result naturally.” Saxl, on the other hand, was not a single hole-driller. He, according to Gombrich, “drilled everywhere.” 26 See Bing, “ Fritz S a x l. . . ” as in n. 2 above, p. 6. Both G ombrich and Meyer relate num erous instances of how W arburg entranced the scholars with w hom he came

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into contact. His eyes, in particular, seemed to possess a mesmeric effect. In a recent conversation, G om brich recalled how Bing had described her first meeting w ith Warburg: “Bing said that meeting him the first tim e she felt that his eyes looked straight through her ... he had a sort o f hypnotic look.” 27 Panofsky has been quoted, more than once, as having claimed that he owed everything to W arburg and that he, Panofsky, was famous in the United States only because people did n o t know about W arburg whose works had not yet been translated into English. 28 I thank Professor Nicolai Rubinstein, in particular, for discussing this issue with me. 29 See the com ments of Pope-Hennessy cited in n. 18 above. See also the perceptive com m ents in R. Hinks’s unsigned review of Saxl’s Lectures in The Times Literary Supplement, for 23 May 1958, pp. 1-2, where he states: “It was perhaps a devotion to the concrete instance, a respect for the unalienable individuality of facts and events, that Saxl found reassuring in the best English scholarship; just as Saxl’s English friends often found their hesitancies and inhibitions thawing and yielding to the genial w arm th of his intuitive sympathy, and saw the recalcitrant atoms of their learning com bine and transform themselves u nd er the pressure o f his creative im agination” (p. 2). 30 These insights have been gained thanks to Professor G om brich’s conversations w ith me on the topic. 31 In a recent conversation, Gombrich m entioned that Saxl constantly used the word “norm alise” when it came to describing the task he faced when he first came to London: “In order for this not all to go to waste, he had to simplify the Institute. He didn’t want all these intellectual knots to be tied and felt he had to iron out some o f the quirkiness in order to make the Institute intelligible to the average academic or scholar.” 32 In Saxl’s “H istory o f W arburg’s Library” (as in n. 3 above, pp. 325-38), he presents a glimpse into how W arburg’s cataloguing system worked: “O ften one saw W arburg standing tired and distressed bent over his boxes with a packet o f index cards, trying to find for each one the best place w ithin the system; it looked like a waste o f energy and one felt sorry ... It took some time to realize that his aim was not bibliographical. This was his m ethod of defining the limits and contents of his scholarly world and the experience gained here became decisive in selecting books for the Library” (p. 329). It m ight be m entioned that Saxl’s quotation is presented out of context in Chernow ’s biography on the Warburgs, which makes this exercise sound pathetic, rather than inspired. See Chernow, The Warburgs..., as in n. 24 above, p. 124 (where the note to this passage is also incorrectly cited). 33 O f all W arburg’s disciples, it was probably Bing who was closest to him and who, m ost likely, felt that she understood— and perhaps m ore im portantly, believed

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

in— the greatness of his thought. It had been the plan originally that G ombrich would edit the Nachlass and that Bing and Saxl would write W arburgs biography. This then developed into a scheme whereby G om brich would write about W arburg’s ideas based on the material preserved in his notes and Bing would write a study of W arburg’s use of language, which, both as a close colleague and as a philosopher by training, she was perfectly placed to do. For reasons that are not altogether clear, Bing destroyed m ost of w hat she had w ritten on the subject shortly before she died. The tem ptation is to suggest that she felt that she could not do it justice and that she would prefer not to continue, rather than mislead future generations due to her own perceived inadequacies. 34 See G om brich, Aby Warburg ..., as in n. 3 above. It m ight be m entioned that appreciation o f G om brich’s volum e is n ot universal and, in particular, Edgar W ind wrote a biting review of the book when it first came out. The review was first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 1971, pp. 735-6 and was republished as “O n a recent biography of Warburg,” in E. W ind, The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in H um anist A rt, ed. J. Anderson, Oxford 1983, pp. 21-35. The num erous instances o f unhappiness, which grew up between W ind and several of the scholars associated with the W arburg Institute, need not unduly concern us here, save to m ention that there was sufficient venom packed into this review to suggest that W ind had his arrows aimed at m ore than one target. Nevertheless, having read W arburg’s and Saxl’s work myself, I would still advocate G om brich’s study as the best way into a study of the topic. 35 See Gombrich, Aby Warburg..., as in n. 3 above, pp. 186-205. 36 See Gombrich, Aby Warburg..., as in n. 3 above, p. 4. 37 See Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie ....,” as in n. 20 above. 38 See Gombrich, Aby Warburg..., as in n. 3 above, p. 192. 39 M uch of this m aterial is draw n from my doctoral thesis, “The Frescoes of the Salone dei Mesi in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara: Style, Iconography and C ultural Context,” University o f Chicago 1987, esp. pp. 138-95. See also, K. Lippincott, “Gli dei-decani del Salone dei Mesi di Palazzo Schifanoia,” Alla corte degli Estensi. Filosofía, arte e cultura a Ferrara nei secoli X V e X V I [Atti del Convegno internazionale di Studi, Ferrara, 5-7 m arzo 1992], ed. M. Bertozzi, Ferrara 1994, pp. 181-97. 40 Johannes Angelus, Astrolabium planum in tabulis ascendens, Augsburg: Ratdolt, 1488. An illustrated version of the Astrolabium planum also exists in a G erman translation of ca. 1490 in Heidelberg, UniversitatsbibL, cod. pal. germ. 832, ff. 36r-83v. See H. Wegener, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der deutschen BilderHandschriften des spâten Mittelalters in der Heidelberger Universitàtsbibliothek, Leipzig 1927, pp. 102-06 and B. Haage, “Das Astrolabium planum des Codex

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palatinus germanicus 832. Ein Forschungsbericht,” Heidelberger Jahrbücher, XXIX, 1985, pp. 87-105. 41 M adrid, Biblioteca Escuralensis, Ms h.1.15, ff. i2r-i2v. See Alfonso el Sabio: Lapidario and Libro de las formas & ymagenes, eds. R.C. D im an and L.W. Winget, Madison W I 1980, pp. 165-71 and the facsimile edition of the m an uscript, Lapidario del Rey D. Alfonso X. Códice original, ed. J. Fernández M ontaña, M adrid 1881. 42 As Gom brich has pointed out, W arburg’s awareness of the Tabula Bianchini was gained via F. Boll, Sphaera. Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder, Leipzig 1903, pp. 299-305 and 433 ff. A record of the top right corner o f the Tabula is preserved in drawings made during the seventeenth century by Nicolaus-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the whole, therefore, is often referred to as the “Fragmentum Peiresc.” See B. de M ontfaucon, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, Paris 1719, I, 2, pl. CCXXIV. See also. W. Gundel, Dekane und Dekansternbilder. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Sternbilder der Kulturvôlker, Glückstadt and H am burg 1936, pp. 184-87. 43

Leiden, Universiteitsbibl., Ms Voss. lat. 4 /, 179, fol. 4 0 V.

44 See Boll, Sphaera ..., as in η. 42 above, pp. 159 ff. W arburg expanded this thesis in an unpublished lecture “W anderungen der antiken Gôtterwelt vor ihrem Eintritt in die Hoch-italienische Renaissance,” delivered in Gottingen on 29 November 1913. 45 The history of the decans and its various images is by no means clear, having been subjected to the sorts o f mistakes, m isunderstandings, conflations and approxim ations com m on to m uch of the astro-mythological lore that was passed around and around the M editerranean. In the Tabula Bianchini, for example, this relationship between the planet-god ruling each decan and the prosopa is made clear by their relative placements on the disc. The prosopa are placed between the planet gods and the zodiacal signs. W hat is unclear, however, is whether this interm ediary b and of images represents “masks” of the planet-gods or a subsidary set of decanal demi-gods or messengers. Bouché-LeClercq, for example, argues that “L’important, si quelque chose importe ici, c’est que, sans nul doute, les π ρ ό σ ω π α portent les noms des planètes: ce sont les décans déguisés en planètes” (see A. Bouché-LeClercq, L’Astrologie grecque, Paris 1899), pp. 225-26 (note). And Aulus Gellius quite specifically limits the meaning imposed on the Greek term: “Sicuti quidam faciem esse hominis p utant os tantum et oculos et genas, quod Graeci

π ρ ό σ ω π ο α dicunt, quando facies sit forma omnis et modus et factura quaedam cor­ poris totius a faciendo dicta, ut ab aspectu species et a fingendo figura” (see Noctes Atticae, XII, 30 (29), ed. C. Hosius, Stuttgart 1959, II, p. 98). By the fifteenth century, however, as seems clear from the text o f the Tabula ascendens, the figures illustrated represent ‘faces’ o f the planet-gods and are not demi-gods in their own right.

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

46 M adrid, Bibl. Escurialensis, Ms H. I. 15, fol. 9 4 η The text reads: “De la piedra que a nombre sanguina. DEla [sic] primera fa z del signo de aries es la piedra aque llaman sanguina. Esta a tal vertud que, el que la trae consigo, fazel seer atreuundo & orgulloso; vencedor de batíalas & de lides. Et esto se faze mas complida miente seyendo mars en esta faz. & en su ascendente & en su hora & en su bon catamiento del sol. Et que descenda sobrestá piedra la vertud de la figura de un onme negro que a los oios salidos afuera. & tiene un cinto alquice. & in su mano un açadori' Cited from El Primer Lapidario de Alfonso X el Sabio. Ms h. 1. 15 de la Biblioteca de El Escorial, eds. M. Brey M ariño, J.L. A rnoros Portolès and A. D om inquez Rodriquez, M adrid 1982, p. 118. 47 Boli, Sphaera..., as in η. 42 above, p. 237. One of the im portant distinctions to rem em ber is that the Egyptian system o f decan-stars was based on an equatorial system of measurements. The Greeks always measured their stellar co-ordinates relative to the ecliptic. As soon as the Greeks adopted— or rather, adapted— the Egyptian system o f decans to their own ecliptical system, the astronom ical and time-keeping significance of these star-groupings vanished. All that was left were the astrological characteristics that may have been associated with each grouping. And, it would seem, even these astrological associations were doom ed to a shortened life, since the Greeks very soon supplanted any native Egyptian myths with their own zodiacal and planetary astro-mythology. 48 The so-called “Fenduli A bridgem ent” is actually a com pilation of extracts taken from the H erm annus o f C arinthia (also som etimes know n as H erm annus Dalmata) translation o f the Introductoriam of Abû M acshar composed somewhat prior to 1200. The Fenduli text is unedited, but it exists in a num ber of sum ptuously illustrated m anuscripts. For a resumé, see V.A. Clark, “The Abridged Astrological Treatise ofAlbumasar. Astrological Imagery in the West,” PhD thesis, University of Michigan 1979. 49 See F. Saxl, “Rinascimento dell’antichità. Studien zu den Arbeiten A. Warburgs,” Repertorium fü r Kunstwissenschaft, XLIII, 1922, pp. 220-72, esp. pp. 235-36 and F. Saxl, “The Revival of Late Antique Astrology,” in Lectures ..., as in n. 10 above, pp. 80-1. The description reads: “In the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, we find the members of the family of the sphaera barbarica again; accompanying the Ram, there is a strangely attired dark man, a seated woman with one of her legs showing and a man holding an arrow with a ring, who are all figures with an Oriental pedigree.” 50 See Gombrich, Aby W arburg..., as in n. 3 above, p. 194. 51 See E.H. Gombrich, “Relativism in the Humanities: The Debate about H um an Nature,” in Topics o f our Time. Twentieth-century Issues in Learning and in Art, London 1991, p. 52. 52 E. Maass, Aus der Farnesina. Hellenismus und Renaissance, M arburg i.H. 1902. W arburg’s copy is still held by the W arburg Institute at shelfmark FAF 880. For a

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fuller version of the material presented in this article, see K. Lippincott, “Aby W arburg, Fritz Saxl and the Astrological Ceiling o f the Sala di Galatea,” in Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg 1990, eds. H. Bredekamp, M. Diers and C. Schoell-Glass, H am burg 1991, pp. 213-32. 53 They are arranged in a clockwise fashion around the ceiling in the following m anner: 1. Aries, Jupiter and Taurus with Europa; 2. Leda and the Swan and the Gemini; 3. Hercules w ith the Lernean H ydra and Cancer; 4.Hercules w ith the N emean Lion (Leo); 5. Virgo and Diana (Luna); 6. Libra and Scorpio with Mars and Mercury; 7. Apollo (Sol) w ith Sagittarius; 8. Venus and C apricorn; 9. Ganymede (Aquarius) and 10. Venus and C upid (Pisces) and Saturn. 54 A m ongst the notes he w rote in his copy o f M aass’s Aus der Farnesina, W arburg observed that Saturn was conjunct w ith Venus; Luna was in Virgo; Venus was in C apricorn or, possibly, in Pisces; Apollo was in Sagittarius; and Jupiter was either in Aries or in Taurus (both signs are shown flanking the god). Mars and M ercury were in conjunction w ith the form er in Libra and the latter in Scorpio; the zodiacal panel for Cancer contained a depiction of Engonasin (the constellation Ophiuchus) and A quarius was near F ortuna and Phoenike (or ursa minor). 55 See A. W arburg, “H eidnisch-antike Weissagung in W ort u n d Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” Sitzungsberichte

der Heidelberger Akademie

der

Wissenschaften.

Philos.-hist. Klasse, XXVI [A bhandlung], 1920 (repr. in W arburg, Gesammelte Schriften ..., as in n. 20 above, II, pp. 489-558, esp. p. 511) and A. W arburg, “O rientalisierende Astrologie,” Wissenschaftlicher Bericht über den Deutschen Orientalistentag in Hamburg, 1926. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlàndischen Gesellschaft, NF VI, 1927 (repr. in Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften ..., as in n. 20 above, II, pp. 561-65, esp. p. 563). 56 See F. Saxl, “La fede astrológica di Agostino Chigi,” La Farnesina [Collezione. Reale Accademia d ’ltalia, 1], Rome 1934. A. Beer’s calculations appear on pp. 61-67. Note esp. the conclusions on p. 65 and 67. Beer republished his findings in A. Beer, “Astronomical Dating o f Works o f Art,” Vistas in Astronomy, IX, 1967, pp. 177-223, esp. pp. 189-99. 57 Saxl, “La fede di Agostino C h ig i. . . ” as in n. 56 above, p. 29. In the 1934 version of his Farnesina lecture, Saxl did n ot m ention W arburg’s work at all. See Saxl, Lectures. .., as in n. 10 above, p. 197. 58 See W. H artner, “Qusayr cAmra, Farnesina, Luther, Hesiod. Some Supplem entary Notes to A. Beer’s Contribution,” Vistas in Astronomy, IX, 1967, pp. 225-228, esp. pp. 226-27. 59 Siena, Archivio di Stato, Pieve di San G iovanni 2, fol 69r: “Agostino Andrea di Mariano Chigi si batezô a di 30 di novembre 1466 e naque a di 29 di deto messe a ore 21 1/2 e fu conpare Giovani S a l v a n i See I. D. Rowland, “The Birth Date of

A VI EW OF ABY WARBURG' S WRI TI NGS ON ASTROLOGY AND ART

Agostino Chigi: D ocum entary Proof,” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XLVII, 1984, pp. 192-93. 60 It should be m entioned that the exact details of Chigi’s natal chart rem ain the subject of debate. Rather than rehearse the argum ents here, the reader is directed to the following articles (with the, perhaps, obvious caveat that the author of the present essay rem ains unconvinced by the argum ents presented in the m ost recent contribution to the literature). See M. Quinlan-M cGrath, “The Astrological Vault of the Villa Farnesina. Agostino Chigi’s Rising Sign,” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XLVII, 1984, pp. 91-105; K. Lippincott, “Two Astrological Ceilings Reconsidered: The Sala di Galatea in the Villa Farnesina and the Sala del Mappamondo at Caprarola,” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LIII, 1990, pp. 185-207; and M. Q uinlan-M cG rath, “Time-Telling, Conventions and Renaissance Astrological Practice,” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LVIII, 1995, pp. 53-71. In a private com m unication, Quinlan-M cG rath has pointed out a num ber of m isprints and m inor errors in my 1990 text (such as the appearance of “Alessandro” for “A gostino” in m ore than one instance and o f an inadvertent conflation of two parts of her argum ent) for which I apologise and thank her. 61 Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, III, 128-29. See also Bouché-LeClercq, L’Astrologie grecque, as in n. 45 above, pp. 289-96. 62 The note reads: “08/214,” indicating th at it was the 214th book that W arburg bought in 1908. The corresponding entry in W arburgs ledger informs us that he paid DM 1.20 for it. I thank John Perkins for his assistance in tracing this inform ation. 63 Note the heading of W arburg’s annotations: “8/IX.[i]9i2 im C o u p é” 64 See F. Saxl, “The H istory of W arburg’s Library” in Gombrich, Aby Warburg ..., as in n. 20 above, p. 327. 65 See Gombrich, Aby W arburg..., as in n. 3 above, pp. 191-99. 66 This possibility was suggested to me by Anne Marie Meyer. 67 See Gombrich, Aby W arburg..., as in n. 3 above, pp. 177 and 170 (for the formula “psychology of com prom ise”). 68 A. W arburg,“Francesco Sassettis letztwillige Verfügung,” Kunstwissenschaftliche Beitràge August Schmarsow gewidmet, Leipzig 1907, pp. 129-52 (repr. Gesammelte Schriften ..., as in n. 20 above, I, pp. 127-58. See also Gombrich, Aby Warburg ..., as in n. 3 above, p. 173. 69 G om brich makes a similar p oin t in another context, stating: “W hat attracted W arburg to this period of transition was precisely its divided self, which was anything but naïve.” See Gombrich, “The Ambivalence of the Classical T radition.. as in n. 3 above, p. 126. 70 See Saxl, “La fede di Agostino C higi..

as in n. 56 above, p. 29.

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71 In a recent conversation, G om brich m entioned that he had once told Saxl of his suspicions tha t W arburg had discovered the source o f the Schifanoia decan through musing on the textual layout of Boll’s Sphaera, and that Saxl had agreed that it was probably true. If true, which there seems no reason not to believe, it is am using to note that such a m ethod happily coincides w ith the fact that W arburg’s own m otto was “Das Wort zum Bild” (see G om brich, “The Ambivalence o f the Classical Tradition ...,” as in n. 3 above, p. 123). 72 For the phrase, see Gombrich, Aby Warburg..., as in n. 3 above, p. 3.

"serious issues": the last plates of warburg's picture atlas mnemosyne1

charlotte schoell-glass aby

w a r b u r g ’s

l a st

p r o je c t ,

the

picture atlas “Mnemosyne,” unfinished at Warburg’s death in 1929, is still not available today2 and, dealing as it does

mainly

with

mythological

imagery, has itself now attained the status o f a myth. Much has been written about the picture-atlas, and much o f it in metaphors: It was described as a symphony,3 as a collection o f loci classici, as an assemblage o f constellations, as a laboratory o f the history o f images— this last metaphor has at least the merit o f being Warburg’s own— and in similar comparative ways. Often, scholars have analysed the Bilderatlas in terms o f aesthetics, that is, as if it were an art-work rather than a scholarly endeavor. Attention was drawn to the fact that Warburg’s plates are close in time to the invention o f collage and may be inspired by similar intentions;4 it was also suggested that the plates o f the atlas may have been intended as a purely visual text.5 These observations would seem to have to be qualified by what we know today about Warburg’s last project.

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There is much scholarly and not-so-scholarly interest lately in the atlas, but so far, we do not have the foundation o f an historically reliable publica­ tion which would enable us to attempt a coherent interpretation o f the whole. This foundation is currently being layed by Kurt Forster and Martin Warnke as part o f the new edition o f Warburg s Collected Works, which will include a large body o f unpublished texts. Among them is also the Tagebuch

der Κ . B. W. covering the years from 1926 until W arburgs death in October 1929, and containing a wealth o f information about the formation o f the “ Bilderatlas.” 6 The unpublished diary was used by Pieter van Huisstede7 to reconstruct the origins and metamorphoses o f the atlas. A final assessment o f what the picture atlas can reasonably be said to be about and its place in the history o f ideas o f its time (“ heutige Erkenntnistheorie” 8) will, however, have to wait for the publication o f this and other material. Now already, the completed transcription o f the entire Tagebuch der

K.B.W. allows a more detailed view o f the circumstances surrounding the creation o f the picture atlas. It now appears in a new light— as the daily prac­

tice o f the cultural science that Aby Warburg fought for on the levels o f arthistorical scholarship itself, o f its institutionalization and o f the formation o f a theory o f the human memory for images. These questions o f discipli­ nary practice (and, not rarely, ritual) have been addressed for the sciences, whereas the humanities have yet to be scrutinized in this manner.9 Here, I am not referring to the critique o f the ideological background o f the work being done (or having been done) in Warburg’s Art History. In what ways, it is asked here, can the plates be read? How were they put together? What is the function o f contemporary visual material at the end o f the predom ­ inantly historical atlas? The analysis o f the last plates o f the picture atlas may help to answer these questions and may contribute to its understanding on three levels: the “ theoretical,” the “ iconological,” and the practical.

praxis In his Intellectual Biography , Ernst Gombrich relates how the idea o f an “atlas” evolved from the pratice at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.) in Ham burg.10 It is thought to have been Fritz Saxl, who, not long after Warburg had returned in 1923 from Kreuzlingen to Hamburg

THE LAST PLATES OF WARBURG' S PICTURE ATLAS MNEMOSYNE

after his confinement to this and other mental institutions for several years, had introduced Warburg to a new technique for mounting multiple pictures for comparison. Early in 1924, Warburg had begun to work with screens o f the dimensions o f roughly 150 cm by 200 cm. They consisted o f a light metal frame on which a dark cloth was tightly fixed. On the cloth, reproductions o f artworks could just as easily be attached with metal clasps as they could be rearranged, or removed. At a time when double-projection in art-historical lecturing was still uncom m on— the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek still worked with a rather monstrous and sometimes unruly single projector— the possibility o f multiple comparison made an enormous difference in the visualization o f any given art historical problem.11 Warburg took to this new tool and used it to prepare his Rembrandt-lecture o f 1924,12 then for exhibitions in the library and elsewhere. From these projects, the plan for an atlas emerged. Over the years, the Tagebuch also mentions dozens o f Warburg’s ad hoc lec­ tures (FiXhrungen) for visitors o f the library. These talks had the function to propagate the aims and methodology o f the K.B.W. but it comes across emphatically from Warburg’s notes that they served just as much as a way of clarifying and testing the complicated thought processes that went into the construction o f the atlas. Often, both his listeners’ reactions and his own success or failure to reach or convince them are recorded.13 While M nemosyne , “ remembrance,” remained the chosen main title, Warburg tried out a considerable number o f subtitles over the years, among them “ Primeval Language o f Gesture,” “ Critique o f Pure Unreason” and others.14 For each plate there was to be a commentary, but most o f them were never written. All plates-to-be were assembled on the large frames mentioned, numbered and then photographed. In all, we have three series o f photographs o f about 60 plates in different stages and an “ Introduction” ; it is quite clear that the project remained a fragment. In the context o f practice at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek one should consider once again what the name o f the enterprise can tell us. Here I am not referring to Mnemosyne , Greek for remembrance and memory. To think about memory and its function in Warburg’s work was and still is a major focus o f scholarship. The choice o f the tool o f the atlas (“our atlas” 15), tells us just as much, as an atlas is an instrument with a long and dignified

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history in European culture. Bilderatlasse abound in the 19th and early twen­ tieth centuries, predominantly in medicine (dermatology), in geography for city-views, and in other areas where a comparative approach to objects had its place within different methodologies.16 The introduction o f the tool to Art History today seems to be an easy move; however, it may not have been so obvious a choice then. And rather than connecting it by way o f analogy with Cubist collages, I suggest seeking an analogy for Warburg’s “ invention” in the realm o f science. After all, he saw his research institute (and the atlas) as a laboratory; where information was assembled and then processed and worked with just as in a chemistry or a physics lab, as well as a seismograph to register underground movements that would not be noticed otherwise. An atlas, o f course, is an instrument to reduce the world and information about it to the size o f a book, “ the plates o f which may be flattened, com ­ bined, reshuffled, superimposed, redrawn at will,” as Bruno Latour put it.17 And to use his words in a slightly modified way: Now the art historian dom ­ inates what had dominated him before. W arburgs problems and questions tied to the artistic heritage o f Europe not only could now be visualized, they had become an “ immutable and combinable mobile.” 18 The relationship o f the atlas to its contents and function, mnemosyne , could be said to be one o f transformation from fluid to fixed. The process o f “depoisoning” o f violent gestures in a new context— sport for example— which Warburg had observed in the wanderings o f Pathosformeln into the modern world19 may also be a process which is represented in the picture atlas itself.

theory In a letter to Karl Vossler, written by Warburg only a few days before his death, the different goals o f the atlas are succinctly set out: “ Because o f the very precarious state o f my health I could not ignore the fact any more that now or never there was an opportunity to unite my dif­ ferent and specialized studies into a unified work, which would demonstrate the common goal o f all o f my diverse endeavors (Bemühungen). To this end a journey had to be undertaken to collect and sort pertinent materials: from Bologna to Rimini, Perugia, Rome and Naples. Only thus I could hope to integrate important and powerful artistic figures as links o f proo f in the

THE LAST PLATES OF WARBURG' S PICTURE ATLAS MNEMOSYNE

chain o f my deductions which aim at a new science o f artistic formation itself. With the help o f the self-effacing zeal o f Dr Bing, I was able to bring together the material for a picture atlas. Its series o f images will unfold the function o f the prefigured classicizing nuances o f expression which were used to represent the inner and outward movements o f life. It will at the same time also be the foundation o f a new theory o f the function o f the human memory o f images.” 20 From this, the built-in difficulties o f the picture atlas plainly emerge: All o f W arburgs previous work was to be included in order to demonstrate its unified purpose; both the new art history and the new theory as well as their application were to unfold in its plates and commentaries. The new theory— I doubt whether the characterization “ theory without a theory” 21 will hold— rests on a number o f terms, all o f which have been discussed in previous scholarship but are difficult to organize into a coherent whole. It is no coincidence that Martin Warnke’s seminal studies o f 1980 approach the question under the title “ Four Keywords,” thus implying that fragmentation has to be accepted as a necessary condition if one wants to do justice to W arburgs work. Gombrich’s reconstruction o f W arburgs intellectual biog­ raphy explained his terminology and thought processes genetically with respect to their origin in 19th century science and scholarship. It is equally important, however, to explore the links that connect Warburg’s thought with our own methodological problems. These central terms structuring Warburg’s plates would have to find their places in the theory that he attempted to illustrate in the Bilderatlas: orienta­ tion, polarity, Pathosformel,22 engramme,23 symbol,24 inversion o f energy (“ energetische Inversion” ). As will be seen, these terms have their visual counterparts in plate 79. Fiere, there can only be the merest hints at their possible

meaning

in

a

“ kulturwissenschaftliche

Kunstgeschichte” :

Orientation represents the basic human need which triggers all attempts to interpret signs and to see signs in the world. An equally basic assumption attributes to any given psychological state and its corporeal expression the potential to contain extreme opposites: polarity. The repertory o f

Pathosformeln in European art are ways o f representing moments o f high passion— life in movement— in art (and life) as recognizable signs for these passions and emotions through the centuries. The engramme is the trace in

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the mind and brain o f everything seen and committed to memory. The

symbol can have different functions in different cultures. Three possible ways o f using and understanding symbols are discerned in Warburg’s theory: it can have the character o f a trope or o f a metaphor and both these states can be present at once. Warburg’s theory o f the symbol is based on Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s symbol theory, and for both, Vischer and Warburg, the theological debates about the Eucharist provide the central metaphors with which they explain the function of symbols.25 The term energetic inversion refers to the dynamic process o f transformation through symbolization. But clearly, Warburg found it dauntingly difficult to conceptualize and systematize his findings and documents. The last two volumes o f the

Tagebuch frequently mention Edgar Wind26 and his first wife Ruth, Gertrud Bing, Walter Solmitz and others as important partners in clarifying Warburg’s thoughts and perceptions in discussions and in formulating the principles that govern the groupings o f more than a thousand reproduc­ tions. The many versions o f the subtitle— some poignantly aphoristic— testify to these difficulties. The main problem— to this day— could be described as the mixing o f subject matter and what it was thought to exem­ plify, or, in other words, o f signifiers and signifieds. While Warburg was trying to put together nothing less than a “ Psychology o f Human Orientation on the Foundation of a History o f Pictorial Universals” 27 he was at the same time and in one move trying to devise a theory o f signs. This is expressed in another, “esoteric,” as he says, subtitle: “ Transformatio Energética “ as the Subject o f Research as well as the Function o f a Library o f the Comparative History o f Symbols (the symbol as catalytic quintessence).” 28

contemporary images Among the many important aspects o f the atlas one will be singled out here for closer scrutiny: Warburg’s inclusion o f contemporary, non-art visual material in his last plates. Both these choices, it should be noted, would have been unprecedented in art historical scholarship at the time, had the atlas been published. He seems to have arrived at this decision only in 1929; until then a purely historical perspective prevailed with regard to the material to be included. However, such a decision seems entirely justified if the theoret-

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ical aspect o f the atlas is borne in mind. If a unified theory o f the “ human memory o f images” was to be devised, it could hardly be restricted to the art and culture o f the Renaissance. Contemporary material, then, had the func­ tion o f a touchstone for the viability o f the whole endeavor. Within the structure of the atlas as described by Warburg to Vossler, these plates have more than one layer o f meaning: they have an iconography or can be read as a visual text which can be reconstructed with the help o f the Tagebuch as historical and, at the same time, symbolic. That very structure, meant to represent a life’s work, is in itself a message. Although photographs o f golf players, advertisements for cosmetics and press-cuttings o f different events are assembled in the last three plates (77-79>) the Tagebuch of 1929 (vols. 7, 8 and 9) seems to indicate that one event in particular suggested to Warburg the inclusion o f its documentation: the signing o f the Lateran Treaties on 11 February 1929 by Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. Warburg was staying in Rome that winter, together with Gertrud Bing, and both gave accounts o f the different events they witnessed which were connected to the signing ceremonies— among them a papal pro­ cession in front o f and inside St. Peter’s as well as Warburg’s visit to a cinema to see a film about the signing ceremony itself.29 On the whole, Warburg found it difficult to convince others that his visualized “ art historical cul­ tural history” could indeed also be used to understand contemporary visual­ izations: one such discussion is mentioned in the diary o f 1929.30 Gertrud Bing once said o f Warburg that he often felt not wholly understood by his contemporaries and that he had hoped to entrust his concerns to the future by means o f his vast archive and library.31 The last plates o f the atlas could be seen as an instance o f this strategy. Plates 78 and 79 are not only o f a nature other than the main body o f the plates, but are also obviously interconnected. Together with reproductions o f works o f art, they display contemporary press photographs, several o f which invoke two different important political incidents: One— already m en­ tioned— is the signing o f the Lateran treaties between the Holy See and the Italian state by Pope Pius XI. and Mussolini on 11 February 1929: Plate 78 is solely given to illustrate this event. The Church resigned all worldly power and claims to the Italian state; the Italian state in turn instituted the Catholic faith as a State religion; the Vatican State was founded in its

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Figure 8.1

M nem osyne. Bilderatlas, plate 77. (T he W arbu rg Institute, Archive).

