WARBURG’S OBJECT IN ARCHIVE, ASYLUM, AND ATLAS

A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty of

Southern Methodist University

in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the degree of

Master of Arts

with a

Major in Art History

by

Brittany Luberda

(B.A., University of Chicago)

May 18, 2013

Copyright 2013

Brittany Luberda

All Rights Reserved

iv

Luberda, Brittany B.A., University of Chicago, 2009

Warburg’s Object in Archive, Asylum, and Atlas

Advisor: Professor Adam Herring

Master of Arts conferred May 18, 2013

Thesis completed April 19, 2013

This thesis probes the orienting role of physical objects in Aby Warburg’s

research process before, during, and after his asylum institutionalization from 1918 to

1924. While Warburg is recognized as a figurehead of twentieth-century art history, his

list of short, philological publications are insufficient expressions of Warburg’s two

major theories on meaning in images: Pathosformel and Nachleben. In the process of

disciplining Warburg within art historical historiography, scholars have assuaged

Warburg’s errant archival practices, incomplete systematic designs, collecting

compulsions, and diagnosed mental illness. This essay looks at the disjunctions and

idiosyncrasies of Warburg’s working process as spaces of formation. Pre-asylum,

Warburg used note boxes, sketchbooks, and literary acquisitions as containers of

information. These research mechanisms reinforced a physically and psychologically

confined organization process, which prevented Warburg from comparing a broad

spectrum of material. While at Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland,

Warburg encountered a different relationship with objects. Mental patients, looking to

satisfy unattainable desires such as security or companionship, often attribute alternative

or unanticipated meaning to found physical forms. At Bellevue, Warburg began to

illustrate his thought processes through collecting small objects with approximate formal

v

or inherent affinity to desired prototypes. This principle is enacted in the selection of

objects for his post-asylum projects. After leaving the sanatorium, Warburg initiated an

external, tactile body of work in a library shelving system and pictorial timeline, the

Mnemosyne Atlas. Bellevue’s architecture also promoted an intimate proximity between

patient and analyst that Warburg replicates in his design for a new library. The Atlas and

library in lieu of publications realize Warburg’s approach to visual culture. This

translation from internal thought to external representation was facilitated by Warburg’s

socialization within an asylum optic, spatial, and object culture. Imbricating the structural

principles of asylums and Warburg’s library, make-do objects and Atlas collages, reveals

a catalyst for the network of object interpolation and reciprocation definitive to a

Warburgian theory of art history.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION 1

The Botticelli Dissertation 10

2. ARCHIVE 15

Custom Note Boxes 16

Experimental Diagrams 18

The Book Collection 22

3. ASYLUM 26

Schizophrenia 26

The Asylum 28

The Library Design 34

The Catalogue System 38

4. ATLAS 41

Asylum Subculture 41

Moths and Make-dos 44

The Mnemosyne Atlas 49

5. CONCLUSION 60

FIGURES 62

BIBLIOGRAPHY 92

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. The Reading Room with Mnemosyne Atlas panels, K.B.W., 62

Hamburg, ca. 1929

2. Example of Zettelkästen interior, Warburg Institute Archives 62

3. Zettelkästen, Warburg Institute Archives 63

4. WIA [III.71] “Pathosformel Schemata,” foliation 3, Warburg 63

Institute Archives

5. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, ca. 1483-85 64

6. Warburg and his Brothers, K.B.W., Hamburg, 1929. 64

7. Bellevue Sanatorium Advertisement, 1936 65

8. Ludwig Binswanger, ca. 1960 65

9. The Villa System Plan, Herisau Sanatorium, Switzerland, 66

photograph c. 1936

10. Map of Bellevue Sanatorium 66

11. View of Bellevue Villa, ca. 1857 67

12a. Bellevue Sanatorium, ca. 2000 67

12b. Bellevue Sanatorium, ca. 2000 68

13. Villa Maria, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated 68

14. Binswanger Family Residence, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated 69

15. Parkhaus, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated 69

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16. Map of Bellevue Sanatorium with landscaping, undated 70

17. Isolation cell, Prangins Sanatorium, before 1936 70

18. Straight jacket, before 1936 71

19. Dining Hall, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated 71

20. Entrance hall with reading room (left) and entrance to dining 72

room (right), Bellevue Sanatorium, undated

21. Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, façade, 73

Heilwigstrasse 116, Hamburg, 1926

22. Gerard Langmaack, 1st Plan of Bibliothek Warburg, 2/9/1925 74

23. The Reading Room, K.B.W., Hamburg, c. 1930 75

24. Gerard Langmaack, sketch for Bibliothek Warburg Reading 75

Room with Alcove, interior view, winter 1926

25. Restored sunroof, Reading Room, K.B.W., Hamburg 76

26. Private bathroom, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated 76

27. Basketweaving, Bellelay asylum, before 1936 77

28. Making paper bags, Königsfelden Asylum, before 1936 77

29. Working with horsehair, Rheinau Sanatorium, before 1936 78

30. Fieldwork, Rheinau Sanatorium, working in the fields, before 1936 78

31. Book bindery, Bel-Air Sanatorium, before 1936 79

32. Braiding straw, Prefargier Sanatorium, before 1936 79

33. Outdoor exercise, Le Landeron asylum, before 1936 80

34. Recreation center, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated 81

35. Observation ward, La Friedmatt Asylum, before 1936 81

36. Observation ward, Rosegg Asylum, before 1936 82

37. Washbasin, Freidmatt Sanatorium, Observation ward, before 1936 82

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38. Petite Roll-Top Writing Desk, ca. 1900 82

39. The Reading Room with Mnemosyne Atlas panels, K.B.W., 83

Hamburg, ca. 1929

40. Aby Warburg, Panel A, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 84

41. Aby Warburg, Panel 77, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 85

42. Aby Warburg, Panel 32, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 86

43. Aby Warburg, Panel 32, detail, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 87

44. Aby Warburg, Panel C, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 88

45. Aby Warburg, Plate 77, Mnenosyne Atlas, 1929 89

46. The Reading Room with panels for the Rembrandt Lecture, 90

K.B.W., Hamburg, 1926

47. Postcard, interior view of Cell House, New Illinois State 90

Penitentiary at Stateville, near Joliet, Il., undated

48. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Head of Dr. Ludwig Binswanger and 91

Little Girls, c. June, 1918.

x

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

K.B.W. Kulturwissenschaftliche BibliothekWarburg

WIA Warburg Institute Archives

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The present inquiry is the result of insight and guidance offered by many

generous faculty members, colleagues, and archivists. The Southern Methodist University

Art History Department provided exceptional support through thesis advising, colloquia,

and research funding. I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Adam Herring, who

came to this project when it was a collection of ideas and helped transform the material

into critical analysis. His astute suggestions and encouragement were essential to forming

the argument and organization. Also, Dr. Eric Stryker’s engagement from inception

through completion informed some of the best elements of the essay. I am indebted to his

compelling Subcultures seminar, which prompted my initial question: Is Aby Warburg

Dr. Marbuse? I would also like to thank Dr. Janis Bergman-Carton for her detailed edits

and comments. Especial thanks also to Dr. Roberto Tejada for introducing me to

Warburgian scholarship and Dr. Pamela Patton for her wisdom on choosing a thesis

topic.

This research was conducted with the aid of multiple grants and fellowships. I am

appreciative to Meadows School of the Arts for awarding a Cullum Thesis Research

Grant for travel to the Warburg Institute Archives in London and Warburg-Haus in

Hamburg. At the Warburg Institute, Dr. Claudia Wedepohl and Dr. Echkart Marchand

helped tremendously. In Hamburg, Dr. Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Eva Landmann were

exceptionally generous with their knowledge and time. I am also indebted to the Kress

xii

Foundation for funding a summer at the German Language School at Middlebury College

and the Jan Berens fund for assistance to take German language courses.

Finally, I owe much thanks to family and friends who have contributed to this

project over the past two years. The interdisciplinary input of friends working as clinical

psychology graduate students, practicing psychoanalysts, Latin American, Renaissance,

and Modern art historians, and economists befits everything this thesis was attempting to

accomplish in defining a Warburgian perspective. Especially, I would like to thank

friends Lulu Cao, Kristen Milano, Ana Perez Baquero, Lauren Rivet, Andrew Sears, and

Jun Nakamura. I am most grateful to my parents, Kimberly and Joseph Luberda and my

brother, Mickey Luberda, for their love and support.

1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

“Sometimes it looks to me as if, in my role as psycho-historian, I tried to diagnose the

schizophrenia of Western civilization from its images in an autobiographical reflex.”1

–Aby Warburg, 1929

Aby Warburg (b. 1866- d. 1929) is widely recognized as one of the founders of

twentieth-century disciplinary art history. 2 However, Warburg’s long-term insanity

problematizes his academic institutionalization. In the following essay, I interrogate

Warburg’s working process before, during, and after his institutionalization in sanatoria

from 1918 to 1924. From his dissertation to final lectures, Warburg struggled to express

his research using the conventional scholarly paradigms of academic argumentation,

namely publications or professorships. Instead, Warburg developed his own presentation

practice. This practice did not emerge until after his socialization within the spatial,

social, and visual setting of an asylum. Warburg’s engagement with material objects

while institutionalized was the fulcrum in a shift from publishing towards using objects

as mediators between theoretician and public forum. In his later years, Warburg’s

1 E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),

303. Aby Warburg was a philanthropist, art historian, and archivist; a “financially independent private

scholar” (Gombrich, 131). 2 Warburg’s theories are the subject of several monographs and articles. For a preliminary bibliography on

see Paul Bishop, The Persistence of Myth as Symbolic Form: Proceedings of an International

Conference Held by the Centre for Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow, 16-18 September

2005 (Leeds: Maney, 2008); Georges Didi-Huberman, “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the

Exorcism of Impure Time,” Common Knowledge 9:2 (Spring, 2003), 271-285; Richard Woodfield,

“Warburgs ‘Method’” in Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield

(Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001); Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol,

Art, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)

2

organization of visual material required seeing and touching. Through these senses, he

developed a theory of art history presented in the form of a pictorial timeline which

linked imagery from the East and West, past and present. Warburg’s projects were

informed by the architecturally-inscribed opticality and unique object socialization of

sanatorium subculture. The disciplinary constructions and object practices of Warburg’s

original institutionalization– the asylum– determined his idiosyncratic approach to visual

material. This method culminated in two post-asylum projects: The

Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, now the Warburg Institute in London, and

the Mnemosyne Atlas (fig. 1).

