Prophetic Stomach

In​ 1926, Aby Warburg taught a seminar at Hamburg University on the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the ‘exemplary pathfinder’ whose investigation of the Italian Renaissance anticipated Warburg’s own. Burckhardt was, he argued, ‘a necromancer in full consciousness’, who conjured up sinister shadows but ultimately eluded them. Invoking a character from Faust Part II, Warburg said of Burckhardt: ‘His kind of vision is Lynceus’; he sits in his tower and speaks.’ Lynceus embodied Warburg’s idea of the scholar as a seer endowed with penetrating but privileged vision: Goethe’s watchman could spy vistas of ‘eternal beauty’ in the heavens because he was shielded from the fire that consumed the ‘dark world’ below. To practise necromancy or stargazing without the benefit of a tower was risky. The following year Warburg told his students the cautionary tale of Burckhardt’s associate Friedrich Nietzsche, a visionary who lacked any ‘regulating force for his dream-bird flight’. If Burckhardt had shown admirable discipline, sticking ‘within the boundaries of his own mission’, Nietzsche had refused to acknowledge any conceptual or empirical limits, and was swallowed by the flames. Seeing correctly required a secure vantage point. Warburg built his own tower out of books. He described his library as both a sanctuary – ‘a book defence chest’ – and a laboratory, a ‘rotating observational tower’ whose ‘unreality’, namely its distance from the everyday world, was the precondition of true sight.

Warburg’s portraits of Burckhardt and Nietzsche were informed by personal turmoil; he had spent much of the previous seven years in and out of hospitals, after the collapse of the German Empire in November 1918 coincided with a deterioration in his mental health. Blaming himself for the national calamity, in the final days of the war he had come to suspect that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the writer Leonhard Frank and Bertha Pappenheim (the original Anna O). Warburg’s depressive moods and neurotic instability seemed to mirror the fracturing of bourgeois Europe. ‘He had the knack of experiencing the times in a direct and physical way,’ his younger brother Max recalled. ‘I have a prophetic stomach,’ Warburg boasted.

As part of his recovery, Warburg retraced the steps of his intellectual development. In 1923 he gave a lecture to the staff and patients at Bellevue, recounting his visits to Pueblo Indian settlements more than a quarter of a century earlier. He expounded on the scenes he had witnessed among the Hopi tribe in Arizona, through whose customs and dances he believed ‘American prehistory’ could be understood. Central to his analysis, though he did not observe it himself, was the snake dance, a Hopi rain ceremony. The ritualised gestures of the snake dance seemed to articulate a forgotten mode of perception, ‘the borderless relational possibility between man and environment’. What to Europeans might appear as ‘schizoid’ thinking – a term recently applied to Warburg by his doctors – was entirely natural to the Hopi, consistent with their ‘pictorially thinking, poetic-mythologically grounded soul’.

Viewing the Hopi as ‘living fossils’, Warburg drew parallels with the ancient Greeks, for whom snakes were also ‘the most natural symbol of eternity and rebirth from sickness and near death’. Warburg was looking for sources that could illuminate the mythic worldview inherent in all societies before the ‘contamination’ of modern civilisation and the deadening ‘machine age’. In his Kreuzlingen lecture, he proposed that in Native American culture ‘fantastic magic and sober utilitarianism’ were not opposing but overlapping tendencies. Warburg came to believe that all cultural eras were predicated on a similar coalescence of irreconcilable energies, in which the search for enlightenment rubbed up against atavistic passions inherited, through the magic of images, from a distant and often traumatic past.

Appropriately, for a thinker synonymous with the ‘Nachleben der Antike’ or ‘afterlife of antiquity’ (a phrase coined by Anton Springer), Warburg’s own afterlives are instructive. When he died of a heart attack in 1929, at the age of 63, there was little to indicate the influence he would later exert on the humanities. His one great book had never materialised; in its stead he produced dozens of dense occasional essays. In 1932 the historian Johan Huizinga remarked that ‘despite the elevation of his intellect and the excellence of his work … there is something tragic, something not fully developed, about the figure of Aby Warburg.’ Even a sympathetic collaborator such as Gertrud Bing likened Warburg’s career to ‘traces of wreckage: projects not carried out, promises of articles never written, and ideas which were never developed’. The great exception, of course, was the achievement of his library. The posthumous relocation of almost sixty thousand books from Hamburg to London, following the Nazi seizure of power, reshaped the myth of Warburg in unexpected ways. When the then director of the Warburg Institute, Ernst Gombrich, published the first biography in 1970, he aimed to make a messy and eccentric scholar into the single-minded founder of a school. In doing so, Gombrich ironed out some of Warburg’s crankiness, downplayed his demons and minimised the relevance of his Jewish background. He positioned Warburg as a champion of enlightened rationality over superstition, of Western learning over Eastern mysticism, a struggle he made into a personal motto: ‘Athens wants again and again to be reconquered afresh from Alexandria.’