THE LAST PLATES OF WARBURG' S PICTURE ATLAS MNEMOSYNE

Figure 8.2

Mnemosyne. Bilderatlas, plate 78. (T h e W arburg Institute, Archive).

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Figure 8.3

M nem osyne. Bilderatlas, plate 79. (T he W arb u rg Institute, Archive).

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present boundaries; compensatory payments to the Vatican were agreed on. Warburg was present at St. Peter s square when the Pope blessed the crowd gathered there after the ceremony, while Gertrud Bing, his work and travel companion, was in St. Peter during the entry o f the pope, o f which she gives a vivid and detailed description in the diary.32 For Warburg, this act o f resig­ nation from real, physical power on the part o f the Church took on a special meaning which, as we have to see it today, he much overestimated in its importance as a turning point in European history.33 The second contemporary event o f some political importance is illus­ trated on plate 79 in the upper right corner. It is a photograph o f the signing o f the Treaty o f Locarno on 1 December 1925 in London by Aristide Briand, Hugh Chamberlain and Gustav Stresemann for France, Britain and Germany respectively. The highest hopes had been invested— not only by Warburg— in this first European treaty after Versailles, finally to open up a path to an order o f international co-operation and peace in Europe. The importance attributed to it by those connected to the Kulturwissenschaftliche

Bibliothek and particularly by Warburg is testified to in the Tagebuch o f 1926, where, on the occasion o f the awarding o f the Nobel Prize to the three signers, Warburg had an air mail stamp designed which showed a plane thrusting upward and bearing the inscription “ Idea Vincit.” The aircraft was to symbolize the victorious idea o f Europe which Warburg hoped would emerge as a new reality from the horrors o f the Great War in a new era of peace. It is the function o f the press photograph in plate 79 to represent this trust in the power o f idealism.

the last plate Whereas plate 78 (Fig. 8.2) is fairly straightforward in its contents and meaning— although it is not at all clear why it should be in a picture-atlas devoted to the after-life o f Classical Antiquity— plate 79 (Fig. 8.3) has not yet been understood as a coherent message. Ernst Gombrich certainly failed to see much point in it in his last chapter o f Warburg s Intellectual Biography, which is devoted to the atlas. What he has to say about the two last plates is very little. He explains W arburgs use o f contemporary photographs side by side with historical material as an attempt “to remind viewers o f the serious­

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ness o f the issues involved.” Gombrich finds it hard to understand why Warburg would have felt that the signing o f the Lateran treaties between the Pope and Mussolini were such importance.34 In order to understand the plate’s meaning, it is necessary to take stock o f what is there, and how the reproductions relate to each other. The question o f the arrangement o f the reproductions in Warburg’s atlas has not been addressed yet— it is not made clear by numbers or other indications in which sequence we are to “ read” the images. I propose to look at the plate as a composite which does not necessarily have to be read from top left to bottom right. It is then easy to see that we are impelled by the size and com­ position of the reproduction in the second row down to see it as the center o f the plate, to which all other reproductions refer concentrically in a rela­ tion o f commentary. At the center o f the plate, then, is Raphael’s fresco o f 1511 in the Stanza d ’Eliodoro in the Vatican showing the Mass of Bolsena (the miracle o f the bleeding host that was supposed to have taken place in 1263 in Bolsena). We should, I suggest, read the plate like a page o f a medieval glossed text in which Raphael’s fresco is the text while other reproductions constitute a multiple commentary. After the Lateran Council o f 1215 when the transsubstantiation o f the host was made a dogma, reports about miraculously bleeding hosts multiplied. One such miracle occurred in Bolsena in the presence o f Pope Urban IV. who subsequently introduced the feast o f Corpus Christi into the Church calendar. During the Mass o f Bolsena, the host began to bleed into the cor­ porale because the priest, while performing the rite, had doubts about the reality o f the transsubstantiation o f the host into the flesh o f Christ. Above the reproduction of the Mass of Bolsena there are three reproductions o f the Cathedra Petri, a reference to the symbolical center o f power o f the Church and its venerable tradition.35 At the same time, this reference is to the hidden presence o f ancient myth and pagan imagery at the very center o f the church’s symbolism, as the Cathedra Petri is covered with ivory tablets the carvings o f which show scenes from the Hercules myth and the signs o f Zodiac. At the time when Warburg was in Rome and until the early 1960s, the throne had never been allowed to be studied by art historians.36 It there­ fore was still mysterious in a very real sense. In August 1929 Warburg notes

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in the Tagebuch: “ I notice the opposition between Larsson’s service to the moloch with the flesh o f the king and Rembrandts Last Supper which has come into its own truth. And then, how in Bernini’s throne at St. Peters all the pagan monsters are inscribed in the old Byzantine throne which is inside (Heracles and the signs o f the Zodiac).” 37 Underneath the reproduction o f the fresco the figure o f Speranza (Hope) from Giotto’s cycle o f grisailles in the Arena Chapel echoes in its gestures and posture a female figure to the left o f Raphael’s fresco— both echoing the pas­ sionate nympha purified into spiritual fervor.38 Next to Speranza, Botticelli’s rendering o f St. Jerome’s last Holy Communion echoes another moment o f the Eucharist, the sharing o f the sacrament by the believers. To the right of the fresco, which shows the papal court o f Raphael’s time (1511) as taking part in the mass of 1263 (thus emphasizing the timelessness o f the ritual) are reproductions of the Eucharistie Procession in Rome in 1929. In Warburg’s interpretation, the demonstration o f the host in a public procession had to be seen as the reenactment o f the “ tragic ‘Hoc est corpus meum’”, a reference to the Canon Missae, and, through it, to its institution during the Last Supper. If we move on to the more peripheral pictures of the plate, two images refer to the culture o f the Japanese Empire, the one on the left to “ harakiri,” or ritual suicide; the other picture shows parts o f the body— hands, legs, a head— referring to bodily punishment as practiced in Japan. To the right o f these, the press photograph o f the signing o f the Locarno Treaty is placed. The pres­ ence o f the Japanese “ sacrificial images” is explained by a newspaper-clipping in the archive, written by the German historian Ludwig RieE39 about Imperial Japan’s use o f earlier religious rituals around the turn o f the century that had already been superceded by the Buddhist— “ more spiritual”— reli­ gion for the purpose o f forming a modern nation state. Beneath these is a whole page from a Hamburg daily newspaper showing a motley array of pictures. We know why it is there— Warburg had used this page for a half-humorous, half-serious speech he gave to graduates (Doktorfeier) on 30 July 1929.40 Among other points he made in this speech, he bemoans the insensitivity o f those who had done the lay-out o f that page. The photograph o f a successful swimmer intrudes upon the image o f the Eucharistic Procession (the same procession as on the left) and Warburg comments:

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I ask myself: does this sw im m er know w hat a m onstrance is? Does this braw nist— I do n o t refer to his person b u t to the type— need to know the meaning of that symbolism which is rooted in paganism and which provoked such strong resistance in the N orth th at Europe was split in half? [...] The brutal juxtaposition shows that the cheerful hoc meum corpus est can be set beside the tragic hoc est corpus meum w ithout this discrepancy leading to an outcry against such barbarous breach o f decorum .41

Here, as always, Warburg, the art historian and historian o f culture takes very seriously the role o f the media in transmitting (and failing to transmit) accurate facts, or in reenforcing trends. The hum orous twist o f Christ’s “ tragic” words o f self-sacrifice to the narcissistic phrase o f self-admiration is heavy with connotations o f a polarity that was at the center o f Warburg s anxieties over intellectual and political developments. He was deeply suspi­ cious o f what he called “ redemption through muscles” 42 and all such body worship was for him tainted with notions of racialism and ideas about the “ Herrenrasse.” 43 The remaining images in the right-hand corner seem to be connected to the lower right side o f the fresco. They juxtapose parading papal and Italian m ilitary and the photograph o f the opening pages o f a book on papal m ilitary supplies with two views o f the façade o f St.Peter’s in July 1929. Divided by the parading troops, at the very periphery o f the plate, two 15th century woodcuts showing Jews desecrating the host are repro­ duced, one from an Italian, Florentine source, the other printed in Lübeck, the Hanseatic sister city o f Hamburg, depicting a scene that was thought to have taken place in Sternberg. This last reproduction, the Lübeck woodcut o f 1492, was taken from the Jüdisches Lexikon , published in 1927, from the entry on “ Hostienfrevel” (the desecration o f the host), so we can be certain that W arburg was fully aware o f the historical background o f these images. 44 The legends accusing Jews o f attacking and desecrating the host had orig­ inated in Paris shortly after the Fourth Lateran Council o f 1215, and from there spread all over Europe.45 The host, said to bleed or show a cross or turn into pieces o f flesh when attacked by Jews, would invariably in some way betray their blasphemous act, upon which the hunt was open on the Jewish community o f the town where the rumor had been spread. It has

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been shown that these tales— like other miracles o f the bleeding host such as the one in Bolsena— are in some way connected to the council o f 1215, when the question o f the real presence o f Christ in the host was “ settled” as a dogma (other constitutiones dealt with the usery o f the Jews, their heresy, and issued dress-rules for the Jewish and Muslim communities). The real presence, invisible, yet to be believed as dogma: The reality o f the sacrificial body in the sacrament is the scandalous center o f the Christian belief in redemption. Its reenactment fed on the blood o f the Jewish sceptics who refused to believe in redemption accomplished. It was their role within this act o f reconstitution o f the Christian community to feed real flesh and real blood into an otherwise tamed sacrificial ritual.46 The aspect o f ritual is also emphasized in the last press photograph in the lower right corner o f the plate: It shows a priest performing the Extreme Unction on the dying victim o f a train crash. So death has the last word in this “ visual text,” but it is death incorporated as much as it can be into the social fabric o f life.

iconology The message on the level o f iconology o f the two plates, then, may be para­ phrased in this way: As the Church, ecclesia militans , renounces power and violence, there is hope ( speranza ) for an end o f the shedding o f blood for religious causes. A new order o f international peace, already underway, could replace the old order centered around sacrifice. To be sure, such achievements cannot be had and could then be thought o f as settled, as the pictures o f the return o f sacrifice in Japanese society remind the viewer. The struggle for this kind o f progress is never won for good. Again, the Tagebuch records Warburg’s thoughts on the Eucharist and its meaning, particularly with regard to the Catholic Church’s role in the contemporary world. Warburg describes a “ riveting” discussion with a Dutch visitor in August 1929, in which he held that “ I am neither anti-Catholic nor Protestant but I could imagine (and wish for) a Christian religion o f the future which is aware o f the function o f the metaphorical “as” as a problem to struggle with. What with all the active “ hoc meum corpus est” the North fails to notice how the Catholic Church since the time o f the Mass o f Bolsena is about to rid itself o f primitive magic.” 47

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The coherent message underlying this plate can thus be said to be its “ iconology”— yet it is also an illustration o f what “ iconology” is in a “ new” Art History. The work o f the art historian must include all pertinent mater­ ial, regardless o f its provenance from the spheres o f “ high” or “ low.” Iconology is only one o f several means to an end which lies outside o f the boundaries o f the discipline. For Warburg, this end was enlightenment in an emphatically political sense.48

a theory of signs? Neither Raphaels fresco, centering the host so convincingly in a scene o f timeless presence, nor Warburg s plate is exhausted by this message. Its sym­ bolism can also be said to be a visualization o f W arburgs theory o f signs and symbols, or, as Nietzsche put it, its metaphorical structure could be said to be the “ vicarious image which actually hovers before him in place o f a concept.” 49 Gombrich’s summary o f the nature o f the Bilderatlas as main­ taining “ a balance between a poetic metaphor and a theory o f reality” 50 seems derived from this perception. There is the double aspect o f the Eucharist as sacrificial killing and redemptive death; the double function o f symbolizing/distancing and realizing/re-enacting that sacrifice. In the twofold nature o f the Eucharist as retelling a myth and re-enacting a ritual the tension o f polarity is present in every Mass that is ever read. And yet: The images seem to point to a modification o f W arburgs documented termino­ logy: it is not polarity (and consequently, an attempt to “ harmonize oppo­ sites” )51 but ambivalence and ambiguity which emerge from the model of transsubstantiation and its visual commentaries. The term ambivalence was only introduced in 1911 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to describe the simultaneous presence o f conflicting impulses as well as contradictory evaluations o f a drive by the same individual. In developing a model which is centered on an unresolvable ambiguity, Warburg begins a move from the 19th century Nietzschean concept to one which becomes immensely influential in 20th century thought. The symbol o f the host stands to its signified, Christ’s flesh, in an iconic relation o f inversion: its whiteness and cleanness is the opposite o f the bloody death on the cross.52 The function o f the symbol, described by

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Warburg as an “energetic switch” (meaning a switch from positive to nega­ tive energy in the polar setup o f a Pathosformel), the very concept o f transsubstantiation, is, in W arburgs interpretation o f the function o f symbols, a literal translation o f this function, but surely one could also say: its préfiguration, its Vorpragung. The last plate thus illustrates— visualizes— all the constitutive terms o f Warburg’s theory. What we have not been able to account for in this reading is the “ engram me”— a 19th century term o f the physiology o f the act o f m em ory on the level o f the individual and on that o f the species. These theories were first sketched out by Ewald Hering and later elaborated by Richard Semon. One point o f departure for the kind o f questions they asked is the nature o f the human capacity to learn a language: the fact that a child must learn to speak and communicate but learns it at a pace which points to the existence o f “ brain-matter which reproduces the thousands o f years of work o f his forebears.” 53 Apart from the fact that the time-span involved can be said to be thoroughly underestimated, these questions are still being asked today and with even more fervor and high hopes to unravel the mystery o f consciousness and the working o f the mind than a hundred years ago. The role o f art in these processes, as they probably predate all making o f art, may be discarded with, as Gombrich pointed out. The metaphorical use Warburg puts the term to, however, is extremely interesting. The engramme accounts for our capability to represent a sign in our minds, it fills a space that is neither the sign nor the signified. Structurally, it is the equivalent of the elusive and all-important “ interpretant” in Peircean semiotics. The impossibility to settle the question o f the physiology o f our capacity to transmit “ meaning” from one person to another and down the generations does not, in my view, render the model obsolete.

a need for ritual? The overwhelming emphasis o f the last two plates, however, lies on the enactment or ritual surrounding the central symbol. We have reason to believe that Warburg began to abandon his earlier belief in the banning power o f images.54 The last plate o f the Bilderatlas seems to me to point to a move toward an understanding o f the need for rituals o f “ metaphorical

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Figure 8.4 d ’ Eliodoro.

Raphael, The Mass o f Bohena, detail: T h e b leed in g h ost, Vatikan, Stanza

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distancing” and of, as he put it, “ a religious concretion.” This is not to say that he began to consider conversion to Catholicism for himself. But he thought and talked about the role o f the Catholic Church in modern society. The all-important difference between the Protestant and Catholic under­ standing o f the Eucharist: the question o f whether the host is or signifies Christ’s body, was thought o f by Warburg in terms o f a symbolism that far transcended the sphere o f religion. The problem is mentioned a number o f times in the Tagebuch, where past and present, theology and anthropology are present side by side. In August 1929 he notes an anecdote gleaned from David Hume: “ On the day after his first Communion, the missionary asked a savage whether there be a God, who answers, no, he ate him yesterday.” Among other comments Warburg notes: “ The Eucharist as ‘dance’ in prim i­ tive culture (Cassirer).“ 55 In September, the Eucharist is again the topic o f one o f Warburgs entries: “ In front of the altar in St. Peter’s a transparency of Leonardo’s Last Supper was hung!! The representation o f the redeemer breaking the bread while on his way to death, and in front o f him the [repre­ sentative] on earth, who eats His heavenly body and through this shares it with thousands as a sacrificial animal (hostia).” 56 It is possible, then, that the rites o f the Eucharist also came to stand for, symbolically, what is needed to hold at bay social and individual disintegra­ tion: “ In whatever way, [scientific abstraction or religious concretion ]— so

oder so— , the chaos o f unreason needs to be confronted with a system o f filters of reflective thought (Besonnenheit) T h e Tagebuch abounds with hints at the worries with which Warburg saw the political developments of his time, and there is reason to believe that he took anti-Semitism to be one o f the most serious symptoms o f what he called the “ spiritual crisis” o f Germany and Europe as a whole.57 He may, like the Lübeck protestant Thomas Mann, have hoped that the Catholic Church could provide a bulwark— or at least a paradigm o f a bulwark— against the chaos threaten­ ing from Nazism and racism. These hopes, o f course, were misguided. However, the move to incorporate considerations o f the human need for visualization and the “ real presence” into his unwavering concept o f enlight­ enment seems to me to be a legacy that deserves to be studied seriously. We have to ask whether this attempt to use the specific visual quality o f works o f art to develop a tool which brings together history and the needs o f the

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present, the practice o f the comparative gaze and its linguistic translation could not— even today— be seen as exemplary. The formation o f theory— o f Theory, capitalized— still seems to be a predominantly linguistic pursuit. Theoretical terms transform their represented in ways that cut off the speak­ ing about art and its history from its subject entirely. The way we see a visual metaphor put to heuristic use in the Bilderatlas was then beyond the borders o f “ Wissenschaftlichkeit” : today this cannot be said to be the case. And finally, its use in a climate o f erudition and passion for historical truth (“ Truth” )— Warburg’s and his collaborators’ deep respect for the correct detail— did keep their theory-building within the bounds o f reasoning. The two traditions have since parted ways but are seen here as not being m utu­ ally exclusive.

books and articles cited Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers und Charlotte Schoell-Glass (eds), Weinheim: VCH, 1991 Backhaus, Fritz, “ Die Hostienschàndungsprozesse zu Sternberg (1492) und Berlin (1510) und die Ausweiseung der Juden aus Mecklenburg und der M ark Brandenburg,” in: Jahrbuch fiir brandenburgische Landesgeschichte 39 (1988), pp. 7-26 Barta Fliedl, Ilsebill und Christoph Geissmar (eds), Die Beredsamkeit des

Leibes. Zur Kôrpersprache in der Kunst, Salzburg/Wien: Residenz, 1992 Bôhm e, H artm ut, “Aby M. W arburg (186 6-19 29)”, in: Klassiker der

Religionswissenschaft. Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade , ed. Axel Michaels, M ünchen: Beck, 1997, pp. 133-156 Buschendorf, Bernhard, “ War ein sehr tüchtiges gegenseitiges Fôrdern: Edgar W ind und Aby Warburg,” in: Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger

Kunsthalle4 (1985), pp. 165-209

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Dilly, Heinrich, “ Lichtbildprojektion— Prothese der Kunstbetrachtung,” in:

Kunstwissenschaft und Kunstvermittlung (ed. Irene Below), Giessen: Anabas, 1975, pp. 153-172 Dundes, Alan (ed.), The Blood Libel Legend. A Casebook in A nti-Sem itic

Folklore, London/Madison: The University o f Wisconsin Press, 1991 Erb, Rainer (ed.), Die Legende vom Ritualmord. Z ur Geschichte der

Blutbeschuldigung gegen Juden (Dokumente, Texte, Materialien. Verôffentlicht vom Zentrum fü r Antisemitismusforschung der TU Berlin , Bd. 6), Berlin: Metropol, 1993 Hering, Ewald, Über das Gedachtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organ-

isierten Materie. Vortrag gehalten in der feierlichen Sitzung der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien , am 30. M ai 1870, third ed. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1921 Gombrich, Ernst H., Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography. With a memoir

on the history o f the library by F. Saxl, (The Warburg Institute, University o f London), London 1970 Gombrich,

Ernst, “Aby Warburg

und

der

Evolutionismus

des

19.

Jahrhunderts,” in: Aby M. Warburg. “Ekstatische N ym phe ... trauernder

Flufigott.” Portrait eines Gelehrten, Robert Galitz und Brita Reimers (eds), Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1995, pp. 52-73 Heckscher, William S., “ The Genesis o f Iconology,” in: Stil und Überlieferung

in der Kunst des Abendlandes. Akten des XXL Internationalen Kongresses fü r Kunstgeschichte in Bonn 1964, Bd.3, Berlin: Mann, 1967, pp. 339-262 Huisstede, Peter van, De Mnemosyne Beeldatlas van Aby M. Warburg een lab­

oratorium voor beeldgeschiedenis, Phil. Diss. Leiden 1992 (Typescript) Huisstede, Peter van, “ Der Mnemosyne-Atlas. Ein Laboratorium der Bildgeschichte,” in: Aby M. Warburg. “Ekstatische Nym phe ... trauernder

Flufigott.” Portrait eines Gelehrten , Robert Galitz und Brita Reimers (eds), Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1995, pp. 130-171

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Jacobson, Jon, Locarno Diplomacy. Germany and the West, 1925- 1929, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972

Jildisches Lexikon. Ein enzyklopàdisches Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens in vier Bànden , Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927 (Reprint: Franfurt a.M.: Athenàum, second ed. 1987) Kany, Roland, Die religionsgeschichtliche Forschung an der Kulturwissen-

schaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, Bamberg: Stefan Wendeln Verlag, 1989 Kemp, Wolfgang, “Walter Benjamin und Aby Warburg,” in: Kritische Berichte

3 (1975), PP. 5-25 Kônigseder, Karl, “Aby Warburg im ‘Bellevue’,” in: Aby M. Warburg.

“Ekstatische Nymphe ... trauernder Flufigott” Portrait eines Gelehrten, Robert Galitz und Brita Reimers (eds), Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1995, pp. 74-98 Latour, Bruno, “ Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands” in: Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology o f Culture Past and

Present. A Research Annual 6 (1986), pp. 1-39 Latour, Bruno, Science in Action. How to follow scientists and engineers

through society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987 Mehl, Margaret, Eine Vergangenheit fü r die japanische Nation. Die Entstehung

des

historischen

Forschungsinstituts

Tokyo

daigaku

Shiryo

hensanjo

( 1869- 1885). Europàische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 3: Geschichte und ihre Hilfswissenschaften, vol. 528, Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, Bern: Peter Lang, 1992 Nirenberg, David, Communities o f Violence. Persecution o f Minorities in the

Middle Ages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996 Preziosi, Donald, “ The Question o f Art History,” in: Critical Inquiry 18 (1992), pp. 363-386 Schramm, Percy Ernst, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik. Beitrâge zu

ihrer Geschichte vom dritten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert , vol. 3, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1956

THE LAST PLATES OF WARBURG' S PICTURE ATLAS MNEMOSYNE

Semon, Richard, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organi-

schen Geschehens, second improved ed. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1908 Settis, Salvatore, “Pathos u nd Ethos, M orphologie u nd Funktion,” in: Vortràge aus dem Warburg-Haus 1 (1997), pp. 31-73 W arburg, Aby M., Ausgewahlte Schriften und WiXrdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke with Carl Georg Heise (Saecula Spiritalia 1), Baden-Baden: Valentin Kórner, 1980 (Warburg ASW) Warnke, M artin, “Der Leidschatz der Menschheit wird hum aner Besitz,” in: Werner Hofm ann, Georg Syamken, M artin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg, Frankfurt a.M.: Europàische Verlagsanstalt, 1980, pp. 113-186 Warnke, M artin, “Vier Stichworte. Ikonologie— Pathosform el— Polaritàt und Ausgleich— Schlagbilder und Bilderfahrzeuge,” in: W erner Hofm ann, Georg Syamken, M artin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg, Frankfurt a.M.: Europàische Verlagsanstalt, 1980, Bd. 1, pp. 61-68 Wind, Edgar, “ Warburgs

Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und

seine

Bedeutung für die Asthetik,” in: Vierter Kongrefi fü r Asthetik und Allgemeine

Kulturwissenschaft, Beilageheft der Zeitschrift fü r Asthetik und Allgemeine Kulturwissenschaft 25 (1931), pp. 163-179 (Reprinted in: Warburg ASW (1980), pp. 401-417)

notes 1 This essay is a revised version of a paper given at the Getty Research Institute, then still in Santa Monica, California, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J in 1996/7. 1 should like to thank my colleagues in the United States for their critical and helpful comments. I should also like to thank my colleague Karen Michels of the University of H am burg and David Scott of Trinity College Dublin for reading this version and for their helpful suggestions. 2 The individual plates were published in loose-leaf form as Begleitmaterial zur Ausstellung “Aby M. Warburg. Mnemosyne ’ (1994). 3 G om brich 1970, p. 282. 4 Heckscher 1967. 5 Kemp 1975.

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6 The edition o f the Tagebuch is being prepared by the present author and Karen Michels for Akademie Verlag, Berlin. 7 Pieter van Huisstede 1992 and 1995. 8 Tagebuch 9, p.6 9 ,11 September 1929. 9 Bruno Latour 1987, pp. 215-257. For Art History the consideration of practice has been included by Preziosi 1992. 10 G om brich 1970, pp. 283f. 11 It seems that H einrich Wôlfflin was the first to use double projection in his art history classes and lectures in Berlin since around 1900. O n the use o f slides in teaching art history: Dilly 1975. 12 The first m entioning of the budding project can be found in Tagebuch 1, p. 7, 26. August 1926: “Prepared picture atlas for Claudius Civilis.” Claudius Civilis refers to R em brandt’s painting. 13 One entry from Tagebuch 8, p. 27 of 14 June 1927 is exemplary for a great many others: “A fternoon guided tou r for M r Ignacio Bauer and his wife (daughter of my very dear late cousin Rosa von Günzburg) and M r and Mrs Lachmann from the Hague. M r Bauer hides a judeo-bibliophile heart under the belly-balcony of the Spanish grande.— For Rothacker I need to have prepared a picture wall [Bilderwand] (world view in the slide [W eltanschauung im Lichtbild]). Q uos Ego— Barbados— Fasces of the lictors and Mussolini. This would also entail a general contem plation on the preconditions for the perception of images w ithin the cult— loss o f the consciousness of the limits of the self through instrum ental objects and through carrying and being carried.” 14 Huisstede 1995, pp. i5if. 15 Tagebuch 1, p. 47, 26

O ctober 1926: com m ent

on an entry by Saxl who

returned from Berlin, where he had given a lecture on Elsheimer. 16 For the relevant years,

only two art historical publications will have to exemplify

the vogue: Das Bild.

Atlanten zur Kunst (ed. W ilhelm H ausenstein). Vol. 1:

Tafelmalerei der deutschen Gotik (75 plates) Munich: Piper, 1922: this publication does nothing more than give a series of reproductions, one per plate. Bilder zur Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, 4 fasc.(ed. Andreas R um pf (1), Guido Schoenberger (2 and 3) and Richard G raul (4)), Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1928-1931. Teubner’s “atlas” deals w ith the entirety of European art from A ntiquity until the early 20th century. The plates are them atic and include commentaries. It seems possible that the W arburg project influenced this collection through the publisher Teubner. The intro du ction to the second fascicle states that the work has a twofold aim: to give a history o f forms through the ages (Stilgeschichte) and to exemplify “the great events of the spiritual, religious and historical life [... ] It was intended to let both parts, the history of styles and the cultural history elucidate each other.” (Second fascicle, unnum bered page at the beginning). It is precisely

THE LAST PLATES OF WARBURG' S PICTURE ATLAS MNEMOSYNE

this traditional rift between the “cultural” and the “form al” which W arburg’s atlas at that very m om ent was being designed to bridge with its new approach of a theory of culture as a theory of signs. Bilder zur Kunst is particularly interesting in its choice o f contem porary material, including photographs of technical objects such as aircrafts, posters, and the m ost avantgarde architecture o f the time. 17 Latour 1987, pp. 226-228; Latour 1986, pp. 1-20. 18 Latour 1987, p. 227. 19 Tagebuch 8, p. 211 on the gesture of a Japanese golf player as a “depoisoning of the gesture o f the executioner.” 20 W arburg Institute, London, Archive, Correspondence W arburg, 1929, V, Letter to Karl Vossler, dated 12 October 1929. 21 Bôhme 1997, p. 138. 22 Warnke 1980, “Vier Stichworte,” pp. 61-68; Settis 1997,38-42. 23 Warnke 1980, “Leidschatz der Menschheit,” pp. 116-118; G ombrich 1970, pp. 242f. 24 W ind 1931 (also in W arburg ASW, pp. 401-417); Buschendorf 1985. 25 W ind 1931, p. 171. 26 Buschendorf 1985. 27 Tagebuch 9, p. 69. 28 Tagebuch 8, p. 225. 29 Tagebuch 7, pp. 143-159. 30 See below, p. 197. 31 Letter by G ertrud Bing to Senator Bierm ann-Ratjen in H am burg: W arburg Institute, London, Archive, dated 10 July 1967; I owe this transcription to Silvia Baumgarten and Bettina Gôtz. 32 Tagebuch 7, pp. 145-153·

33 G ombrich 1970, 279. 34 G om brich 1970, p. 301. 35 At that time it had not yet been possible to examine the Cathedra Petri archaeologically. It was still impossible by 1956: see Percy Ernst Schramm, p. 694. 36 Schramm 1956, pp. 694-707. 37 Tagebuch 8,1929, p. 233. 38 O n W arburg’s interpretation of the nym pha as a figure to carry the expression of passion into early Renaissance art see G om brich 1970, pp. 105-127. 39 Ludwig Riefi (1861-1928), a student of Hans Delbriick, taught at the Todai in Tokyo for 15 years. He had been called by the Japanese governm ent to reform Japanese historiography after the G erm an example: see Mehl 1992. 40 G ombrich 1970, p. 281. 41 G ombrich 1970, p. 280 f. 42 Tagebuch 8, p. 273, in a discussion with Kurt Hahn, the founder of the schools in Salem and later G ordonstoun in Scotland: “Muskelerlôserei.”