To study Warburg is to analyze the art historian’s unceasing effort to objectify,

systemize, and define the relationship between visual materials. Warburg was gifted with

an omnivorous intellectual curiosity and inquisitiveness. He pursued over decades of

scholarly work. And yet, for most of his career, he chose to lecture in the place of

publishing.3 The subsequent paucity of complete texts belies the complexity of

Warburg’s visual juxtapositions and broad-based theses.4 Philosophies attributed to

Warburg, such as Nachleben and Pathosformel– theories which posit sustained meaning

in objects and universal psychological impulses– collapse ancient with contemporary,

Eastern with Western, and scholarship with popular media.5 These theories are implicit in

3 Although this essay argues publishing became increasingly important, especially after the Kreuzlingen

years, lectures form a significant part of Warburg’s practice post-1924. Example: Rembrandt lecture

(1926) [fig. 46] and Herziana Lecture (1928) 4 For a complete English edition of Warburg’s essays see Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:

Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research

Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999) 5 Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, myths, and the historical method (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1989) 20. For a succinct definition of Pathosformel see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic

Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 6-7: Pathosformel was originally used to define “the

recurrence of the ‘formulae of pathos’ (Pathosformeln), ‘genuinely ancient formulae of an intensified

physical or psychic expression in the Renaissance style which strives to portray life in motion’ (Die

3

the writings he did produce and the profusion of archival documents maintained by his

followers. They show Warburg as the combination of connoisseurial archivist and

quixotic philologist.6

Today, we are in a second wave of Warburgian scholarship, spearheaded by

Georges Didi-Huberman, Uwe Fleckner, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Davide Stimilli,

Christopher Wood, among others.7 As the named predecessor for both Erwin Panofsky

and E.H. Gombrich, scholarship produced and funded by Warburg now reaches far

beyond his immediate circle.8 Warburg has become a centerpiece in “la metahistoire de

l’art,” arguably part-and-parcel with a scholarly “culte de ancêtres.”9 Warburg, the mind,

has readily replaced his affiliation with iconography, the discipline. Recent publications

are proximately divided between applications of Warburgian principles or Warburg

historiography. Texts such as Geroges Didi-Huberman’s L’Image Survivante and Wood

and Nagel’s Anachronic Renaissance reevaluate the relationship between form and

context over a broad temporal period.10 Renaissance studies look to Warburg’s

Erneuerung 2:447).” Pathosformel, in the later Atlas, assumes a broader scope, stretching from antiquity

to the present. For an analysis of twentieth-century interpretations of Warburg’s theory of Pathosformel

see Silvia Vidal, “Rethinking the Warburgian tradition in the 21st Century,” Journal of Art

Historiography 1 (December, 2009) 6 The Warburg Institute Archive and Library in London houses the vast notes of Aby Warburg, his library,

and the work of his contemporaries and followers. Archive documents housed at this location are hitherto

referred to by the abbreviation WIA. 7 See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Preface to the English Edition: The Exorcist,” Confronting Images:

Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University

Press, 2005) 8 Jan Bialostocki, “Iconography and Iconology,” Encyclopedia of World Art VII (1962): 769-786.

Iconologic research is “concerned more with the continuity than with the material… [this approach]

seeks to understand the symbolic, dogmatic, or mystical sense (even if hidden) in figural forms”

(Bialostocki, 774) 9 Christopher Wood, “Aby Warburg, Homo victor,” Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 118

(2011/12): 81-82. 10 See Georges Didi-Huberman, L'Image Survivante: Histoire De l'Art Et Temps Des Fantômes Selon Aby

Warburg (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002) and Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “Toward a

New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87:3 (September 2005): 403-415.

4

dissertation as integral to pairing pagan antiquity with Neoplatonic poetry and painting.11

Historiographic articles and publications on Warburg build on collecting and deciphering

the scholar’s massive output of notations and bibliographic reorientation. Produced

among German-speaking scholars, these analyses carry forward a process begun

immediately following Warburg’s death to preserve the scholar’s legacy. This paper

commends the impetus to apply Warburg’s explicit and implicit theses to other bodies of

material. Yet, it cautions scholars to not disregard Warburg’s gaps in productivity or the

severity of his psychotic episodes.

The tendency to sanitize, to normalize, to objectify Warburg’s thought elides the

realities of his schizophrenia. In his 1970 biography of Warburg, Gombrich writes only

one paragraph on Warburg’s five years in sanatoria.12 Recent scholarship is equally

mollifying. All the texts attempt to reconcile Warburg’s institutionalization with the

desire for the scholar to have a stable, coherent career trajectory. For example, in the

recent opening essay of a collection of essays on Warburg’s post-asylum research,

Fleckner emphasizes the synthesis between Warburg’s early and late organizing

principles. He draws a neat trajectory between a single lecture poster board design and

the elaborate image boards used in Warburg’s 1924–1929 Mnemosyne Atlas pictorial

timeline. Fleckner passes over the intervening twenty years of stifled production and

mental institutionalization.13 On the other hand, Didi-Huberman exploits one of

11 See Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time

of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992) for a full explanation of

Warburg’s contribution to Botticelli scholarship. 12 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 215. 13 Uwe Fleckner, “Ohne Worte: Aby Warburgs Bildkomparatistik zwischen wissenschaftlichem Atlas und

kunstpublizistischem Experiment,” in Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012),

1.

5

Warburg’s neurotic fixations. While at Bellevue Sanatorium, Warburg cared for brown

moths in his room. Didi-Huberman uses these moths to allegorize Warburg’s image

theory: “Was not speaking to butterflies for hours on end the definitive way of

questioning the image as such, the living image, as image-fluttering that a naturalist’s pin

would only kill?”14 Finally, in his essay Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on

Two Continents, Kurt Forster privileges Warburg’s recovery over prognosis. He asserts

Warburg’s post-institutional research, specifically the Atlas project and library, was

exercised as a therapeutic instrument to treat his own schizoid neurosis.15 The following

essay contends such pacifying or romanticizing assertions. A single chart from 1905 does

not qualify a standard working method; a fixation on moths does not translate to flitting

butterfly wings cum cinematic movement; the psychobiographic reading of self-therapy is

outside the scope of observable evidence.16

From his earliest research until the Kreuzlingen years (1921-1924), Warburg

struggled to find a satisfactory model for his scholarly arguments. He began texts and

abandoned them. He went to extensive lengths to gain new information that he then

stored for decades – like the 1895-1896 research trip to New Mexico.17 The inability to

complete projects tormented Warburg, his colleagues, and his family. On June 28, 1902,

Max Warburg wrote to his brother Aby, “…[while he and Dutch critic and painter Jan

14 Georges Did-Huberman, introduction to Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, by Philippe-Alain

Michaud (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2004), 14. 15 Kurt W. Forster and David Britt, “Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents,”

October 77 (Summer, 1996): 5-24. 16 Warburg saw himself as cured after he was released from Bellevue. 17 In the American West, Warburg conducted original research on Pueblo Indian semiotic systems, but he

did not deliver this research until the much later 1923 Schlangenritual lecture. See Michael P. Steinberg

and Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1995) and Aby Warburg, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg

Institute 2:4 (April, 1939): 277-292; Nicholas Mann, Aby Warburg, and Benedetta Cestelli Guidi,

Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 1895-1896 (London: Merrell Holberton in

association with the Warburg Institute, 1998)

6

Veth were] convinced of Aby’s huge scholarship and talent for discovering connections

(Kombinationsgabe), they were also convinced that he did not work as he ought to, and

that he lacked systematic application.”18 Prior to 1925, Warburg’s scholarship lacked

synthesis, but not a lack of effort. This thesis is organized into a series of case studies

which reveal Warburg’s idiosyncratic working process. Through a constellation of

examples, the primary principles structuring Warburg’s kunstgeschichtliche

Kulturewissenschaft (the cultural science of art history) are represented. Simultaneously,

I present new approaches to studying object-handling and architectural power-

dynamics.19 The argument is articulated across three partially-chronological subheadings:

Archive, Asylum, and Atlas.

In Archive, I analyze two sources from the Warburg Institute Archive. Both

exhibit Warburg’s early attempts to employ a sense of systematic application to a large

quantity of visual material from antiquity through the Renaissance. In lieu of aggregated

theoretical treatise, two different archival documents illustrate Warburg’s desire to rectify

the lack of cohesion alleged by his brother Max: the Zettelkästen and “Pathosformel

Schemata” workbook. Warburg’s Zettelkästen are note boxes of letters, newspapers, and

notes on particular subjects (fig. 2-3).20 From the beginning to end of his career,

Warburg added to and altered the contents of these boxes according to his current

research interests. The boxes are highly personalized, containing fragments and subject

headings scripted by Warburg. The second case study is a workbook titled “Pathosformel

18 Davide Stimilli, “Aby Warburg’s Pentimento,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 56 (2010): 168. 19 Elizabeth Sears, “Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence,” Common Knowledge 18:1

(2012): 33. 20 WIA III.2.1 ZK/

7

Schemata.”21 Within this bound blank sketchpad, Warburg drew a chart of the motions

and emotions expressed in art. The rows are organized by paradigmatic visual features

(running, dancing, etc.) and correspond with medium or artists listed in the columns (fig.

4). Warburg began but did not complete this diagram, leaving his sense of correlation

between elements unclear. These two objects suggest alternative organizational systems

for categorizing knowledge: one indexical, the other pictorial. The systems were created

before his years in a sanatorium. They, rather than a singular essay or book, offer the

most comprehensive insight into the range of subjects that engaged Warburg’s early

research. However, neither note boxes nor sketchbook were conducive to publication.

