Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural HistoryAuthor(s): Michael Diers, Thomas Girst and Dorothea von MoltkeReviewed work(s):Source: New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring - Summer,1995), pp. 59-73Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488533 .Accessed: 03/07/2012 14:07

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Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History

Michael Diers

Almost forgotten for decades, above all in Germany, the works of the art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) have become topical again in an exceptional way far beyond the confines of his own field. This is due to the specific claim and program of Warburg's scholarship rather than to the output of his factual research. As Jacob Burckhardt's succes- sor and a student of the historian Karl Lamprecht, the Hamburg scholar's entire work is emphatically devoted to cultural-historical [kul- turhistorisch] research. The current relevance of the so-called Warburg method is founded precisely upon this interdisciplinary, problem-ori- ented, and integrative determination of the tasks in his field.

Recourse to a scientific tradition of the twenties has made possible a present which discusses the term culture anew, which contemplates a revision of the concept of cultural history, and for which cultural sci- ence [Kulturwissenschaft] as model becomes interesting again in terms of self-understanding. Since about 1980, there has been much discus- sion, particularly in Germany,' about an updated and advanced concept of cultural science, a reflection which has already been embodied in the founding of numerous institutions. A process of integration of the sciences, which was programmatic for Warburg even in his days, is at issue once again, a process which, as Walter Benjamin - who was

1. Such as, for example, the "Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut" at the Wissen- schaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen in Essen, the "Zentrum zur Erforschung der friihen Neuzeit - Renaissance-Institut" at the University of Frankfurt/Main, the "Institut flir Kul- turwissenschaften" in Leipzig, or the Fachbereich Kulturwissenschaften at the Humboldt- University in Berlin, all of which are foundations or re-foundations of the past few years.

59

60 Warburg and Cultural History

engaged with the Warburg School - put it in 1928, "increasingly takes down the dividing walls between the disciplines, characteristic of the concept of the sciences of the last century" in order, for instance, to "promote an analysis of the work of art which recognizes in it an inte- gral expression of the religious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of an epoch which can in no way be limited in terms of sub- ject areas."2 This passage could have been borrowed from Warburg's plea at the end of his famous lecture in Rome, 1912, on the astrological Renaissance frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia, in which he insisted on a "methodological extension of the boundaries of our studies of art in terms of both content and geographic scope."3 He fulfilled this exten- sion of boundaries in an exemplary fashion in his published and unpub- lished writings as well as in the organization of his library which also served as a research institute.

One of the central terms that characterizes the current interdisciplinary discourse and determines the present discussion in numerous branches of the humanities is "cultural memory" [kulturelle Erinnerung].4 Since the complex of problems conjured up by this term is, not only for the his- tory of art, "forever bound up with the life-work of Aby Warburg,"5 he is considered one of the prominent exponents of the history of forms and functions of art as an organum of "remembrance" [Eingedenken]. Through his method as well as his library, the "Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg" - the tradition of which has been continued at the Warburg Institute in London ever since Warburg was forced to emigrate in 1933 - Warburg devoted himself to the inquiry into the memory of images. It is thanks to this emphasis that his writings have remained topi- cal or rather have become so once again after having been forgotten for a long time. By looking carefully at the history of his work's critical reception, it becomes clear how much the present owes to the work of the art-historian Warburg and his concept of cultural science.

2. Walter Benjamin, "Lebenslauf III," Gesammelte Schriften vol. 6 (Frankfurt/ Main, Suhrkamp, 1972) 218. All quoted material translated from the German by NGC.

3. Aby Warburg, "Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schi- fanoja zu Ferrara," Gesammelte Schriften vol.2 (Leipzig/Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932) 478.

4. Introduction to Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erin- nerung, eds. A. Assmann and D. Harth (Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1991).

5. Wolfgang Kemp, "Memoria, Bilderzahlung und der mittelalterliche esprit de syst6me," Poetik und Hermaneutik 15 (1993):264.

Michael Diers 61

Although Warburg's collected works were published at the beginning of 1933, they were hardly distributed at the time, and in National Socialist Germany his writings achieved only an extremely limited effect. The rediscovery of and renewed interest in Warburg results (1) from the unusually widespread reception of Benjamin's writings during the second half of the sixties (and continuing since then) and (2) from the continuation of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which was able to resume its work in Germany as early as 1951.