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43 See my article in Jewish Identity in Modern A rt History (ed. Catherine Soussloff), Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1999, pp. 218-230. 44 Tagebuch 8, p. 189,10 August 1929: “Searching for examples of the desecration of the host.” 45 Erb 1993; D undes 1991. 46 N irenberg 1996, who em phasizes the ritual character o f violence against the Jewish and Muslim communities. 47 Tagebuch 8, p. 199,4 August 1929. 48 Warnke 1980, “Vier Stichworte,” pp. 55-61. 49 See W ind 1931. This translation quoted from: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism, translated by William A. H aussm ann. The Complete Works o f Friedrich Nietzsche. The First Complete and Authorized English Translation, ed. Oscar Levy, vol. 3, Edinburgh and London: Foulis, 1909, p. 66. I am using this quote here because it is heavily marked in W arburgs own copy of “Die G eburt der Tragôdie,” still in the library o f the W arburg Institute. Nietzsche of course refers to the poet, and the pre-Classical poet at that. 50 G om brich 1995, p. 70. 51 Gom brich 1970,168-177; Warnke 1980, “Vier Stichworte,” pp. 68-74. 52 This perception is Stephen Greenblatt’s. 53 H ering 1921, p. 20 54 H orst Bredekamp, “D u lebst und thust m ir nichts,” in: Aby Warburg. Akten 1991, p.3; see also Kany 1989, p. 13L 55 Tagebuch 8, pp. 259 and 261,31 August 1929. 56 Tagebuch 9, p. 37, 26 September 1929. 57 See Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus. Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik. Frankfurt/M .: S. Fischer, 1998 by the present author for a detailed account.

aby warburg and the florentine interm edi o f 1589: extending the boundaries of art history1

m. a. katritzky i introduction THE BREADTH OF V ISION AND INTENSELY

personal

originality

which

Aby

Warburg brought to his study o f art history was firmly based on a thor­ ough understanding o f the standard techniques and skills o f his discipline. In this, Warburg was a worthy succes­ sor to Burckhardt, whose writings on renaissance art and culture were such an inspiration to him. But unlike the great art historians o f Ruskin and Burckhardt’s generations, Warburg relinquished the opportunity to forge a synthetic interpretative framework for a broad spectrum o f art. With the exception o f his largely pictorial Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg chose instead to focus his activities on detailed examination o f a limited selection o f very specific examples, often discovered through his own researches. The examples which Warburg selected, and the range o f methodological practice and criti­ cal perspectives which he demonstrated in their analysis, have been o f such suggestivity that not all their implications are yet generally acknowledged.

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One such area which received W arburgs particular attention was that o f Italian renaissance festival. Here, his innovation did not lie in his recognition o f these festivals as offering insights into the realities o f the age and its society as a whole. Burckhardt s grand unifying vision had already made the connection between festivals and everyday life, and his definition o f Italian festival, in its higher form, as “ a true transition from life into art” became a leitmotiv for Warburg, and an inspiration for his own investigations into

intermedi.1 In “ I costumi teatrali per gli intermezzi del 1589,” the article in which he summarized his major research in this field, Warburg linked inter­

medi with “transitional types between real life and dramatic art.” This Italian language article, written for a publication o f 1895 celebrating the tercente­ nary o f the riforma melodrammatica , and Warburgs previously unpublished German language original (from which it was translated) were included, with numerous additional footnotes researched by Gertrud Bing, in

Gesammelte Schriften? One o f W arburgs “ lesser known papers,” it has not yet achieved translation into English, and was excluded from Ausgewâhlte

Schriften , although the Italian text had been republished in 1966.4 Art historical methods are increasingly applied to the study o f images as the documents o f other academic disciplines, as well as for the sake o f their own inherent aesthetic, or (non art-historical) cultural worth. Perhaps the most far-reaching contribution to scholarship arising out o f cCostumi teatral’i was Warburg’s realization that visual images could function not only as aesthetically valuable work o f art (monument), or as passive witness, or as illustration, but also as specific historical document; the implications o f which he grasped with a clarity which has rarely been matched. His explana­ tion o f his approach to the study o f court festival, by combining the stan­ dard techniques o f the art historian with the more traditionally accepted textual-based skills o f the historian, in a subtle counterpointing o f evidence drawn from written and illustrative sources, is a succinct manifesto for pre­ photographic theatre-iconographical methodology. It was many decades before comparative analysis o f visual and written evidence of this type began to register in the considerable post-Burckhardtian literature on Medici festi­ vals. The widespread systematic study o f images as theatre-historical docu­ ments and full acceptance o f the legitimacy o f theatre iconography as a

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE IN TERM ED l OF

1589

valid research procedure for theatre scholars, are comparatively recent developments.5 It was in Florence that Warburg discovered the court festival documents he published in Costumi teatrali. His first opportunity to visit Florence had come in October 1888, when he arrived in the city as one of a group of eight students invited there by the art historian August Schmarsow (in connec­ tion with Schmarsow s campaign for the setting up of a German institute for art history in Florence), returning to Bonn for the start of the summer semester 1889.6 These were particularly productive months for Warburg, who, within weeks of arriving, had both met his future wife, the painter Mary Hertz, and started engaging with the central issues of his intellectual career. To a greater or lesser extent, Warburg shared these with many fin de siecle writers and creative artists, albeit at a profounder level, not least because of his interest in collective psychology, and his recognition that “the tragedy of costume and implement is ultimately the history of human tragedy.”7 Contemporary art historians variously define the essence of Warburg s contribution as his investigation into “the continued vitality of the classical heritage in Western civilization,” the development of iconological analysis as a major art-historical methodology, and an engagement with renaissance images “as a pivotal point in the transition from the symbol to the allegory.”8 It is far from certain whether it is valid to regard these as separate, perhaps even mutually exclusive, issues, or whether they may more usefully be con­ sidered aspects of the same issue. Closely related to this group of issues, and of perhaps equal importance, was Warburg’s drive to investigate the full potential of his chosen discipline, art history. He returned to Florence only after successful completion of his doctoral thesis and a year’s military service, which finished in October 1893.9 This second visit started badly. But Warburg received a temporary respite from recurring bouts of depression through, by his own account, chancing upon a series of archival documents. Their significance was greatly magnified by his ability to associate them with the Medici wedding festivities of 1589, and to recognize the relevance of this court festival to his joint quests for the continuing significance of the classi­ cal heritage, and of the proper study of images.

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ii intermedi Intermedi were spectacular dramatic entertainments performed between the acts o f plays, and considered an essential part o f the presentation o f come­ dies at court in the mid-sixteenth century.10 Typically, they had high musical content, and were based on legend or myth, with topical allusions to the occasion in question. For this reason, they were generally specifically devised for unique state festivals such as particular weddings and christenings, and, unlike their accompanying plays, performed only on that one occasion. Like Greek chorus and Roman Mimi, on which they were to some extent m od­ elled,11 they were not necessarily related to the plot o f the play.

Intermedi became associated with tragedies, sacra rappresentazione, and pastoral plays as well as with comedies, and were popular in late Renaissance Florence, where they developed into elaborate spectacles fusing many arts.12 They are thought to have arisen from the morescha , pageants, and other short diversions and entertainments presented between the courses o f medieval and renaissance banquets, and from the late fifteenth century onwards provided a substitute for the chorus o f the classical Greek theatre, between the acts o f humanist revivals o f classical plays. Courtly intermedi were taken up outside Italy, influencing the French

intermèdes , Spanish

entremés , English “ dum b-shows” and German

Zwischenspiele . Some identify them as ‘the raw material from which opera emerged’, or as ballet-opera,13 although others more cautiously prefer to define them as a type o f pantomime or tableau vivant.14 Pirrotta goes so far as to suggest that the old identification of the intermedi with “madrigals” or choruses is giving way to a new situation, in which music, no m atter how rich and varied in its vocal and instrum ental com binations, or even impassioned and moving as in Psyche’s lam ent, represents only one of m any elements contributing to the “w ondrous show o f the intermedi”15

Crescimbeni, writing in 1702, notes that in contrast to his own times, in the sixteenth century, “ tutte le Commedie furono sempre recitate, e non mai cantate, fuorché i cori, o gTintermedj, fino a tempi dO ttavio Rinuccini.” 16 The way in which the 1589 Florentine intermedi overshadowed the three plays they accompanied, La Pellegrina, La Zingana and the Pazzia o f

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTI NE I NTE RME DI OF 15 8 9

Isabella,17 confirmed apprehensions which critics and playwrights such as Trissino, Ingegni and Grazzini had been voicing for some tim e.18 Produced as just one o f numerous festivities in celebration o f the wedding o f Ferdinando I de’Medici (1549-1609) to Christine de Lorraine (1565-1636), the intermedi stole the show in their own day to the extent that, four cen­ turies later, they can still be characterized as “probably the most described theatrical production in history.” 19

iii documentary sources for the intermedi of 1589 Warburg’s substantial documentary discoveries were made in Florence, during the course o f what he later refers to as archival “ truffle-pig duties.” 20 In the Biblioteca Nazionale, he found forty-three annotated colored draw­ ings which he recognized as the work o f Bernardo Buontalenti and his assistants.21 Elsewhere in Florence, he identified a manuscript volume including correspondence and tailors’ accounts for the costumes depicted in these same drawings, and four prints (two by Agostino Carracci and two by Epifanio d’Alfiano) which depict the costumes in a stage context. He was able to identify all this material as visual and textual documents connected with the Florentine intermedi o f 1589. Unlike many types o f court festival, on which scholars from predom i­ nantly one discipline (for example in the case o f entrata , art history), have co-operated to analyze and enlarge one shared pool o f documentary evidence, intermedi have attracted scholars researching relatively indepen­ dently in many separate disciplines.22 The lack o f a systematic interdiscipli­ nary overview has resulted in a fragmentation both o f research and o f knowledge of the available prim ary and secondary evidence. However, since Warburg’s researches, enough visual and written documentation for the 1589

intermedi has been identified to have allowed a recording o f the music,23 a film reconstruction of five o f the six intermedi themselves, using digital post­ production techniques,24 several monographs (including one focusing on the music, another on Seriacopi’s Memoriale , and an appraisal o f the inter­

medi within the context o f an interdisciplinary chronological reconstruction o f the 1589 Medici wedding festivities as a whole25), and numerous specialist studies which consider specific aspects o f the intermedi.26

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M· A. KATRI TZKY

Related Italian texts which achieved contemporary publication, most already known by 1895, include printed music, a 1589 edition o f Girolamo Bargagli’s play La pellegrina , and accounts and descriptions o f the intermedi in numerous printed festival books, “ diaries” and later compilations, o f which the most significant include those by the Florentine Bastiano de Rossi (Florence, 14 May 1589), the Bolognese Giuseppe Pavoni (Bologna, June 1589) and the Roman Simone Cavallino (Rome, 1589).27 At a further remove is, for example, the poem o f Gabriello Chiabrera based on Isabella A ndreinis “ madness” scene.28 Saslow s admirable “ illustrated Catalogue o f all the known materials— drawings, prints and paintings— that record the wedding events, either from the design phase or retrospectively,” 29 reproduces sixty-one pictures relating to the intermedi, including the forty-seven discovered by Warburg and noted in the original edition o f his article, as well as six o f the ten illustrations added by Bing (namely those she reproduces as figs. 93 and 94, and four Buontalenti drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum first published by Laver,

who

acknowledges

his

debt

to W arburgs

article

for

this

identification),30 but not those she reproduces as figs. 91 and 95, or the two paintings by Pellegrino Tibaldi which she notes. Eight o f Saslow’s sixty-one illustrations are noted neither by Warburg nor by Bing, namely two further engravings by d’Alfiano, five drawings (in the Uffizi, Victoria and Albert Museum and the Louvre), and a print by Orazio Scarabelli.31 The prints by Carracci, d’Alfiano and Scarabelli (unknown before four o f them were dis­ covered by Warburg), all issued in 1592, are o f central significance to a study o f Italian theatre history. The earliest surviving illustrations to intermedi stage settings, they are also, by virtue o f being among the earliest prints o f the proscenium arch stage with receding side wings and a back-shutter, a “ fount o f Italian baroque scenography”.32 Recent research suggests that these prints are not based directly on Buontalenti’s drawings, but on drawings after them by Andrea Boscoli, o f which only two have been located (those for intermedi 1 and 5), which are more horizontal in format, with more ani­ mated and feminine figures.33 More distantly related iconographic material includes a number o f drawings, jewelled pendants and pieces o f porcelain with dragon motifs, associated by Hackenbroch with Buontalenti, and

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTE RME DI OF 15 8 9

specifically with his dragon design for the third intermedio o f 1589,34 and portraits o f stock characters o f the Gelosi troupe, which provided two o f the comedies associated with the 1589 intermedi, on a signed and dated print of 1589 by Ambrogio Brambilla.35 The most informative o f the numerous further manuscript texts relating to the 1589 intermedi identified in the Florentine archives since Warburg’s discoveries is the notebook o f Girolamo Seriacopi, the quartermaster o f the 1589 wedding festivities, transcribed in part by Getrud Bing, and in full by Testaverdi M atteini.36 The “ diary” o f Settimani has to be treated with extreme caution, as it is an eighteenth century amalgamation o f earlier doc­ uments, many o f them now lost. Further music includes that to the fourth

intermedio , identified by Ghisi, who pays tribute to Warburg’s musicological contribution.37 Non-Florentine manuscript sources include a letter now in the Vatican Archives, written on 22 May 1589 by the Papal Nuntius in Florence, Monsignore di Vicenza, contrasting the intermedi with the come­ dies, and referring to a description o f the intermedi “ nel foglio qui incluso,” which has not been traced.38 Also in this category is a surprisingly fruitful source of evidence entirely unreflected by Warburg, Testaverde Matteini or Saslow, namely foreign-language manuscript descriptions o f the intermedi. Two such (diary entries by the German Barthold von Gadenstedt and an anonymous Frenchman) were published in 1970 and 1994, and a third, a Bavarian report, is here published for the first time.39 The Frenchman and Gadenstedt both describe the intermedi o f 2 May 1589, the first official performance, staged in conjunction with La Pellegrina, in the context o f accounts o f various selected highlights o f the wedding fes­ tivities as a whole. Both were clearly eye-witnesses, recording many details specific to this particular performance; although the Frenchman indicates that he also saw a later performance o f the intermedi, and the possibility that his account was influenced by publicity information, by printed accounts published at the time of the wedding, or by information obtained informally from others cannot be ruled out. This certainly seems to have been the case with Gadenstedt. His seventeen page vernacular account o f the wedding fes­ tivities is actually preceded by an eight page account in Italian, which includes a much briefer and less personal account of the intermedi than his

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. a . katritzky

German one. Kümmel notes that the two accounts have numerous differ­ ences, and that the German account has certain similarities to Bastiano de’Rossi’s account, whose publication, however, postdates Gadenstedt’s departure from Florence, while his shorter Italian account is very similar to that in an anonymous festival book published in Florence, Ferrara and Venice.40 The Bavarian report o f the wedding festivities describes Christine’s entry o f 30 April 1589 in the past tense, but describes the intermedi (and very briefly, other highlights) as if they have not yet taken place, in an account which has certain similarities to the Italian account o f Gadenstedt. Careful analysis of these accounts in the light o f the eyewitness accounts and pub­ lished festival books could prove significant in determining the content o f any standardized “ hand-out” or information pack which may have been made available to foreign visitors for publicity purposes. Gadenstedt’s account o f the intermedi explicates a serious problem confronting outside chroniclers o f such events. Efforts made by himself and his compatriots to investigate Florentine production techniques and stage machinery were strenuously resisted. Küm m el’s comparison o f Gadenstedt’s Germanlanguage description o f the 1589 intermedi with those o f the Italian publica­ tions highlights some problems o f trying to reconcile different accounts o f a theatrical event. He concluded that differences are inevitable, because while Gadenstedt’s description is based on eyewitness experience o f one particular performance, that o f 2 May 1589, the official Italian accounts evidently reflect an amalgamation o f more than one performance, or perhaps even o f several stages in the planning o f this event.41 The intermedi attracted numerous foreign spectators (Gadenstedt notes over 100 Germans alone at the performance o f 2 May), and further accounts and shorter notices surely still await discovery. Because the researches o f Warburg and his followers have ensured that the 1589 intermedi are known through a large quantity o f visual and textual documentation, the significance o f foreign accounts is primarily interpretative. There are numer­ ous expressions o f misgivings concerning the interpretation o f visual and written festival descriptions. Warburg is aware o f the potentially powerful effects o f authorial bias, and Dotzauer comments on the negative effect o f this, and the wish to overwhelm and amaze the reader, on the objectivity o f

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTI NE INTE RME DI OF 15 8 9

such accounts, while Fruth emphasizes their lack o f objectivity as historical records (surprisingly making an exception for texts and images produced by those connected with the actual planning o f the festival, whose reasonable accuracy she accepts).42 Later studies, alerted by the findings o f scholars such as Tintelnot, Jacquot and Strong,43 suggest that the relationship o f such evidence to historical reality is far less uncomplicated than even such authors suggest.44 Although theatre historians are becoming increasingly concerned with methodological implications o f evaluating large masses o f conflicting docu­ mentary evidence, attempts to draw on the findings o f related investigations in other fields, notably legal studies, the psychology o f memory, and cultural anthropology, have been relatively restricted.45 The problems associated with assessing eye-witness testimony and standpoint have received detailed atten­ tion from legal scholars. They recognize the importance o f measuring the many variables affecting the relevance, credibility and inferential force o f evidence (for which they identify three significant factors, namely judge­ ments concerning the witness’s veracity, objectivity and observational sensi­ tivity), and draw on a number o f analytic and synthetic techniques, both holistic (narrative) and atomistic (chart-based), to organize evidence, in order to decompose arguments into complex interrelated chains and reach a defensible conclusion concerning a hypothesis. These approaches, which draw on decision theory, the philosophy o f probabilistic reasoning, and the emerging science o f complexity, have profound implications for the assess­ ment o f the authorial and artistic standpoints and reliability o f different his­ torical representations and accounts concerned with the same event. Cultural anthropologists have long been aware of the significance o f perceptual dis­ tance: the gap between the cultural norms, behavior and expectations o f the observer and those o f the observed. Only very recently have psychologists concerned with the study o f human memory begun to pay close attention to issues such as detailed comparative analysis o f differing versions o f word-ofmouth material o f the type o f folk-tales and popular songs o f oral cultures. Primarily, foreign reports o f the 1589 intermedi should be appreciated not for a certain naive freshness,46 or even for the chance to check specific facts against the “ inside” accounts,47 but for the valuable opportunity they offer to achieve perceptual distance, by comparing locally-produced material with

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m. a. katritzky

documentation written or depicted from a contrasting authorial standpoint. A broadly-based comparative approach which is able to draw on visual as well as textual material, preferably from outside as well as local sources, reduces the inevitable bias o f conclusions reached from working with a limited quantity o f documents or o f documentary sources. To take just one example, there has been considerable speculation concerning the way in which scene changes were effected. Gascoigne, working from the Italian accounts only, suggested “a very early foretaste o f the sliding flat wings o f the future,” a hypothesis also favoured by Saslow, who considers the use o f rotat­ ing prisms “ unlikely,” and offers a detailed schematic stage plan o f the Uffizi theatre based on sliding shutters in grooves.48 Nagler cautiously suggested the possibility o f a turning mechanism.49 This hypothesis is strongly sup­ ported by the foreign reports, all o f which make some reference to rapid stage turns. The French diarist, for example, notes that at the end o f the first

intermedio : “ le theatre e tourna en ung instant: la prospective changea et parust ung autre theatre qui representoit la ville de Pise.” 50 Subsequent archival discoveries contribute towards rounding out and supplementing the impression o f the intermedi that Warburg was able to give. But even such basic information as the sequence o f events, exact number o f performances o f the intermedi, and the dates on which they were held, remains uncertain.51 Warburg’s account remains valid, not least because points made in Costumi teatrali have a significance beyond inter­ pretation

o f the

1589

intermedi themselves. Warburg consolidated

Burkhardt’s insight that festivals such as these intermedi cannot be studied in isolation. They contribute not only to a complete theatrical performance, o f which the accompanying comedies formed an integral part, but to a festa , an elaborate series o f public and private court festivals staged in celebration o f a specific event. This approach has been refined in many later publications, but still has a great deal o f potential for further investigation, for example concerning explication of the relationship between the intermedi and each of the three comedies which they framed.52 Warburg also pioneered the com­ parative use o f theatrical images as extra-textual documentation, a break­ through which is examined in greater detail below, and laid the groundwork for scholars such as Nagler and Kiimmel to initiate the comparative use o f local and foreign documentation. This latter, by opening up a perceptual

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTI NE INTE RME DI OF I 5 8 9

distance and creating the opportunity to compare authorial standpoints and evidential redundancies and dissonances, offers an interdisciplinary approach to festival research which merits detailed investigation.

iv warburg's account of the intermedi of 1589 In letters o f M ay and June 1894, Warburg informed his parents o f his archival findings concerning the 1589 intermedi, and his intention to publish them. The invitation to publish Costumi teatrali came from a group o f Italian scholars, led by Riccardo Gandolfi, collaborating on a volume in commemoration o f the tercentenary o f Ottavio Rinuccini’s Dafne (which they identified as marking the start o f the riforma melodrammatica). They invited Warburg to join them on the planning committee, and he raised money from his own family to pay the production costs for the reproduc­ tions which accompanied Costumi teatrali, and, between February and April 1895, translated his original German account into Italian for publication, with the help o f Alceste Giorgetti.53 The letter o f 24 March 1895 to his mother in which he requests financial help for the cost o f the reproductions notes that for the past year, I have concentrated myself, and all my efforts, financial not excluded, on the intention of rescuing from obscurity a significant bu t com pletely ignored turning point in Florentine culture. Once I have finished this, I will at some point tell you all about the highly interesting prelim inary stages, in which, I may safely say, my own role has been by no means discreditable. But I am aware of how m uch effort it has taken.54

Warburg was alone in his awareness o f the full significance o f his findings and methods. Italian reviewers praised the importance and originality o f

Costumi teatrali in fairly bland terms (Rodolfo Renier even characterized it as a model for the study o f “ all the bizarre, even absurd, classisizing symbol­ ism which predominates in innumerable court festivals o f our renais­ sance” ),55 and Warburg received not ungenerous acknowledgements from some o f the German scholars with whom he was in touch, such as Karl Lamprecht, Wilhelm Creizenach and Karl Schmetterer. But their comments revealed no recognition o f the originality o f his approach, and Warburg was

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deeply hurt by the dismissive and patronizing attitude o f German reviewers. He was also disappointed that Angelo Solerti, a scholar to whom he had given exceptionally generous access to his archival findings, should, in a footnote which praises W arburgs achievement in Costumi teatrali, take him to task for overlooking Girolamo Seriacopis manuscript notes on the festivi­ ties o f 1589.56 He noted on the flyleaf o f his working copy o f Costumi teatrali that discussion o f this document would have to be incorporated into any future German version. In the event, Warburg did not publish an expanded version o f the article. This had to wait for Getrud Bings posthumous edition o f 1932, in which she added twenty-nine pages o f notes, including lengthy extracts from Seriacopis manuscript,57 as well as the complete script o f Warburg’s original German language account. This differs in many minor respects from the Italian publication o f 1895 for which it formed the basis, and contains two significant passages it excludes, one speculating on the extent o f the Accademia della Crusca’s influence on the intermedi, the other a considerably longer formulation o f the concluding paragraphs.58 Warburg introduces Costumi teatrali by informing the reader that he is bringing not only newly-discovered documents to his study o f the 1589 inter­

medi, but also a new methodology, and by directly relating this investigation to his academic concern with the impact o f antiquity upon later culture. He reviews the major known sources relating to the Florentine wedding festivi­ ties o f 1589 (namely the diaries o f Pavoni, Cavallino and Benacci, Gualterotti’s description o f the entrata, and Bastiano de’Rossi’s account o f the intermedi);59 then introduces the new documentary sources which he has discovered, which are both visual (forty-three costume sketches by Bernardo Buontalenti and four engravings) and textual (Cavalieri’s accounts and note-book for the intermedi costumes). The innovative approach he outlines, based on his recognition o f the importance o f images in animating these dry accounts, involves a comparative investigation o f the visual and textual documentation, making full use o f art historical methods. In this way, Warburg is able to identify the engravings as stage designs for the inter­

medi by Agostino Carracci (I & III) and Epifanio d’Alfiano (II & IV), by comparing them with Rossi’s description; and to identify the characters, their intermedi (I, II, III and V only) and, in some cases, named actors, depicted in the costume sketches, by using written documentation, includ­

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTI NE INTE RME DI OF 15 8 9

ing notations on the drawings themselves, identifications later confirmed by comparison with lists in Seriacopi’s note-book.60 The four main personalities concerned with the creation o f these inter­

medi are identified as Giovanni de’Bardi (1534-1612), Emilio de’Cavalieri (d.1602), Bernardo Buontalenti (c.1531-1608) and de’Rossi. Following earlier writers, notably Stefano Arteaga,61 the most important o f these is singled out not as the artist, Buontalenti, but the director, Bardi. Warburg criticizes

intermedi as a musical genre, but praises Bardi’s attempts to counteract their “ pom pous baroque” nature, and his strenuous attempts to forge a certain unity. He is less concerned with detailed historical reconstruction o f the event than with understanding its imagery, and offers an interpretation o f the symbolism o f the six intermedi , which he sees as falling into two groups (I, IV and VI symbolising heavenly music; II, III and V human music), and as reflecting Bardi’s attempt to provide “ antikisierende Pantomime iiber die Bedeutung der Musik,” based to the minutest detail on precedents set by classical writers.62 Bardi s concern for the classical cul­ tural heritage gives investigation o f these intermedi particular appeal for Warburg. Warburg notes parallels between the third intermedi and Rinuccinis Dafne , the first product o f the riforma melodrammatica. His fas­ cination for the markedly contrasting artistic interpretation o f the ideas and myths o f antiquity by these two works, separated by only a few years, and involving some o f the same artists, gives him the motivating question for his investigation, namely: “ What is the source for this change in the influence o f antiquity?” 63 His question prompts him to a consideration o f mythological representa­ tions o f the musical harmony o f the spheres. Some early renaissance exam­ ples are presented,64 and the most effective ways o f representing it on stage are discussed. For the intermedia Warburg identifies these not as the written medium o f script or plot, but as the visual characterization o f mythological attributes through costume details and props, a method which, however, led the over-enthusiasm, and “ baroque taste” o f the intermedi designers into “capricious and unnatural combinations,” further obscured when translated into the “ raw reality o f actual costumes.” Detailed discussion o f the first

intermedio leads Warburg to conclude that “ the profound allegories through which the great classical philosophers and poets attempted to symbolize the

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enigmas o f human existence became, for the learned academics o f the six­ teenth-century, data for the characterization o f personifications, who trans­ formed their obscure symbols into explicit costumes and props.” 65 Warburg turns to the written documentation to discover whether the visual symbol­ ism with which Bardi “tortured classical writers” was successfully com muni­ cated to spectators o f the intermedi. He concludes from the accounts o f Pavoni and Cavallino that it was not, and that this was only to be expected considering the

circumstances

under which

the public

saw these

personifications, in the context o f scriptless “ pantomimes” in which large numbers o f characters were paraded in quick succession before an audience unfamiliar with the symbolism o f their costume and props because they had no other means o f access to such figures.66 But Warburg makes an important distinction between the three intermedi which represented worldly music, which he links closely to festival proces­ sions and other non-verbal pantomimic “ transitional types between real life and dramatic art,” and what he sees as the three more genuinely dramatic

intermedi which represent the music of the spheres. O f this second group, he singles out the third intermedio for particular attention. With the help o f the visual documentation, which confirms that there was a conscious effort to subdivide the chorus into small autonomous groups, he identifies in it a genuine attempt on the part o f Bardi to enlist all possible aids: the aural ones of plot and script as well as the visual ones o f costume and props, in trying to communicate his symbolism to the spectators. For Warburg, the result o f this creditable experiment (which he examines in some detail, quoting the whole o f Rossi’s description), was a “ singular hybrid between academic mythological festival procession and sentimental pastoral drama,” which marked a significant step towards the replacement o f the baroque excesses o f the madrigals and costumes o f the intermedi by the stile recitativo and less overblown classicism o f musical melodrama, which made its first fullyformed appearance in the Dafne o f 1594.67 It was not in their sources, but in the way in which they presented those sources, that intermedi differed from musical melodrama, in which the unsubtle, almost brutal quarrying o f clas­ sical mythology in the intermedi gave way to an altogether lighter touch. Warburg sees this as being symbolized by the metamorphosis o f Apollo, from the venerable cosmic symbol o f the 1565 intermedi, to the youthful