The Zettelkästen served as Warburg’s physical file cabinets, with the primary purpose of

storing information. The abandoned Pathosformeln diagram failed as a conceptual

apparatus, in part because of its linearity. Warburg’s first attempt at schematization,

however, foreshadows the circular and malleable nature of the Atlas-to-come. While

Warburg made efforts to synthesize his research interests into one larger project prior to

institutionalization, it was only after that the historian created a cohesive vision of art

history in a personal library and the Mnemosyne Atlas.

Asylum, the central section, visits Warburg’s years in an asylum institution from

an unattended angle. This essay reconsiders Warburg’s life within the sanatorium culture

of Switzerland and the German-speaking world in the 1900-1920s. Two elements of

asylum sociology were instrumental to the initiation and success of Warburg’s library and

Atlas. The first is the architecturally inscribed relationship between analyst and patient on

the asylum grounds. The spatial and visual intimacy between sanatorium staff and

Warburg introduced the art historian to a form of analysis substantiated on contact and

21 WIA [III.71]

8

observation. Thus, when books in Warburg’s post-asylum library are organized by a “law

of good neighbors,” Warburg is both neighbor and coordinator. The asylum’s haptic

spatiality becomes the blueprint of Warburg’s panoramic design for a Reading Room at

the K.B.W.

Warburg’s hospitalization exposed him to an alternative object-culture. Asylum

patients use objects as a way to stabilize and control information and space.

Commonplace items are substitutes for unattainable objects in an effort to accommodate

psychological desires.22 Warburg, for example, spoke with moths that flew into his room;

they became his friends and a channel through which to discuss his own neurosis with

nurses and family. Warburg re-contextualized the moths, approximations of living

beings, to fulfill a need. Similar formal qualities between the “make-do” asylum object

and its original referent served as the selection basis in the highly imaginative process of

redefining objects to fulfill patient desires.

The final section, Atlas, imbricates the life of objects in asylums with Warburg’s

treatment of archival material after his institutionalization. Post-1925, Warburg presented

his research in new forms, namely, the systematic schema of his personal library and his

semi-complete photographic compendium of Pathosformeln: the Mnemosyne Atlas. The

Mnemosyne Atlas is an incomplete assemblage of two thousand images organized into

image clusters onto approximately eighty plates. Warburg traces overarching themes in

aggregations of images which he believes reflect a universal motif– regardless of the

subject, context, or scale of the original image. The arrangement of objects on the

22 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates

(Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1961), 200.

9

Mnemosyne Atlas panels reflects the learned object practice of asylum culture, especially

the benefits of using objects as communicative devices. The formal associations Warburg

makes in the Atlas panels- between contemporary and antique, high and low, sculptural

and two-dimensional- are not unlike the dynogramatic movements that link moths to

humans in Warburg’s asylum chamber, and subsequently the object as mediator between

patient and outer world. Furthermore, the investment in an exterior object during the

production process, the tangible interaction with material in the making of the Atlas,

answers systemization problems posed in the abandoned Pathosformel drafts of

Warburg’s pre-institutional work.

The Atlas, an a-textual scholarly apparatus, is the closest Warburg comes to

publishing his mass-scale re-mapping of art history. It provides the most insight into

Warburg’s holistic perspective on interrelated visual elements.23 The rapport between

“make-do” and Atlas assemblage infers a significant revision to Warburgian discourse.

While Warburg states his objective is to “diagnose the schizophrenia of Western

civilization from its images,” the inverse is the case. Warburg works from theory to

image, not image to theory.24 Like an institutional patient, he begins with a constructed

23 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,12. John Michael Krois disagrees. In the introduction, Krois

writes, “Warburg did not delineate a set of system of pathos formulae. His project of creating a picture

Atlas remained unfinished. He kept reworking it because, ultimately, it could not be contained in a fixed

order like a book. Pathos formulae are not ordered the way language is, nor do they constitute a fixed

set.” 24 The therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient within psychoanalytic critique examines similar

constructions of directionality, questioning transference, both the therapists influence on the patient and

the patient’s influence on therapy. See Charles J. Gelso and Jean A. Carter, “Components of the

psychotherapy relationship: Their interaction and unfolding during treatment,” Journal of Counseling

Psychology 41:3 (1994): 296-306. The relationship with psychological and image theory is particularly

verdant during Warburg’s institutionalization. Freud’s “The Moses of Michelangelo” was published in

1914. Also, philosophers began turning to patients as case studies in perception and time. See Eugene

Minkowski, “La Schizophrenie” (1927) and “Les Temps Vecu” (1933). Sanatorium as sites of

philosophical instead of psychological research is a space wanton of contemporary scholarly inquiry.

10

idea or desired pathos and culls from existing visual representations to satisfy that

design.25

The Botticelli Dissertation

Warburg’s dissertation research is anchored in contemporaneous discourse but

differentiated by Warburg’s discerning eye and multidisciplinary material. In the late

nineteenth century, Warburg embarked on a scholarly career in the wake of a theoretical

and temporal shift in German art history. Jacob Burckhardt’s studies on the secular

Renaissance ushered a transitional moment in German art historical scholarship. In the

latter half of the nineteenth century, the cultural history of Italian art superseded

Medieval art as the fulcrum between a revered classical past and esteemed German

present. Warburg’s work stems from this transition. Like many other fin-de-siècle

German scholars, Warburg dedicated himself to studying classical antiquity and the

Renaissance.26 In 1886, Warburg began studying art history with Carli Justi at the

University of Bonn. He specialized in Quattrocento Florence. After spending time at

universities in Munich and Strasbourg, Warburg went to Italy for research in 1888.27

Five years later in 1893, Warburg completed his doctoral thesis on the

interpretation of classical topos which reappear in Botticelli paintings.28 Warburg used

25 This begs larger questions on the relativity of the future iconographic program. It also questions whether,

as Warburg often attested, the Good Lord was ever in the details (see footnote 32), or if the macrocosmic,

monistic unification of the history of art was always at the fore of his theories. I will argue no, that a

change occurs post-Kreuzlingen, where Warburg was able to, through a spatial engagement with object

definition, manage the macrocosmic. (Macrocosmic is referenced in Stimilli, “Pentimento,” footnote

142) 26 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 131. 27 There he met his future wife, sculptor and painter, Mary Hertz. She was the daughter of a prominent

Protestant Hamburg senator, with whom he would later have three children. She was also the sister of

two of his fraternity brothers. He married Mary eight years after they met in Florence. 28 Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis’ Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity

in the Italian Early Renaissance (1893),” reproduced and translated in Forster, Renewal of Pagan

Antiquity, 89-156.

11

compositional details to redirect attention to the mythological and pagan elements of

Renaissance aesthetics.29 His cross-chronological study challenged Winckelman’s

reading of the Renaissance’s widespread taste for idealized forms. Based an analysis of

Botticelli’s curvilinear, untamed figuration of hair and drapery in the Birth of Venus and

contemporaneous poetry referencing antiquity, Warburg proposed Quattrocento artists

did not appropriate antique models for their “tranquil grandeur” (fig. 5).30 Instead,

Renaissance artists employed classical forms in the accessory features of the dynamic,

motile figures: “artists of the Florentine Quattrocento made vigorous efforts to extract

from the life around them analogous forms,” resulting in paintings and poetry that

articulate rather than imitate classical models.31

The dissertation inaugurates Warburg’s paradigmatic research techniques:

attention to small, often overlooked details to reveal larger truths and a synthetic view of

Renaissance culture. Warburg was fascinated by more than just imagery and actively

sought sources from psychology and philosophy to religion and poetry.32 For example,

Warburg was interested in female characters divorced from their original context and

inserted into scenes of daily life in Quattrocento Florence. The trope of “nympha” —

sanguine female figures in motion, gracefully entering or existing in a scene, often

carrying water jugs – was central to this mode of inquiry. The nympha was an antique

type that reemerged in Renaissance painting. For Warburg, these individual figures

29 His thesis draws from Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Appolonian dialectic in classical drama. See Nietzsche,

Friedrich Wilhelm, and Michael Tanner, The birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music (London: Penguin,

1993) 30 Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 141. Warburg looks specifically to the literature produced under

the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici. 31 Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 125; 141. Burckhardt’s notations on Italian pageantry as

conflation of life and art are analogous to Warburg’s thesis. 32 Stimilli, “Pentimento,” 140-141. Warburg was known to repeat “God is in the Details”/„Der liebe Gott

steckt im Detail.”

12

repeated in various times represented pulses within the history of image making. “To

such figures… Warburg attached two themes of his scholarly work: the postures and

gestures from the repertoire of antiquity, which later centuries used to represent specific

states of actions and psychological arousal, and the irruption of ‘alien figures’ from

remote antiquity into the everyday world of the Renaissance.”33 Warburg’s mature work

focuses on the meaning underlying gestures. His thesis proposes the repetition of one

image across time signifies a cultural impetus to subconsciously collapse the past and

present. His view dismantles context or relativity.