There have not been any efforts at "repatriating" the Warburg Institute which was integrated into London University in 1944 - they most likely would have failed in any case, and not only for legal reasons. Efforts to call Erwin Panofsky - then at Princeton - back to his old chair at Hamburg failed not least because of their half-heartedness. Thus a continuation of the Warburg tradition, even in the broadest sense, in Hamburg or elsewhere in Germany was out of the question for the foreseeable future. It took almost two decades after the war before the name Warburg and with it the research tradition of his library gradu- ally became a perceptible part of art-historical discourse once again. The change came about at first through rather dutifully held commemo- rations and speeches, then, however, through various scholarly contribu- tions such as William Heckscher's at the International Congress for Art History in Bonn, 1964;6 an article by Erik Forssmann in 1966 written for the Zeitschrift fir

,Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft;7 and

an essay by the historian Carlo Ginzburg which was published in Italy the same year,8 all of which together had a lasting impact.

Yet it might also be noted that the majority of the articles were neither written in Germany, nor, for that matter, by full-fledged art historians. Fur- thermore, they were published in quite remote places and dealt predomi- nantly with iconology, the theory of cultural-scientific analysis of images. Formally, this theory seemed closely associated with Warburg's research,

6. The German translation of William Heckscher's "The Genesis of Iconology" can be found in Ikonographie und Ikonologie, ed. E. Kaemmerling (Cologne: DuMont, 1984) 112ff.

7. Erik Forssmann, "Ikonologie und allgemeine Kunstgeschichte," Zeitschrift fir Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11 (1966): 132-69.

8. Carlo Ginzburg, "Da A. Warburg a E. H. Gombrich. Note su un problema di metodo," Studi Medioevali III (1966): 1015-65.

62 Warburg and Cultural History

although in fact it is only one of its aspects. The career of iconology as a method of art history and its eventual establishment as "international style"g was first and foremost based on Panofsky's studies and not, or less so, on a rereading of Warburg's writings which, in their 1932 dou- ble-volume edition, were either catalogued in libraries or to be found in second-hand bookshops - a situation which the reprint of 1969 did not essentially change. While eventually attaining to the status of "para- digmatic obligatoriness" [paradigmatische Verbindlichkeit], iconology as a model of interpretation turned out to be accordingly one-sided and in its adaptation seemed rather formulaic and empty.10 Panofsky already distanced himself from Warburg's demand for an "art-historical cultural science" and his followers departed from this idea even fur-

ther.11 In terms of their power of abstraction, Panofsky's exemplarily systematical and theoretical explications of the term "iconology" sur- pass Warburg's definition. The latter's use of the term was almost entirely based on concrete applications and practical usage.

This distance becomes evident when one looks back to 1927, the year in which Panofsky published his article on "Problems of Art History" in which he states, among other things, that - with regard to the question of methodology - the near future belongs to those examinations "with a narrowly circumscribed but preferably universal method," a method "which attempts to examine a specific single phenomenon from as many sides as possible and to reveal its premises (not only temporally speaking) to as great an extent as possible."l12 Seconding Panofsky, as it were, Warburg made the field take note: "Not until art history can show . . . that it sees the work of art in a few more dimensions than it has done so far will our activity again attract the interest of scholars and of the general public."13 This almost identical sounding demand for a diverse method that would take into account numerous dimensions and aspects of a work of art, this call for a variety of methods, was shared

9. Martin Wamke, "Salvatore Settis: La 'Tempesta' Interpretata," Kritische Ber- ichte 7.2/3 (1979): 41.

10. Andreas Beyer, "78 Jahre danach - Bemerkungen zur Geistes-Gegenwart der Ikonologie," Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions, eds. H. Bredekamp, M. Diers, and Ch. Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora, 1990) 269.

11. This is also Warburg's official term for his "discipline," ef. Verzeichnis der Vor- lesungen der Hamburgischen Universitditfi'r das Sommersemester 1928, 79.

12. Erwin Panofsky, "Probleme der Kunstgeschichte," IDEA 7 (1988): 12. 13. Warburg in a letter to Jacques Mesni. Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. Eine

intellektuelle Biographie (Frankfurt/Main, Europaiische Verlagsansstalt, 1981) 430.

Michael Diers 63

by both representatives of the "Hamburg School." But in the later writ- ings of Panofsky and his successors, the multifaceted nature of the argu- ments is sacrificed in favor of a form of intellectual history, so that under the keyword "iconology" two separate methods could be distin- guished, each leading to different results. Warburg's research, in con- trast to Panofsky's views, can be termed decidedly cultural-historic.