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTI NE INTE RME DI OF 15 8 9

sentimental God o f the operatic stage, a transformation in which the inter­

medi o f 1589 marked a crucial turning point.68

V extending the boundaries of art history: theatre iconography Warburg did not research the drawings he found for the sake o f their own aesthetic worth, or primarily to gain information about the personality of their artist, Buontalenti, or his workshop, either o f which would have been standard art-historical approaches. The main focus of his investigations was the theatrical event itself, recognized by both contemporaries and historians as the greatest attraction o f the 1589 wedding celebration, and a highpoint of European court festival. Warburg studied these drawings as historical images, and recognized that, in conjunction with the written documenta­ tion, they enabled him to attempt a historical investigation into the inter­

medi o f 1589 based on art-historical methods. The sentence in which he outlines his approach, at the very beginning o f his article, is a succinct mani­ festo o f theatre iconography: At first glance, [festival] accounts now strike us as dry or curious reports, and there exists only one way to transform them into genuinely vital evocations of the past. That is by attem pting to examine them in conjunction with contem porary works of art which depict such festivals. To date, such an attem pt has been made neither with respect to a specific area of research nor on a more general scale. [... ] I gladly grasped the prestigious opportunity [which these newly-discovered docum ents] offered me to attem pt an art historical investigation into the historical significance of the intermedi of 1589 for the developm ent of theatrical taste.69

Observations such as this reflect an important preoccupation o f his approach to his discipline, summarized towards the end o f his life, in his remark (in a letter to the Belgian art historian Jacques Mesnil), that “only when art history can demonstrate that it sees works o f art from a few more perspectives than it has done so far, will our activity again attract greater scholarly and general interest.” 70 Warburg’s stance is relevant to the current debate on art history as an academic discipline as a whole, and Costumi

teatrali is significant for the emergence o f a small and specialized subsection

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o f the study o f visual images as historical documents, namely theatre iconography. The debate on art history is throwing into sharp relief attitudes which continue to be com monly accepted as underpinning the formal study o f visual images. It remains a central tenet o f art history that the images which form the subject o f its study are monuments which “earn” the right to be studied through their inherent cultural and/or aesthetic worth, and that this is a hierarchical system, with the greatest masterpieces deserving the most attention. Taken for granted by the majority,71 this tenet is stoutly defended by our most sophisticated art historians, scholars who have themselves made major contributions to the study o f visual images both as documents and as monuments. For Gombrich, for example, “ the history o f art is rightly con­ sidered to be the history o f masterpieces and o f the ‘old masters’ ”, and Haskell takes the position that “ aesthetic discrimination must always lie at the heart o f any serious discussion involving the arts, even in an inquiry that is not intended to make a contribution to art history.” 72 In this respect, Gom brich’s own distinction between the needs o f teaching and those o f research is pertinent.73 Although the establishment o f aesthetic worth belongs by definition squarely in the realm o f philosophy, as far as the teach­ ing o f art history is concerned, the traditional stance o f art historians is fully justified. The basic techniques o f the discipline need to be learnt with respect to the great masters and their masterpieces. These are embedded in a cultural continuum, and successful theoretical interpretations are grounded in a firm grasp o f the subject’s history, genres and techniques. Concerning research, the position seems much less clear cut.74 The nineteen senior academics who responded to a recent questionnaire formulated by the editors o f the journal October 75 have evidently thought deeply about such issues. Many appear to agree with Gombrich that if the academic study o f images were to be re-organized on anthropological rather than art historical lines, the discipline would be “ swamped with material.” 76 Their replies are symptomatic o f a widespread suspicion o f interdisciplinar­ ity, and a continuing fear that if art history were to relax its adherence to its traditional standpoint o f artistic quality as a measure o f academic interest, it would be engulfed by conflicting methodological demands, o f which those proceeding from the anthropological approach to cultural studies pose the

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most consistent challenge.77 The October questionnaire specifically invoked Warburg’s name, and due respect is paid by respondents to his intellectual stature, his interdisciplinarity and his “ audacity and disrespect for discipli­ nary boundaries.” 78 However, the October respondents largely remain silent regarding an area o f enquiry o f considerable academic potential, pioneered by Warburg’s Costumi teatrali, and as dependent on the applica­ tion o f art historical techniques to the study o f visual images as traditional art history, namely the study o f images as historical documents. Images are not only the monuments o f art history. They can also be the documents o f other academic disciplines, to be studied not for their own sake, but in order to illuminate, for example, other cultural m onum ents.79 Viewed from this perspective, there is little correlation between the aesthetic value o f a visual source as art historical m onument, and its historical significance as cultural, economic or political document.80 For many cul­ tural historians o f Warburg’s time, not least Burckhardt, great works o f art were surviving witnesses to the spirit o f bygone ages. As reprographic tech­ niques advanced, images were increasingly used as an illustrative resource. But as late as 1966, John Hale felt it necessary to draw attention to the lack o f cooperation between historians and art historians.81 Theodore Rabb, an active participant in the debate concerning the interpretation and use o f images by historians, o f visual “ art as a special class o f evidence, shaped by im agination as well as tradition and purpose,” keep alive, has noted a recent decrease in interdisciplinary activity in this area with respect to sub­ sequently developed interactive areas o f historical research.82 One area in which interdisciplinary collaboration is, however, playing an increasingly significant role, is that o f theatre iconography. The theatrical arts, whether manifested as drama, music, court festival, or in some other form o f performance, are characterized by their ephemeral nature. Theatrical events, the cultural monuments the theatre historian’s enquiry, only exist as long as the performance lasts. In retrospect, they can no longer be studied directly, but only through secondary documentation. But it was Warburg, in Costumi teatrali, who first fully realized the significance o f a comparative approach to studying a theatrical event, which embraced visual as well as textual material as historical documents worthy o f study in their own right, and independently o f any aesthetic merits, and the value o f art-

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historical methods for gaining the maximum theatre-historical information from them. It is a phenom enological fallacy to assume there is such a thing as immediate, intuitive evidence of works of art of the past; they need to be secured, authenticated, even reconstructed in their original state and their historical context, before we can begin to interpret them , to retrieve their meaning. This is the hard core of art history as a discipline.83 Theatre iconography systematically attem pts to integrate the pictorial representation o f theatre as a vital source of inform ation in researching the history of theatre [...it] involves the search for a new dialectical relationship between the w ritten word and the theatre illustration, one in which the illustration is n o t im m ediately interpreted as an appendage to a text. It involves an autonom ous “reading” o f the image in which the use of other docum ents, preferably from other sign systems, cannot and may not be discounted.84

Given these definitions, and in the light o f Zorzi’s eminently quotable state­ ment that “ senza la storia dell’arte, la storia dello spettacolo rischierebbe di rimanere una disciplina senz oggetto,” 85 can theatre iconography be regarded as requiring a firm art historical methodological base? And can Warburg’s pioneering work on the intermedi o f 1589 be regarded as the first significant exercise in theatre iconography? Gombrich repeatedly warns against identifying Warburg’s method with “ iconography,” but he is referring to Warburg’s work as a whole, and to the approach o f art historians such as Emile Mâle, which has little to do with the study o f “ theatre iconography” (which might in any case have been more accurately called “ theatre iconology” ).86 The contribution made by

Costumi teatrali has neither been analyzed or acknowledged by mainstream theatre iconographers. Unlike his follower Panofsky,87 Warburg hardly fea­ tures in theoretical writings concerned with this methodological approach to the study o f theatrical events. Costumi teatrali considerably predates the earliest formal recognition o f the self-conscious development and applica­ tion o f theatre-iconographical methods, whose beginnings are generally pinpointed to the 1960s.88 The article was apparently unknown even to Germ an academics o f Warburg’s time concerned with theatrical images, such as the founding father o f German theatre history, M ax Herrmann, whose “ Dramenillustrationen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts” o f 1914, perhaps

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTE RME DI OF I 5 8 9

the earliest monograph-length treatment o f this subject to apply art histori­ cal methods in the service o f theatre-historical concerns, does not acknowl­ edge Warburg, and has itself been identified as the earliest serious exercise in theatre iconography.89 A number o f contemporary theatre historians do refer to Warburg. Lecoq (but not Rodini), does so in the context o f a review o f contemporary festival research, and numerous references to him in Zorzi’s writings testify that he read Warburg’s work with attention.90 Clifford Davidson makes a direct association between what he refers to as “ stage iconography” and Warburg’s methodology. But he is acknowledging Warburg’s importance not in the context o f images o f the stage, but in the very different context o f imagery on the stage.91 There are no direct references to Warburg in the 1997 Theatre

Research International “ theatre iconography” special issue, but in the 1996 “ theatrical images” double-issue o f Biblioteca teatrale, Guardenti mentions Warburg in passing, M olinari’s reference to the Uffizi’s Buontalenti draw­ ings is surely paying him silent homage, and Botti’s short introduction to the issue emphasizes the significance o f “Warburghian iconology.” 92 Gabriele Brandstetter’s comparative analytical study o f recurring gestures, postures and configurations in early twentieth-century avant-garde dance, and related visual depictions and literary descriptions, explicitly draws on the substance and methodologies o f Warburg’s work, as presented in Gom brich’s influential biography, in a fundamental way unique to contemporary theatre history. Brandstetter is directly concerned with Warburg’s research into iconographie conventions, which drew on psychology and anthropology, as well as more conventional art historical methods, to develop the “ pathos formula,” and her monograph does not refer to Costumi teatrali.93 Daniela Zampino recognized that Warburg’s article o f 1895 anticipated certain key elements o f methodological approaches suggested by modern theatre historians.94 Her article o f 1977 traces the development o f Warburg and Panofsky’s iconographical and iconological methods, and analyses

Costumi teatrali, and its contribution to theatre history, in considerable detail.95 She suggests that the theatre-historical articles o f the Journal o f the

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (whose abstracts are appended to her article), are representative o f a distinct approach to theatre historical research, whose origins can be traced back to Warburg’s article, and which

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maintains a clear distinction between the problems presented by the analysis o f documents, and those o f reconstructing the history of stage spectacle. The 1970s saw intensive investigations into the relationship between renaissance theatre and the festivals o f which they were often an integral part. Zampino identifies the central problem o f the study o f theatrical events as their dependence on their cultural and historical context and sees Warburg’s awareness o f this as demonstrating an astounding modernity. She is aware o f Warburg’s achievement in being the first to investigate a theatrical event by integrating an analysis o f visual and textual documents, and o f the im port­ ance o f a critical consideration o f the visual arts to what she identifies as the “Warburghian approach” to theatre studies. But, for Zampino, at least as essential to this approach are an interest in diverse aspects of the purely the­ atrical event and a broadly-based, as opposed to purely art-historical, analy­ sis o f these aspects in the context o f the culture and historical period which produced that theatrical event. Zampino concludes that Costumi teatrali “ inaugurates a methodological approach which indicates, already in 1895, the path which modern theatre history will take [... ] in its attempt to reconstruct a reality which extin­ guishes itself in the moment in which it is attained,” 96 as much because it augments purely theatrical with extra-theatrical documentary sources, as through its comparative study o f textual and extra-textual (i.e. visual), sources.97 This emphasis on the extraordinary range o f Warburg’s vision, even in the limited context o f his contribution to theatre studies, and even given that more credit for some o f these advances is actually due to Burckhardt, has the paradoxical effect o f underplaying his pioneering essay in theatre iconography, an essay which effects a fruitful extension o f the boundaries o f art history, and whose fundamental importance in laying the foundations for an effective new theatre historical approach deserves full recognition.

vi conclusion In Costumi teatrali, Warburg mobilized new archival discoveries and form u­ lated new comparative methodologies in the service o f his efforts to address

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTI NE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

the central questions which motivated his academic research, including the proper study o f his discipline, which he saw as embracing all visual images, not just “works o f art.” Almost incidentally, his article also threw new light on one o f the most influential court festivals o f all time, and re-wrote an important chapter in the history o f early musical drama, two achievements which have received due acclaim, as well as defining and founding the new discipline o f theatre-iconography, a breakthrough whose significance has remained largely unrecognized. All too often, tensions between conflicting research criteria prevented Warburg’s work from reaching publication. But in Costumi teatrali, he brilliantly managed the feat o f co-ordinating the output o f concentrated research on several fronts simultaneously, in order to produce interdisciplinary work which serves as an elegant demonstration of perhaps his most far-reaching contribution to scholarship, his recognition of pictures as historical documents. Warburg’s archival discoveries relating to court festival could have pro­ vided him with rich source material for theatre-iconographical publications o f a similar nature on many other festivals and performances, based on the approach developed in Costumi teatrali. In this, he indicates that he planned a publication on sixteen costume studies by Allori and textual documents relating to the 1590 performance o f Disperazione di Fileno, another on the two volumes o f 260 sixteenth and seventeenth-century festival drawings in which he discovered Buontalenti’s forty-four 1589 costume sketches as a whole, and an extended, German-language, publication o f Costumi teatrali itself.98 All these remained unwritten. He retained a life-long interest in fest­ ivals which is reflected in his notes and in numerous o f his publications, but published no further significant theatre-iconographical studies. Evidence such as a note in a letter o f 16 July 1895 to the German art historian Hermann Grimm, to the effect that he did not know how soon he would be publishing a more thorough German version o f Costumi teatrali, and his generosity in drawing the Allori material and other festival documents to the attention o f theatre historians such as Angelo S o le rti," suggests that by 1895 Warburg himself was keen to move on from his study o f Florentine court festivals, in order to address new challenges, and to explore new ways of extending the boundaries of art history.

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APPENDICES: non-italian reports of the medici wedding festivities of 1589 APPENDIX la: Bavarian report (transcription)100 [f.2451·] Dem 30. Aprilis A[nno] [15]89 ist die Princesin aus Lottringen zu Florenz ankhom[m]en, und ir der GroPherzog mit unzellich vilen auf die Hochzeit geladnen und berueffnen herrn in schonen Liureen entgegen zogen. Und alls man alia porta del prato zuesamen khom [m ]en, ist die Princesin von irer Gutschen, so schon vergoldt gewesen, abgestanden, und hat Ir der Bischove di Fiesole ein Creiz zekhussen geben. Nach solchem hat der Erzbischove von Pisa dem GroPherzog[en] in einer grossen silberen schissl ein Cron gegeben, die haben Ir Allta. der Braut auf ir haubt gesezt. Und alls solches beschechen, und sie gegen der Statt zu einer khirchen gezogen, alda die Cardl. Gioiosa, Gonzaga, Colonna, und del Monte gewartet. Da ist der Gropherzog auf seiner Gutschen in das Palaz gefahren, und daselbs auf die Braut gewartet, welche man unnder einem khostbarlichen himl, und auf einem weissen Zelter, so mit einer gar statlichen deckhen bedeckht gewesen, in das Palaz geftiert. [f.245v] Haben solchen himl 60. fiirneme Florentinische gentilhuomini , so all in weip, wie auch Braut und Preitigam, gar herrlich bekhlaidt gewesen, getragen. 1st Hochgemelter Braut der Herzog von M antua auf der rechten, und der Don Pietro de M edici au f der linckhen seiten neben dem himl geriten. Und nach Inen die Herzoginn von Braunschweig. Allpdann der

S[ignore] Don Virginio Ursino Duca di Bracciano , und sonst ein fiirneme Person. Denselben send 3. frauen sambt 12. Junckhfrauen, so der Braut zugehôrt, zwischen zwen allten Florentinischen herrn, Jede a u f einem zellter gevolgt. Nach denen 1st der Márchese Gio. Vincentio Vitelli mit einer

compagnia Reitter mit weissen harrnischen und feichlfarben rôckhln, mit silber und gold verbrembt, auch sameten binden, geritten. A u f die send lestlich 4. haubtleiith mit 4. compagnie caualli legieri auf schenen Pferden, und mit weissen harrnisch, geritten. [f.246r BLANK] [f.246v: like all these

folios , this one had been folded into quarters before being bound into this volume. This side bears a heading at the top o f the bottom right-hand quarter] Florentinischer Einritt. [ff.247r-v BLANK]

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTI NE INTE RME DI OF 15 8 9

[f.248r] Von den stattlichen sachen, so zu Florentz auf der Herzogin von Lottringen, alls Hochzeiterin, einzug, und dann zur Hochzeit, zugericht werden. Erstlich ist beim ersten Thor al prato genannt, ein Thor wie ein theatrum , daran aile des GranDuca aus Toscana Statt beschriben und abgemalen, sambt 10. von den fürnemsten Malern gemachten tafeln von ôlfarben, darauf herrliche sachen, alls wie Florenz mit Fiesole, der ersten Statt, ain ding worden, wie darnach auch Pisa, Arezzo , und anndere Statt darzue khom[m]en. Am Eckh der grossen Borgo ogni Santi genannt, ist ein sehr khostlicher triumphpogen, oder arcus triumphalis , mit des GranDuca und dem Lottringischen wappen, sambt 9. taflen von ôlfarben, aida des Khonigs aus Franckhreich ganze, wie auch das Lottringisch, und weilund des GranDuca

Cosimo geschlecht abgemalen. A u f der bruggen Sta. Trinita genannt, da stehn auf ainer seiten der GranDuca Cosimo der Junger, und Cosimo de

Medici, der aliter. A u f [f.248v] der anndern seiten Carolus Magnus und Carolus Quintus , so all von stuccho gemacht, und ist schôn zusechen. Al Canto à Carnesecchi ist widerumb ein herrlicher arcus triumphalis mit 10. gar schonen taflen von ôlfarben, daran Khonig Gottfrids thaten gemalen wie Er Hierusalem erledigt, sambt anndern sachen von den Khonigen aus Franckhreich. An der Thombkhirchen ist aupwendig ein fürnem und khunstlich hilzen ding aufgemacht, so schôn gemalen, und ist sonnderlich das General Concilium daran, wie sich die Griechen mit den Catholischen verglichen und verainigt. Item wie Sixtus zu Papst gekhrônt, und dann, wie dieselb khirchen gereicht worden, sambt anndern Catholischen sachen, von unnseren Papsten und Florentinischen heiligen beschechen, die dann all von gebrentem stainwerch, und daneben das Florentinisch wappen, herrlich gemacht. Inwendig in der khirchen ist ein gewaltige Pin, mit treffenlichem auβwendigem zier. Und auf dem Hochalltar ein ding zugericht, wie ein wolckhen, darinn [f.249r] miiessen 16. Musici stehn, und sich solche wolckhen aufthuen, und ein Engl aufs zierlichst daraus heerausgehn, so die Fiirstlich Braut khrônnen solle. Da wiirdet ein uberaus schene Musickh stim, mit 2. orglen, 2. Pulten, und 5. Chôr. Soil solche zuberaitung, wie man sagt, uber 5000. A.gestehn.

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Al Canto de Bischeri ist ein arcus triumphalis von Khonig Philips zug wider den Türckhen, wie Don Giovan dA ustria die schlacht auf dem Meer gethan. Item wie Khayser Carl Quienton der Tiirckhischen belegerung erledigt. 1st gar ein schôn ding.

Al Canto delle farine ist abermaln ein arcus triumphalis mit 4. taflen. Darin sind alle die herrn de Medici abgemaln, mit herrlichen reymen von iren thaten. Bey des GranDuca Palaz ist ein gar khunstreiche Porten von goldwerch aufgemacht, alda auf einer tafl gar herrlich gemalen, wie der GranDuca

Cosimo Toscana khrônet. Dann so ist noch au f 2. anndern taflen, wie Pius V. den Duca Cosimo zu Rom khrônet, und auf der anndern, wie nach deβ- [f.249v] selben absterben der nechstverstorben Duca Fran.co von denen von Florenz confirm irt und zu GranDuca gekhronnt worden. Inwendig im Palaz ist ailes mit samet und seiden von allerley farben aufs khostlichst zuberait. So werden Senesische Comici, Li intronati genannt ein Comedj, la peleg­

rina , halten. Dabey werden volgende Intermedia sein. 1. Erstlich ist ein herrlich groβ zimer mit gold und allerley farben gar lustig auβgemalen, da lasst man ein rote leinwat herab, [und wiirdt] das die

prospettiva mit einer anndern blauen leinwadt bedeckhet [wiirdet]. In deren mitte steht ein sessl, darin singt ein Idea, so also allain herrlich singt, und allgemach allgemach, das mans gleichsam nit merckhen khan, verleurt sie sich in etliche velsen, so darzue gemacht, und in einem augenblickh verschwindet die leinwat. Thuet sich der himel schnell auf, und ist die prospettiua offen. Da sicht man auf 3. seiten in das Paradeiphinein, und erheben sich 4. wolckhen gar maisterlich vom erdboden, gehn mit schonem gesang uber sich gegen [f.25or] dem himl, und verschwinden darnach. Da wiirdt man aber herrliche M adrigal und Musickh hôren, dann bey disem intermedio 44. singer, und allerley Instrumenten. Bald das aus, so khôrt sich die prospettiua umb, und man sicht die ganz statt abgemalen. 2. Man verkhôrt die prospettiua widerumb, und erscheinen lautter berg, velsen und briinnen, und wachst aus dem erdtreich ein berg heraus, darin 18. Musici so treffenlich singen. Und so bald ein Madrigal aus, khôrt sich der berg geschwind gegen der prospettiua , und werden 2. hole oder grosse lôcher wie in den bergen send, daraus in deren jeder 12. Musici sich abermaln uberaus wol hôren lassen.

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE I NTE RME DI OF 15 8 9

3.

Man verkhôrt die prospettiua aber einmal, und gehn 36. Musici heraus,

mit selzamen Inuentionen und mit 4. tanzern. Und weil sie nur singen, wechst aus einer hole, oder antro , ein greilichs monstrum. Das bringen die tanzer und Musici mit irem gesang umb. Darnach thuet man ein herrlichen tanz in Musica. Soil gar ein schon intermedium sein. [f.250v] 4. Man verkhôrt die prospettiua mehr ein mal. Und erscheint in dem lufft Juno in einem Triumphwagen dene 2. thüer ziechen. Und ist so selzam angemacht, das mans nit merckhen oder sechen khan, wo und an weme es seye. Wann nun solche Juno in mitten des theatri khombt, da singt ein ainigs weib gar herrlich, darnach zeuchts widerumb darvon, und erscheint auf der anndern seiten ein grosser nebl, der sich, so bald er in die mitl khombt, aufthuet. Und da sind 22. Musici darinen, die singen und musicirn. Solcher nebl vergeht aber bald, und vonstundan darauf sicht man die hôll. Khombt der Lucifer, ein greilich monstrum , mit einem grossen hôllischen hauffen, und dem Vulcano, und ist alda ein recht gemachtes feur. Werden auch schene, aber melancholische Madrigal gesungen. 5. Widerumb verkhôrt sich die prospettiua , und wiirdet ein gar Natürlichs Meer, darauf erscheinen auf einer nicchia die Meergôttine, und singen ein schenes Madrigal; bald nach demselben khombt ein ganz ubergolte naue mit 20. personen, das wiirdt [f.25ir] von dem ungestiiemen Meer so geschwind hin und heer geworffen, das sich zum hôchsten zuverwundern. A uf derselben Naue ist der Turrenioy und singt allain, da springt ein Delphin hinauf, so Ime zuhôrt, und tregt Ine hin, geht auch also die Naue welch soil gar schen sein. 6. Die prospettiua verkhôrt sich noch einmal, und scheint alls wanns lautter guldene gerôr weren. Darnach thuet sich das Paradeyβ auf 3. seiten auf, und man sicht den Iouem in einer wolckhen, wie Er sich dann darin, sambt noch 2. anndern wolckhen, herab auf die erden lasset, und sich in ein gulden rôgen verendert, damit verzeren sich die nebl, doch khomen anndere, darin 50. Musici. So sind unden auf dem boden 40. anndere Musici, mit mancherley Inuentionen, die singen, schlagen und Musicirn all zusamen, tanzen auch daneben, und fiirwent 4. vortanzer. Zu disem Intermedio singt man 7. Madrigal. Und ist nit zubeschreiben, was es für ein gewaltig ding. Es khans auch khainer glauben, alls ders sicht. [f.25iv] Es werden 50. Florentinisch Junge vom Adi geladen und all in weiβ seiden, mit gulden schnieren gekhlaidt, deren khlaider jedes uber 200. Δ. gesteht, das sie den Himl oder baldacchino tragen.

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Der GranDucchessa copertina würdt von weip tilleta sein, und mit berlen auch Edlstain verstegt werden. Welches man auf 150. A.schezt. Man hellt bey den Pitti ein torneo. Alda sich die Florentinischen vom Adi mit mancherley Inuentionen sehen lassen. Wann Harnach das banchett fiiryber, so zeucht man gleich wider an dasselb ordt. Und würdet schon einer

braccio oder Florentiner elln und 2/3 wasser angeloffen und vol sein. Da haltet man ein schlacht zu wasser: würdt herrlich und verwunderlich zesechen sein. Verrer würdet man an Santa Croce ein Calcio di Pallone auf Florentinisch halten, daryber wol was geht. Gleichsfahls helt man ein Jaid von manch[er]lay thüeren. Es send schon 4. Cardinal, und der Herzog von Mantua hie. [f.252r] Es macht ein Theütscher auf den Abent am Einritt aufm thurn feurwerch, so ein schon und wunderbarlich ding werden soil.

APPENDIX lb: Bavarian report (translation) On 30 April 1589, the princess from Lorraine arrived in Florence, and the grand-duke rode out to meet her with countless gentlemen invited and sum­ moned to the wedding, in beautiful liveries. And when they met at the Porta al Prato, the princess stepped down from her beautifully gilded carriage, and the Bishop o f Fiesole gave her a cross to kiss. After this, the Archbishop o f Pisa101 gave the grand-duke102 a crown in a large silver dish, which his Highness placed on the bride’s head. And when this had taken place, and they had ridden towards the city to a church, where the Cardinals Gioiosa, Gonzaga, Colonna and del. Monte waited, then the grand-duke rode in his coach to the palace,103 and waited there for the bride, who was led to the palace under a precious canopy, and mounted on a white palfrey which was covered with an imposing cloth. [f.245v] This canopy was carried by 60 noble Florentine gentilhuomini, most magnificently dressed, all in white, as were the bride and groom. The Duke o f M antua104 rode to the right, and Don Pietro de Medici to the left side o f the highborn bride, next to the canopy. And behind them the Duchess o f Brunsw ick.105 Thereafter Don Virginio Ursino Duke o f Bracciano, and another aristocrat.106 And the same were followed by three ladies, together with twelve ladies-in-waiting o f the bride, between two old

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Florentine gentlemen, each on a palfrey. Behind them rode the Márchese Gianvincenzo Vitelli with a company o f cavalrymen with white armour and brightly-colored uniforms, trimmed with silver and gold, and with velvet fastenings. After these rode lastly four captains with four compagnie cavalli

legieri on beautiful horses, and with white armour. [f.246v] Florentine Entry

[f.248r] Concerning the impressive events, which were arranged in Florence for the Duchess of Lorraine’s Entry as bride, and then for the Wedding. Firstly, at the first gate, called the al Prato, there is a gate like a theatrum,107 on which all o f the grand-Duke’s cities in Tuscany were described and painted, together with ten panels painted in oils by the most eminent artists, on which were marvelous things, such as when Florence, the foremost city, became united with Fiesole, as thereafter also Pisa, Arezzo and other cities joined them. On the corner called the large Borgo ogni Santi is a very sump­ tuous triumphal arch, or arcus triumphalis ,108 with the coats o f arms o f the grand-Duke and the House o f Lorraine, together with nine oil panels, on which are painted the complete family trees of the Kings o f France, as also of the House of Lorraine and the late Grand-Duke Cosimo. On the bridge called Sta. Trinita there stand on one side Grand-Duke Cosimo the younger and Cosimo de Medici the elder, on

[L 2 4 8 V ]

the other side Charles the Great and

Charles V, all made o f stucco, and beautiful to behold. At the Canto de Carnesecchi is another wonderful arcus triumphalis 109 with ten really lovely panels in oil, on which are painted King Godfrey’s deeds, during his conquest of Jerusalem, together with other things concerning the Kings o f France. At the Cathedral, outside an elegant and ornate wooden monument has been erected,110 so beautifully painted, and noteworthy on it is the General Council, at the time when the [Orthodox] Greeks and the Catholics made their agreement and united. Also o f Sixtus being crowned as Pope, and fur­ thermore how the same church was handed over, together with other catholic property, as ordained by our Popes and Florentine saints. All these then were o f terra-cotta, and beside them the Florentine coat-of-arms, beau­ tifully made. Inside the church is a monumental column,111 with admirable relief. And on the high altar, a monument has been prepared like a cloud, in which [f.249r] sixteen musicians have to stand, and the said cloud opens,

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and an angel most gracefully comes out from it, in order to crown the ducal bride. Exceptionally good music was heard throughout, with 2 organs, 2 music stands and 5 choirs. Such provisions are said to have cost over 5000 D[ucats]. At the Canto de’Bischeri is an arcus triumphalis 112 o f King Philip’s campaigns against the Turks, and Don Giovan o f Austria’s sea battle. Also o f Emperor Charles V ’s defeat o f the Turkish siege. Is a very fine thing. At the Canto delle farine is another arcus triumphalis ,113 with four panels. On them all the Medici noblemen are painted, with wonderful rhymes o f their deeds. At the grand-ducal palace,114 a very ornate gold-work gate115 has been erected, on which is a panel on which [an allegory of] Grand-Duke Cosimo crowning Tuscany has been wonderfully painted. And here also are on two other panels, how Pius V crowned Duke Cosimo in Rome, and on the second, how, after the death of the [f.249v] same, the next-deceased Duke Francesco was the Florentine nominated, and crowned as grand-duke. Inside the palace everything is prepared in the most expensive way, with velvets and silks o f many colors. Thus Siennese actors, called Li intronati, will stage a comedy, La

Pellegrina,, at which there will be the following intermedi: 1. Firstly a magnificent large room has been very divertingly decorated with gold and diverse colours. There, a red curtain is lowered, and the scene will be covered with another, blue, curtain. In the middle o f this stands an armchair, in which an Idea sings, splendidly singing solo, and gradually, gradually, so that one does not immediately notice it, she disappears into a group o f rocks made for this purpose, and in an instant the curtain disap­ pears. The heavens quickly open up, and the scene is open. Then one can see into the paradise on three sides, and four clouds rise in very impressive fashion from the ground, rise with beautiful singing up towards [f.25or] the heaven, and thereafter disappear. Additionally, one hears splendid madrigals and music, as there are forty-four singers in this intermedio , and all manner of instruments. As soon as it is finished, the scene turns around, and one sees the whole city painted. 2. The scene is turned again, and nothing but mountains, cliffs and foun­ tains appear, and a hill grows up out o f the earth in which 18 musicians sing most excellently. And as soon as one madrigal is finished, the hill quickly turns toward the scene, and turns into two caves or large hollows, such as

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

there are in the hills, out o f each o f which twelve musicians are once again splendidly heard. 3.