The Botticelli dissertation contains the key prerogatives of Warburg’s lifelong

research. The scholar was discontent with reducing Renaissance classical revival to

“rhetorical formulas.”34 In addition to his constructions of cultural context from close

readings of painting and literature, Warburg also interested himself in the psychology of

art.35 The fundamentals of reception theory were at the fore of late-nineteenth century

scholarship, polarized by dedicated groups of erudite, conservative aesthetes versus

others like Warburg who were intent on defining the intersection of art and everyday life

within the history of visual representation. In 1902, Warburg published two essays which

blatantly rebuff the restricted parameters of connoisseurial analysis.36 Davide Stimilli

33 Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 15. 34 Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 14. 35 Forster, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 81. Gertrude Bing, Warburg’s assistant and collaborator, notes

Warburg’s conviction in his method, particularly the coupling of psychology and art history, was so

strong that he traveled to Munich to inquiry about studying psychology from a medical standpoint. Karl

Lamprecht’s translation of a Hegelian model of history to psychological terms separates history into a

series of dominate psychological attitudes which define phases. Lamprecht wrote the 12 volume history

of Germany. 36 Stimilli, “Pentimento,” 142. Two substantial publications of his were issued in 1902: the essay on The

Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie, in book form, and the one on “Flemish Art and the

Florentine Early Renaissance,” in the Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, which

were to be the first in a series of installments meant to supplement Jacob Burckhardt’s posthumous essay

on portraiture. Warburg’s correspondence with Andre Jolles reveals clearly the heightened debate

13

writes, “It is the ability to transcend both the nearsightedness of the ‘attribution-ists’ and

the naive idealism of the aesthetes, and thus to gain access to the ‘prose of real life,’ that

Warburg is advocating…” at the turn of the century.37 Renaissance artists turned to

classical models as participants in everyday or mundane activities in addition to cerebral

or ideological subjects.

While not extensive, Warburg’s combined pre-asylum texts are united by general

principles. Warburg privileged “the physiognomic, expressive content of works of art.”38

A work’s expressive content is the semiotic response to a psychological stimulus

recognizable to artist, patron, and viewer. Over his lifetime, Warburg essayed to locate

the renewal impulse of classical revival and found it in an empathetic (Einfühlung)

rapport between Renaissance man and antiquarian referent.39 In his final work, the

Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg’s research culminates in a genealogy of cyclical

transformation. In the Atlas, he locates objects which appropriate historical forms into an

anachronistic composition representing contemporaneous visual culture.40 Achieving this

type of critique was a long process, where the barriers were often self-imposed or

psychologically laden. The presentation of his observations in a permanent public forum,

even a non-solipsistic medium, proved complex for Warburg prior to institutionalization.

Warburg kept his work close to him, mentally and physically. Analyzing the art

historian’s modes of research is the entry into his thought processes. Tracing the

between connoisseurial and psycho-cultural analysis at this juncture in art history and the intellectual

community. 37 Stimilli, “Pentimento,” 152. 38 Forster “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 13. 39 Freud later uses “einfuhlung” in his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses; Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of

Michelangelo,” The Complete Psychoanalytical Works XIII (London, 1957): 211-238. 40 Forster “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 15. “The former phenomenon he defined through

the concept of the Pathosformel, or the emotive formula; the second he pursued to the end of his days as

the true enigma of human perception of the expressive analogies between historically far remote periods

and cultures.”

14

transformation over his career fully encompasses Warburg’s output in a way publications

and lectures cannot.

15

Chapter 2

ARCHIVE

This chapter investigates Warburg’s early thesis on art history through the

incomplete, moveable, and unstable documents in his archive. Three evolving research

mechanisms— note boxes, sketchbook, and books— all fragmentary, were modes of

organizing information. These apparatuses were integrated into Warburg’s formulation of

ideas.41 The objects, each signs and systems, make a statement about the development of

Warburg’s practice and the definition of an interdisciplinary art historical inquiry. Michel

Foucault calls a statement “the modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a

modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than

a succession of marks on a substance, something more than a mere object made by a

human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation with a domain of objects, to

prescribe a definite position to any possible subject...”42 The combination of these

archival elements, themselves just traces or marks, read together summate Warburg’s

early subject matter. They exhibit his attempts to define an overarching thesis on a

monistic art history. This body of knowledge on Warburg, which now includes an

41 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 107. “…we could

call formulation the individual (or possibly collective) act that reveals, on any material and according to a

particular form, that group of signs: the formulation is an event that can always be located by its spatio-

temporal coordinates, which can always be related to an author, and which may constitute in itself a

specific act …” 42 Ibid.

16

Archive of letters, notes, lectures, photos, sketchbooks, and also buildings, institutes,

relationships, and a secondary sources, completes the fragmentary nature of Warburg’s

early years.43 The considering the pieces, especially those abandoned or unfinished but

later concluded post-asylum, allows for enunciating Warburg’s methodology.

Custom Note Boxes

Warburg employed multiple methods of organizing research material. The first

and most consistent were Zettelkästen, large note or index boxes Warburg used to collate

research notes (fig. 1-2).44 The collection housed in the Warburg Institute Archives

numbers over 100 boxes. He used index boxes during his dissertation and continued this

archiving medium post-institutionalization. Although now aged to brown and yellow, the

boxes are individually covered with patterned paper. Allegedly, Warburg ordered the

paper for all the boxes from Florence, intimating the care and attention paid to both the

exterior and interior of the containers.45 The Zettelkästen contain florilegia from personal

letters, newspaper clippings, notes, and images.46 The contents collectively represent the

multifarious research interests of Warburg, as well as the profuse amount of discursive

and individuated correspondence he deemed revelatory to an archive.

43 Foucault, Archaeology, 105. This essay proposes definite characterization of Warburg can be culled from

a few archival documents. The statement about Warburg’s early career will nonetheless be subject to all

declared statements: “The statement, as it emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various

networks and various fields of use, is subjected to transferences or modifications, is integrated into

operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced. Thus the statement circulates, is

used, disappears, allows or prevents the realization of a desire, serves or resists various interests

participates in challenge and struggle, and becomes a theme of appropriation or rivalry…” (Foucault,

105). 44 WIA III.2.1 ZK/ The Zettelkästen (note box) collection is housed at the Warburg Institute Archive. 45 Ordering paper from Italy is oral history related to me in January 2013 by the Warburg Institute

Archivist. It is possibly the case, but the archive cannot confirm this. 46 The original content of each box is not fully determined, as later scholars altered Warburg’s ordering

under the directive to continue KBW (Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg) projects.

17

During his lifetime, the Zettelkästen were a ledger for Warburg’s thought

processes. He organized his work within them, carefully writing out subdividers,

headings, and adding annotations. The categorization of information within the note

boxes varies significantly. Some are numbered and contain miscellaneous subject titles –

precursors to an iconographic database – while others store preparatory material and

correspondence for lectures or special projects. Zettelkästen 17, for example, titled

“Politik,” contains forty-five subdividers labeled many things, such as Ethics, Freedom,

Prussian Military, Chamberlain, America, or the French Revolution.47 Zettelkästen 25,

titled “Mnemosyne” contains envelopes with information on prospective Atlas panels,

although the date of its creation is unknown. The details are largely penned posthumously

by Gertrude Bing, Warburg’s assistant. 48 In the first envelope are folio labels, “that is,

abbreviations, shorthand or catchwords for specific objects, to be remembered or

represented on plates, mobile walls or other suitable technique of visual aid” which reveal

plans for 212 panels. 49 This indicates the Zettelkästen were maintained by Warburg’s

archivists following his death and that boxes could accompany particular projects, in

addition to general thematic categories.

Integral to notebox archives are their mobility. The tactile handling of the boxes

and their contents was active. Their scale, approximately twelve inches deep and five

inches wide, reflects a will to condense thoughts into an obtainable place and space. Just

so, the boxes could be easily transported with Warburg on his travels. Equally, the

information filed in these boxes was never static. The perpetual motion of entering and

47 WIA III.2.1. ZK/17 48 Joacim Sprung, “APPENDIX III: Preliminary Comments Regarding WIA III. 2.1 ZK 25 Mnemosyne,

Envelope 1,” Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas och visualiseringen av Konsthistoria kring 1800/1900

(PhD diss. Kunstakademi, Jens Toft, KU, IKK 2008, 2011). 49 Ibid.

18

erasing, adding and subtracting information responded to Warburg’s ever-changing and

open-ended research questions. Commenting on these boxes in the mid-nineteen twenties,

one assistant wrote, “Often one saw Warburg standing tired and distressed bent of his

boxes with a packet of index cards, trying to find for each one the best place within the

system.”50 The Zettelkästen attempt to reduce and classify the polarities of Warburg’s

work into a contained archival space. Scholar Spyros Papapetros summarizes Warburg’s

research strategies as presented by the material in the index boxes: “Warburg creates a

dynamic ‘psychomonism,’ attempting to compensate between two polarities, such as

subject and object, empathy and distance, the identification of magic, and the division of

logic” in the pairing of diverse materials within a single space.51 The Zettelkästen include

the cross-pollinated source material that defines Warburg’s scope for cultural and visual

history. Yet, this mobile archive never quite accomplishes a holistic presentation of

Pathosformel or interdisciplinary art history. While the source material is subject to

continuous revision, the index boxes are opaque containers and retainers of information.

As compact cartons, these boxes preclude the cross-readings, comparisons, and collective

pathos requisite for externalizing Warburg’s polymorphous theories.

Experimental Diagrams

The schematic organization of research material in visual diagram is also a

capricious endeavor during the first half of Warburg’s career. In a large notebook labeled

50 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2004),

235. Quoted by Fritz Saxl. 51 Spyros Papapetros, “On the biology of the inorganic: Crystallography and discourses of latent life in the

art and architectural historiography of the early twentieth-century” in Biocentrism and Modernism, ed.

Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wunsche (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011), 93-94. Papapetros is

a biology historiographer of early twentieth-century artistic rendering of environment forms interested in

Warburg’s studies.

19

“Schemata Pathosformeln,” Warburg experiments translating expressive correlations

between Renaissance and Antiquity, figure and medium into a comprehensive diagram

(fig. 3). This sketchbook was used between 1905 and 1911.52 The earliest notation,

Foliation 73 is dated 1905, indicating Warburg began in middle of the workbook. Entries

on all manner of subjects, similar to the Zettelkästen contents, are scattered throughout

the foliations. Foliation 11, 11a, and 12-15 are large sketches of objects.53 Foliation 29 is

a blank chart of twenty-eight rows and sixteen columns; it is a spreadsheet with no

entries.54 These enigmatic entries over one-hundred pages show that Warburg tried

multiple figural models to schematize his research.