At issue here is not a terminological quarrel, nor, for that matter, one of authorship or patrimony. What is important is rather the starting point for the rediscovery of Warburg at the end of the sixties and in the following decade. While being far from undisputed, Panofskyian iconol- ogy, albeit in a somewhat corrupted form, could readily be integrated into the traditional spectrum of methodologies in art history, and finally could succeed - together with stylistic and formal analysis - as a complementary variant, focusing on the interpretation of contents. Yet in this form, it only had limited value as a self-proclaimed critical sci- ence, limited insofar as it dealt primarily (and in the eyes of the critics of this method exclusively) with questions of meaning and (image-)con- tent, in short, less with representation than with what was represented. And after 1968, the epithet "critical," in art history as well as in neigh- boring disciplines such as history and German studies, developed in no time into a hallmark of a strict opposition, aligned against the conven- tional "ruling" science and the "bourgeois" notion of the discipline. This attribute was derived as a philosophical and political term from the Frankfurt School's critique of society and ideology and found its agenda in Critical Theory, founded by Horkheimer in the thirties and continued by Adorno and later especially by Habermas.

Looking back to traditional as well as forward to future science, ide- ology critique, which was considered materialist in the early seventies, now served as a catalyst. Thus, a younger generation of art historians, too, successfully staged an insurrection in hallways, lecture halls, and seminars, raising objection, demanding a say, and staking their claim against their professors and the teaching body.

This claim was officially voiced for the first time at the XII German Congress of Art Historians in Cologne, 1970, and was taken up in a sec- tion called "The Work of Art between Science and Word-View" led by Martin Wamke.14 This section was dominated by younger art historians

14. The contributions were published in Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung, ed. M. Warnke (Giitersloh: Bertelsman, 1970).

64 Warburg and Cultural History

who furthered the demand for a general opening up of their discipline by criticizing its self-portrayal. On the one hand, they examined tradi- tional themes and means of interpretation by critically looking at their ideological content and the epistemological interest manifested therein, while on the other hand introducing new themes and theories, particu- larly those of Walter Benjamin.

If not before, then certainly with this section of the conference, which adopted the critique of science as its motto, the Frankfurt School made its entrance into art history before the incumbent public of experts. The very title of the section is reminiscent of Walter Ben- jamin's much discussed study of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan- ical Reproduction. It was he who was presented as a highly contemporary guide - Warburg probably would have said a "Pfad- finder" [pathfinder]15 - for a different, materialist art history.

The "Hamburg School" was, to stay with the metaphor, still or once again on its way to being a recognized part of German art history. Some of the contributions to the conference were published in the same year in a book with the title of the section mentioned above, which also documented the controversial discussions. For leftist art historians, this publication became somewhat of an alternative textbook - for the time being, however, Warburg was mentioned only in a footnote.

One important contribution to the section could not be included in the volume but was published seperately one year later: Leopold D. Ettlinger's paper on Art History as History.1 Considered from the standpoint of a reconstruction of the Hamburg School, his treatise doubtlessly represents an essential building block. It is certainly no coincidence that an emigrant art historian of the older generation - who is closely linked to the Warburg School and, as a scholar, to the Warburg Institute in London - took up the task of decisive and effec- tive recollection. Taking his cue from Warburg's writings, Ettlinger develops "methodological reflections"l17 in his treatise, with the ques- tion of the "original function" of a work of art and its historical con- text at the center of his thoughts.

15. Warburg, vol. 1, 93. 16. Leopold Ettlinger, "Kunstgeschichte als Geschichte," Jahrbuch der Hamburger

Kunstsammlungen vol.16 (1971): 7-19. Expanded version in Aby Warburg. Ausgewdhlte Schriften und Wiirdigungen, ed. D. Wuttke (Baden-Baden: v. Koerner, 1980) 499-513.