The scene is turned once again, and thirty-six musicians come out,

with unusual inventions ,116 and with four dancers. And while they are just singing, out o f a cave, or antro , emerges a gruesome monster, which the dancers and musicians dispatch with their singing. After this a magnificent dance is held, to music. Is said to be a very lovely intermedium. [f.250v] 4. The scene is turned again once more, and Juno appears in the air, in a triumphal cart being drawn by two animals. And it is so exceptionally attached that one cannot notice or see where, or onto what. When the afore­ mentioned Juno gets to the middle of the stage, one solitary woman sings most wonderfully, after which she goes away again, and on the other side a great fog appears which, as soon as it reaches the middle, opens up. And there are twenty-two musicians inside it, who sing and play. But the fog soon disap­ pears, and from this time on one sees hell. Lucifer comes, a gruesome monster with a large hellish band, and Vulcan, and there is a convincingly constructed fire there. Beautiful but melancholy madrigals are also sung. 5. Again the scene turns, to become an entirely realistic sea, on which the sea-goddesses appear out o f a niche, and sing a lovely madrigal. Soon after this comes a completely gilded ship with twenty people. That is [f.25ir] thrown hither and thither so quickly by the stormy sea, that it is most aston­ ishing. On this same ship is Turrenio, and he sings solo, then a dolphin which is listening to him jumps up, and carries him hence, and then the ship, which is said to be most beautiful, also goes. 6. The scene turns once again, and seems to be nothing but golden tubes. Thereupon, the paradise opens on three sides, and one sees Jove in a cloud, in which he is coming down to the ground, together with two other clouds, and changes himself into a golden shower. With this, the fog disappears, but others come, in them fifty musicians. There are forty other musicians down on the ground, with various inventions , who sing, play and make music together, to which they also dance, and in front go four dance-masters. Seven madrigals are sung to this intermedio , and it is indescribable, what a power­ ful thing it is. No one can believe it, either, except he who sees it. [f.25iv] Fifty young Florentine noblemen are to be invited to carry the canopy or baldacchino, and all dressed in white silk, with golden fastenings,

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whose outfits will cost over 200 D. each. The decorative cloth for the Grand Duchess’s horse is to be o f white “ tilletta,” and to be embroidered with pearls, also jewels, which is estimated at 150 D. By the Pitti Palace a torneo is to be held, at which the Florentine nobility will display various “ inventions.” When afterwards the banquet is finished, one will immediately go back to the same place again and already one and two-thirds braccios or Florentine yards o f water will have poured in and it will be full. There a battle will take place in the water: it will be magnificent and astounding to watch. Furthermore, a Calcio di pallone in the Florentine manner is planned at Santa Croce, which is not to be outdone. Similarly a hunt o f various animals is to be held. Four cardinals and the Duke o f Mantua are already here. [f.252r] A German is to make fireworks on the tower on the evening of the entry, which is to be a beautiful and astonishing event.

APPENDIX II: Diary of Gadenstedt117 On 2 M ay or Tuesday, the comedy was played. Is said to have cost over 80,000 crowns, which is easily believed by those who saw it, including the Germans who, at the grand-dukes command, had been freely allowed into the hall, where the comedy was held and where other tournaments were to take place, on showing a token which each o f them had to demand from the commanding officer of the German auxiliaries, a nobleman o f the house of Trautmansdorff. This comedy was played by the Siennese actors called Gli

Intronati. The comedy was called La pellegrina , and was itself rather poor. But the intermedi between the acts, when an act was finished, were exceed­ ingly splendid, and, to those who have not see the like, almost unbelievable. I would like [p. 671] to mention the comedy, and especially the intermedi, even though they cannot be described as they ought to be. Originally, a great hall under the Galleria in Florence was assigned to this comedy by the grand-duke. In this hall, many thousands o f people could be accommodated, and everyone was able to watch the comedy properly. This hall is quite exceptional. The ceiling above was painted with gold, silver and many colors. From this hung twelve large, beautiful crowns, on which an

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

abundance o f wax candles were mounted, and right around great candelabra on all sides, on which thick lights like torches were mounted and thereafter lit, in order that one could see that much better, because as soon as the comedy was to begin, all the lights, o f which there were many thousands in the hall (because it was as high as a vaulted church), were lit, the windows having been closed, so that daylight could not shine in. The site or stage118 on which the comedy was played was also six ells higher than the hall in which the spectators were, so that one could see it that much better. In front of this raised site, a red silk cloth had been pulled right across, so that one should not see onto the stage on which the comedy was played, before it began. As soon as a sign was given to start the comedy, the red cloth was quickly drawn aside, and a blue silk cloth stayed, in which cloth, up in the middle, a woman playing a lute sat in a splendid gilt chair, decently clad in a silk dress like a goddess, surrounded by a white cloud, who started singing so delightfully, at the same time plucking her lute, that everyone said it would be impossible that a human voice could be so delightful. Furthermore, she so moved the feelings o f all the spectators with her singing that it is inde­ scribable. During this singing she was let down so gradually from up above that one could hardly notice it, so that no one knew how it took place, as then throughout in the intermedi o f this comedy such letting down and pulling up took place very skillfully, at which everyone was amazed. After this woman or goddess had come right down to the ground with the cloud, during which she sung to the end a well-composed piece or madrigal, she disappeared, and the blue cloth was also pulled away in an instant, so that one looked onto the stage o f the comedians, on which the comedy was to be played, [p. 672] as if one was looking into the clouds. Thus the scene up above, and to half-height, was surrounded by very realistically made and painted clouds. Then the clouds up in the heights moved apart, as if the heavens were opening, in which many musicians were sitting, dressed like angels, surrounded by lights (for lights splendidly decorated this scene). They played, struck and blew very delightfully on harps, lutes, violas, trum ­ pets and all sorts o f instruments, to which they also sang delightfully (such that Gotfriedt von Berbsdorff, who sat next to me, said that in his opinion it would be like this in heaven too, and was, as it were, a fore-taste o f the joyous music which the holy angels make in heaven) so that it was to be

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wondered at, and an unheard o f production. Down on the ground were two blue clouds mixed with white, in which musicians also sat, who harmonized with those at the top in the heavens. They separated, and all played beautiful madrigals with many voices set to separate parts, composed for these nup­ tials in homage o f the grand-duke. The above-mentioned two clouds were pulled into the heights from the ground, also so gradually that one could hardly notice it, up to the top cloud, into which they disappeared, and then the heavens immediately closed. But the vault up above the actors’ stage remained covered with blue clouds throughout the whole comedy. Also remarkable was the skill with which it was arranged that the clouds which were up in the vault moved like real clouds. It also looked as though the real moon and many stars hung in the clouds, which rotated and moved. In this

intermedia there were around 100 musicians, who made music very harm o­ niously together, also very skillfully, because the Grand-duke had contracted the most distinguished musicians in Italy to participate in this performance. When the heaven, as noted, had closed, the scene made a half-turn, and quickly changed into the shape and form o f how one commonly paints the city o f [SPACE],119 on which the comedians then started to act the first act, and they came in and out, out o f the doors in the scene, as though out o f houses. II.

When the first act was finished, the scene again changed on all [p. 673]

three sides, as if into a pleasure garden which one could see to be decorated with many and different flowers. On which, from below, out o f the ground, a considerable hill very gradually grew out and up, green, and with flowers growing all over it. On the peak o f the hill sat one who represented the person Parnassus (de quo poetce), playing a harp, right around whom twenty-four goddesses sat in nice orderly fashion on the hill, playing all sorts o f instruments. Soon the scene opened at the sides, next to this hill, in the shape o f two small hills, so that the highest hill, which came up from below, stood in the middle. On each o f these two hills sat twelve musicians in very orderly fashion with all sorts of instruments, and accompanied the twentyfour musicians on the high hill, so that there were forty-eight o f them in total, pleasing and delightful to hear. After this music was performed, the high hill subsided again, and the two little hills also turned round again, the scene changed as if into houses again, and they played the second act.

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

III. When the second act was finished, the scene changed into the shape of an attractive wood, most skilfully and delicately painted with various shady trees and bushes. Thirty-six musicians came onto the stage, dressed in a variety o f ways, with all sorts o f instruments, and on them played several dances o f unusual types, composed to grace the comedy. O f these thirty-six musicians, eighteen were divided off on each side, who danced facing each other, and on each side two exceptionally famous dance-masters were appointed to them, who led the dance, because they danced the best. From below, from out o f the ground, came out a horrible, gruesome, large monster or animal in the shape of a great dragon, spewed out fire, had large wings, with which it made a loud clamor, ugly claws on its feet, and proved to be very frightening. It rushed towards the musicians and dancers, just as if it wanted to swallow them with opened jaws, because o f which they play a piece shaking as if with fear. Meanwhile the dancers approached the animal, jumped around this animal with great agility, fought with the same, finally pierced the same, so that it fell to the ground, twisting this way and that, and fell dead with a great cla-[p. 674] -tter, again into the hole out of which it had emerged. After this, out o f happiness, the dancers additionally per­ formed a joyful dance, they exited from the stage again. This was one o f the most beautiful intermedi, and the third act started. IV. When they wanted to start the third act, the scene was again trans­ formed into the city o f Pisa, where they then completed the third act. Up in the air, one saw the goddess Juno drawn nearer in a splendid gilded chariot constructed like a triumphal cart, the chariot was drawn by three dragons. When the chariot was in the middle o f the stage, up under the clouds, it came to a standstill, and the goddess Juno (who, in my opinion, was the woman who had sung in the blue clouds at the beginning o f the comedy) sang a lovely delightful piece. When this was finished, the chariot was pulled further by the dragons, right to the other side, and there disappeared in the clouds. Soon after, from the same side and place out o f which the chariot came, the chariot was followed by a large closed cloud, in which music was made. When the same also arrived in the middle of the stage, it stood still, both sides divided apart, inside sat twenty-four musicians making music. When this had taken place, the cloud closed up again, the musicians contin­ ued to make music, very softly, as if it came from afar in the clouds, it was

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delightful to hear. Meanwhile it gradually went away, right up to the other side, and disappeared there like the chariot. These two pieces were very skil­ fully done, so that no one could recognize how it could ever be possible that something like this could be staged, or how something like this could have taken place so publicly in the open air. After this cloud disappeared, the scene changed again, and appeared gruesome, like fiery flames. Furthermore, soon the ground also opened below, out o f which blazed a mass of flames, and one could see into it, as if into a glowing furnace, or into Hell, as it was intended to represent Hell. Out o f this, the devil soon came out, made horri­ bly large and frightening, with open jaws, monstrous body and ugly hands. In whose bosom sat many small devils, dressed like him, who sprang from his bosom, danced around him. These same caught numerous small boys and girls, as naked as they came from their mothers’ wombs, who had been ordered to do this, and ran around on the stage, [p. 675] and pushed some o f them between the devil’s jaws, who swallowed them, threw some o f them into Hell. Meanwhile, thirty-six musicians come forth from one half o f the scene, horribly dressed, how one paints the Furias infernales, the hellish god­ desses, sit down on chairs which rose up from the ground in a ring around the devil, and played two pieces. But these pieces were composed very dole­ fully, pitiably and melancholically, as if they were half crying. They were doleful to hear. After the same were finished, the devil went down into hell again, as did the chairs on which the musicians sat, hell closed again, the musicians went away again, the scene was transformed again into houses and the fourth act started. This was certainly an ingenious intermedi, but moreover very frightening to watch.

V.

After the fourth act had been completed, the scene turned, so that it

looked like a m ountain range with rock cliffs, moss and brooks (like cliffs by the sea generally are, in some places). The ground everywhere was tran sformed into a sea, moving as if it were swayed by wind. O ut of this sea, in the middle, lifted up fairly high, one saw the aforesaid woman, who could sing so well, clad like a siren, below like a fish, above like a beautiful maiden with long delicate blond hair, towards whom came twelve sirens out of each half of the sea. They sat somewhat lower, also in similar dress, sung together very delightfully, after which they sank into the sea. Immediately a gilded and ingeniously constructed ship came halfway out of the scenery onto the

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

sea, fitted out with masts, sails, rigging and other things which belong to ships. The ship was tossed to and fro by the sea, to the astonishment o f the spectators. On this ship sat twenty-four musicians, who played and sang to this. After this had finished, the sailor up on the mast, who sang a wonderful tenor, started to sing a solo, he had mastered the art o f knowing the right time for coloratura, was also diverting to listen to. After he had finished singing the piece, a large dolphin or porpoise came out o f the sea, which lis­ tened to the music. The said sailor jumped onto this porpoise, and lowered himself into the sea on the dolphin, [p. 676] The musicians in the ship made music delightfully, rode around the sea three times in the ship, after which they sailed back again to the place from whence they had come, the ground closed again, the scene was transformed into the form o f the city again, and the fifth act started. Intermedium Miraculosipimum. VI.

After the fifth and last act had been completed, the scene was finally

transformed into clouds again. They shone splendidly, as if the clouds were raining gold. And the clouds up in the heights again separated out, as at the beginning o f the comedy, so that one could see into the heaven or paradise, where then again numerous musicians in angelic clothing sat making music with all manner of instruments, and singing delightfully to it. Three other clouds came down next to each other out of the paradise (up in which nev­ ertheless many musicians stayed). In the middle cloud sat the god Jupiter with eighteen people dressed like gods, somewhat higher than the rest. At his right hand one cloud, and at his left hand the other cloud, in each o f which also sat eighteen people, all with their instruments, and dressed in a variety o f Inventions o f the gods. These three clouds descended very slowly and gradually, although the middle one always remained slightly higher then the two others, it was fine to behold. And meanwhile a lovely madrigal was per­ formed, until at last fifty other musicians came onto the stage down below, also dressed in several fashions and inventions. At the same time the four previously-noted dance-masters also came onto the stage, the musicians played several galliards and Italian dance-tunes, whereupon these four dance-masters, the best in all Italy, gave a demonstration of their mastery and skill in dancing, so that everyone had to recognize them as accom­ plished dancers. When the dance was over, all o f the musicians, those up in the heaven, as also those in the three clouds, likewise the fifty, all

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commenced to perform together, three pieces or madrigals divided into several parts, so delightful and wonderful that the same cannot be described. Likewise should someone who otherwise has neither much to do with, nor much interest in, music, travel many miles for it (if he could hear or see the like), [p. 678] he would not regret it, as it was almost more an angelic (in a manner o f speaking [>] than a human performance to see, and to hear. There were said to have been around 150 musicians altogether, whose several and different instruments were all simultaneously and perfectly harm o­ niously in tune with each other, including the singing voices used at the same time. As already partially indicated, these musicians were appointed by the duke o f Florence as the most renowned in Italy, and ordered to Florence at great expense. Because Italian music is certainly very celebrated, all who understand and appreciate music can judge for themselves and reflect on what sort o f music this was. When these musicians had thus concluded all three madrigals, the heaven closed again, the three clouds disappeared into the ground, and the red cloth was instantaneously pulled forward again, so that one could no longer see onto the stage, and with this the comedy was concluded and completed. The splendour and great ingenuity o f these inter­

medi cannot be fittingly described, and those who have not seen this super­ human performance cannot imagine how it could be possible. But there were over a hundred Germans there who watched this, quite apart from other nations, as witness I have from this place Anthonies von der Streithorst, at present Brunswick ducal privy councillor in Wolfenbüttel. Over 300 people were ordered by the grand-duke to help with this perfor­ mance (because it is said to have been controlled with screws and ropes). The acting o f this comedy started at around 22 hours, lasted into the night until 5 hours, seven long hours. We would have appreciated the opportunity [to see] how this could have been produced, but it was strictly forbidden to grant anyone permission to see this. This then is the description o f the comedy, or rather, the intermedi o f the comedy.

APPENDIX III: Diary of anonymous Frenchman120 On Tuesday 2 May, 1589 the Duchess o f Tuscany stopped wearing her French clothes and there was sent to her by the Grand Duke an [f.65r] Italian outfit

ABY W A R B U R G A N D THE FLOREN TINE INTE RME DI OF 1589

which she wore that same day to the comedy which was played. The dress was nevertheless according to the Florentine fashion, and was o f cloth o f silver. Since this day she has always worn her clothes according to the Florentine fashion, as have also all those ladies-in-waiting who have been given to her to stay with her, all Italian. On the said 2 M ay the comedy was played, which was considered the most beautiful which had ever been presented. The expenditure for it was huge, because it cost the Duke more than sixty million ducats. There were more than two hundred people, musicians as well as others, who took part in the comedy. It was played in a large hall expressly adapted for this purpose. Although the windows were closed, it was as bright as outside, because on two sides o f the hall there were two rows o f torches, twelve in each, which gave out a great light. It started at around 12 o’clock French time, and finished at around eight o’clock in the evening. The ladies were on two sides o f the hall on scaffolding in the form o f a theatre which had been specially constructed. In the middle o f the hall were the men. The comedy was titled La pellegrina and was played by Siennese noblemen. For every act o f the comedy there was an intermedio which was admirable.

The first. In the front o f the stage, which is very big and high, there were two curtains which concealed the whole stage. When they wanted to start, immediately [f.65v] the first, which was red, fell to the floor. The second, which was sky blue, stayed. Right in the middle o f this one appeared a donne who was seated on a cloud holding a lute in her hand, who sang and little by little descended down to the stage, where she disappeared forthwith. She played and sang so well that everyone admired her, and at the end o f her song there appeared an echo which accompanied her, who seemed to be very far from the stage, a mile or so. When she had disappeared, the second curtain rose to the rafters, and revealed the open paradise with its clouds in the air, one in the middle and two others on the two sides, all full o f musi­ cians and players o f instruments, totalling more than fifty in number, who played and made music so well that everyone admired it. After they had played for a long time, little by little the clouds returned and rose again into the sky and disappeared in an instant, and then the sky appeared in some places to be very foggy because o f the clouds and in others light and shining, and stars appeared. This was all done with such artifice that there did not

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seem to be anything anywhere. The stage turned in an instant: the scene changed and another stage appeared, which represented the city o f Pisa. At the 2nd act the scene o f the stage changed again, and seemed to be high mountains and gardens and fountains, and little by little appeared [f.66r] sixteen seated nymphs holding lutes and violas in their hands. There appeared on the other side a cavern from which came out nine nymphs who discussed amongst themselves who could sing the best. They sang several different songs. In an instant most o f these nymphs were transformed into magpies, who traversed the stage singing and looking for places to hide themselves and keep away from the presence o f men; wells, gardens and fountains so cleverly made that one more-or-less could not notice anything. At the 3rd act the stage changed and there appeared on it as many men as women, to the number o f thirty-six, with lutes and other types o f instru­ ment, who sang various very sad songs and related the problems, and even deaths, which had come their way through a serpent which plagued the whole country, and even their dwellings. And while they sang this song, this serpent came out o f a cave, who, with very frightening roars blew fire from his jaws, nose and ears onto the stage. Then a man descended from the sky, armed with a bow and arrows so artfully that he could not be seen until he was on the stage, where he fought the serpent for a long time with his arrows, with one o f which he brought the serpent to the ground. After the death o f the serpent everyone returned together, and sang songs as a sign of their happiness, which were pleasant to hear. And thus singing and playing their instruments they returned from where they had come, and imm edi­ ately the stage changed its shape. The fourth act. Before the stage changed, there appeared a chariot with four wheels drawn by two dragons. [f.66v] And in the chariot sat a done , holding in her right hand a globe, and in the other hand the reins o f the dragons’ bridles. The dragons pulled the chariot to around half-way down the stage, and there she stopped them and dropped the reins, placed her globe down, and took a lute which she had in her chariot, sang and played on the same for a considerable time, and an infinity o f other voices and instruments answered her. Others say that by her singing she called forth the demons who were in the air, and after putting down the lute, took her globe again, and the reins o f the dragons’ bridles and continued on her path

ABY W A R B U R G A N D THE FLOR ENTINE INTERMEDI OF 1589

until she had disappeared. It is notable that during all o f this the work o f no stagehands could be seen, or any machinery, and the chariot and dragons appeared to move as if they were on the ground. After they had disappeared, a large cloud appeared in the air, o f a round shape, which went as far as the middle o f the stage, where it stopped, divided into two, and in the inside o f it could be seen more than fifty demons, singing and playing their instru­ ments. It had inside it such an intense light and such a large number o f people that everyone marvelled at how it could have been possible for all this to be suspended in the air without seeing ropes, or any people to control them. Most o f the spectators thought that they were angels, especially since their clothes and ornaments appeared [f.67r] as if they were meant to repre­ sent them, but they were wrong, because I was assured that they were intended as demons, which this woman had earlier called forth. The inside o f the cloud was so gilded and shining and beautiful to see that most said that it was a representation o f paradise, and after the cloud re-closed, and continued on its way, as had the chariot, and disappeared, the stage immedi­ ately changed its shape, and mountains, caverns, fires and flames appeared, and represented hell with two groups o f devils, each o f whom had his face and hands stained with blood, and snakes around his head and arms. Hell was represented completely on fire, which lasted for a considerable time on the stage, and in hell several souls who were being tortured, for whose repre­ sentation there were thirty-five or forty completely nude children, aged nine, ten and twelve. Lucifer was at the centre o f Hell, who half showed himself, with a large head with three faces, holding souls in the mouth o f each o f these. The devils took souls from both sides, and carried them to Lucifer. While he devoured one o f them, two others escaped from him, who were caught again by the devils and carried to Lucifer, who devoured them imme­ diately. Charon in his boat ferried and re-ferried the souls across, and the whole thing was represented so well that it horrified the audience. There were also some rocks on which were the devils who sang and howled and moaned [f.67r] which were very plaintive, and little by little the whole hell disappeared, as if everything had withdrawn into the ground, because after­ wards the stage changed to another form. At the fifth act the stage was changed to rock, mountains, and a sea with waves which bore a strong resemblance to reality, a little later there appeared

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in the middle, among the waves, a large niche in the shape o f a mother-ofpearl shell, which gradually rose until it had reached the height o f at least four “ braces,” and three in breadth, in which was a sea goddess completely covered in pearls and an infinity o f jewels, with several branches o f coral and a crown on her head. When she had emerged from the sea, there also gradually emerged some tritons and nymphs to the number o f twenty-eight, in two groups. When they had all risen from the sea, the goddess com ­ menced to play her lute and sing, and the others accompanied her with all sorts o f instruments, which were pleasant to hear. After having sung and played their instruments for a long time, they returned into the waves o f the sea, such that one gradually lost sight o f them. The sea seemed to be without anything except the waves, which appeared to come and go as on the open sea, and soon thereafter a galley came on the sea, fifteen paces in length, with a mast and sails; inside it were more than twenty-five people. The galley made four or five circuits in the sea without anyone being visible to work machines for it. When it arrived in front o f the duke and duchess, the sailors lowered [f.68r] down the sails, climbed and descended the rigging, as they do on the open sea in great ships. When they had stopped, the captain of the galley started to play a harp and sing, and two echoes accompanied him, one after the other, in such a way that one could have said that the echo was over two miles away, it seemed to be so far from the stage and from the sea, as if it had come come from a cave or a cavern. While he sang, the sailors plotted against him in order to kill him, and when he realized this, he threw himself into the sea and was taken by a dolphin which had been close to the galley in order to hear the music, and carried him up to the shore on his back. The sailors, thinking that he had drowned, started to sing as a sign o f their rejoic­ ing, blew trumpets and bugles, set the sails, made three or four circuits on the stage, then they went by the same path by which they had come, and immediately the sea and the waves disappeared and the scene changed. At the sixth and last act the stage changed and seemed to be completely covered with sheets and strips o f gold, with a music so lovely that everyone admired it, because o f the great number o f people who made it, and because o f the harmony which was between them, the diversity o f the instruments. During this music, above the stage at a height o f about one and a half lances, the paradise opened, in which there were a great number o f people who

ABY W A R B U R G A N D THE FLO RENTINE INTERM EDI OF 1589

represented the gods of [f.68v] the pagans with seven clouds which descended onto the stage, in each of which was a great num ber of musicians and instrumentalists. They all came out of the said clouds. After having sung and danced, they all went back into their clouds, and gradually re-ascended up to the sky, and so skillfully that one lost sight of them, without anyone at all appearing for any of the ropes or other things necessary for this ascent. In order to make this music, the grand-duke had searched out all the cleverest men of Italy, and so the comedy was completed. And it was staged five times: the first time as a rehearsal, the second, at which I was, for the arrival of the grand-duchess. On this day the done of Florence were very strongly represented there, with an infinity of jewelry. The third time for the Florentine and foreign gentlemen who had come for the wedding, the fourth for the common people and the courtiers of Florence. On that day with the Venetian and Genoese ambassadors who had come to congratulate the grand-duke on his marriage (I went there with them); and the fifth time on the arrival of the ambassador of Spain, who arrived after the wedding for the same reason as the other ambassadors.

notes 1 My thanks to the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (Fellowship 1996,1997, 1998, 1999); the H arold Hyam W ingate Foundation (W ingate Scholarship 1996-7,1998-99); and Alexander von H umboldt Foundation (Fellowship 1997-98, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Universitàt M ünchen, hosts: Professors Christopher Balme and Hans-Peter Bayerdórfer) for supporting this research; to Jill Bepler, Julian Brooks, Philippe Büttgen, Eva Engel-Holland, Marie-Laure Lartigue, Elizabeth M cGrath, O uti Merisalo, W illiam Twining and Richard Woodfield;

and

to

Dr.