In more recent interpretations, Alexandria has been in the ascendant. Warburg is now regarded, alongside Freud and Walter Benjamin, as part of a pantheon of Jewish thinkers interested in the irrational underpinnings of modernity. ‘Warburg is our haunting,’ the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman wrote in 2004. ‘He is to art history that which an unredeemed ghost – a dybbuk – might be to the place where we live.’ Warburg’s disdain for ‘border guard mentality’ has made him an important figure for interdisciplinarity, global art history and visual culture studies. His personal struggles have only reinforced his cult status. Hailing him as a ‘scholar and psychopath’, Giorgio Agamben declared that ‘not only his idiosyncrasies but the remedies he found to master them correspond to the secret needs of his age.’ The photograph-strewn panels he assembled in his final years have been compared to cinematic montage. Warburg had intended to exhibit them in 1928 at a former water-tower in the Hamburg Stadtpark (a venue, he hoped, evocative of ‘the dignity and efficacy of a “Lynceus-tower”’), but they were left unfinished at the time of his death. The 63 panels of the Bilderatlas were finally displayed together four years ago at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.*

Born in 1866 into one of Germany’s leading Jewish financial dynasties, Warburg made it clear early on that the only business he cared for was learning; before the age of fourteen he had swapped his birthright with Max in exchange for an unlimited supply of books. From the local Johanneum Gymnasium he went on to enrol at the universities of Bonn, Munich and Strasbourg, working with some of the foremost humanists of the age. Academia took him away from the Judaism of his upbringing: Warburg would marry out, and later refused to recite Kaddish for his father or attend his funeral, insisting that he was a ‘dissident’ from religion. But he never occupied a full-time academic position, remaining an independent scholar – or, as he preferred to style himself, a ‘scholarly private banker’, adding touchily that his ‘credit is as good as that of the Reichsbank’.

Warburg’s freelance status had less to do with the antisemitism of the German academy (pervasive though it was) than with his temperamental unwillingness to submit to the basic requirements of an academic career. While peers such as Heinrich Wölfflin were busily advancing the autonomy of the new discipline of art history, Warburg seemed doggedly antiquarian. He dragged his feet over publishing in journals, endlessly delayed by a sterile perfectionism. His submission to the Preuss-isches Jahrbuch/Italienische Studien in 1901 was dedicated to Thomas Carlyle: ‘A sacrificial offering, by Teufelsdröckh the Younger’. Always ‘dawdling and dreaming, and mumbling and maundering’, the protagonist of Sartor Resartus appealed to Warburg’s sense of being lost in a metaphysical fog. He hoarded his scholarly discoveries, morbidly suspicious that others would get wind of them. His decision to refuse a prestigious position at Bonn stemmed from his unwillingness to endure the humiliation of a public viva voce.

Warburg wanted to be a scholar on his own terms. This reflected his fidelity to an older model of intellectual cultivation, or Bildung, in which the full and free development of the private personality, underpinned by solitary research, provided the passport to the ‘republic of letters’. He was more comfortable with the ethos of Wilhelm von Humboldt than with Adolf von Harnack’s plea in 1905 for ‘big science’. He thought that the pursuit of truth couldn’t be tabulated by bureaucrats in Berlin and that state control of the universities reduced them to ‘civil-servant-minting-institutions’. With the Medicis in mind, he admired those independent philanthropists at whose touch arts and learning sprang into life. Such feats, he wrote, depended on ‘the energy of private citizens’, reserving special praise for the example set by American philanthropists such as Jacob Schiff, whose daughter married his brother Felix.

From childhood Warburg harboured an outsized idea of his future importance. Searching for his ticket to ‘immortality’, he explored a range of fields, digesting the linguistic theories of Hermann Usener on the names of the gods, the baggy cultural history of Karl Lamprecht and even Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (‘At last a book that helps me’). His interest in the rendering of agitated draperies in Renaissance Italian art – particularly those of Botticelli, the subject of his dissertation – came by way of debates in classical archaeology about the recently unearthed Pergamon Altar, whose dynamic figures exploded the aesthetic canons of Greek sculpture set down in the 18th century. From Giovanni Morelli, and especially from August Schmarsow, under whom he studied in Florence in 1888, Warburg learned that incidental detail could be revelatory. His keen eye for animated ornament gave him the confidence to query received periodisation; according to him, ‘baroque undercurrents’ unsteadied the placid figures of the Quattrocento.