The Schemata Pathosformeln sketchbook also records what and how Warburg

was looking at objects and locating expressive content. Warburg’s focus on visual

imagery changes from medium to compositional action as a principle component. One of

the earlier sketchbook entries, the recto of Foliation 79, Warburg penned the first mention

of a picture Atlas: “Present a picture Atlas: / the Reproductions containing / drawings /

sculpture / individual prints / wall paintings / woodcut books / canvas paintings.” 55

Thomas Hansel, in a 2011 publication on Warburg’s graphic work, points out that “the

[Atlas’] focus is here alone on the reproductive media, in which images are exclusively

grouped according to their medium, a categorization according to motives or pathos does

52 WIA [III.71] Dates noted on the first page. The folio workbook has unlined pages. 53 WIA [III.71] Foliation 11 is five Roman coins, 11a is illustrated by three Italian images from the

Renaissance. Twelve through fifteen are Italian works. 54 WIA [III.71] Foliations 62-64 include columns with the heading “Fortuna” and headings for Byzantine,

Antique, and Renaissance “Energie.” Foliations 73 through 82 are inked outlines on the Renaissance and

Durer. 55 Thomas Hensel, Wie Aus Der Kunstgeschichte Eine Bildwissenschaft Wurde: Aby Warburgs Graphien

(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011) 47-48. Hansel quotes Wedepohl, “Wanderstrassen der Kulture”: “Die

Bestimmung einzelner in die Tabelle einzutragender Kunstwerke nicht nur durch Motivik, sondern auch

durch deren Medialität wird im hinteren Teil des 92 Folioblätter umfassenden Bandes noch zugespitzt.

Hier namlich findet sich in einer Ideenskizze eine der frühesten Erwähnungen des Konzeptes BilderAtlas:

"einen BilderAtlas vorlegen: / der Repduktionen enthalte / v. Handschriftenillustrat[ionen]/ Skupluturen /

Kupferstichen Buchern Einzelblattern / Wandgemalden / Holzschnittbuchern / Leinwandbildern’”

20

not occur.”56 If the 1905 date for nearby Foliation 73 is upheld, then a distribution of

works by medium was Warburg’s initial inclination for a pictorial-based timeline of art

history. While medium was not marginal to Warburg’s method, its final axiom is

compositional movement.57

In the first pages of the sketchbook, likely entered between 1907 and 1911,

Warburg experiments with a hybrid picture-word organizational system that combines

medium, artist, action, and object. He does this using a table (fig. 4). While a matrices is

the converse of his future picture Atlas, the relationship between temporal specificity,

tangible object, and Pathosformel thema is here laid out in rudimentary form. Foliation 1

is blank, save for light pencil marks on the right hand side which outline four diagonal

rows and one fragmented column of a chart, either pentimenti of an abandoned design or

passive sketching. Foliation two is blank. This foliation is the coverpage for the

notebook’s most complete diagrammatic entry. On foliations three through six, Warburg

designed a Pathosformel ledger. These four leaves are trimmed one inch from the folio

page edge creating an interpolated a sub-book within the workbook.58 While this may be

practical for page location, it also is an implosive expansion of a two-dimensional

surface. Now, information extends between pages and into the binding. The research

recedes and projects within the organizing mechanism.

56 Hensel, Wie Aus Der Kunstgeschichte, 48. “Signfikanterweise liegt der Fokus heir allein auf den

Reproduktionsmedien,die zu sallenden Bilder werden ausschliesslich nach ihrer Medienzugehorigkeit

gruppiert; eine Kategorisierung nach Motiven oder Pathosformeln findet nicht statt.” 57 Hensel, Wie Aus Der Kunstgeschichte, 49. Other archival documentation that also uses medium as a basis

is a 1909 slide presentation that tallied the number of works from each material presented and a similar

ledger of medium statistic for a 1928 lecture to the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce. 58 This booklet works like a document within one of Warburg’s note boxes: a component of Warburg’s

intellectual property inserted between conterminous studies.

21

The table lists motifs on the left-hand column and visual materials in the

compartments along the top row. The left-hand column on the verso of foliation 2 is a

static list of pictorial elements that characterize Pathosformeln. Warburg’s list of motiven

represent energetic forms found in the classical past.59 These include

“Lauf/Tanz/[unclear]/Raub/Kampf/Sieg/Triumph Mythic/Triumph [unclear]/Triumph

allegory/Tod Klage/Auferstehung.”60 The complementary source materials, what Thomas

Hensel erroneously blankets under the term “Medien,” are listed in the column headings.

Here, Warburg enters a literary or artistic media, while other spaces are occupied by a

particular artist. The selection of subjects reflects Warburg’s indiscriminate body of

material. He finds Pathosformel in specific artists, like “Donatello” and “Verrocchio,”

and also on “wood panels” and in “poetry.”61 In this chart, the valences of media and

artistic personage are concomitant.

In Warburg’s design, temporally specific conditions, like maker and material, are

subjugated to universal motifs. These conditions are conjoined with motif through an

object; the table cells are completed with works of art. For example, on Foliation 6 the

entry for Donatello and “Victory” is completed with the word “David,” referencing

Donatello’s sculpture. The work of art pairs a historical moment with a paradigmatic

theme from antiquity. This culture-object-universal formula points to a clear theoretical

model for Pathosformel and dates a prototype for Warburg’s ultimate project, the

Mnemosyne Atlas, as early as 1905-1911.

59 Hensel, Wie Aus Der Kunstgeschichte, 48 60 WIA [III. 71] Translations are mine. List of motifs taken from [III.71] manuscript at the Warburg

Institute. The full list: “Lauf/Tanz/[unclear]/Raub/Kampf/Sieg/Triumph Mythic/Triumph

[unclear]/Triumph allegory/Tod Klage/Auferstehung” “Run” “Dance” “Battle” “Victory.” There are also

more general terms such as “Mythic Allegory,” “Allegorical Triumph,” and one anno domini motif

“Resurrection.” 61 WIA [III.71] Column headings from foliation 3-6.

22

But, the trajectory from textual, pictorial, and diagrammatic experimental schema

to Atlas is not direct. Foliations 3 through 6 of the “Schemata Pathosformel” workbook

are less a prototype and more an example of Warburg’s rejection of a linear

organizational frame for remapping visual synchronicity across time. This table is

incomplete. Several columns lack headings. More than half of the chambers contain no

entry. In dialogic context with other pages of blank charts in this workbook, the table

confirms exactly what Aby’s colleagues cited: Warburg’s propensity for inconsistency. It

took several years before Warburg initiated a new Pathosformel schema vis-a-vis the

Mnemosyne Atlas. Filling in a table, notating potential plans, and copying pictures on

pages is incommensurate with Warburg’s working process. Post-asylum, Warburg

directly interacts with objects to synthesize research.62

The Book Collection

Warburg was consistent in one scholarly enterprise, which he addressed with

abandon: acquiring books. This passion began in Florence and continued to Warburg’s

death. At age 13, Warburg allegedly nullified his birthright as first son of the family

banking magnate, in exchange for life-long funding to buy items for his personal library.

At age 23, Warburg wrote his mother to declare he intended to “lay the foundation of my

library and photographic collection, both which cost much money.”63 His brother Max,

who became head of the bank in Aby’s stead, generously acquiesced, citing the value of

62 For Warburg’s use of diagrams in the post-Kreuzlingen Tagesbuchen see Christopher D. Johnson,

Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012),

182-184. 63 Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 3.

23

intellectual cultivation.64 Max wrote, “I told myself that when I was in the business I

could, after all, always find the money to pay for the works of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing,

and perhaps also Klopstoc, and so, unsuspecting, I gave him what I now must admit was

a very large blank check.”65 Figure 6 depicts the five brothers with Warburg on the fore

right. Warburg holds his hands out in a sardonic nod to the lifelong familial support of

his research and living. The Warburgs were generous to both Jewish and community

philanthropic foundations, as well as individual patrons of charities and artistic

communities.66 Warburg’s philanthropic motives were channeled into the acquisition and

care of historical documents.

Throughout the 1900’s and into the 1920’s, Warburg accumulated a vast

collection of prints, books, and artifacts. In 1909, Warburg had 9,000 books in his

Hamburg home. By 1911, the books numbered 15,000. In 1920 it reached 20,000, and by

1933, The Warburg Library contained 60,000 books selected and catalogued by

64 Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: the twentieth-century odyssey of a remarkable Jewish family (New York:

Random House, 1993). Warburg was the eldest of five brothers and two sisters. The Jewish family fled

from Venice to Hamburg in the early 1500s and continued to function as private bankers through the

twentieth century. Father: Moritz Warburg (1838 – 1910). Mother: Charlotte Oppenheim (1842-1941).

Aby, Max, Paul, Felix, Olga, Fritz and Louis (5 boys, 2 girls). Olga died in 1904, but Aby was the first

brother to pass away. Known as the “Mittelweg” Warburg side of the family. Moritz’s brother Sigmeund

(1835 – 1889) led the Alsterufer side of the Warburg family. In his biography on the Warburgs, Ron

Chernow describes Aby as “high-strung and imaginative” child who used his temper to “brazenly

manipulate others.” For further family history see, A.M. Meyer, “European Scholarship: Aby Warburg in

his Early Correspendence,” The American Scholar, 57:3 (Summer 1988), 445-452. 65 Chernow, The Warburgs, 30. He is quoting Gombrich’s biography on Warburg. 66 Chernow, The Warburgs, 27-28. “In this generation, Jewish identity wouldn’t disappear but would be

transformed into a Jewish-based philanthropy devoid of real spiritual content.” Aby’s brother Felix,

collected Italian paintings, now located in the National Gallery of London. See Cyrus Adler, “Felix M.

Warburg in Memoriam,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 68 (Dec. 1937), 2-4.