C ram er-Fürtig

(Bayerisches

H auptstaatsarchiv,

M ünchen); the DAAD and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (Fellowships to G erm any and Venice: 1996, 1997); and the British Academy (Research, Conference and Travel Grants: 1995,1996,1997). Otherwise unattributed translations are mine, and are intended only as a guide to the originals. 2 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien , Berlin, n.d. (1st ed. i860), 263: “Das italienische Festwesen in seiner h ôhern Form ist ein w ahrer Übergang aus dem Leben in die Kunst” 3 Aby W arburg, “I C ostum i teatrali per gli interm ezzi del 1589. I disegni di Bernardo B uontalenti e il Libro di C onti di Emilio de’ Cavalieri,” A tti dell'Accademia del Regio Istituto Musicale di Firenze, 1895: Commemorazione

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della Riforma Melodrammatica, 23,1895,133-46; Warburg, “I C ostum i teatrali per gli interm ezzi del 1589,” in: Gesammelte Schriften, I (Die Erneuerung der Heidnischen Antike:

Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitrage zur

Geschichte der

Europâischen Renaissance), 2 vols, ed. F. R ougem ont and G. Bing (Leipzig and Berlin 1932), 259-300 & 394-438 [281]: “Zwischenformen zwischen dem wirklichen Leben und dram atischer Kunst” 4 M atthew Rampley, “From symbol to allegory: Aby W arburgs theory of art,” A rt Bulletin, 79, 1997, 41-55 [46]; Aby W arburg, Ausgewahlte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. D. Wuttke, (Baden-Baden 1992); La rinascita del paganesimo antico, (La nuova Italia 1966), 59-107 5 Theatre Iconography issues of Biblioteca Teatrale (19/20,1990 & 36/37,1996, ed. Cesare Molinari) and Theatre Research International (22,1997, eds R. L. Erenstein and Laurence Senelick); Thom as F. Heck (ed.), Picturing Performance. The Iconography o f the Performing Arts in Concept and Practice, (Rochester 1999) 6 E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, an intellectual biography, (Oxford 1986 [1st ed. 1970]) 40,50 7 Gombrich, Warburg, 221 8 Gombrich, Warburg, 16, 27,43-4,87, 270-1,307; Johann Konrad Eberlein, “Inhalt u nd Gehalt: Die ikonographisch-ikonologische Methode,” in: Hans Belting et al (eds) Kunstgeschichte, eine Einführung, (Berlin 1988 [1st ed. 1985]), 169-190 [178-183]; Rampley 1997,52 9 Gombrich, Warburg, 85; in early 1894, according to A. M. Meyer, “Concerning W arburg’ s “Costum i Teatrali” and Angelo Solerti,” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50,1987,171-188 and plates [173] 10 Iain Fenlon, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua, 2 vols (Cambridge 1980), I, p. 37; Gunhild Niggestich-Kretzmann, Die Intermezzi des italienischen

Renaissancetheaters

(G ottingen

1968);

Elena

Povoledo,

“Intermezzo,” Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, 9 vols (Rome 1954-62), VI, columns 572-581. 11 Lodovico Dolce, Le Troiane, 1566 (as noted by Helen Purkis, “II rapporto tra gli interludi e Topera teatrale nell’Italia del sedicesimo secolo,” Letterature moderne, 10 (i960), 802-815 (p. 812 n.2); Lionardo Salviati, II Granchio, 1566, introduction (as noted by Cornelia Baehrens, The origin o f the masque (G roningen 1929), p. 124); Alessandro Ceccherelli, preface to d ’A m bras La Cofanaria (as noted in N ino P irrotta and Elena Povoledo, Li due Orfei. Da Poliziano a Monteverdi (Torino 1975), p. 203; and ibid., Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (C am bridge, 1982), p. 176); G iovanni M aria de’ Crescimbeni, D e’ Comentarj intorno alVistoria della volgar Poesía, I (Rome 1702), p. 210. 12 G. Giannini, “O rigini del dram m a musicale,” II Propugnatore, 1 (1893), 209-61, 391-424 (pp. 239-40); Baehrens, 1929, chapter IV; Helen Purkis, “Le origini dell’-

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

intermezzo in Italia,” Convivium, n.s.25 (1957), 479-83; Purkis, i960; NiggestichKretzmann, 1968, p. 2. 13 Denis Arnold, “Con ogni sorte di stromenti,” Early Music, 4 (1976), 167-171 (p. 168); Balthasar Stumfall, Das Marchen von Amor und Psyche in seinem fortleben in

der franzosischen,

italienischen

und

spanischen

Literatur

bis

zum

18.Jahrhundert (Leipzig 1907), p. 44. 14 O.G. Sonneck, “A description of Alessandro Striggio and Francesco Corteccia’s interm edi ‘Psyche and A m or’, 1565” [first published 1911], in: Miscellaneous studies in the history o f music (New York, 1921), 269-286 (p. 271); E. D ent and F. Sternfeld, “Music and Drama,” in New Oxford History o f Music, IV (The Age o f H um anism 1540-1630), ed. G. Abraham , (Oxford 1968), 784-820 (p. 787); Pirrotta and Povoledo, 1982, p. 182. 15 Pirrotta and Povoledo, 1982, p. 182. 16 Crescimbeni, 1702, p. 212. 17 W arburg/Bing, GS, p. 423. 18 Angelo Solerti, Gli albori del melodramma, 3 vols (M ilan, Palermo, Naples, [1904-5]), I, p. 5; John Cunliffe, “Italian prototypes of the masque and dum b show,” Publications o f the Modern Language Association, 22 (1907), 140-156 (p. 153); M argherita Sergardi, Lingua scenica e terminología teatrale nel Cinquecento, s.l. [Edizioni internazionali la nuova Europa], 1988,77 19 Paul Kafno, quoted by Peter Freedm an, “At last the 1589 show,” The Evening Standard (14 December 1990), p. 47. 20 Gombrich, Warburg, 140 (“Trtiffelschweindienste”). 21 Volume C.B.3.53, vol. 2 22 An overview to festival research is being actively consolidated by reference works, notably Helen W atanabe-O ’Kelly and Anne Simon (eds.), Festivals and Ceremonies. A bibliography o f works relating to court, civic and religious festivals in Europe 1500-1800 (London, 2000), and by international research groups such as Europa Triumphans , a multidisciplinary enquiry into renaissance court festivals led by Helen W atanabe-O’Kelly, Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring 23 Una “stravaganza” dei Medici, London, EMI, 1988, with notes by Hugh Keyte, “Intermedi for La Pellegrina.” 24 Freedm an, 1990; Ian Stones, “Electronic Renaissance,” Opera Now, 14 (May 1990), 36-39 25 G ertrud Bing’s additions to W arburg’s article (in W arburg/Bing, GS), some based on W arburg’s notes, m any the result of independent research, constitute a m ajor contribution to the field. Annam aria Testaverde Matteini, “L’officina delle nuvole. II Teatro Mediceo nel 1589 e gli Intermedi del Buontalenti nel Memoriale di G irolamo Seriacopi,” Musica e Teatro (Quaderni degli amici della Scala), vols.11/12,1991 (this publication, not referenced by Saslow, appends a complete

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transcription of Seriacopi’s Memoriale); James Saslow, The Medici wedding o f 1589, Florentine festival as “theatrum m undi”y New Haven & London 1996. Jean Jacquot (“C urrent projects,” Research opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 3, 1957, pp. 11-14; “Les fêtes de Florence [1589]. Quelques aspects de leur mise en scèn e” Theatre Research / Recherches Theatrales, 3, 1961, 157-176, p. 174 n.3), paying tribute to W arburg’s “now classic study on the subject,” announced several forthcom ing volumes on the 1589 Medici wedding festivities in the series “Le C h œ ur des Muses,” in preparation by himself, in collaboration w ith Roselyne Bacou, Sylvie Beguin, Ida Maier and D. R Walker, in which “special emphasis will be placed on the dram atic productions.” Only the first of these planned volumes appeared (Daniel Pickering Walker (éd.), Les Fêtes du mariage de Ferdinand de Médicis et de Christine de Lorrains, Florence, 1589. Vol. I, Musique des Intermèdes deuLa Pellegrina,” Paris, 1963). 26 The literature is vast, and only references specifically used here are noted. Agne Beijer, “Visions célestes et infernales dans le théâtre du moyen-age et de la renaissance” in: ed. Jean Jacquot, Les fêtes de la renaissance (Paris 1956), 405-417; G ünter Berghaus, “Theatre perform ance at Italian renaissance festivals: m ultimédia spectacles or Gesamtkunstwerke?,” in Italian Renaissance Festivals and their European Influence, ed. J. R. M ulryne and M. Shewring (Lewiston/ Q ueenston/ Lampeter, 1992), 3-50; Hans Engel, “N ochmals die Interm edien von Florenz 1589,” in Festschrift M ax Schneider (Leipzig 1955), 71-86; Iain Fenlon, “Preparations for a Princess: Florence 1588-89,” In cantu et in sermone: For Nino Pirrotta on his 80th Birthday, ed Fabrizio Della Seta and Franco Piperno, Florence 1989; Federico Ghisi, “Un aspect inédit des interm èdes de 1589 a la cour médicéenne,” in Jacquot (éd.), 1956, 145-52; Yvonne Hackenbroch, “Some Florentine jewels: Buontalenti and the dragon theme,” Connoisseur, November 1968, 137-143; Jacquot, 1961; M. A. Katritzky, “A G erm an description of the Florentine intermedi of 1565,” Italian Studies, 52,1997, 63-93 & “Eight portraits of Gelosi actors in 1589?,” Theatre Research International, 21,1996,108-120 8c ‘Aby W arburg’s “C ostum i teatrali” (1895) and the A rt H istorical F oundations o f Theatre Iconography’, Theatre Research International 24, 1999, 160-167 & ‘Perform ing-A rts Iconography: Traditions, Techniques, and Trends’, in Heck (ed.) 1999, 68-90; Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence during the principate o f the Medici (Florence 1993); W erner Friedrich Kümmel, “Ein deutscher Bericht über die florentinischen Interm edien des Jahres 1589,” Analecta Musicologica, 9 (Studien zur italienisch-deutschen Musikgeschichte, 7, Kôln/W ien 1970), 1-19; James Laver, “Stage designs for the Florentine intermezzi of 1589,” Burlington Magazine, 60,1932, 294, 299-300, and 8 plates; Anne MacNeil, “The divine madness o f Isabella Andreini,” Journal o f the Royal Musical Association, 120,1995,195-215; Meyer, 1987; Cesare M olinari, “Delle nozze medicee e dei loro

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

cronisti,” Quaderni di teatro, 2 (1980), 23-30; Luigi Monga, Voyage de Provence et d ’Italie, Biblioteca del Viaggio in Italia, 49 (Geneva, 1994); Philippe Morel, “Sirene e dem oni celesti. Fonti filosofiche e precedenti iconografici degli intermezzi fiorentini del 1589,” Biblioteca teatrale, 19-20, 1990, 75-90 and 2 plates; A. M. Nagler, “Theater der Medici,” Maske und Kothurn, 4, 1958, 178-198 & Theatre Festivals o f the Medici 1539-1637, New Haven & London, 1964; Helen Purkis, “La décoration de la salle et les rapports entre la scène et le public dans les mascarades et les intermèdes florentins, 1539-1608,” in Jean Jacquot (éd.), Les fêtes de la Renaissance III (Paris 1975), 239-251; Roger Savage, “Staging an inter­ medio: practical advice from Florence circa 1630,” in: M ulryne and Shewring (eds), 1992, 51-71; Roy Strong, A rt and power, renaissance festivals 1450- 1650, W oodbridge 1984 (1st ed. 1973); Hans Tintelnot, “Die Bedeutung der ‘festa teatrale’ für das dynastische u nd künstlerische Leben im Barock,” Archiv fu r Kulturgeschichte, 37, 1955, 336-51; D. P. Walker, “La m usique des interm èdes Florentins de 1589 et l’hum anism e,”in Jacquot (éd.), 1956, 133-144; Robert Weaver, “Sixteenth-Century Instrum ent-ation,” Musical Quarterly, 47 (1961), 363-378; M. Daniela Zampino, “Gli studi teatrali e il ‘Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute’”, Biblioteca teatrale, 18,1977,1-44; Ludovico Zorzi, II teatro e la città. Saggi sulla scena italiana, Turin 1977. 27 See Testaverde Matteini, 1991 (7-22); Saslow, 1996 (4,178-181,310-11). 28 Ferdinando Taviani, “Un vivo contrasto. Seminario su attrici e attori della commedia dell’arte,” Teatro e storia, 1,1986,25-75, p. 71 29 Saslow, 1996, p. 8. Although, for example (pp. 278, n. 20 and 283, n. 10), he notes tha t later models and diagram s o f the Medici theatre, and various drawings “tentatively identified as preparatory sketches by B uontalenti” have been excluded from the catalogue “for reasons of space and focus.” 30 Warburg/Bing, GS, notes to p. 266; Laver 1932. 31 Saslow, 1996, cat.nos. 55, 64, 9, 53,32, 51, 54, 68. 32 Strong, 1984,136,140; see also Bamber Gascoigne, World Theatre, an illustrated history, L ondon 1968, 145; Sara M am one, “L’œil théâtral di Jacques Callot,” Artista critica, ΐ993> 138-149 (the two plate captions are reversed); Harald Zielske, “Inszenierung ais mediale Transposition. Zu Jacques Callots Radierungen fur Prospero

Bonarellis

Tragôdie

II Solimano

(1620),” in: Andreas

Kotte

(ed.), Theater der Region— Theater Europas. Kongress der Gesellschaft fü r Theaterwissenschaft, Basel 1995, 95-108. O pinion is divided concerning the exact nature of the influence from Scarabelli’s p rint to those of Callot for the first edition of II Solimano, 1620. Gascoigne and Zielske favour the suggestion that it was purely artistic, and that Callot copied Scarabelli’s etching; M am one that the set used for the performance of 1619 was the same, or similar to, the actual set of 1589.

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33 Saslow, 1996, cat.nos. 9, 54. Julian Brooks reported on this aspect of his ongoing Oxford University doctoral research on Boscoli in a talk “Agostino Carracci and prints of the 1589 wedding intermezzi” at the Ashmolean Museum, 18 March 1997. 34 Hackenbroch 1968 35 Katritzky, 1996, plate 17 36 W arburg/Bing, GS, 1932,397-410; Testaverde M atteini, 1991,176 et. ff. 37 Ghisi 1956,146 38 Engel, 1955, 79 & n. 19 (“senza gusto per la com peratione degli intermedij, che erano in essa Reali veram ente et meravigliosi, che furono tutti modestissim i into rn o più tosto di rappresentatione che di atto comico, con concerti m olti belli et gravi, et per la quantité de musici et strom enti non s’intendono ne ancor le parole délia musica”). 39 See appendices, above 40 Kümmel, 1970 p. 4 41 Kümmel, 1970 pp. 5,19. 42 W. Dotzauer, “Die A nkunft des Herrschers. Der fürstliche ‘Einzug’ in die Stadt,” Archiv fü r Kulturgeschichte, 55, 1973, 245-288 (258, 280); M ary A nn Fruth, “Research w ith French festival books: an introduction,” Theatre studies, ι8, 1971-2, 7-12 (8) 43 Tintelnot 1955,347; Jacquot (ed.) 1956 & 1975; Strong, 1984 44 John Shearman, “The Florentine Entrata of Leo X, 1515,” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38, 1975 [146]; C hristian W agenknecht, “Die Beschreibung hôfischer Feste. Merkmale einer Gattung,” in: Buck et al (eds), Europàische Hofkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, H am burg 1981, 75-80 [79]; Helen W atanabe-O ’Kelly, “Festival books in Europe from Renaissance to Rococo,” The seventeenth century, 3,1988,181-201 [181]. 45 Christopher Balme, “C ultural anthropology and theatre historiography: notes on a m ethodological rapprochem ent,” Theatre Survey, 35, 1994, 33-53; M. A. Katritzky, “The m ountebank: a case-study in early m odern theatre iconography,” in W illiam Twining (ed), Evidence and Inference in History and Law: Interdisciplinary dialogues (forthcom ing) 46 Kümmel, 1970, 6; Sibylle Dahms, “Italienische Tanzkunst nôrdlich der Alpen”, in: M arkus Engelhardt (ed.), In Teutschland noch gantz ohnbekandt. MonteverdiRezeption undfrühes Musiktheater im deutschsprachigen Raum , 1996,63-76 (69) 47 Nagler, 1964,74 n.11,75 48 Gascoigne, 1968,145; Saslow, 1996, 82-3 & fig. 7 49 Nagler, 1964,75 (whose careful reading o f Gadenstedt, which precedes K üm m els publication o f 1970, was evidently m ade only after N agler’s own G erm anlanguage article of 1958, and is, in his m onograph-length English edition, only acknowledged in a series of com ments awkwardly grafted onto his 1958 interpretation of the festival, made solely from Italian sources)

ABY W A R B U R G A N D THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 1589

50 Monga, 1994,113 51 Although, on this particular point, the French account appears to offer the fullest inform ation, nam ely that, discounting rehearsals, o f which there are known to have been several, including at least one full dress rehearsal, there were four performances of the intermedi, of which the first was that o f 2 May in celebration of Christine’s royal entry into Florence on 30 April, held for the noblewomen o f Florence, the second and third performances were held, respectively, for the noblem en and com m on people of Florence, with the ambassadors of Venice and Genoa attending the third (which Gadenstedt dates to 10 May), and the last was specially held for the ambassador o f Spain, who arrived after the planned festivities were over (f.68v, see appendix III, above). 52 Zorzi, 1977; Robert Rodini, “The festa and theater: a decade of research,” Forum italicum, 14, 1980, 476-84; Cesare M olinari, “L’altra faccia del 1589: Isabella Andreini e la sua ‘pazzia’,” in: Garfagnini (ed.), Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nelVEuropa del '500. A tti del Convegno Internazionale di Studio tenutosi a Firenze 1980, (Florence 1983), 565-573 [573]. Richard Andrews (Scripts and Scenarios, Cambridge 1993, 235), describes Isabella A ndreini’s performance as “gloriously over the top,” a fundam entally different assessment from that o f MacNeil (1995), who seeks to dem onstrate its close links w ith the hum anist approach of the intermedi themselves. 53 Meyer, 1987,173-5 54 Meyer, 1987,185 55 Meyer, 1987,176 56 Solerti, 1904-05,1, 44 57 For complete transcription, see Matteini, 1991, pp. 176 et ff. 58 23 lines om itted on p. 269 (would have been between “con poca diligentia di risparm io” and “sino dai prim i giorni dell’ottobre”); p. 296 59 W arburg quotes long extracts from Rossi’s account; and summarizes the textual and visual sources (including further examples), in appendices I & II (297-9) 60 Warburg/Bing, GS, [267, n. to 273] 61 Le rivoluzione del teatro musicale italiano, 1785 (cited in Berghaus, 1992, 6-8) 62 Morel (1990) points out difficulties with integrating the fourth intermedio into W arburg’s complex schema 63 W arburg/Bing, GS, [265] 64 W arburg/Bing, GS, [270-1] 65 W arburg/Bing, GS, [277, 280] 66 See also E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images, studies in the art o f the renaissance II, Oxford 1972, 176-7, with reference to “C ostum i teatrali,” for discussion of this point 67 Warburg/Bing, GS, 281-4,294-5; Walker (Jacquot 1956), 144, apparently disagrees w ith this conclusion

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68 Warburg/Bing, GS, 296 69 W arburg/Bing, GS, 423-4 70 Gombrich, Warburg, 322, extract from letter of 18 August 1927 71 Pace Keith Moxey, in a contribution to “Visual culture questionnaire,” October, 77,1996,25-70 [56]. 72 E. H. Gombrich, Jdea/s and Idols, essays on va/i/es ¿rc history and in art, Oxford 1979,150-2; Francis Haskell, History and its images, arf ¿md t/ze interpretation o f the past. New Haven 1993,6. 73 Gombrich, 1979,57-8,118-120 74 Gom brich’s distinction between the role o f research in the sciences and in the hum anities (1967) appears to have undergone revision by 1973, when he pleas for more innovative research in the humanities, while w arning against the accum ulation of data for its own sake. While it seems em inently reasonable to agree with G ombrich that a visual corpus of, for example, all doorknockers, has no place in the study o f art-history (1979, 116), it is w orth bearing in m ind that m uch scientific research is speculative. Just as practical applications of scientific research often only suggest themselves after data has been collected, so availability of, for example, a representative corpus o f doorknockers m ight stim ulate worthwhile further research in previously unpredictable directions. 75 Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster (eds) “Visual culture questionnaire,” October, 77,1996, 3-4 & 25-70; all bu t two based in the art history (7), art and archaeology (1), architecture (1), film (1), visual and cultural studies (1), history/ governm ent (2) and english and/ or foreign language and literature (4) departm ents of N orth American universities 76 Gombrich, 1979,151 77 As Caroline Elam (Editorial: “Art history or Kunstgeschichte?,” The Burlington Magazine, 129,1987, 643-4) points out, in Germany, the quest for new m eth od ologies does no t challenge the com m on ground o f the discipline, which continues to be accepted as its professional foundation. 78 Michael Ann Holly, Thom as Dacosta Kaufmann, C hristopher Wood, October, 77> 1996, pp. 39-41, 45-8, 68-70 79 A point in

fact discussed by Kurt Forster (“Aby Warburg: his study o f ritua

art on two continents,” 5-24 [16]), in the same issue o f October. 80 Pace Moxey, who suggests that the way forward is to make aesthetics the “keystone of disciplinary focus” o f visual studies: October, 77,1996,58. 81 “W hat help from art?,” TLS, 7 April 1966 82 Theodore K. Rabb, “The historian and the A rt H istorian,”

Journal o f

Interdisciplinary History, 4, 1973, 107-17; “The H istorian and the Art Historian Revisited,” JIH, 14, 1984, 647-55; “Historians and Art Historians: a lowering of sights?,” JIH, 27,1996, 87-94, p. 88; Rabb and Jonathan Brown, “The evidence of art: images and meaning in history,” JIH, 1986,17,1-6, p. 5.

ABY WARBURG AND THE FLORENTINE INTERMEDI OF 15 8 9

83 Elam 1987,643 84 R. L. Erenstein, “Theatre Iconography: An Introduction,” Theatre research inter­ national 22,1997,185-9 [185] 85 Ludovico Zorzi, “Figurazione pittorica e figurazione te a tr a l e in : Storia delVarte italiana, Torino 1979, I, 419-462; quoted by Cesare M olinari, ‘Sull’iconografia come fonte della storia del teatro’ and Renzo Guardenti, “II quadro e la cornice: iconografía e storia dello spettacolo,” Biblioteca teatrale, 36/37,1996,19-40 [20] and 61-74 [65] 86 Gombrich, Warburg, 144,269,312. 87 Tadeusz Kowzan, “Iconographie-iconologie théâtrale: le signe iconique et son référent,” Diogenes, 130,1985, 51-68, [67-8]; Guardenti 1996, 66; Molinari 1996, 26; Christopher Balme, “Interpreting the pictorial record: theatre iconography and the referential dilemma,” Theatre research international 22,1997,190-201 [193]; Lyckle de Vries, “Iconography and iconology in art history: Panofsky’s prescriptive definitions, and some art-historical responses to them,” in: T. F. Heck (ed.), 1999, 42-67 88 Molinari (1996,19) 89 Max H errm ann, Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Berlin 1914, p art II, 273-500; Stefan Corssen, “Das erste Standardwerk der Theaterwissenschaft: Max H errm ann und die Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance,” in: Kotte (ed.) 1995, 201-9 [206]; Corssen, M ax Herrmann und die Anfange der Theaterwissenschaft, Tübingen 1998,129-134 90 Anne-M arie Lecoq, “La ‘Città festeggiante.’ Les fêtes publiques au XVe et XVIe siècles,” Revue de lart, 33,1976, 83-100, p. 91; Rodini, 1980 91 Clifford Davidson, “Iconography and some problem s of term inology in the study of the dram a and theater o f the renaissance,” Research opportunities in renaissance drama, 29,1986-87,7-14 [12] 92 G uardenti 1996, 66; M olinari 1996, 25; G iovanna Botti, “Presentazione,” Biblioteca teatrale, 36/37,1996,13-17 93 Gabriele Brandstetter, Tanz-Lektüren. Kôrperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde, Frankfurt am Main 1995; see especially pp. 28-30, 43-8,104-110,151, 178 94 Zam pino 1977, 2 95 Zam pino 1977,1-14 96 Zam pino 1977,14 97 Zam pino 1977,22 98 W arburg, 1895, 296 n. 1; [267]; Warburg/Bing, GS, Bing’ s 2nd note to p. 262 99 W arburg/Bing, GS, Bing’ s note to p. 296; Meyer, 1987,172-3,178 100 Transcription from: MüBHStA Kurbayern Αη β ε ^

Archiv 4576, ff.245r-252v;

here italics indicate the use of Latin script (as opposed to gothic) in the original.

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101

Carlo Antonio Puteo

102

Ferdinando de’ Medici

103

Palazzo Pitti

104 Vincenzo Gonzaga 105

Aunt o f the bride

106 Cesare d’ Este 107 First of the seven triumphal arches: representing the military history of France 108 2nd arch, at the Ponte alia Carraia: Medici and Lorraine dynasties 109 3rd arch: military history of House o f Lorraine 110 111

4th arch: history of the Church in Florence

Antonine Column (see also: M. A. Katritzky, “The Florentineentrata of Joanna of Austria and other entrate described in a German diary”,Journal

o f the

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 59,1996,148-173 [159]) 112

5th arch: House o f Habsburg

113

6th arch, at the Canto degli Antellesi: history of the Medici

114

Palazzo Vecchio

115

7th and last arch: Apotheosis o f Tuscany

116

The word is taken directly from the Italian “Invention”

117

Translation from the German: WobüHAB, Cod.Guelf.67.6 Extrav.,pp. 670-6, 678 (Due to an error in pagination, there is no page 677. See also Nagler, 1964,71, 74-6, 81; transcribed in: Kiimmel, 1970). Italics indicate foreign terms used in the original. Gadenstedt gives two accounts (pp. 658-66 = Italian, pp. 666-83 = Germ an), both of which include descriptions o f the intermedi in the context of selected highlights of the wedding festivities.

118

“Platz”: literally “place”

119

Pisa

120 Translation from the French: Bibliothèque N ationale, Paris, ms.fr.5550, ff.64v-68v (transcribed in: Monga, 1994). The full account describes the inter­ medi in the context of selected highlights of the wedding festivities.

warburg's "method"

richard woodfteld “N ot until art history can show... that it sees the work o f art in a few more dimensions than it has done so far will our activity again attract the interest o f scholars and o f the general public.” Warburg to Mesnil, 18 August 19291

ABY WARBURG IS ONE OF THE LEGENDARY

figures o f early twentieth century art history; he is also one o f the least read. His works have been gradually migrating westwards in translations into Italian and then French; the Getty Foundations English translation is due to appear in the summer o f 1999. At that point the Anglophone reader may well discover a disjuncture between the legend and the reality available from the published works. There are two reasons for this. The first is that rumor has spread a notion o f the Warburg method which is actually at odds with Warburg’s work. The second is that readers familiar with Ernst Gombrich’s Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography will discover that they

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do actually need the supplement o f W arburg’s notes and unpublished writing to make sense o f what he has had to say. Warburg’s work includes his library Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek

Warburg (the K.B.W.) which is, as the title states, a library for the study o f the cultural sciences. This should give warning to anyone who wants to claim Warburg for Art History in any simple-minded way. In the English language the expression “Art History” carries equal weight with “ The History o f A rt” and the latter is as much a resource as a discipline. Thus Warburg was an art historian in the sense that he used the resources o f the visual imagery o f the past in a search for answers to certain problems revolving around a central question. In a letter to his friend Mesnil (1926), Warburg wrote that his question “ what in reality did antiquity mean for the men of the Renaissance?” might be amended to “A problem that later, in the course o f years, was extended to the attempts to understand the meaning o f the sur­ vival o f paganism for the whole o f European civilization.” 2 And the key terms o f this reformulation are “paganism” and “ European civilization,” which both refer to what is now called mentalités. The study o f the image was simply a means to an end: an understanding of the tensions between the pagan and the civilized in concrete historical situations. Both Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s assistant, and Ernst Gombrich, his biogra­ pher, have objected to the use of the term “Warburg method.” Questions and a preparedness to step out o f the disciplinary boundaries o f Art History hardly constitute a method. And serendipity does not constitute a method either. The fact is that a great deal o f luck is needed, both in science and in history. As Gombrich once remarked: The past survives only in shattered fragm ents and in the accidental traces which were left by the events which we w ant to reconstruct as best we can. Like any other historian, and like his colleagues the archaeologists, the historian of the arts is engaged in putting together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle from these stray fragments.3

Sometimes, the historian may manage to achieve a perfect fit between the pieces o f evidence, like an archaeologist might with the fragments o f a papyrus. But perfect fits are few and far between: there is always the possibil­ ity o f absence o f vital evidence. It may seem obvious, but it is the absence of

w a r b u r g 's

"m e t h o d "

conclusive evidence which generates varieties o f interpretation. Perhaps the historian is best counselled “ whereof one may not speak one should remain silent” but this would run against the grain o f the built-in loquaciousness of the practice o f art history. Like science, history is fallible and the best schol­ ars are those who are most conscious o f the potential weaknesses o f their case. And in the same way that new evidence may disprove an hypothesis, a lucky find may offer a solution to an intractable problem. Warburg was aware o f the fact that works o f art do not explain them­ selves and that in the search for explanation it is important to explore other territories: the fields o f different scholarly practices. But in the hands o f his followers, his wide range o f interests were narrowed down to iconography and iconological research. Thankfully the Warburg Institute itself has long been a haven for scholars from a wide range o f disciplines. If one is going to look for the inventors o f the fictional Warburg method, one couldn’t do much worse than turn to Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, who introduced Warburg’s work into the United States through their essay “ Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” published in Metropolitan Museum

Studies in 1933. On its second page they declared: w hat may be called the problem of “renaissance phenom ena” is one of the central problems of the history of European culture. W ith this as his point of departure the late Professor Aby W arburg of H am burg conceived the fruitful idea o f directing his scientific research at the way in which classical thought continued through the post-classical era. To this end he built up a library devoted exclusively to that subject. In doing this, so far from confining himself to what is usually called art history— for that would have made his research impossible— he found it necessary to branch out into many other fields until then untouched by art historians. His library, therefore, embraces the history of religions as well as that of literature, science, philosophy, law, and what we may generally call superstition, together with their various streams o f tradition. In the present essay it will be our endeavor, while exam ining a single problem, to dem onstrate the methods o f research developed by Aby W arburg and his followers.4

The designation o f Warburg’s point o f departure as “ renaissance phe­ nomena” is a partial truth, though it is a perfectly adequate description o f what they discuss in their article. What emerged, however, was a classic

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exercise in Kunstgeschichte aïs Geistesgeschichte, whose major exponent was Fritz Saxl s teacher, M ax Dvorâk. Admittedly, the material which had formed the basis o f their essay was drawn from Warburg’s repertoire o f interests though, significantly, his own focus was on the astrological cycle in the Palazzo Schifanoja at Ferrara: a specific piece o f imagery in a specific place. In the hands o f Saxl and Panofsky, the analysis turned into a study o f the history o f the motifs o f the pagan gods, from their mutations and transfor­ mations in the medieval west and Arabic east to their renaissance recreation, nested into an account o f the differences between medieval and renaissance

Weltgeisten: the Renaissance attitude towards antiquity was different from the medieval one in that the Renaissance had become aware of the “historical distance” separating the Greeks and the Romans from the contem porary world. This realization of the intellectual distance between the present and the past is com parable to the realization of the intellectual distance between the eye and the object, so that a parallel may be draw n between the discovery o f the m odern “historical system,” ... and the invention of m odern perspective, both of which were achieved by the Renaissance.5

They recast Warburg’s notion o f mental distance, between irrationality and rationality, in terms o f a difference in attitudes to historical sources between the middle ages and the Renaissance. Furthermore, instead of track­ ing the specific psychological resonances to images in particular situations they adopted a totalising and Hegelian mode o f explanation which Warburg himself would have found uncongenial. Panofsky’s theorisation o f Warburgian work, Studies in Iconology:

Humanistic Themes in the A rt o f the Renaissance, which appeared six years later in 1939, did not emerge out o f an American cultural vacuum. As William Kleinbauer has pointed out, iconographical research had already been established by Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton and was flourishing on Panofsky’s arrival.6 Furthermore, as Craig Hugh Smyth has shown, Panofsky’s lecture “ The History o f Art as a Humanistic Discipline” was given in the context o f Princeton’s Special Programme in the Humanities which was based on the idea o f “ a belief in the supreme value, and the intercon­ nectedness, o f all studies relating to the human condition.” 7

w a r b u r g 's

"m e t h o d "

Studies in Iconology offered a theorized vision o f what a rigorous approach to the history o f renaissance imagery might be. In Panofsky’s hands the “Warburg method” stood for the study o f the history o f the trans­ formation o f artistic motifs, through their interaction with texts: it became iconography.8 Unlike Warburg’s approach, which was to proceed from the word to the image (Das Wort zum Bild ), the new iconographical approach has been to assemble as many texts as possible to fit an image, with the handy resource o f Migne’s indices which were, o f course, unavailable in the Renaissance. Iconography was to be supplemented by iconology, which Panofsky defined as the: History o f cultural symptoms or “symbols” in general (insight into the m anner in which, under varying historical conditions, essential tendencies o f the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts).9

This may be contrasted with Warburg’s understanding o f iconology: For W arburg iconography was marginal; [in] his interpretation o f the astrological im agery in the Palazzo Schifanoja in Ferrara ... it was less the identification of the Decans that concerned him than the discovery o f ancient images transform ed and disguised, waiting to be restored to their pristine beauty. If W arburg tu rn ed to iconography it was in fact only to make this p edagogic point. He liked to contrast the same them e in its degraded and its appropriate rendering, and to re-live vicariously the liberation o f a content from alien accretions. He som etim es referred to this p reoccup ation as “iconology,” b u t his iconology was n ot the study of com plex em blem s and allegories b u t the in teractio n o f form s and contents in the clash o f trad itio n s.10

In Warburg’s work one gains a sense o f individuals being involved in the dramatic conflicts o f historical experience, with an emphasis on the tension between the workings o f reason and unreason. In Panofsky’s work, by con­ trast, one gains a sense o f almost ahistorical embodiment: Michelangelo’s particular stylistic techniques represent not so much grapplings with the contingencies o f a medium in a specific working context as the symbolic equivalent o f a neo-Platonic world-view.