He was unfussed about defining historical styles, focusing instead on the psychology of perception, particularly on the way painters depicted the movement of draperies and other ‘accessory forms’. He was inclined to look sideways and backwards, extending the inquiries of earlier antiquarians; his ‘iconological’ method, as he liked to call it, winked at the 1593 Iconologia of Cesare Ripa. For his early critics, Warburg seemed far more preoccupied with digging up obscure texts than with broader issues of artistic composition. Schmarsow thought that his fixation on draperies did Botticelli no favours – reducing him to a ‘superficial imitator of ancient hems and lappets’ – and made the discipline of art history into ‘nothing more than archaeological study of flourishes and philological absurdity’.

After receiving​ his doctorate from Strasbourg in 1892, Warburg cast around for a new project, trying to find ways of marrying his various instincts. He spent a term studying neurology in Berlin and even considered switching to a medical career. But while in the US in 1895, attending his brother Paul’s wedding to Nina Loeb, he began working on ‘Symbolism as Determination of Scope’, a notebook he covered with mathematical formulae. To his published dissertation he now appended four theses, announcing the theoretical claims underpinning his previous findings: visual motifs, he argued, arose not just via conscious imitation, but through physiological automatism, the involuntary repetition of ‘memory images’ impressed on the artist’s mind. Symbols, as suggested by the philosopher Friedrich Vischer and by Warburg’s own observation of the Hopi, correlated to different phases in humanity’s search for meaning and self-knowledge, developing from religion (the least free), via the intermediate realm of art (where their truth remained ‘obscure’), to the summit of free inquiry, or science. Unfortunately, the diagrams Warburg produced to illustrate his theories are baffling, their reciprocal flows and circular patterns undermining any sense of a legible progression.

Scholarly salvation came as a result of a surprise swerve towards positivism. In 1897 he married Mary Hertz, an artist and the daughter of a prominent Hamburg senator, and later that year the couple moved to Florence. Warburg threw himself into the study of documents relating to the early Tuscan merchants who had proved such outstanding patrons of art. In lieu of grand theory, he now found joy in being a ‘truffle pig’, snuffling out rarities in the archives. He identified with his historical subjects, entering into the intricacy of their household and spiritual arrangements with relish. ‘One can almost say that in his works on Florence,’ Bing remarked, ‘Warburg wrote his own Buddenbrooks.’ After the futile search for general laws, there was a pleasure in surrendering to particulars, convinced that ‘God is in the detail.’ Following Burckhardt, he turned historical necromancer, summoning the patrician shades of the 15th century: ‘In the hundreds of archival documents that have been read – and in the thousands that have not – the voices of the dead live on.’

Warburg’s Renaissance characters were composed of diverse cultural inheritances, which they fought to hold in balance. Having scoured inventories, he knew of the large quantity of Netherlandish paintings collected in 15th-century Italy, and he described naturalistic portraiture as an updated form of ex-voto. He appreciated that many merchants and bankers, far from being wholehearted proponents of rationalism, were pious Christians and highly receptive to astrological divination. Judging from the injunctions recorded in his will, the Florentine patriarch Francesco Sassetti exemplified these opposing forces. Sassetti possessed ‘firm and principled attachment to his medieval roots’ alongside a ‘worldly intelligence’; meanwhile, the imperious expression of his bust, produced by the workshop of Antonio Rossellino, exuded an ‘Etruscan-Roman masculinity’. As the art historian Edgar Wind pointed out, Warburg, writing against the horizon of his own fin-de-siècle, was consistently drawn to the ‘in-between levels’ he found in other ‘ages of transition and conflict’. The Renaissance proved to Warburg that the ‘conflicting worldviews’ that tore societies apart could nevertheless unlock enormous cultural power ‘when those views hold a balance within a single individual’.

In his own life, balance was never Warburg’s strong suit. He was wracked by insecurities yet believed he was destined for great things, searching obsessively for the signs of destiny in his daily affairs. Hans Hönes’s new biography – which reconstructs the erratic zigzags in Warburg’s thinking and refuses to swallow his vatic pretensions – stresses that he was the ‘constant exegete’ of his own life, revisiting and regurgitating his fleeting inspirations. Hönes argues that a ‘warped self-image’ proved an ‘albatross’ to Warburg, preventing him from finding either mental peace or a stable scholarly footing. Trying to justify his existence to his brothers, who had made large fortunes and occupied high public office, brought additional anxiety. Convinced that his time in Florence represented a beautiful parenthesis, he decided in 1903 to return to Hamburg and rejoin the urban patriciate into which he had been born.