17. Warnke, Das Kunstwerk 11.

Michael Diers 65

The role of iconographic research can be understood only if one does not take it to be a scholarly answer to charades invented in the past. Instead, it must be understood as an attempt to comprehend the work of art in all its manifestations as a product of the historical circum- stances under which it arose.18

Insisting on the legacy of Warburg (and Panofsky), the author main- tained that iconology should once again be equipped with those theoret- ical foundations that were lost in the course of history - particularly of Germany's (academic) history. In his article, Ettlinger wanted to

give Warburg ample consideration so as to show that his iconological method is precisely not just an explanation of content ... , but rather an encompassing examination of the function of the work of art, both in its immediate historical context and within a tradition. It should moreover become ... clear that for Warburg art derives from a collab- oration among individuals and thus is a symbol that does not allow for the separation of form and content.19

Warburg's understanding of the term "symbol" as linking form and con- tent inseparably together was directed against the objections of iconol- ogy-opponents who accused this method of neglecting precisely the aspects of form. Ettlinger's definition of art as "communication" [Mit- teilung] through which the inherent function of a work of art is to be deciphered20 in order to clarify that art history as "part of social his- tory" must never be an autonomous field existing ouside of common historical, social, or economic conditions.

With his lecture, Ettlinger not only brought Warburg back to the attention of art historians, but moreover reminded them of the latter's ethos and understanding of art history. It was realized that Warburg's demand remained valid and had not yet been met. Whoever wished to examine the question of topicality was referred to Warburg's writings further. This reading could soon be supplemented by Ernst H. Gom- brich's "intellectual biography" about the Hamburg scholar which was published in London and soon became a standard work providing the reader with extensive and previously unpublished material.21

18. Ettlinger 507. 19. Ettlinger 510. (Emphasis mine - M. D.). 20. Ettlinger 512. 21. Gombrich, first published as Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography (London:

The Warburg Institute, 1970).

66 Warburg and Cultural History

Ettlinger's appeal (as well as Gombrich's tribute to Warburg) did not go unnoticed; a look at the discussions within the art history depart- ments of the early seventies makes clear the gradual reintroduction of Warburgian thought. Along with the art theorist Walter Benjamin - whose name became ubiquitous to an incomparably greater degree, due not least to the continuous publications of his works - Warburg as an historian of culture and of the arts gradually became visible again in Germany during the seventies. The field of art and cultural history, which at the time was seeking to reorient itself, soon recognized War- burg as an important progenitor.

In the early seventies, the extensive list of propostions by the Warburg- ian research program had to appear as a demanding counter-program to the then common specialization of that field. Warburg's program included the demand that art history be an historical science ("art history must remain a history"22); the demand for the integration of the subject into a broader context of a history of civilization, aimed at interdiscipli- nary research ("art-historical cultural science"); for expansion of the field of studies ("in terms of content and geography"), which would then include all visual data along with the so-called "high" arts, extend- ing also to the low, small, and trivial art forms. Furthermore, Warburg- ian research called for a history of visual medias' use of images ("historians of the image"23) and a close analysis of its constantly chang- ing historical function. Also part of the Warburgian program was a prob- lem-oriented history of art, that is, a discipline starting out from over- arching questions and transcending the established canon of master- pieces only, which allegedly justify the attention they receive in and of themselves. Warburg had done the groundwork for the newly develop- ing fields of study concerning society, politics, culture, theory of the media, (visual) communications, and the culture industry, all of which were evolving not least as a result of the turn to critical theory. With his historical studies, Warburg had done much preliminary work in these areas: a vast stock of paradigmatic research ready to be called upon.

22. Warburg's letter to Karl Koetschau, February 19, 1906, Briefkopier-Buch 1.184 (London: The Warburg Institute).

23. Cf. Warburg's diary entry of February 12, 1917, Tagebuch 3.1 (London: The Warburg Institue): 885.

Michael Diers 67

Iconology, this could be learned from Warburg, could not be reduced to the scholarly deciphering of images or to iconographical research of motifs; it also had to embrace socio-historical and socio-psychological, social and political questions. Art did not merely develop at the base and didn't only produce effects within a historically specific order, but was itself part of the system and represented it - albeit only through mediations. The worldview of the Renaissance societies in Florence, Bruges, or Nuremburg, for example, manifested themselves in their "sense of reality,"24 in their faith and superstitions, in their "spiritual politics" [Geistespolitik],25 as well as in their daily trade or in their fashion and literature. To Warburg, a work of art and its documented functionalization in, for instance, the fields of religion, politics, and business was an eloquent expression of all these aspects. According to Warburg's essays, the worldview of a society can be determined via iconology. Thus it became necessary to examine closely the collection or lists of commissioned art works of a Florentine banker, in order to reconnect art with the surrounding culture and historical reality.