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Warburg’s ambitions for a cross-disciplinary study became mutated into an investigation o f relations between image and text, contextualised into broad cultural settings. His ambitions in the direction o f psycho-history and cultural psychology evaporated. In the fateful year o f 1933, Fritz Saxl moved the K.B.W. from Hamburg to London to enable its escape from the clutches o f the Nazis. His prim ary concern on arrival was to find support for its work. As he recalled: It was a strange adventure to be landed with some 60,000 books in the heart o f London and to be told: “Find friends and introduce them to your problems.” The arrival of the Institute coincided with the rising interest in British education in the study o f the visual docum ents o f the past. The W arburg Institute was carried by this wave, and its m ethods of studying the works of art as an expression o f an age appealed to some younger scholars.11

The problem was, of course, that the bulk of the books were written in German and Italian, and represented continental traditions of scholarship. Saxl turned that weakness into an asset. As David Watkin has shown, British art history has been marked by a strong streak o f insularity.12 Art history did not exist as a university disci­ pline until the creation o f the Courtauld Institute in 1932. Up until then the English approach to art was either a matter o f connoisseurship or criticism and it had thriving traditions in both areas. The problem in 1932 was to create an indigenous sense o f historical scholarship and the Courtauld Institute must have faced the same kinds o f difficulties that Oxbridge had with literary studies some fifty years earlier. As Terry Eagleton has observed: ... since every English gentlem an read his own literature in his spare time anyway, what was the point of subjecting it to systematic study? Fierce rearguard actions were fought by both ancient universities against this distressingly dilettante subject: the definition of an academic subject was what could be examined, and since English was no more than idle gossip about literary taste it was difficult to know how to make it unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit. ... The only way in which English seemed likely to be able to justify its existence in the ancient universities was by systematically m istaking itself for the Classics; but the classicists were hardly keen to have this pathetic parody of themselves aro un d.13

w a r b u r g 's

"m e t h o d "

Legend has it that many o f the Courtauld’s first students simply wanted to find out more about the paintings in their families’ collections. Its first Director was W. G. Constable, who Kenneth Clark described as having been “ an industrious official at the National Gallery.” 14 Its D eputy Director and Reader in the History o f Art was James M ann, a specialist in the history o f armor. Constable’s successor, Tom Boase, was a medievalist who was attacked by Herbert Read in the pages o f the Burlington

M agazine for being “ unknown to the world o f art studies” with the qualification that his researches into the history of the medieval Papacy have no doubt given him a m ethodical and scholarly m ind which should be of great value in the adm inistration of an institution which m ust in future pretend to learning or lose all public respect. The appointm ent will surprise our foreign colleagues, who are not familiar with our English eccentricity in such m atters.15

The arrival o f the Warburg Institute in 1933 meant that a very talented group o f art historians, trained in the German traditions, could be used to strengthen art historical studies. This had implications for the way in which Warburg’s work was regarded in England. As Gombrich recalled Previous generations o f art historians who were mainly based on the great m useums had concentrated on connoisseurship and aesthetic criticism and so it is not surprising that the endeavors o f the W arburg Institute to investigate art in its cultural context were widely interpreted as an advocacy of iconographie studies, the linking o f images w ith their textual sources, while the concern with the positive and negative tendencies deriving from the ancient world was simplified in the handy form ula of the “Study of the Classical Tradition.”16

And, indeed, Fritz Saxl lent Otto Kurz and Ernst Gombrich to the Courtauld Institute to teach religious and secular iconography and commis­ sioned them to write textbooks on those subjects. He also prepared exhibi­ tions to demonstrate the Institute’s work. The first was called The Visual

Approach to the Classics and was intended to wean the public from a purely aesthetic attitude and using works of art as docum ents for the history of culture and of religion. It was a great success and continued to be circulated in schools.17

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According to Watkin, the most memorable exhibition for the academic world was British A rt and the Mediterranean , on the British debt to the clas­ sical tradition, produced by Saxl and Rudolph Wittkower in 1941.18 Saxl was offered the directorship o f the Courtauld Institute but decided to stay with the Warburg and Anthony Blunt, who had been amongst the Warburg s supporters became the director instead. What had originally been the Journal o f the Warburg Institute (1938-9), and before that the Studien der

Bibliothek Warburg, became the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1939-42 to the present). The subsequent career o f the Warburg Institute, and its journal is open to public inspection. What has not been open to inspection, in the same public way, has been Warburg s own work.

a digression On January 19th 1929, Warburg gave a lecture in Rome’s Hertziana on the the “ Nympha” and one o f his listeners was Kenneth Clark, who told the story o f his encounter in his autobiography. It is worth quoting at length: W arburg was w ithout doubt the m ost original thinker on art history of our time, and entirely changed the course of art historical studies. His point of view could be described as a reaction against the form alist or stylistic approach of Morelli and Berenson. But I am sure that this was no t his intention, because from the first his m ind moved in an entirely different way. Instead of thinking o f works of art as life-enhancing representations he thou gh t o f them as symbols, and he believed that the art historian should concern him self w ith the origin, m eaning and transm ission o f symbolic images. The Renaissance was his chosen field of enquiry, partly because renaissance art contained a large n um b er o f such symbolic images; and partly because he had the true G erm an love of Italy. He accum ulated vast learning, bu t his writings are all fragments. He should not have been an art historian, b ut a poet Hôlderlin. He him self said that if he had been five inches taller (he was even shorter than Berenson) he would have become an actor, and I can believe it, for he had, to an uncanny degree, the gift o f mimesis. He could “get inside” a character, so that w hen he quoted from Savonarola, one seemed to hear the Frate s high, compelling voice; and when he read from Poliziano there was all the daintiness and slight artificiality of the Medicean circle. Symbols are a dangerous branch of study as they easily lead to magic; and magic leads to the loss of reason. W arburg went out o f his m ind in 1918, bu t by 1927, under the nun-like care of D r Bing, he was sufficiently recovered to visit Rome and

w a r b u r g 's

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give a lecture. D r Steinmann, the director o f the Herziana, knowing that my G erm an was imperfect, arranged for us [Clark and his wife Jane] to sit in the front row, and Warburg, who preferred to talk to an individual, directed the whole lecture at me. It lasted over two hours, and I understood about twothirds. But it was enough. Thenceforward my interest in “connoisseurship” became no more than a kind of habit, and my m ind was occupied in trying to answer the kinds o f questions that had occupied Warburg. The parts o f my writing that have given me most satisfaction, for example, the chapter in The Nude called “Pathos,” are entirely W arburgian.19

While it was entirely appropriate for Clark to describe Warburg’s approach as being distanced from connoisseurship, which it was, the con­ trast with Berenson was rather over-stated. Berenson shared with Warburg a deep interest in the relevance o f psychology to the study o f art, which he theorised in terms o f “ life-enhancing representations.” He was also an admirer o f Nietzsche’s Birth o f Tragedy, believing that it offered “ the best thinking on aesthetics from a psychological point o f view.” 20 The critical point, however, is that Warburg’s symbols were not lifeless abstractions but products o f the depths o f human experience. As he declared in the final section o f his Schifanoja lecture W ith this tentatively hazarded, isolated effort, I wishes to perm it myself a plaidoyer in favor of a methodical expansion of our art historical discipline, in both its material and its spatial reaches. Overly lim iting developm ental categories have until now hindered art history from making its material available to the, albeit as yet unw ritten, “historic psychology o f hum an expression.” Because o f its excessively materialistic or excessively mystical tenor, our young discipline denies itself the panoram ic view of world history.21

Warburg’s prim ary interest was in the “ historic psychology o f human expression” and that was what Clark pursued in The Nude in his chapters “ Energy” and “ Pathos.” In this respect Clark was closer to Warburg’s line of thought than either Saxl or Panofsky. The extent o f Warburg’s impact on Clark can also be registered in his book Piero della Francesca, in which he wrote No

painter has

shown

m ore

clearly the

com m on

foundations, in

M editerranean culture, o f C hristianity and paganism. His M adonna is the great mother, his risen Christ the slain god; his altar is set up on the threshing

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floor, his saints have trodden in the w in e-p ress... This unquestioning sense of brotherhood, of dignity, o f the returning seasons, and of the miraculous, has survived many changes o f dogm a and organization, and may yet save Western m an from the consequences o f materialism .22

In this context the belief in a cultural collective unconscious may seem to have been drawn from Carl Jung. But in the light o f Warburg’s treatment by the Jungian psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger it may ring true as a Warburgian idea, the kind o f idea lying behind Mnemosyne. Clark had recognised the ideas o f the deeply human and redemptive powers o f visual imagery in W arburgs thought. At the end o f his Schifanoja lecture Warburg had declared that: O u r enthusiastic w on derm en t at the inconceivable achievm ent o f artistic genius can only be strengthened by the recognition that genius is b o th a blessing and conscious transform atory energy. The great new style th at the artistic genius o f Italy bequ eathed to us was rooted in the social will to recover Greek hum anism from the shell of medieval, O riental-Latin “p ractice.” W ith this will tow ard the restitution o f antiquity, the “good European” began his struggle for enlightenm ent in the age of the international m igration o f images tha t we refer to— a little too mystically— as the age o f the Renaissance.23

For Warburg, the achievements o f the Italian Renaissance resulted from its artists’ conquest o f the powers o f darkness. Put that way, it can be seen why this was not a route pursued by either Saxl or Panofsky, whose concerns were with historical context rather than psychological dramaturgy. Not for nothing did Warburg adopt the voices o f Savonarola and Poliziano. While they were still in Hamburg, Fritz Saxl together with Gertrud Bing conceived a project to introduce Warburg’s scholarly activities to a wider audience. The idea was to publish a collection o f Warburg’s articles, his work on M nemosyne , his unpublished lectures and m inor essays with his “ Fragments o f a Theory o f Expression on Anthropological Foundations,” a collection o f letters, aphorisms and autobiographical records and, finally, the library’s catalogue.24 The first work to appear was the two volumes o f

Gesammelte Schriften in 1932;25 it would be interesting to explore its recep­ tion in the burgeoning climate o f Nazism. In 1934 the Institute’s first volume o f the Bibliography o f the Survival o f the Classics was favoured with the

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dubious distinction o f a full page review in the Vôlkische Beobachter which was, as Saxl wrote, “equally outstanding for ignorance and insolence.” 26 The rest o f the project fell by the wayside, excepting the lone publication o f an English translation o f Warburg’s essay on Serpent Ritual in the second volume o f the Journal for 1938/9. Fritz Saxl died in 1955 and Gertrud Bing in 1964.27 Saxl had been too busy to see the project through and it seems that Bing had given up in despair. In a posthumously published article she wrote o f the difficulties involved: Warburg’s wide ranging interests, his difficult use o f language and the appar­ ent disconnectedness o f his projects and their wrecks and ruins. In short, the published material could only be given real sense through a thorough and difficult subterranean exploration o f his notes, recognising that “ the spread o f scholarly curiosity is so wide as to obscure the red thread o f a leading interest.” 28 The red thread was there; the problem was to follow it. In 1970 Ernst Gombrich published Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography in which he assumed the difficult task o f connecting Warburg’s published work to his unpublished manuscripts. Not one o f its reviewers took on the task o f analysing the strength of Warburg’s arguments or Gombrich’s critique. From one point o f view this is understandable: independent judgements would have to be framed on the basis o f an intimate knowledge o f Warburg’s

oeuvre. But this would be no reason for the absence o f an internal critique. Possibly the views o f Lamprecht, Usener, Semon and Darwin would seem to be so dated as not to merit serious consideration, let alone Warburg’s use of them. Possibly Warburg’s project itself no longer strikes a chord. And, possibly, no one wants to get involved in the gruelling demands that the book itself makes. The reader who is not familiar with the rest o f Gombrich’s oeuvre would find it doubly difficult. The remainder o f this paper offers reflections on that book. Gombrich had joined the staff o f the Warburg Institute in London in January 1936. He had been employed by Saxl and Bing to work on Warburg’s

Mnemosyne papers for projected publication. The war intervened. Saxl and Bing changed their minds about how Warburg’s work should be published and then after the war Gom brich was given the task o f writing about Warburg’s ideas, to complement a biography to be written by Bing. Bing never got round to writing the biography and neither did M ax A dolf

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Warburg get round to producing a selection o f his father’s letters. So, as an outstanding duty to honor the commitment o f the original project, Gombrich published Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography with a Memoir

on the History o f the Library by F. Saxl in 1970. As he said in his introduction, the bulk o f the manuscript had been completed in 1946 and 1947 and it didn’t exactly delight Gertrud Bing when she saw the drafts: “ she was not always happy to notice the critical detachment in these presentations.” 29 The book was certainly detached in its presentation o f Warburg’s ideas and the final chapter “Warburg’s achievement in perspective” offered a rather low key critique. The book was, after all, intended to be a commemoration and celebration of Warburg’s work.

Mnemosyne addressed “ not so much a problem o f formal traditions as one o f collective psychology” 30 and that would be true o f the larger body o f Warburg’s work. His library, the K.B.W., had been created for the pursuit o f the scientific ( wissenschaftliche) study o f culture. Felix Gilbert complained that Gombrich did not try to set Warburg within the context o f the wider field o f those studies, but it should be sufficient to note the connection between Warburg’s library and, his teacher, Lamprecht’s ideas.31 It was Lamprecht who effectively transformed the status o f cultural history as an academic discipline and Warburg can be seen as developing his project. This does not mean to say that art history was irrelevant to Warburg’s work, quite the reverse, but it was to be seen as a resource rather than as a discipline. The history o f art offered a repertoire o f images for the study o f cultural psychology and, in this context, mundane imagery was likely to be more rewarding than the great art o f the past. Warburg’s interests extended from Botticelli’s Primavera to a contemporary postage stamp. Saxl had found in Gom brich a young scholar who was already well equipped to engage in Warburgian work. He had himself written a disserta­ tion on the extraordinary creations o f the artist Giulio Romano, based on the archives in Mantua. He had emerged from that work critical o f the fash­ ionable Geistesgeschichte approach to art history advocated by M ax Dvorák. He had also pursued an interest in the relationship between psychology and art history by following the work o f Karl Bühler, semiotician and Professor o f Psychology at the University o f Vienna. On graduation he worked with

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Ernst Kris on a project on the emergence o f portrait caricature in the seicento. Kris and Gombrich shared Warburg’s interest in popular imagery, though they veered towards social, rather than cultural, psychology. An important difference between Warburg and Gombrich, however, was the form er’s habit o f keeping his theoretical ruminations private. To read Warburg’s published work is to encounter mountains o f evidence, with the theoretical substructure only revealing itself in the occasional gnomic utter­ ance strategically based to help an argument along or to formulate a conclu­ sion. By contrast, Gombrich believed that an argument’s theoretical assumptions needed to be exposed and assessed. And it was those assump­ tions which Gombrich found so difficult to accept when working on Warburg’s biography. Like Warburg, Gombrich did not subscribe to the Geistesgeschichte histo­ rians’ totalising and neo-Hegelian approach to the relationship between style and culture. He had discovered the flaws in that approach in his research into Giulio Romano and described them as being based on what he was later to call the “physiognomic fallacy.” He described that fallacy in an article pub­ lished in 193732 and reframed it in an inaugural lecture twenty years later: The idea which m ost o f us form of Medicean Florence is colored, and how pleasantly colored, by that splendid cavalcade through a smiling landscape which Benozzo Gozzoli painted in the Riccardi Palace. W ho would find it easy, after a visit to Ravenna and its solemn mosaics, to think of noisy children in Byzantium, or who thinks of haggard peasants in the Flanders of Rubens? Let me call this tendency to see the past in terms of its typical style “the physiognomic fallacy.”33

It was almost inevitable that art historians would take Botticelli’s

Primavera to be symptomatic o f the pagan sensuality o f Renaissance Florence or Michelangelos late paintings as symptomatic o f a spiritual crisis dominating Rome. And then no evidence o f the daily religiosity o f the Florentine citizens or mundane concerns o f Papal officials would be allowed as conterevidence against these inferences. The so-called hermeneutic circle becomes a vicious circle when the works o f art which are called upon to illustrate the spirit o f the times are established as a criterion by which that spirit is then defined.

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Warburg was acutely aware o f the complexities o f artistic life in quat­ trocento Florence and he was unconvinced by Vasari’s retrospective account o f developments leading up to the creation o f the High Renaissance style: He explictly rejected a “unilinear” interpretation o f art history and strove for an understanding o f the complex fields of force that make up a “period.” In trying to map out these tensions he could not but use his own experience of his environm ent as a model. As a result he may have m isinterpreted the meaning of choices and the overtone o f images which he was out to un derstand. But he should not, therefore, be denied the credit of having sensed and expressed the degree to which every move in the realm of art or fashion may be charged with social and moral m eanings.34

Living at the end o f the nineteenth century and being a witness to the various stylistic battles o f his day accentuated Warburg’s sense o f potentiali­ ties for artistic conflict. And being a witness to the ways in which style was used to promote self-image and fashion led him to project his own environ­ ment back into the quattrocento. Ironically, he felt that he had particular access to the cultural life o f the Florentine merchants in terms o f his own social habitus and his family’s background in banking. The way in which Warburg sought to understand the ways in which “ the realm o f art or fashion may be charged with social and moral meanings” is probably best demonstrated in Chapter VIII o f Warburg. “ The Conflict o f Styles as a Psychological Problem (1904-1907)” is one o f the most interest­ ing sections o f the book and also, surprisingly, one o f the least discussed. The central theme o f the chapter is the question “ what factors motivated artists’ stylistic choices in quattrocento Florence?” What would have m oti­ vated the choice o f an antique m otif and what would have been the attrac­ tion o f the style alla franzesé ? Warburg did not think that the solution to these problems was self-evident and he rehearsed a variety o f solutions. One o f Gom brich’s major problems in establishing what Warburg might actually have thought about a subject was the fact that Warburg was a great dramatist who was capable o f stating contradictory cases with complete conviction. His decision to publish the apparently seamless Francesco

Sassettis Last Will and Testament must have been taken at the end o f a long internal debate.

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W arburgs starting point, and it was the view that Panofsky and Saxl echoed, was that there was O n the one side a “naive realism” which lacks any sense of distance between the present and the p a s t ... on the other “antiquarian idealism” ... Botticelli is the forerunner of the second group, o f the painters of the grand m anner with their mythological and antiquarian inspiration.35

Given the problem o f depicting scenes from classical mythology, the real­ ists fell for the costume style “alia fram e” and this was: the m ost powerful obstacle in the path of that more elevated and grander style “all’ antica ’; it needed the heroic gesture of A ntonio Pollajuolo to shake off the weighty splendours of so m uch clothing.36

The taste for fashionable costume was a product o f the merchants’ way of life: ... the Florentines were both the masters and the slaves o f their m aterial culture: silks, weavers of brocade, goldsmiths, masons, colour grinders.37

Their “ weighty splendours” represented the Florentine merchants’ invest­ ment in the materialities o f life which would trap the workings o f the free spirit. The obvious flaw in this line of argument is that the Franciscans, as well as the Dominican priest Savonarola, thought that riches detracted from the pursuit o f the spiritual life, so the rejection o f materiality would have been quite consistent with either mysticism or enlightenment. Warburg should have remembered Burckhardt’s early advice to him to think o f “ Botticelli, the mystical theologian.” 38 Warburg was party to the various polarizations o f attitude which sur­ rounded bourgeois taste around the turn o f the century. He was hostile to what he called “ wealth and frenchifying elegance-Alsterufer.” 39 Costume pic­ tures were in vogue amongst the bourgeoisie and the philistine citizen of Hamburg was having difficulties with Bôcklin’s nude nymphs and satyrs. Realism was tasteless and obstructed enlightenment. For Warburg this wasn’t simply an issue o f taste, it had profound consequences for humanity: In [W arburg’s] analysis the details of the costum e of a female figure in a Q uattrocento print assume sym ptom atic value for the greatest issues not only o f art bu t of hum an civilization.40

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The rendering o f life in motion through the swirl o f accessories was taken by Warburg to signify a break with the medieval past and a leap towards Michelet’s “ discovery o f man and the discovery o f the world.” But from another point o f view Gothic realism could be seen as a neces­ sary catalyst in the development o f the new style. The weight o f materialism was necessary for patrons and artists to engage in a liberated escape, libera­ tion being distinguished from mere freedom: [Botticelli’s] mythological figures display that strangely suggestive flavor of classical sculpture in m otion because they are liberated, rather than free creations of the painter’s imagination: liberated from the spell of the splendors of courtly dress which decorated the luxury boxes, planet-books, and to u rn a m ent flags.41

One has to feel oppression to feel the full freedom o f escape; without oppression, such freedom would be meaningless. Thus escape from the clutches o f fashion would represent true freedom. There is yet another way of looking at the matter: Com pared with the austere grandeur of a Masaccio or a Donatello, [the International Gothic style] was indeed reactionary, but was it not nevertheless a sym ptom of that zest for life, that joy in the sensuous beauty o f the world, which we usually associate with the Renaissance.42

It is possible that “ M asolino’s realistically strutting dandies” had more going for them in the construction o f an energised classical style than “ the unapproachable figure o f St. Peter striding past in Masaccio’s 'Shadow healing’.” 43 At the level o f folk art “ the violent movement o f the Moresca dancers manifests that same will to unrestrained gesticulation and passion­ ate motion which was to give birth to the new style o f classical maenads and battle scenes.” 44 The possibilities to be offered by the use o f the different styles o f art were only matched by the character o f the Florentines themselves: All the heterogeneous characteristics o f the medieval-Christian, chivalrousrom antic and classic-platonizing idealist on the one side, and the w orld Etruscan-pagan practical m erchant on the other, interpenetrate and unite in the Medicean Florentine: they fuse in an enigmatic type of personality whose explosive and yet harm onious vital energies show themselves in the way in

w a r b u r g 's

"m e t h o d "

which the Medicean Florentine joyously welcomes any stirring of the soul as an extension of his m ental scope which he quietly develops and uses.45

This represents a major step away from regarding the Hamburg bour­ geoisie as latter-day equivalents o f Florentine merchants. Perhaps it was a better characterization o f Warburg himself. The upshot o f his meditations was his paper on Francesco Sassetti s Last

Will and Testament in which he argued that apparent contradictions could be resolved in terms o f straightforward compatibility. As Gombrich put it Over his [Sassetti’s] tom b he had the painting of the saintly death of his patron; on his tom b the desparate wailing of a pagan burial— how would he harm onize the passion o f the pagan dem ons w ith the traditional medieval philosophy of life? ... Antichità is not banned from the precincts o f the church. Rather it is allotted a fixed place in the typological picture of history. It can stand side by side with the Jewish Old Testament as part o f the world “before the Salvation.”46

But then the use o f classical pathos was not without its risks: Just as the elements of the N orthern style can either tem pt the artist on to the path of pedestrian and loquacious realism or help him to m irror the true expression of the hum an face, so the language of the ancient world can be a guide to the representation o f a higher, ideal, sphere or a tem ptation to loud and theatrical hollowness. In the end it is up to the artist w hat use he makes of the heritage that he enters.47

Consequently in Ghirlandaios “ Massacre” fresco: the pagan figures have left the zone of archaeological contem plation and run riot on the stage. Here the sensationalism of “superlatives” has swamped the artist’s aesthetic detachm ent and has tem pted him to an accum ulation of horror and violence which foreshadows the “excesses” of Baroque art.48

The excesses of Baroque art formed the grounds for its rejection by the eighteenth century classicists in general and Winckelmann in particular. Winckelmann s views on classical art were shared by Nietzsche and so it is very interesting that Gombrich should have remarked that it was in Nietzsche’s Birth o f Tragedy that Warburg found “that identification o f stylis­ tic trends with permanent psychological states which gradually replaced the

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evolutionist model in [his] system of thought.” 49 However, while Nietzsche contrasted the Apollonian visual arts with the Dionysiae arts o f poetry and drama, Warburg chose to concentrate on the “ Dionysiae elements in GraecoRoman sarcophagi.” 50 But why, as Gombrich observed, did Warburg identify pagan art as such with Hellenistic art? Why not with other moments o f the classical style as well? A likely explanation could have been in the pecularity o f Warburg’s views on style, views which were rather more concerned with contemporary artistic issues than the problems o f traditional art history. But before turning to such issues it would be interesting to consider Gombrich’s alternative account o f the development o f Botticelli’s style, particularly because it was intended to demonstrate his own involvement with Warburgian work. At the beginning o f his career W arburg had addressed the problem o f B otticelli’s use o f fluttering draperies. In the traditional account o f the developm ent o f renaissance art such accessories would have been regarded as a step backwards on the path to greater naturalism. In the stylistic evolution towards the High Renaissance style from Masaccio to Raphael, how could such a regression fit in? W arburg’s solution was simple: it may be one-sided, but not unjustified, to make the treatm ent of accessories in m otion the touchstone of the “influence of antiquity.”51

Learning o f Poliziano’s fascination with antiquity and love o f such “ acces­ sories in m otion” in his Giostra, Warburg imagined him suggesting the theme o f the birth o f Venus to Botticelli and pointing out suitable antique motifs to copy. Recognizing that Agostino di Duccio also used agitated drapery, he imagined Alberti giving Agostino the same advice that Politiziano gave to Botticelli. What Warburg failed to recognize was that the use o f fluttering drapery extended considerably further than a small handful o f Florentine artists. As Gombrich pointed out it is particularly m arked in certain schools of N orthern sculpture and painting, where it is described as “late Gothic.” One o f the originators o f the device is probably Rogier van der Weyden who can make m ost effective use of these ornam ental flourishes o f w ind-blown scarves and ribbons both for com positional and for expressive purposes.52

WARBURG'S "METHOD"

And he also commented that W arburg had never been interested in the orthodox art historical approach which concentrated on the slow evolution of stylistic means of representation. He had no use for connoisseurship but aimed at a scientific psychology of the artistic process.53

These last two sentences obscure rather than clarify Gombrich s point. While orthodox art historians had certainly been deeply concerned with stylistic issues, it was Gombrich him self who theorized the relationship between stylistic concerns and the “ means o f representation” in A rt and

Illusion. And while Warburg undoubtedly “ aimed at a scientific psychology o f the artistic process” it was deeply flawed through being based on out­ moded psychological theories. This is bound to raise the question of the relationship between psychology and the history o f art. While the psychologist is in a position to analyse the process o f skill aquisition, it is the art historian who should be concerned with the conventions governing the aquisition and deployment o f such skills. So a central question which should have concerned Warburg was “ How would Botticelli have acquired his skill in the rendition of drapery and what were the technical resources available to him?” It is at that point that the importance o f International Gothic art should have become apparent. There is no evidence to demonstrate that humanists were in the habit o f offering artists advice and there was no need for it on this occasion because the particular m otif was already available in contemporary artistic practice. Throughout the fifteenth century pattern books filtered their way across Europe from court to court and studio to studio, along with paintings and artists themselves.54 The artists o f the International Gothic style introduced a highly fashionable mode o f painting which bred its own success. Warburg assumed that “ it is the revival o f classical subjects alone that accounts for these formal characteristics [of accessories in m otion]” 55 failing to see that they were part o f the International Gothic movement. Had Warburg asked himself how Botticelli might be seen in this context he m ight have interpreted the bias o f certain Q uattrocento artists for antique statuary of expressive rather than serene quality as a sym ptom of the taste and artistic problems of that time and place.56

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If earlier versions of the Nympha m otif had not been derived from classi­ cal statuary, then it was not necessary to postulate that later versions o f the same m otif had to be. In this context Gombrich paid Warburg a rather backhanded complement: Unless we follow W arburg’s later thought and interpret her deportm ent as a break-through of racial memories we have to explain the persistence of this type by the sway of conventions to which W arburg him self has opened our eyes. 57

While it is true that Warburg was deeply interested in the persistence o f motifs, he was rather lacking in interest in the period conventions which dominated the production o f works o f art: those were Gombrich s field o f interest, developed in A rt and Illusion. Warburg retained the mimetic approach to the figurative arts which still dominated art historians’ minds until Gombrich published A rt and Illusion. He had been fascinated by what artists might have seen and this was one o f his reasons for being interested in pageants. He held to Burckhardt’s dictum that “ The tradition o f pageantry in Italy, in its more elevated form, is a true transition from art to life” : Were we perm itted to assume th at these festive pageants presented such figures bodily to the artist’s eyes, as part of real life as it moved before them , we could more easily understand the process of artistic creation. In that case the program m e of the learned adviser also loses som ething o f its pedantic flavor, the inspiring scholar did not really suggest the object to be imitated, b ut only facilitated its articulation.58

Gombrich referred to Warburg’s “ allegiance to the realistic movement o f his time which had so impressed him during his visit to the Munich Art Exhibition” and commented “ Perhaps the importance Warburg attached to ancient statuary which the artist may actually have seen springs from a similar conviction that the essence o f painting is always mimetic.” 59 But was it an accepted convention o f quattrocento art that the artist should attempt to depict pageants or festivities as opposed to illustrate them?60 The musical iconographer Emanuel Winternitz has shown that “ the groupings and and combinations o f angelic concerts in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paint­ ings have not proved reliable guides to reconstructing contemporary perfor-

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mance practice.” 61 Figurative images were not produced in the quattrocento as windows on to contemporary life: Alberti’s metaphor has been over-extended. In his essay “Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine cassone workshop seen through the eyes o f a humanist poet,” 62 Gombrich drew attention to the fact that the poet, Ugolino Verino, a contemporary cassone painter, called Apollonio “ the Tuscan Apelles” for his paintings o f scenes from Virgil. Although the subject matter o f the painting was classical, in hindsight its style was not. But what would a classical style have been in the mid-quattrocento?-presumably that most apt to receive classical forms o f praise: if hum anists employed any conscious standard of criticism it was, of course, that of tru th to nature, of which they could read in the ancient authors. This standard seems well satisfied by G othic realism.63

Apollonio was an illustrator. His depiction o f the Tournament o f S. Croce “develops a traditional scheme for jests which was employed by illustrators o f romances” but he could also “ improvise a relief alV antica where the context suggested it” and his use o f Byzantine costume for men “ is explained by Vespasiano da Bisticci’s remark that the fashions o f dress had not changed, in the East, since ancient times.” 64 In his own essay on Botticelli’s Mythologies, Gombrich adopted a typo­ logical approach for understanding the imagery. Botticelli was familiar with the traditions o f secular art: Its m ain themes were drawn from the world o f chivalry and courtly love. The Gardens and Bowers of Love, the Fountains of Youth, the pictures o f Venus and her children, the storm ing o f the castle o f Love ... the w hole cycle of courtly imagery w ith its flowery meadows and delicate m aidens m ust have been in Botticelli’s m in d ... 65

But he was also a painter o f M adonnas and the connection between Venus and the Madonna was one which was recognised in the association of the Bower o f Love with Paradise, a cause o f complaint amongst devout writers. Gombrich argued that Botticelli did not visualize the Graces like the dancing maidens that used to decorate the walls and coffers o f noble Florentines; nor did he look for models

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am ong the frenzied m aenads o f classical sarcophagi. The rhythm of their dance is inspired by the harm onious m otions of the blessed spirits in one of Fra Angelico’s scenes o f Paradise or o f the chorus of angels in Sienese paintings.66

Botticelli conceived o f the painting “on the scale and on the plane o f reli­ gious painting. It was from this sphere that he derived the intense and noble pathos that pervades his work.” 67 Gombrich challenged Warburg’s idea that Botticelli sought pathos in clas­ sical art. Classical art had been available to artists for the adaptation o f motifs throughout the middle ages and into the renaissance: Religious art had never ceased adapting classical motifs and had done so consciously ever since the Pisani. W hat w ould D onatello’s great “p athos” be w ith ou t classical inspiration? If Botticelli borrow ed a classical m o tif for a movem ent or a drapery he was only doing what m any artists had done before him.