This decision enriched the city’s cultural infrastructure. Warburg gave artefacts from his American travels to the Ethnology Museum, delivered popular lectures on art history at the Volksheim, lobbied for the founding of higher educational bodies such as the Kolonialinstitut (where in 1912 he was named honorary professor) and championed the overbearing monument to his hero Bismarck on the Elbe. Such interventions were part of what he called a ‘crusade against petty un-taste’. He believed in the cultural responsibilities incumbent on the propertied bourgeoisie, who alone were entitled to shape civic life and to exercise ‘communal reason’: ‘To me, the masses are tolerable only in a well-ordered state; a mediocre human animal in a controlled situation is bearable.’ The improvement in his scholarly reputation while at Hamburg partly reflected his gifts as an organiser and networker: among other activities, he arranged conferences for the German Association for Folklore Studies and the Association of Philologists and Schoolteachers, and served as treasurer for the International Congresses of Art History between 1906 and 1912. ‘He may have shunned a career in business,’ Hönes writes, ‘but at times the family heritage seems to shine through.’

It can even be detected in the accumulative drive of his book collecting. As early as 1900 he told Max of his plans to found a ‘Warburg library for cultural science’, thereby transforming what had been a private passion into a public-facing research institute. In 1904 he hired an assistant to catalogue the collection, which had already reached 3500 volumes, and the following year he introduced a letter-copying press for documenting his correspondence. These simulations of institution-building were modelled on the family bank, from which Warburg also acquired the itch to prove ‘the profitability of my ability’, as measured by the number of visiting readers, or, better yet, scholarly citations. By 1911 the library had reached eleven thousand volumes. In addition to rare works from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, which he had picked up cheaply in Florence, Warburg’s library also encompassed art history, classics, magic, astrology, mythography – along with several thousand photographs. He berated his brothers for wasting money on luxuries and splurging on charities such as Jewish schools in Hamburg instead of subsidising his own cultural ‘mission’.

At a conference in Rome in 1912, Warburg delivered a now legendary paper on the fresco cycle in the Sala dei Mesi in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. What set it apart was not simply his ability to spot specific astrological constellations mentioned in the writings of the Roman poet Marcus Manilius and the ninth-century Persian intellectual Abu Ma’shar. Rather, it was his reconstruction of the way these esoteric theories migrated ‘from Asia Minor by way of Egypt to India … via Persia’ before their translation into Hebrew, French and Latin. The talk was a highly compressed but erudite excursus into the global circulation of ideas, at once mathematical and mysterious. Differing from the diffusionist theories of comparative philologists and mythographers, Warburg was less interested in specific nodes of transmission than in uncovering the wider ecology and mobility of images, their function as relays or ‘messengers’. In the lecture he referred to artworks as Bilderfahrzeuge, or ‘image vehicles’.

What was conveyed through images was a primal expression of feeling. Hence the key concept of ‘pathos formulas’ (Pathosformel), first deployed by Warburg in a 1905 lecture discussing representations of Orpheus dying at the hands of the frenzied Maenads. In ‘primitive’ societies, he believed, art-making emerged out of ecstasy, anger, inspiration and fear, impulses that were articulated by certain emotionally-charged forms and gestures. These pathos formulas spoke with ‘the true voice of antiquity’; stores of primal energy, they were capable of being memorised, translated or suddenly rekindled. He inserted into the manuscript copy of the Orpheus lecture a newspaper clipping describing Cossack atrocities committed outside Stavropol earlier that year, where a mob tore apart a teacher as a warning to ‘all students and Jews’. Warburg added in pencil: ‘The eternal beast: homo sapiens.’

The First World War showed the beast at its worst, although Warburg never wavered in his loyalty to imperial Germany. In early 1915 he was employed to travel to Italy, still neutral at the time, to engage in cultural diplomacy with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. In doing so, he was complementing his existing role pumping out German propaganda in a journal he established, Rivista Illustrata. Only two issues had appeared when Italy entered the war on the Allied side, a traitorous act that Warburg blamed on the influence of ‘francophone Freemasons’. He wrote in fury to his protégé Fritz Saxl, then in the Austrian army, that the best thing to be done for the Italians now was ‘to kill them in large quantities’. The war had taken hold of Warburg’s collecting activities, and with the help of nine assistants he assembled a huge archive of photographs and cuttings related to its coverage in the foreign press (‘the museum of lies’). It affected his new work on the media politics of the Reformation too: Warburg argued that prints had been essential ‘agitational tools’ in Martin Luther’s ‘picture-press-war-campaign’. He drew a parallel between Luther and another German hero, Dürer, whose art also marked a decisive shift towards shrugging off dogma and superstition, the ‘overcoming of Babylonian mentality’.