In method and program, Warburg's studies recommended themselves to a highly critical art historical practice, mainly because of the ambitious and straightforward manner of his writings. Characterized as a "living method"26 - a term that tries to grasp the curious correspondence of work and biography - this kind of research must deny any kind of superficial examination of random subject matter. Warburg's systematic inquiry into "the significance of the influence of heathen antiquity on the European mentality"27 is rooted in the idea of enlightenment or, to be more specific, in a concern with the endangering of enlightenment and the betrayal of "Sophrosyne," which is equivalent to the loss of the "feel- ing of detachment between the subject and the object" and the relapse of man into a "mythically fearful orientation." The arts, which can be regarded especially as an inventory of the emotions of a given epoch, reveal this danger posed to humankind. The visual symbols which are transmitted by the history of art carry with them the feelings of a certain age and through them we can discern the form of and stage in the strug- gle for reason. Works of art, to Warburg, are products of a continuous

24. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften vol.1, 188. 25. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften vol.2, 490. 26. Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution. Studien zur Geschichte einer

Disziplin (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979) 25. 27. Warburg, Ausgewaihlte Schriften 308.

68 Warburg and Cultural History

process of balancing, they are "products of the inevitable dialectic between the expressive energies of a distant past and the rational orienta- tions of the present."28 The artist, according to Warburg, should

allow the heritage of passionate (that is, sensual) experience stored in memory-form to take its effect upon him ... and should give it expres- sive form in the act of artistic reflection.... The aesthetic object there- fore appears as the constant return and humanization of myth in no longer mythical times.29

Warburg defines culture as the historical sum of all efforts made by man to overcome his fear, which tries to hold him captive again and again. The act of liberation from irrationality, pagan stupidity, and the rule of desire, is carried out in a slow process of humanization, a pro- cess which is nevertheless subject to setbacks at any given moment. In that respect Warburg describes the reserves of transmitted cultural pos- sessions as "humanity's treasure of suffering" [Leidschatz] which is wait- ing to be transformed into human porperty. "Humanity's stores of suffering become the possessions of the humane."30 This "Leidschatz des Menschen" is waiting to be transformed into humane property.

The "to and fro" of humankind between affect and rationality, between myth and logos, is one of the central theoretical figures of a Warburgian "dialectics of enlightenment." Culture does not stand for barbarism over- come once and for all by progress; instead, it is only the inseperable reverse of that barbarism. Warburg's personal experiences in World War I showed him that enlightenment can revert to mythology at any time. As an historian, Warburg sought explanations for these experiences in his study on "Prophecy of Pagan Antiquity in Word and Image in Luther's Times."31

Up until today, after a quarter of a century of critical reception of his work, the examination of Warburg's research has followed the path of

28. Bernhard Buschendorf, "'War ein sehr tiichtiges gegenseitiges F6rdem:' Edgar Wind und Aby Warburg," IDEA 4 (1985): 187.

29. Buschendorf 187. 30. Warburg notebook (1928), quoted in Gombrich 339. Cf. also M. Warnke, "'Der

Leidschatz der Menschheit wird humaner Besitz,'" Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Ober Aby Warburg, eds. W. Hofmann, G. Syamken, and M. Warnke (Frankfurt/Main: Europtiische Velagsanstalt, 1980) 113ff.

31. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 487ff.

Michael Diers 69

discussing and continuing his theses. Very rarely has the example of text-exegesis been followed, this being a rather sterile approach which nevertheless could have suggested itself in dealing with a "master of modem art history."32 The factual and positivistic results of his studies had already been taken up by the art history of the twenties and in the meantime have in many ways been revised and superseded. But the reception history of the Warburgian research program is based neither on the wealth of data gained for the history of art nor on his positivistic approach, but rather on his expansion of the notion of "art" within the boundaries of cultural history as he developed and practiced it. Warburg started off as an art historian but even before the turn of the century had become estranged from what was traditional history of art at that time. Since he understood his subject as a truly historical discipline, the then common stylistic critique or formal analysis appeared inadequate to him. Works of art, no matter how elaborate and aesthetically dignified they might be, were primarily regarded by Warburg as images which had to be put alongside other kinds of images and documents and which had to be considered as historical evidence. In his classical essay about Warburg's "Concept of Kulturwissenschaften," Edgar writes :