The significant feature o f Botticelli’s art, and a “departure o f momentous significance” was that he had painted a non-religious subject with the fervor and feeling usually reserved for objects o f worship ... O nly th rough such a step was it possible for secular art to assimilate and transform the pathos of classical sculpture.68

This must be the kind o f thing that Gombrich meant by the possibility of Warburg’s having “misinterpreted the meaning o f choices and the overtone o f images which he was out to understand.” But, as he went on to say, Warburg “ should not, therefore, be denied the credit o f having sensed and expressed the degree to which every move in the realm of art or fashion may be charged with social and moral meanings.” Warburg was convinced that the achievements o f the idealizing art o f the High Renaissance were born out of the conquest o f the demoniacal dimen­ sion o f antique imagery. At the end o f his Schifanoja lecture he declared The grand new style that has been bestowed on us by the artistic genius of Italy is rooted in the social will to liberate Greek hum anity from medieval, oriental, latin m anipulation. W ith this will to recover antiquity “the good E uropean” began his fight for enlightenm ent in that age of international

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m igration o f images which we still call a trifle too mystically the Renaissance.69

And, again, in his essay on Luther he wrote Ever since W inckelm ann we have been taught to look up on the classically enobled world of their gods as a symbol o f classical antiquity as such; so much so that we are inclined to forget that this w orld is in fact a creation of the scholarly culture of the H um anists. For this “O lym pian” side of antique culture had o f course first to be wrested from the old, traditional “dem onic culture.”70

But we are less inclined now to credit the Renaissance with the resurrec­ tion o f paganism than scholars in the nineteenth century. It is an interesting question to ask why that belief was ever held but it cannot concern us here. It is a strange suggestion to make, though, that Raphael had to distance himself from demonic astrological figures in order to paint his own beauti­ ful creations. Warburg believed in the importance o f confrontation and the energies o f clash and conflict in the same way that the revolutionaries o f the art world did at the turn o f the century: in the same way that academicism had to be rigorously rejected so did the demonic dimension o f antiquity. And in the same way that the use o f a particular style might demonstrate an antibourgeois strategy so would the rejection o f realism “alia franzese” From the end o f the eighteenth century artists and architects had a choice o f styles upon which they could draw and it seemed to Warburg that the Florentine artists o f the quattrocento were in the same position. But Florentine artists did not choose to use the classical style, let alone confront and distance themselves from its demonic dimensions. Both Alberti, in the Prologue to Della Pittura , and Vasari, in the Preface to Part III o f his Vite, had argued that artists’ work bore comparison with the art o f antiquity and, by implication, that their successes were not due to it. It was only during the High Renaissance and the following years that artists could think o f antiquity as offering an exemplary style, as opposed to a usable reservoir o f motifs which might be raided for the successful comple­ tion o f a pose. The notion that in some way the renaissance recreated the classical style misrepresents the ambitions o f both sets o f artists, though it would be right to argue that they shared an ambition to create convincingly

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lifelike imagery. As Gom brich concluded his essay “ The Style alV antica: Imitation and Assimilation” : I am sure that W arburg was right, that we should look for some general p rin ciple that Renaissance artists tried to distil from their study o f classical m o n u ments. I do not think that we would be far from his intentions if we called one of these principles “the illusion of life.” Renaissance artists were narrators who had a horror of all that looked rigid, stiff, and dead, as the conceptual art of the M iddle Ages appeared to them . O f course, the Donatello o f the San Lorenzo pulpits, the Leonardo o f the Last Supper, and the Michelangelo o f the Sistine ceiling chose other ways towards this supreme goal than either im itation or assimilation o f the style alV antica. But those who first turned to the A ntique for guidance in problems o f naturalistic representation, and came to adm ire the art of the ancients for its vaunted fidelity to nature, m ust soon have discovered that it also held the secret o f that higher fascination: the illusion of movem ent and life. ... Even a few ancient sarcophagi of indifferent quality could give plenty of hints on w hat to avoid and w hat to do.71

In quattrocento architecture, architects working in the style “alV antica ’ moved by a process o f eradication o f errors, like the philologists, though unlike the philologists they had no idea o f what a genuinely classical style might be. Furthermore, it is seriously open to question whether the Renaissance witnessed a revival o f paganism at all in Warburg’s sense: By “paganism,” as we know, W arburg m eant a psychological state, the state of surrender to im pulses of frenzy and o f fear. It was this fateful heritage he m eant to study, and in this quest he freely identified the life of the individual and that o f the collective m ind. The dram a of the revival of these impulses that had been dorm ant in the collective m em ory is mainly played out on the stage o f the Renaissance.72

Warburg had been deeply impressed by seeing the Death o f Orpheus illustrated in an Italian print and by reading Poliziano’s Orfeo. In his essay on Dürer he claimed: We know that the Death of O rpheus was not just a studio motive of formal interest to artists but a real experience felt in the spirit of the pagan past, an event from the dark mystery plays of the Dionysian myth, relived w ith passion and understanding.73

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But Poliziano’s Orfeo was as much a fiction as the depiction o f the death o f Orpheus in a print. There is no evidence that Poliziano actually believed the fictional tale he wrote and even a convincing performance on the actors’ part would not lead to that belief either. If one is going to write about the subjects o f classical myth one uses their repertoires and that is as far as it goes. One does not have to believe in magic to retell Apuleius’s Golden Ass. And if, as Gombrich once suggested, Botticelli’s Primavera had been based on an episode from the Golden Ass its effect would have been more likely through the power o f example rather than through any force o f magic. Furthermore, Warburg was guilty of, and it sounds odd, demonizing antiq­ uity and the Arabic East. The Mystery plays were no more or less demonic than the Christian Passion. And the introduction o f Arabic astrology into Western Europe heralded the renovatio o f the science o f astronomy. The fact that Arabic figure drawing was not as good as Greek simply bore testimony to a shift in priorities and was hardly a sign o f an Arabic lack o f rationality. A history has yet to be written o f the demonization o f the Middle Ages. One suspects that its roots were in the aftermath o f the Reformation and that it developed in the eighteenth century Enlightenment. A great deal has been made o f Warburg’s interest in the concept of empathy. It was a similar exercise in empathy when Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl o f Shaftesbury, declared that lack o f appreciation for classical art was a sign o f irrationality: “ Bad figures; bad minds.” 74 As a direct result o f the achievements o f the artists o f the Italian High Renaissance, the culti­ vation o f art became an activity fit for a gentleman and the appreciation of “Apollonian” art a symptom o f good taste and high-minded behavior. Remarking on Plato’s looking “ wistfully towards the Egyptian laws,” Shaftesbury wondered whether the last and present grand hierarchy of Romish Church should not have followed the Egyptian in this (as in m any other things) and keep the orthodox forms horrid, savage, and consequently inspiring superstition, as in reality their first were from the G othic tim es or last feces o f the Empire and o f Arts, w hen images, etc., were introduced.75

Art could be an important instrument o f social control and the use of superstition would be more useful to an authoritarian society than an appeal

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to taste and rationality. Thus the Roman Catholics would have been better off by sticking to grotesque medievalisms than to allow the development of High Renaissance art. It can be argued that Warburg stood at the end o f an Enlightenment tradition which saw Greek classicism as the mark o f rational­ ity and that this is a context in which his famous declaration “Athens must always be conquered afresh from Alexandria” may be understood. It does seem as though Warburg committed Gombrich’s physiognomic fallacy. As he pointed out in his chapter “Warburg’s achievement in perspective” Certain questions W arburg never appears to have asked. One is the w arrant for identifying paganism as such with Hellenistic art, the relatively late phase of classical sculpture that bequeathed to us the Laocoon and the archtypes of the sarcophagi. There are references in W arburg to the revels of the Dionysiae rites and other mystery religions which are to support this identification, bu t such m emories of Nietzsche and of anthropological parallels cannot by th em selves account for the fact that these gestures and movements were only represented in a particular phase o f ancient art.76

If it were the case that there was a dark side to Greek culture then that would have been just as present at the time o f “Apollonian” imagery as at the time o f “ Dionysiae” imagery. Thus to see the Dionysiae mentality as uniquely revealed in classical art from a particular period is to fail to recog­ nise a gradual change in style which was autonomous from the mentalité which it was alleged to represent. This invites the obvious question o f the relationship between styles and mentalités. In his essay “ In Search o f Cultural H istory” Gombrich proposed an important distinction between the historical concepts o f “ periods” and “ movements.” Periods are simply convenient temporal brackets, like the quattrocento, whereas movements are people-centred. The Renaissance was a people-centred movement: it was the humanista , like Niccolô Niccoli, who inspired a fascination for the purification o f classi­ cal literature. It was the humanista who created a sense o f what the ambi­ tions o f classical art might have been: they revived the category of Art 77 and they offered categories for aesthetic evaluation but they had no conception o f a classical style o f visual art and they were not in the habit o f talking to quattrocento artists. It was only in the cinquecento that there was a

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significant increase in interaction and there has yet to be a fully documented study o f the emergence o f the so-called artist’s programme. As Gombrich pointed out, movements are not necessarily homogenous and can operate at a number o f different levels: Each m ovem ent ... has a core of dedicated souls, a crowd of hangers-on, not to forget a lunatic fringe. There is a whole spectrum of attitudes and degrees of conversion. Even w ithin the individual there may be fluctuating levels o f conviction, various conscious and unconscious fluctuations in loyalty.

The consequence to be drawn from this is that the cultural historian will be a little wary of the claims o f cultural psychology. He will n ot deny tha t the success of certain styles may be sym ptom atic of changing attitudes, but he will resist the tem ptation to use changing styles and fashions as indicators of profound psychological changes.78

Take, for example, the use o f astrology. In a little-known article published in a Belgian magazine in the early 50s, Gombrich discussed a carnival song written by Lorenzo the Magnificent and argued that astrology offered a range o f metaphors which could be deployed to characterize human behav­ ior: astrology does not so much explain joviality as create it. The same remark could be applied to the contemporary categories o f “ introverts” and “extroverts,” “ schizophrenics” and “neurotics” ; they do not so much explain behaviour as create its presence out o f “ le chaos déconcertant du théâtre humain.” 79 It is interesting that zodiacal signs are still used today to charac­ terise rich personality traits rather than the poor terms o f “ introvert” and “extrovert” ; there is still an alchemy o f star signs at work. The use o f astrological terms as a rhetorical device invites the thought that there was a greater use o f rhetoric in Renaissance culture than might be commonly recognized. When Luther changed the date o f his birthday, to engage in debate over his horoscope, this was little more than a rhetorical ploy to be adopted in a war o f propaganda. And when Federico Gonzaga created a building in the rustic mode it was out o f a recognition o f the tone which it struck as a matter o f stylishness.80 Stylish behaviour is not a prerogative o f contem porary life and there were still the same possibilities for strategic effect.81

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Consider Francesco Sassetti’s stylish adoption o f Fortuna for his personal

impresa. This should not be taken to mean that in his mercantile affairs he would never plan anything, as everything was in the lap o f the gods anyway.

“Fortuna ’ was simply available for use when things went wrong, like the expression “ Sod’s Law” is today; it is a practical w rite-off device. The humanists’ recovery and refinements o f classical literature made available an extended and alternative language to describe human behavior. But it would be a great mistake to extrapolate from the use o f that language to the existence o f a mentalité. In a radio discussion with Gombrich in 1973, the historian Peter Burke made the suggestion that there was a need for the concept o f “ mentality” to explain cultural differences. Gombrich replied: I would not deny that “m entality” is a useful term, b ut I think that it is also true that people change their mentalities. I am rather attracted by the sociological concept of role-playing in this respect. If you get into another group you may feel th at your m entality is changing: let us say, as an extreme example, the Army, or another group where everybody seems to act and to think and to speak in a different way, and this reacts back on your own responses to a surprising degree. Language is the best guide to m entality in this way. ... The role is not the person, and we are all many persons. Years ago I took part in experiments about the interpretation of facial expressions in news photographs. This turned out to be almost impossible unless you were also given the context: b u t there was an exception. You easily recognised the expression which was “p ut on” to proclaim a public role— as when a Nazi sto rm -troop er modelled his bearing on his Führer. M em bership o f such a m ovement stamps a m an m uch m ore than, say, m em bership o f a ping-pong club.82 [my emphasis]

This is a very important factor to take into account when attempting the analyse the behaviour and beliefs o f quattrocento Florentines. To what extent did the fashion for literature alV antica have an effect on their beliefs and behavior? There can be little doubt that new translations played a role in the resur­ gence o f interest in platonism, for example. But if we bear in mind that pla­ tonism played an extremely important role in creating the foundations o f Christian theology it is hard to believe that the new platonists, o f the

Theologica Platonica , were pagans; they were Christian platonists with a

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developed sense o f what it was to be a platonist. The spread o f knowledge o f ancient artistic ideals, through Pliny and the rhetoricians, helped create a linguistic climate for the praise o f contemporary art but as Baxandall, and Gombrich before him, demonstrated, this could be quite consistent with a variety o f artistic styles. In a sense the humanist writers did not know what a classic style might be until after it had been created; its creation might be called retrodiction. What was really important, as Gombrich has demon­ strated, was a belief in the value o f Art with a capital “A.” Interests in magic and astrology have been called in as witness to the resurgence o f paganism but both predated the quattrocento and both can be located in the Christian middle ages. O f course Marsilio Ficino cast horo­ scopes and wrote on the impressive effects o f magic but he also published

Disputatio Contra ludicium Astrologorum , which was an attack on the prac­ tice o f astrology. In a letter to Francesco Ippoliti, Count o f Gazzoldo, he wrote: These astrologers, in declaring that every single thing is necessarily brought to pass by the stars, are themselves involved in three highly pernicious errors. For, insofar as they are able, they take away from God, Almighty and Supreme, his own providence and his absolute sovereignty over the universe. Next they deny the justice of the Angels; ... Lastly, they take away from m en their free will and deprive them of all peace of mind, for it seems to the astrologers that men, no less than beasts are driven hither and thither.83

Marsilio Ficino could change his mind to suit the occasion. Casting horo­ scopes was not inconsistent with the rejection o f astrology; it was all a matter o f context. It would be beyond the purpose o f this contribution to a collection of essays on Warburg to discuss the logics o f role play and pre-scientific expla­ nations; such a discussion would start from Berger and Luckmann’s The

Social Construction o f Reality84 and Dan Sperber’s Rethinking Symbolism and On Anthropological Knowledge.85 It is important to point out to the fact that anthropology, as a discipline o f understanding and self-understanding, has moved on since Warburg’s day. It is also important to add that the world has changed since Warburg visited the Pueblo Indians: multi-cultural sensitivity has lead to an awareness o f the process o f demonization. Cultural difference is not the same as irrationality and one cannot help but feel that Warburg’s

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own pathological condition shaped his views on paganism:86 paganism was not pagan in his sense. A history which thinks o f artistic styles as defining characteristics o f m en­

talités is likely to take those mentalités to be incommensurable, thus it is likely to adopt a position of extreme historical relativism. With such an atti­ tude the existence o f evidence and the use o f analysis is irrelevant because one commentator’s opinion is just as legitimate as another’s. At which point it is better to give up the historical project altogether than indulge in the vanity o f self-indulgence. While recognizing the fact that cultures offer different ways o f articulat­ ing human experience, Gombrich argued that there are common features o f human life and experience.87 Thus it is possible to recognize the articulation o f difference and it is also possible to achieve translation between languages, while at the same time recognising deviances in formation, accentuation or range. Cultures are hardly closed systems: if they were there would be no point in trying to achieve historical understanding. And the mere use o f a foreign language would be an act o f self-alienation. Given the difficulties o f understanding Warburg’s own thought we should not underestimate the difficulties in explaining the beliefs and values o f quattrocento Florentines. But we will not find an easy route through empathetic reaction to their images, whether they be the images which they painted for themselves or those “ images” which they presented for their contemporaries. Warburg’s ultimate achievement lies in his having raised the kinds o f questions which he did about relations between visual imagery and culture rather than the solutions that he gave to them, which are now dated in the light o f subsequent research into historical anthropology.

notes 1 W arburg, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, with a memoir on the history o f the library by F. Saxl, London, The W arburg Institute 1970, 322; henceforth this text will be referred to as Warburg. I w ould like to acknowledge a great personal debt to Sir Ernst for patiently putting up w ith my questions over m any years and giving me access to m anuscripts of his u n p u b lished material. Any faults in this essay are my own. 2 W arburg in Warburg, 307.

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3 E. H. Gombrich, Address to the Association of Art Historians, 1975, ms. 4 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, “Classical M ythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies, IV (1933), 229. 5 “Classical Mythology,” 274. 6 W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History, New York 1971,57. 7 “Thoughts on Erwin Panofsky’s First Years in Princeton,” in Irving Lavin (ed.), Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, Princeton 1995,354. 8 Cf. Creighton Gilbert, Renaissance Art, New York 1970, xvi: One of the most effective [methods and schools of art history] (and one o f the few to have been somewhat self-analytical) is iconology— or the Warburg method, after its promulgator. ... This method in simple essence is to study the work o f art as a carrier of the interests of its culture and its social myths. Iconologists show and define the atti­ tudes in a work of art by analyzing its technique, its design and style, and most obvi­ ously its subject matter, or iconography, and further those details in which this work varies from earlier and later presentations o f the same subject matter. This last has been the most triumphant and illuminating Warburg technique ...

9 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, New York 1967,15. 10 G om brich in Warburg, 312-3. 11 Saxl in Warburg, 337. 12 David Watkin, The Rise o f Architectural History, London 1980. Note also the tenor o f the article by John Onians, “Art History, Kunstgeschichte and Historia,” originally published in A rt History 1(2), 1978, reprinted in Eric Fernie (ed.), A rt History and its Methods: a critical anthology, London 1995. 13 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford 1983, 29. 14 Kenneth Clark, Another Part o f the Wood, London 1974, 177. Constable was a sufficiently m inor figure not to even w arrant m ention in Udo K ultermann’s very catholic book The History of the History o f A rt History, New York 1993; translation of Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte, 1966. 15 Q uoted in David Watkin, The Rise o f Architectural History, London 1983,147-8. 16 E. H. Gombrich, “W arburg Institute: A Personal Memoir,” The A rt Newspaper, 2 , November 1990,9. 17 Ibid. 18 The exhibition was published in book form in 1948 as F. Saxl and R. Wittkower, British A rt and the Mediterranean, Oxford 1949; reprinted 1969. 19 Kenneth Clark, Another Part o f the Wood, London 1974,189-90. 20 Q uoted from Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making o f a Connoisseur, Cambridge Mass. 1981, 209. 21 Aby W arburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,” in Gert Schiff (ed), German Essays on A rt History, New York 1988, 252.

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22 Q uoted in E. H. Gombrich, “Kenneth Clark’s ‘Piero della Francesca,” in Reflections on the History o f A rt (ed. Richard Woodfield), Oxford 1987,57. 23 W arburg in Schiff, 252-3. 24 Warburg, 2. 25 This is the title u nd er which it is generally know n. The full bibliographical description is: A. [by] W arburg, Gesammelte Schriften, hrsg. von der Bibliothek W arburg,

Bd.

I

u nd

II:

Die

E rneuerung

der

heidnischen

Antike.

Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitràge zur Geschichte der europàischen Renaissance. M it einem Anhang unverôffentlichter Zusàtze. U nter M itarbeit von Fritz Rougemont, hrsg. von G ertrud Bing, Leipzig-Berlin 1932. 26 Saxl in Warburg, 336. 27 Saxl wrote a m em oir on the history of the library, published by G om brich as part of Aby Warburg: A n Intellectual Biography, London 1970 and the Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes published “A. M. W arburg” by G ertrud Bing in 1965 (28), 299-313. 28 Bing, op. cit., 302. 29 Gom brich in Warburg, 4. 30 Gom brich in Warburg, 307. 31 For a detailed study o f Lam precht see Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856- 1915), New Jersey 1993. Chickering has some very interesting and pertinent things to say about the study of cultural history in the later part of the nineteenth century, 87-93. 32 “W ertproblem e u n d m ittelalterliche Kunst,” Kritische Berichte; translated as “Achievement in Medieval Art,” Meditations on a Hobby Horse, London 1963. 33 “Art and Scholarship,” Meditations, 108. 34 Warburg, 319. 35 W arburg in Warburg, 148. 36 W arburg in Warburg, 149. 37 W arburg in Warburg, 157. 38 Q uoted by G om brich in Warburg, 65. 39 W arburg in Warburg, 151-2. 40 Gom brich in Warburg, 150. 41 W arburg in Warburg, 160. 42 G om brich in Warburg, 162. 43 W arburg in Warburg, 163. 44 Gom brich in Warburg, 164-5. 45 W arburg in Warburg, 169. 46 Gom brich in Warburg, 175-6. 47 G om brich in Warburg, 183.

warburg's "method"

48 G om brich in Warburg, 180. 49 G om brich in Warburg, 185. 50 Preface to the 2nd edition of Warburg, Oxford 1986, viii. 51 W arburg in Gombrich, Warburg, 61. 52 Gombrich, Warburg, 311. 53 Gombrich, Warburg, 308. 54 See E H Gombrich, “Supply and D em and in the History o f A rt” in Topics o f our Time, London 1991. 55 G ombrich in Warburg, 311. 56 G om brich in Warburg, 312. 57 G om brich in Warburg, 312. 58 Q uoted in Gombrich, Warburg, 63. 59 Jfcic/. 60 My words are intended to draw a distinction between an image which is an eyewitness recreation of an event as opposed to symbolic concrétisations o f imaginatively present objects. In “Tobias and the Angel,” Symbolic Images, London 1972 G om brich argued th at Tobias was present in the picture as the Archangel Raphael’s ^identifying attribute, thus the picture is truly a symbolic image. In “Evolution in the Arts: The Altar Painting, itsAncestry and Progess” in Evolution and its Influence (ed. A Grafen, London 1989,107-25) he similarly argues that the Renaissance witnessed the transition from iconic images of collections of saints to images in which their relationship is narratively imagined. In “Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura and the Nature of its Symbolism” (reprinted in Richard Woodfield (ed.), The Essential Gombrich) he stresses the medieval precedents o f the images and refuses to recognise The School o f Athens as a bunch of philosophers discussing each others’ interests, as Edgar W ind would have done. 61 Ellen Rosand “Music and Iconology” in Irving Lavin, Meaning in the Visual Arts: View from the Outside, 257. 62 Republished in Norm and Form, London 1966. 63 Michael Baxandall developed this aperçu in Giotto and the Orators: H um anist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition 1350- 1450, Oxford 1971. 64 “Apollonio di Giovanni,” 19. 65 “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolism of his circle,” republished in Symbolic Images, London 1972,62. 66 “Mythologies,” 63. 67 “Mythologies,” 63. 68 Ibid, 63-4. 69 Translation given to me by Ernst G om brich in a personal discussion.

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70 W arburg “H eidnisch-antike Weissagung in W ort u n d Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” Gesammelte Schriften, II, 491, quoted in translation in Jan Bialostocki, Dürer and his critics, Baden-Baden 1986,333. 71 “The style alV antica: Im itation and Assimilation,” Norm and Form, 128. 72 Gom brich in Warburg, 308. 73 “D ürer und die italienische Antike,” Gesammelte Schriften, II, 443-9 translated in Bialostocki, 340. 74 Plastics (in Second Characters, ed. Benjamin Rand, Cambridge 1914), 105. This is a classicist commonplace; for a discussion of its significance see Μ. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, New York 1958, chapter IX. 75 Plastics, 103-4. 76 Gom brich in Warburg, 308. 77 See particularly G om brich’s essays “The Renaissance C onception o f Artistic Progress and its Consequences” and “The Early Medici as Patrons of A rt” in Norm and Form. 78 Ibid, 389. 79 “L’influence des astres sur la culture de la Renaissance,” Les Beaux Arts: hebdomaire d ’ information artistique, special edition: L’Europe Humaniste, Mercredi 15 Decembre 1954,7. 80 See “A rchitecture and Rhetoric in Giulio R om ano’s Palazzo del T è” in The Essential Gombrich. 81 Observers o f contem porary life m ust be aware of the disjunctures between routine existence and stylish pose. There is a current Volkswagen advertisement which trades on this theme: you get more than you see, the hardcase bouncer has a sensitive soul and the bespectacled m atron has a lust for chocolate and sex. 82 “Ernst G om brich discusses the concept of cultural history with Peter Burke,” The Listener, 27 December 1973, 881-2. The article is w orth reading in full, particularly for G om brich’s critique o f a straightforw ardly functionalist anthropological approach to visual imagery. Another way, my way, of putting his point is to say that people operate across a wide variety of discursively em bodied fronts. A refinem ent is to suggest that each one of these discourses operates with what Dan Sperber has called encyclopedic knowledge. One of the characteristics of hum anist writing was com bination o f stylishness with eclecticism, to the point o f a lack of recognition o f the content o f what is being said; as an instance of this read “Marsilio Ficino oratio de laudibus philosophiae” translated in The Letters o f Marsilio Ficino, volume 3, London 1981, 18-21. G om brich him self came to this realisation after w riting ^ leones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in N eo-Platonic T hought,” Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XI, 1948,163-92; see the revision in Symbolic Images, London

WARBURG'S "METHOD"

1972 and then his devastating critique of Panofsky in “Idea in the Theory of Art: Philosophy or Rhetoric?,” Idea, Colloquio Internationale, Roma 5-7 Jennaio 1989, ed. M. Fattori e M. L. Bionilli (Lessico Intellettuale Europeo LI). 83 Letter 37, in Letters, 75. 84 H arm ondsw orth 1967. Still useful and a m uch misrepresented work. 85 Cambridge 1988 & 1994. 86 O n this subject see “Psychohistorie im Zeichen Saturns: Aby W arburg s Denksystem un d die m oderne Kulturgeschichte” by Bernd Roeck in Wolfgang Hardtwig u nd H ans-Ulrich Wehler, Kulturgeschichte Heute, Gottingen 1996. 87 G om brich deals with this subject at length in “Relativism in the Humanities: The Debate about H um an N ature” republished in Topics.

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