The Luther essay was finally published in 1920, by which time the German Empire had shattered. Max, once hailed as ‘King of Hamburg’, was out of favour, having been falsely accused of bankrolling the Bolshevik Revolution and Warburg was in a clinic in Jena. A footnote to the essay lamented that illness prevented him from ‘enlarging on the Janus-faced historic sense, the strain of tragic dualism’ that had plagued ‘the evolution of modern Homo non-sapiens’. During his so-called ‘vacation from the world’, Warburg’s projects flourished without him in the hothouse atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. The creation of a new University of Hamburg in 1919 saw the appointment of Ernst Cassirer, philosopher of symbols, and of Erwin Panofsky as a lecturer in art history the following year. The intellectual temper was turning away from the specialism that had defined German scientific culture in favour of new forms of ‘synthesis’. This postwar emphasis on conceptual wholeness was as much moral as methodological, and Warburg’s eclecticism was a direct beneficiary.

In February 1925, six months after his discharge from Kreuzlingen, Warburg commissioned the architect Gerhard Langmaack to create a permanent home for his long-planned research institute. Fifteen months later the KBW (Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg) opened on a plot of land next to Warburg’s house; the name of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, was inscribed on the inner door. The four floors were arranged around ‘Image’, ‘Orientation’, ‘Word’ and ‘Action’, mirroring the reader’s ascent towards ever greater enlightenment. The elliptical design of the reading room celebrated Johannes Kepler’s astronomical speculations. Despite being open to university students, the KBW can’t have been easy to navigate. Under the ‘law of the good neighbour’, books were grouped not by subject, but according to their owner’s estimate of their utility to one another. Saxl’s attempts to make the library more user-friendly, with a three-colour classificatory system, were stymied by the dictates of his ‘strict Saturn father’. How could it be otherwise, when Warburg regarded the collection as an emanation of his own brain, a refuge from the fallen world and a scientific instrument for testing his own hypotheses?

Ensconced in his tower, Warburg surrounded himself with gifted initiates, like Saxl and Bing, who deferred to his self-image and furthered his increasingly cosmic and improbable research agenda. Small wonder the circle seemed closed to outsiders. Gershom Scholem called the KBW groupies a ‘Jewish sect’, a label Warburg would have detested, not just because of his rebellion against Judaism, but also because of his universalist ambitions. By following the transit of images, he aimed to elucidate the hidden dynamics of cultural memory. This was the inspiration for the Bilderatlas panels; with the aid of a Photostat machine, he and his team created a ‘map of migrations’ to chart the way pathos formulas moved and mutated across centuries and societies, almost independently of human volition. For Hönes, the project was less historical and empirical than cosmological and physiological (inspired by Richard Semon’s theories of the ‘engram’, a biophysical memory-trace deposited in the brain). It was also strangely autobiographical, monumentalising Warburg’s intellectual errancy, drawing method out of magical thinking, and elevating his own ‘travels in the world of symbols’ to the level of a general truth.

The moral lessons taught by the Bilderatlas were sobering. A few noble souls, such as Dürer, might try to withstand and even counter the pull of atavism. But the occult ‘influence’ of pathos formulas was otherwise inescapable, an ‘imperishable heritable mass’ stamped on the subconscious of humanity. The panels documenting these transfers are mesmerising, juxtaposing fine art and antiquities with maps, advertisements and imagery culled from popular culture. Forever incomplete, they incorporate up to a thousand photographs and could be continually reshuffled to accommodate fresh constellations. In his final months, Warburg was fascinated by the symbolism attending the Lateran Pacts struck between the papacy and the ‘Caesarean’ Mussolini (an event he interpreted as the ‘re-paganisation of Rome’). His reading of fascist iconography, assisted by the 16th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno, typified his invigoratingly indirect take on contemporary crises, as well as his attentiveness to the sudden and disturbing reanimation of long-buried archetypes. ‘This history is to be told like a fable,’ Warburg explained of the sequences disclosed in the Bilderatlas panels, calling them ‘ghost stories for all adults’. There was no escape from the psychic burden of images. But exposing the workings of cultural memory at least complicated their unthinking reproduction. Works of art were vehicles of primal energy but could also enable viewers to gain some ‘metaphorical distance’ on their historical predicament. Last week, a new gallery space opened at the Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury, exhibiting some of the contemporary art made in the shadow of the Bilderatlas. Warburg is having his own renaissance, his ghostly grids spawning new images and assemblages in the digital present.