The concept of pure artistic vision, which W6lfflin developed in reac- tion to Burckhardt is contrasted by Warburg with the concept of culture as a whole [Gesamtkultur], within which artistic vision fulfills a neces- sary function. However, to understand this function - so the argument continues - one should not dissociate it from its connection with the functions of other elements of that culture. One should rather ask the twofold question: what do these other cultural functions (religion, poetry, myth, and science, society and the state) mean for the pictorial imagination; and what does the image mean for these other functions . .. ? It was one of Warburg's basic convictions that any attempt to detach the image from its relation to religion and poetry, to cult and drama, is like cutting off its lifeblood. Those who, like him, see the image as being indissolubly bound up with culture as a whole must, if they wish to make an image that is no longer directly intelligible com- municate its meaning, go about it in a rather different way from those who subscribe to the notion of "pure vision" in the abstract sense. It is not just a matter of training the eye to follow and enjoy the formal ram- ifications of an unfamiliar linear style, but of resurrecting the original conceptions implied in a particular mode of vision from the obscurity into which they have fallen. The method used for achieving this can

32. Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, ed. H. Dilly (Berlin: Reimer, 1990).

70 Warburg and Cultural History

only be an indirect one. One must study all kinds of documents which methodical historical criticism can connect with the image in question and prove by circumstantial evidence that a whole complex of concep- tions, which must be established individually, has contributed to the formation of the image.33

To Warburg, this process becomes a "conceptually guided process of recollection" which puts him alongside those who keep the "'experi- ence' of the past" alive:

Warburg was convinced that in his own work, when he was reflecting upon the images he analyses, he was fulfilling an analogous function to that of pictorial memory when, under the compulsive urge to express itself, the mind spontaneously synthesizes images analogous to the rec- ollection of pre-existing forms. The word MNHMOZYNH, which Warburg had inscribed above the entrance to his research institute, is to be understood in this double sense: as a reminder to the scholar that in interpreting the works of the past he is acting as trustee of a repository of human experience, but at the same time as a reminder that this expe- rience is itself an object of research, that it requires us to use historical material to investigate the way in which "social memory" functions."34

Wind's remarks which are quoted here at length, paraphrase Warburg's ideas, which were never systematically carried out in his works; from the viewpoint of a colleague and friend35 closely associated with the founder of the Warburg library during his last years, they provide a superb summary of the thoughts that Warburg - who truly cannot be called a great theorist - expounded in a scattered way throughout his works as well as a summary of the way in which he presented them in regard to their application to the various fields of his studies, especially those which were dedicated to the European Renaissance and to the continuation of pictorial conceptions in antiquity.

Warburg regarded it as his task to

examine the historical facts of tradition, to reveal the paths this tradi- tion followed in as multifaceted a way as possible. Then, however, it becomes necessary to draw conclusions regarding the function of

33. Edgar Wind, "Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung fiir die Asthetik," Zeitschrift fir Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25 (1931), here quoted from the reproduction in Wuttke 450f.

34. Wuttke 406f. 35. Cf. Buschendorf.

Michael Diers 71

humanity's social memory from such knowledge: What is it in the nature of the forms established in antiquity that allows them to survive? What causes the 'renaissance' of antiquity in a certain period while other epochs - with the same heritage of images - do not convert that heritage into a living possesion?36

To Fritz Saxl, Warburg's assistant and later head of the Warburg Library, the image has to play an essential role within the framework of cultural-scientific research in the Institute:

Warburg was led by his studies of Florentine cultural history to recog- nize, for instance, astrological sources of images as among the most important transmitters of the heritage of antiquity. And the library, too, collects the visual and textual documents of astrology as material for the study of the tranformation of mythologemes. The notion of a his- tory of images is thus expanded by considering the image not only for its artistic content, but moreover as a source in the history of religion and in disciplinary history.37

The artists of the Renaissance rediscovered the repertoire of classical forms. Warburg does not only see this as a stylistic or visually rhetori- cal element: the fact that one remembers and uses certain forms does not only stem from a historicizing or historicist orientation or fashion. It comes, rather, from the fact that the new sensibility [Lebensgefihl] just could not be expressed any longer through the ossified formal canon of the Middle Ages. The newly-awoken interest of the Renais- sance artists in the thematization of sensual passion caused them to return to the traditional repertoire of the "pathos formulas" of antiquity, though of course not without altering them characteristically. The forms live on, one remembers them, because the basic questions of ori- entation remain the same for humankind in all ages. In spiritual distress and in the struggle for level-headedness - "Sophrosyne" - it is "Mne- mosyne," the European memory of images, that provides older topoi. The main feature of artistic objectifications, which borrow from the "mnemonic energies" of collective recollection, is neither the limited, explicit, and instrumentalizing reference to the past nor a concept of memory, but rather those characteristics which indicate how fear as the