Moritz and Charlotte Warburg kept a kosher household, including celebrating Sabbath on Fridays. Aby

and his siblings were not allowed to carry books on Saturday. “Sabbath boys” were hired for this

purpose. Moritz’s sons were irreverent towards Jewish customs. Aby showed precocious inclination to

work outside of the financial, medical or religious sectors expected of him. It is reported that Aby

resented his maternal relatives in Frankfurt who admonished his professional aspirations. His enrollment

and intended art historical career were complicated by his Jewish origins. In Imperial Germany, Jews

were less accepted in the universities, often known for Anti-Semitic sentiment. As late as 1909, there

were only 25 full-time Jewish professors in German institutions (Ronchow, 60).

24

Warburg.67 Warburg purchased archival materials relevant to his broad research interests.

Predilections included books, novels, dictionaries, drawings, encyclopedias, maps, and

treatises. His book collection was like the material in the Zettelkästen, each title and

subject related to a facet of Warburg’s research. With an ever-growing scope, Warburg’s

desire for texts on a particular subject could change at any given moment.

Warburg exercised as little control over his collecting compulsion as over his

publishing proclivity, although books were in excess and essays in absence. Warburg

collected in bulk and excess. Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s colleague and head librarian,

commented in 1911 that the quantity and arrangement of books in Warburg’s house was

simply “baffling.”68 Prior to the building of his library in 1926, the book collection was

housed in Warburg’s home, where he lived with his wife and children. This collection

would become the locus of Warburg’s intellectual circle and contents of a rewritten

history of cultural confluence. The resources he cultivated became synonymous with his

research and those who would come close colleagues of Warburg, like Fritz Saxl, were

intellectually tied to its contents. Yet, none of this could happen in piles in Warburg’s

parlor. Organization was needed; the collection and collecting required Warburg to

specify and orient his research interests. This was finally achieved after Warburg’s

institutionalization with the erection of a library. The elocution of this space and the

structure of a catalogue system would behoove Warburg’s career and lasting contribution

to art history. It would also aid in rebuilding Warburg’s mental stability. In the politically

tumultuous years preceding World War I, increasing lapses in sanity interrupted

67 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 24-25. Books were also purchased by Warburg’s

assistants. 68 Ronchow, The Warburgs, 28.

25

Warburg’s quixotic pursuit of knowledge.69 The more information he received about the

terrors of war, the more he became convinced man could no longer be controlled.

Warburg’s psychological distress prompted him to find distance from the world, both its

people and its events.

69 In this period, Warburg realized that man could dominate the universe. His neurosis was intensified by

the realization that uncontrollable man was already in motion with the chemical warfare of WWI and the

rising discrimination against the Jewish population.

26

Chapter 3

ASYLUM

Schizophrenia

Warburg’s inability to aggregate knowledge in a cohesive manner was the

precursor to a more serious psychological disorder. On 8 Sept. 1918, Warburg wrote to

eminent phenomenological psychoanalyst Otto Binswanger: “I find myself, over the last

four years working hard (‚Kriegsarbeit’) for 9-10 hours a day in such an anxious state,

that must admit I need at least two weeks ‚away from the world’ with absolutely no

contact with people and newspapers of any kind.”70 Just two months later, the latency of

his anxious state gave way to a serious neurosis. In 1918, Warburg was convinced foreign

adversaries wanted to murder his family. He describes the night paranoia overcame

rationality in a letter:

On November 18 1918, I became very afraid for my family. So I took out a pistol and wanted to

kill myself and my family. You know, it’s because bolshevism was coming. Then my daughter

Detta said to me, “But father, what are you doing?” Then my wife struggled with me… Malice

(Max and Alice, my brother and his wife). They came immediately with the car and brought

Senator Petersen and Dr. Franke with them. Peterson said to me: ‘Warburg, I have never asked

anything from you. Now I am asking you to please come to the clinic with me, for you are ill.’71

70 WIA GC/12466. Otto Binswanger is Ludwig Binswanger’s father. 71 Quoted in Mark A. Russell, Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of

Art in Hamburg, 1896-1918 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 34. As translated by Russell in his

publication on Warburg’s life in Hamburg from 1866-1918.

27

In his biography on Warburg, Gombrich notes that Warburg’s increasing sense of doom

coincided with the onslaught of World War I and produced a terrible psychotic reaction.

“The two preoccupations of [Warburg’s] scholarly life, the expression of passion and the

reaction to fear, were gripping him in the form of terrible tantrums and phobias,

obsessions and delusions which ultimately made him a danger to himself and his

surroundings and led to his confinement in a closed ward.”72 In an early report, Ludwig

Binswanger suggests Warburg’s psychological distress began several years before

hospitalization: “Already in his childhood Prof. V. [Aby Warburg] showed signs of

anxiety and obsession; as a student he had already expressed delusional ideas; he was

never free from obsessional fears, etc. and his literary productivity greatly suffered from

this.” 73 According to his doctor, the illness explains many of the wanting elements of

Warburg’s early career, like the lack of extensive publication, a sustained professorship,

and a clearly articulated, stable research objective.

Mental illness diagnosis and treatment underwent rapid change at the turn of the

century. Initially, Warburg’s illness was defined as schizophrenia.74 Warburg’s principle

psychoanalyst, Binswanger identified schizophrenia “as a defect in the intersubjective

72 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 215. 73 Russell, Between Tradition, 35. The duration of Warburg’s illness is dubious. The Warburg children

suffered from various maladies. Aby contracted typhoid at age six. Paul had uclers. Fritz had ear, nose

and throat problems. Charlotte almost died from typhus. It may not be an exaggeration to describe a

heightened attention to medical maladies, or even, hypochondria, at a young age. Apparently, news

reports of overseas epidemics could trigger immense anxiety attacks (Ronchow, 58). 74 Karl Konigseder, “Aby Warburg im ‘Bellevue’,” in Aby M. Warburg “Ekstatische Nymphe… trauernder

got” Portrait eines Gelehrten, ed. Robert Galitz and Brita Reimers (Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1995),

82. Daniel T.-Y. Tsoi, Michael D. Hunter, Peter W.R. Woodruff, “History, Aetiology, and

Symptomatology of Schizophrenia,” Psychiatry 7:10 (October 2008):404-409. Schizophrenie was first

used by Eugen Bleuler in 1910, in Psychiatrisch-Neurol. Wochenschr XII. 171. Bleuler renamed

Kraeplin’s term “dementia praecox.” “Emil Kraepelin initially used the term ‘dementia praecox’ to refer

to the ‘sub-acute development of a peculiar simple condition of mental weakness occurring at a youthful

age’ and placed it alongside ‘catatonia’ (neurogenic motor immobility/stupod) and ‘dementia paranoides’

(paranoia) in his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie. Subsequently, Kraepelin unified these distinct conditions by

considering them to represent different expressions of a single, core disorder: dementia

praecox. Critically, Kraepelin distinguished dementia praecox from manic–depressive psychosis (bipolar

disorder).” See E. Kraepelin, Psychiatrie (Leipzig: Barth, 1896).

28

understanding or the failure to achieve inner unity with the other”– that is, an inability to

relate, especially empathize, with other people and with ones innate desires.75 This

parallels Warburg’s struggled to coalesce complex, cross-chronological critique of art

historical imagery prior to his breakdown.

The Asylum

Warburg was first hospitalized in the private clinic of Dr. Lienau in Hamburg. 76

A transfer to the university clinic in Jena brought no improvement.77 Finally, Warburg

arrived at Bellevue Sanatorium where he stayed from 1921 to 1924. There, where he had

his own room, nurses, and personalized schedule (fig. 7). Bellevue Sanatorium was led

by Binswanger, who was one of the most prominent phenomenological psychoanalyst

75 Susan Lanzoni, “An epistemology of the clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s phenomenology of the Other,”

Critical Inquiry 30:1 (December, 2003), 177. Schizophrenia was considered an invariably dismal

prognosis; the diagnosis was subsequently challenged by Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin who was the

recognized authority on this subject in Europe. Kraepelin changed the diagnosis to a mixed manic-

depressive state and anticipated a gradual improvement in the patient’s clinical condition. A recent study

by psychologist reattempts a diagnosis: Pierluigi Politi, “Aby Warburg, 1866-1929,” The American

Journal of Psychiatry 168:8 (August, 2011): 151. Politi’s article shows the emerging interest in

Warburg’s illness in the field of psychiatry. The purpose of the short article is to posthumously determine

the potential medicinal prescription Warburg would have been given had it been available prior to the

1940’s: “Given the conflicting diagnostic hypotheses on Warburg’s mental illness, it remains unclear

how much Warburg’s recovery and art scholarship could have benefited from current

psychopharmacological interventions” (Politi, 151). 76 See Henri Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nérveux et mentaux? (Berne: Huber, 1936). At

the turn of the twentieth century, hospitalization of the insane was highly stigmatized in Germany and

Austria. Perhaps less so in Switzerland, but Warburg lived in Germany when he was first hospitalized in

1918. Individual Swiss cantons usually contained one or two public asylums and potentially a private

clinic, with a concentration of private clinics in the north. In 1930 there were 25 public institutions and

21 private institutions in Switzerland. The private institutes catered predominately to domestic and

foreign middle and upper class. 77 Konigseder, Im ‘Bellevue,’ 81. There exists limited contemporaneous or contemporary analysis of

Warburg’s illness and internment in mental institutions. This paucity may be due in part to a rather

romanticized and cursory treatment of extant records by Warburg’s early great biographer, E.H.

Gombrich and reserved access to archival materials related to Warburg’s Kreuzlingen years. For Italian

and German transcripts of Binswanger-Warburg correspondence see Davide Stimilli, Ludwig

Binswanger, Aby Warburg: die unendliche Heilung: Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte (Zurich:

Diaphanes, 2007). Prior to the 1990s, Permission to access Kreuzlingen archival documents was subject

to written consent from the Warburg estate up until only the last fifteen years, and still is officially listed

as such. From 1937 to the 1990s the head archivist was Anne Marie Meyer, who joined the Institute staff

in 1937.

29

(fig. 8).78 Bellevue was a world-renowned sanatorium, with the reputation for treating

esteemed patients. Warburg went there because it was the most prestigious clinic

Europe.79 In addition to a treatment facility, Bellevue was an institute for scholarly

research. Binswanger hosted several international philosophical and psychological

conferences between the years of 1919 and 1932.80

A patient’s interaction with control mechanisms during institutionalization played

a crucial role in developing a new relationship with opticality and spatialization inside the

asylum. Bellevue’s architectural design and family-based culture touted a system

modeled on community. But, it also surreptitiously employed a hierarchy of control more

pervasive than the prison atmosphere of earlier asylum architecture. Bellevue’s design

and operations were structure by a complex system of surveillance. Staff both cared for

patients, maintained discipline, and assessed patient health, all under the authority of a

head analyst. Warburg, under constant review and restricted to asylum boundaries, was a

subjugated member of a highly-structured environment. The asylum’s authority over its

patients was based on visualization, proximity, and physicality. This rapport was

absorbed and instituted by Warburg post-asylum in his effort to organize his research

through architecture.

78 See Jacob Needleman, Being-in-the-World, Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger (New York: Basic

Books, 1963). Binswanger practiced a form of psychoanalysis called Existential Psychoanalysis. He

sought to uncover the Existential a priori or meaning-matrix, which is “the ground of his experiencing the

world,” as the foundation for making a “reductive, systematic interpretation and diagnosis” (Needleman,

74). The patient’s Existential A Priori is the constructed meaning which unifies two objects under an

universal, such as “aggression, “possession,” or “submission” (Needleman, 74). For example, a knife and

the phallus are associated by an Existential A Priori which assigns them to mean “aggression.” In therapy

sessions with Warburg, Binswanger applied this psychoanalytic approach searching for interconnected

value in disparate objects. 79 This is from conversations with Dr. Charlotte Schoell-Glass and psychoanalyst Anthony Stadlen during

January 2013 research. 80 Yrjo O Alanen, Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Schizophrenic Psychoses: Past, Present and Future

(London: Routledge, 2009), 45. As a result, various professionals, including Freud, Emil Kraeplin, and

Hans Prinzhorn, analyzed Warburg.

30

During the late nineteenth-century mental health care practice changed

dramatically, characterized by a shift towards patient-based practice.81 These reforms

were dictated in clinical practice and asylum spatial organization. Bellevue’s architectural

style, “The Villa System” was a solution to monolithic asylums.82 The singular, enclosed

design of earlier mental houses was replaced by “a complex of smaller buildings— called

pavilions, villas, cottages, or blocks— distributed across the whole terrain of the

institution.”83 An aerial view of Herisau Sanatorium in Figure 9 shows a Villa System

design: a cluster of individual buildings joined by pathways and sculpted gardens set in

the countryside. The circular orientation with conjoining paths bespeaks a sense of

community. The plan of Bellevue Sanatorium exhibits these same characteristics (fig.

10). Bellevue’s “Villa” model negotiates between preexisting architectural structures and

modern asylum design. When Ludwig Binswanger Sr. purchased Bellevue Villa in

Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in 1857, the largest, multi-storied building was built in 1843 on

the grounds of an old monastery (fig. 11).84 It was originally intended to house a printing

press and offices (fig. 12).85 The arrangement of wards and offices within the main

building (No. 1 on the map in figure 10) is divided by small and large spaces, hallways

81 Leslie Elizabeth Topp, “Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in

Historical Context,” Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine 27 (New York; London:

Routledge, 2007), 243. In the late nineteenth century the asylum was still identified with confinement

and isolation where patients were likened to celled prisoners or shackled animals. The public viewed

asylums as places of official misconduct, brutality, and oppression. 82 Topp, “Madness, Architecture and the Built,” 246. Quoting Gutav Kolb from 1907. “The old asylums

had massive buildings with bars on the windows; narrow, dark courtyards; gardens shut off anxiously

from the outside world through high fences or walls.” 83 Topp, “Madness, Architecture and the Built,” 244. 84 Kreuzlingen is a border town between Switzerland and Germany located on Lake Constance. In 1842,

Ignaz Vanotti from Constance bought a large tract of land and built a residential and commercial building

in 1843 to house the emigrant press of Bellevue, which had previously been located in Romerberg. 85 For a more complete history of the early years of Bellevue Sanatorium see: “Psychiatrie in Binswangers

Klinik ‘Bellevue’,” Diagnostik - Therapie - Arzt-Patient-Beziehung (Vorträge einer Internationalen

Tagung Tübingen, 4-5, Oktober 2002)

31

and expansive windows. Similar architectural plans could be found in non-asylum

locations for commercial or public purposes. Residences, like those of Villa Maria and

Binswanger’s home, produced a variegated architectural landscape (fig. 13, 14). The

Bellevue Sanatorium vicinity was accentuated by private arboreal groves and tucked

away buildings. This affected the lifestyle of patients, especially Warburg, who lived,

when not restrained, in the furthest building for the mainhall, Parkhaus (No. 8 on the map

in figure 10). Parkhaus is a picturesque residence nestled amongst trees (fig. 15). Living

there, Warburg walked daily through the park to reach the refectory and parlor rooms

(fig. 16, map with landscape design).

The “Villa Style” architectural plan was programmatic. The architectural layout

of Bellevue reflects a progressive spatial categorization of the insane. The verdant

landscape and pleasant villas deliberately configured a power dynamic between doctors,

patients, and property boundaries. Bellevue Sanatorium was founded on the principles of

English psychiatrist John Connolly, who advocated a “no-restraint policy” of abolishing

isolation rooms and mechanical constraining devices (fig. 17, 18).86 The philosophy

promulgated that “just because a mentally ill person has their civic right to self-

determination removed does not mean that all their human rights are also denied them.”87

Early twentieth-century German psychiatrist Gustav Kolb suggested the modern Villa

System asylum replicated the outside world inside the asylum. The asylum space

86 Alanen, Psychotherapeutic Approaches, 44. For a description of Connolly’s methods in an American

journal, one can find a contemporaneous nineteenth century review in, “Annual report of the managers of

the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital: at Middletown, N.Y.” to the State Commission in Lunacy,

1881. 87 Topp, “Madness, Architecture and the Built,” 243. Statement made by psychiatrist Albrecht Paetz,

director of Alt-Scherbitz, an asylum located outside of Leipzig.

32

duplicated “normal or near-normal living conditions.” 88 “With its scattered home-like

villas, its verandas, and climbing vines thus projected a kind of normality heightened

through its very separation from the normal world— it was meant to represent a place

where disturbed people were confined so that they could lead a more normal and

liberated life than would have been possible ‘outside.’”89 Smaller buildings containing

supervised wards, all located on agricultural land, gave the patient a sense of being a part

of a “self-sufficient colony.”90 In this setting, Warburg lived in an adjusted universe.

But, “The Villa System” operated primarily as a system of surveillance. Staff and

patients shared common living quarters, ate together, and participated in social activities

(fig. 19, 20).91 The hospital staff were quite respectful towards the patients.92 Dr.

Binswanger and his wife lived in a grand home on the asylum grounds and often hosted

tea there (fig. 14). However, despite Bellevue operating on an open-door system,

Warburg’s actions, emotions, desires, and living space were closely monitored by the

authority. Binswanger considered patient well-being and recovery to be the purview of all

hospital staff, at all times. On the liberties accorded the patients – their freedom to

choose their daily activity, learn or practice and new subject, and maintain

communication with the outside world– “all this is just a small section of the decisions

that [Binswanger,] the medical and care staff together with the work therapists [made]

with regard to the treatment of patients.”93 The shared process of patient care extended to

88 Topp, “Madness, Architecture and the Built,” 243. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Lanzoni, “An epistemology of the clinic,” 169. 92 This relationship is unlike a prisoner and warden because the demarcation of authority is purposefully not

emphasized. 93 Alanen, Psychotherapeutic Approaches, 46.

33

interceding in the patient’s physical and psychic space. “For Binswanger, the treatment of

psychoses also included the active use of all the sanatorium’s resources. Nurses cared for

and observed the patients at times very intensively, and even entered into physical

confrontations with them in order to bring the patients’ psychotic aggression into the

arena of real encounters with other human beings.”94 On the one hand, the twenty-four

hour observation of patients was considered beneficiary to the treatment process. But, this

type of observation served to impose a form of self-perpetuating subjugation to authority.

A patient cognizant of being monitored learns to monitor their actions according to the

system rules. Michel Foucault writes, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and

who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play

spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he

simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”95 An

organizational structure which purports freedom yet is ever-waiting to apply constraint is

a fundamental paradox which speaks to Foucault’s critique of the modern asylum.

Foucault asserts that increased patient freedom was in reality the replacement of one form

of control- the arbitrary and physical- with another, which was much more pervasive for

being invisible.96 Rather than the celled confinement or restraining instruments

previously employed to control patients, the Villa System’s disciplinary model relied on

visual monitoring. This was essential to Warburg. Warburg replicates asylum physical

engagement and visual monitoring of subjects in his post-institutional library catalogue

and design.

94 Alanen, Psychotherapeutic Approaches, 46. 95 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (Blackwell Publishers, 1998) 471. 96 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 247.

34

The Library Design

While institutionalized on July 30th 1920, Warburg professed a need to systemize

chaos: “To understand the present state of the psychological conflict… we need… a

receiving station that registers the give and take between the past and present and that can

thus assist us in containing the chaos of unreason by means of a filter system of

retrospective reflection.”97 His personal library became this station and allowed Warburg

to systemize the vast amount of ideas and associations stored in his mind and

fragmentarily in the Zettelkästen. In 1923, Warburg delivered the Schlangenritual lecture

to Binswanger and colleagues at Bellevue. This presentation contributed to Warburg’s

release from Bellevue in 1924. Warburg returned home to Hamburg where his assistant,

Fritz Saxl, had led Warburg’s research initiatives in his absence.98 As interim director of

Warburg’s library and research institute, Saxl also prepared for Warburg’s next major

project. Post-institutionalization, Warburg sought a privileged space for his working life.