36. F. Saxl, "Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibiliothek Warburg in Hamburg," Fors- chungsinstitute. Ihre Geschichte, Organisation und Ziele, ed. L. Brauer, A. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and A. Meyer vol. 2 (Hamburg: De Gruyter, 1930) 355.

37. Saxl 356.

72 Warburg and Cultural History

decisive driving force can be overcome through contemplation. Works of art are products of these expressive energies; to Warburg they are retained as engrams in a collective memory, products of a process of balancing on the model of the present, which also hold "energies" for the future and are thus never completely done with historically.

Warburg pleaded strongly for the inclusion of art history in a broader context of cultural sciences which would deal with all kinds of sym- bolic forms of human modes of expression. Since this inevitably meant a dissolution of the conventional limits of this science, many scholars feared for their arduously gained autonomy; but a counter-movement developed simultaneously: the quest for a meeting and cooperation of all disciplines assembled under the same roof of cultural science. It goes without saying that the history of art - no matter how broad its scope - had to rely on neighboring disciplines in order to meet the new demands. The cultural-historical and cultural-scientific laboratory which Warburg established in 1903 as a library soon expanded into a research center. It was intended to function as a coordinating point and was developed as an organ for information and integration: historians and art historians alike, scholars of religon and philosophers, scholars of literature and musicologists, archeologists and classical philologists could find stimuli here and were free to publish their results or give lec- tures at the library. By the end of the twenties, the library contained around 60,000 volumes and included a huge collection of photographs comprising about 25,000 pictures. The books and other research materi- als were regarded as a collection with which to solve specific prob- lems. The library wanted to help with the

elaboration of a single problem ... in such a way that the selection, col- lection, and organization of the textual and visual material first permits the presentation of the problem it wishes to examine, and the results of the research which addresses this problem can then be published.38

As the reports of active members and the numerous studies submitted by the Warburg Library prove, the collected research material was able to fulfill these promises on a large scale.

Warburg himself never published anything in the volumes of "Stud- ies" and "Lectures at the Library." His own research in the last years of his life remained a fragment. He was working on the as yet unpublished

38. Saxl 355.

Michael Diers 73

"Mnemosyne" picture atlas,39 which bears the somewhat awkward subti- tle: "Image Sequence for the Cultural Study of Expressive Material Rem- iniscent of Antiquity in the Representation of Cosmic and Human Movements during the European Renaissance." The plates Warburg col- lected present an historical corpus of well-chosen examples from the wealth of European pictorial memory; they are meant to be viewed as an attempt to map the paths of the prefigured icons of remembrance [Erinnerungsbilder]. It was Warburg's aim to turn this atlas into an organ for the history of images, art, and culture in general, achieving this goal through a new form of scientific representation. This is why the organization of the books in the library was based on a certain sys- tem of shelving that placed the books according to their content and to a "Law of Good Neighbourliness," as Warburg put it. This idea also pro- vided the organizing principle for the picture atlas as a tool that owed its subject to history itself as well as to the historical memory-work [Erin- nerungsarbeit] of a scholar who also understood himself as an historian of culture since individual disciplines could not answer those basic ques- tions raised by word and image, by art and culture.

In his lecture of 1967, "In Search of Cultural History," the former head of the Warburg Institute, Ernst H. Gombrich, put forth the follow- ing opinion (and demand): "If cultural history did not exist, it would have to be invented now."40 Three years later, he published his biogra- phy on Warburg which had a lasting effect on the (re-)invention of cul- tural history within the interdisciplinary discussions about establishing cultural-historical research in the humanities. In returning to Warburg, Gombrich recalled a successful model of cultural-scientific work, which set high standards that have hardly been met to date.

Translated by Thomas Girst and Dorothea von Moltke

39. The publication of the posthumous "Bilderatlas"-Materialien is planned as part of a continuation of the Gesammelte Schriften.

40. Ernest H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) 45.