The solution was to move his book collection to its own library. The several thousand

books had long outgrown the space in his home and an anticipated center for Warburg’s

scholarly enterprise was finally at hand.

The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg was built next door to

Warburg’s home at number 116 Heilwigstrasse (fig. 21). A doorway linked the two

buildings. Warburg could enter his bookshelves at any hour of the night. The two houses

97 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 281. 98 Michel Foucault, History of Madness (New York: Routledge, 2006), 509. Foucault humorously remarks

on psychoanalytic diagnosis, “Cures without any solid basis, yet whose reality was undeniable, were

quickly transformed into real cures of false illnesses. Madness was not what one thought… it was

infinitely less than itself, a blend of persuasion and mystification.” By delivering a lecture, titled

Schlangenritual, on April 21, 1923 at Bellevue Sanatorium, Warburg convinced Binswanger that he was

ready to return to society. The suspect success of psychoanalytic therapy parallels the mollification of

Warburg’s illness in later scholarship.

35

together provided room for at least 60,000 volumes.99 For the new building, Warburg

commissioned architect Gerard Langmaack to design a library based on the historian’s

criteria (fig. 22).100 No expense or technological innovation was spared. The space

included “the latest technological gadgets, such as telephone, a pneumatic mail system,

elevators, and conveyor belts to transport books from the stacks to the reading room.”101

The house was fitted with a guest bathroom and chambers. Complete living quarters

existed in the basement. The Reading Room, in particular, accommodated a large and

distinct space for displaying and surveying objects. In essence, Warburg created an

enclosed world akin to his recent five year residence in sanatoria.

The library enabled Warburg to enact all three of the asylum control

mechanisms— authority ascertained by visualization, proximity, and physicality— onto

his archival material. The Reading Room was the locus of this process. Warburg built an

ovoid Reading Room. This solicited a panoramic gaze and circumambulation (fig. 23).102

The general plan included a ground floor and second story, with a balcony running the

periphery of the room. The walls on the upper and lower story were lined with

bookshelves. In the center, several large tables with chairs offered space for study or

99 Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 28. Also Claudia Wedepohl and Christopher D.

Johnson, “From Arsenal to the Laboratory,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History,

and Material Culture 19:1 (Spring-Summer 2012): 110. 100 The library address is Heilwigstraße 116, 20249 Hamburg. For more on the library design see Tilmann

von Stockhausen, “Warburg und Schumacher” in Aby M. Warburg: Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von

Sternglaube und Sternkunde im Hamburger Planetarium (1993), 390-395. This library building was

abandoned by Warburg’s colleagues in 1933. All of the contents, included 60,000 books, were moved to

a new location in London. Saxl and other scholars left Germany in response to the growing popularity of

the Nazi Party. In 1993 the library was restored and reopened. I visited in January 2013. The biggest

surprise was the large windows that overlook a channel behind the K.W.B. The infiltration of natural

light and visual synchronicity between exterior and interior worlds, link Warburg’s scholarship in the

library to an ever visible outside; an ideal reminder that Warburg was working towards public

presentation. http://www.warburg-haus.de/ 101 Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 28. 102 An overt design that implements this power system is visible in the image of New Illinois Penitentiary at

Statesville near Joliet, Illinois. In this panoptic design a central watchtower allows the official to easily

view each inmate. [fig. 47]

36

discussion. The library could be also be repurposed. It was built to house lecture series

and visual presentations. Warburg equipped the room with state-of-the-art slide

projectors, screens, and an epidiascope, the precursor to modern overhead projectors.103

The second story offered raised seating. In addition to special engagements, the library

was suited for a particular style of viewership which encouraged visibility. The circular

orientation of this custom library allowed Warburg to stand at a singular point and view

all his research.

Warburg’s process for identifying common expressive content of visual materials

required a grand space to contemplate and rearrange his sources. In turn, the library

architecture empowers an authoritative place to arrange objects. Warburg wrote to his

brother in 1925, “I and my young assistants or research companions must use large tables

on which to lay out the documents, i.e., books and images, so that we can compare them,

and these books and images but be easily and instantly within reach. I therefore need a

veritable arena with tables, so that I can have at hand both the ordinary books and

iconographic material.”104 This process was aided by the voyeuristic and analytic

potential of the Reading Room. Warburg laid out sources in front of him. He then would

perambulate, approach, or retreat from various arrangements to contemplate relationships

between images. It was necessary for Warburg to see his material; when he could not,

this caused real, corporeal anguish for the scholar. For example, while trying to organize

images onto the Mnemosyne Atlas panels, Warburg writes: “The regrouping of the photo-

plates is tedious. . . . [there is] mass displacement within the photo plates . . . The

103 Forester, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 28. 104 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 233.

37

arrangement of plates in the hall causes unforeseen inner difficulties. . .”105 The

organized material (plates of image-clusters for the Atlas project) located outside in the

hallway connecting foyer to Reading Room were beyond Warburg’s vision. Thus, this

architectural impediment caused a conceptual and synaptic disturbance. Figure 24,

Gerard Langmaack’s drawing for the Reading Room, highlights the ovoid space. His plan

is a fairly accurate rendering of the final room. In both drawing and building, a dense

beam of light falls from the sunlight oculus above the circular central floor (fig. 25). This

space is constructed as the capital of Warburg’s institute and entryway to his projects.

The library gifted Warburg with ownership over his peripheral and direct vision.

This relationship between viewer and intended object is essentially panoptic. Foucault

describes the benefits of panoptic perspective: “[T]he Panopticon ... makes it possible to

draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of each individual…

among schoolchildren, it makes it possible to observe performances (without there being

any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous

classifications...”106 The library is a model tantamount to Foucault’s panopticon. While

not a direct architectural rendering, it translates the concept of beholder’s authority into a

scholarly workplace. Warburg treated books, photographs, articles, and art work like

living beings, expressive bodies of information which communicate with one another.

The spatial organization of Warburg’s Reading Room allowed him access to the

symptomatic characteristics of each “patient.”

105 My italicization. Quoted in Peter van Huisstede, “Der Mnemosyne-Atlas. Ein Laboratorium der

Bildgeschichte,” in Aby Warburg, Ekstatische Nymphe . . . trauernder Flußgott; Portrait eines Gelehrten,

ed. Robert Galitz and Brita Reimers (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 1955) 130–171. Translation

by Martin Warnke in Warnke, “’God Is in the Details,’ or The Filing Box Answers,” in Imagery in the

21st century, eds. Oliver Grau and Thomas Veigl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2011). 106 Foucault, “Discipline and Punish,” 471.

38

In this sense, the power system of Bellevue is replicated in the library’s design.

Inscribed in the panoramic architectural plan of Warburg’s new library is the ability to

monitor a large quantity of material and institute a sense of order. Like the asylum, it

places the proprietor at the center of a spatially and optically defined system of control.

Warburg’s library inverts Warburg’s position in the power-system. In the library, he was

no longer the subject of study. Instead, the library situated him as the superintendent,

governor, overseer of the system.107 Warburg functioned as head analyst. He possessed

power over the contents and location of the information. Concurrent with this authority,

Warburg exercised, for the first time, a large-scale systematic organization of his archival

material through a new catalogue system.

The Catalogue System

In the library, Warburg generated his first cohesive catalogue system.

Concurrently, the library administration reflected a newfound engagement with material.

The cataloguing was entirely of Warburg’s creation. In bibliographic bedlam, prescribed

call numbers and classifications are disbanded in favor of pairing works by expressions

of universal memories as per Warburg’s concept of Pathosformel.108 Warburg’s books

were arranged not by author or subject, but by thematic relationships he found joining

two documents. Over the library’s four floors, books were subdivided into four

107 For more on Foucault’s views on psychoanalysis, Freud, and the role of the doctor-patient relationship

see above Foucault, “Discipline and Punish,” 510-511. 108 See Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in

Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 1999), 89-103. Pathosformel is Warburg’s concept of an

intertwining emotional and iconographic formula where it is impossible to distinguish between form and

content.

39

categories: “Word,” “Orientation,” “Image,” and “Action.”109 This cataloguing process

incited perpetual reorganization. The physical object and its location in referential space

were essential to the networks of meaning constellated in Warburg’s library system. At

his command, Warburg and his assistants re-shelved texts and images on the shelves and

walls. His new research method was both haptic and tactile. “During his work sessions,

Warburg was constantly in motion, handling books, comparing photographs, and writing

and classifying reports.”110 Fritz Saxl recalls, “Warburg never tired of shifting and

reshifting [the books]... every new idea about the inter-relation of facts made him re-

group the corresponding books.”111 The physical location signified a theoretical

articulation. The architectural orientation of the catalogue process integrated Warburg’s

early research methods into the process of coalescing ideas; the intermittent movement of

material on the Reading Room tables is a transformation of the mobile Zettelkästen or the

Pathosformel diagrams open and partially filled in. Forster speculates, “The unique value

that [Warburg] assigned to the book… reflects the illustrative, and indeed, denotative

function performed by books and the whole bibliographic apparatus within the edifice of

Warburg’s thought. This is why the arrangement of his books could never be allowed to

ossify so long as his thoughts were still on the move.”112 He culled from his past practice

to attempt a concrete present system.

Yet without a strict library circulation design, Warburg was sometimes the sole

possessor of the knowledge on where to locate information. As Michaud writes,

109 Wedepohl, “From Arsenal to the Laboratory,” 111. The current shelving in the Warburg Institute in

London maintains this system. 110 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 235. Michaud likens this process to ritual dances

Warburg witness on his tour of America in the 1890s 111 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 229. 112 Kurt W. Forster and David Britt, “Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents,”

October 77 (Summer, 1996), 11.

40

“Warburg had discovered the possibility of abolishing the boundary between the world

and representations... the walls of his library, elaborat[e] a type of thought that espoused

the movements of intuition, allowing itself to be decoded according to its rhythms, a

thought inseparable from the body and the encounters affecting it.”113 The library became

a third appendage, a vast extension of Warburg’s mind. Passionate forces conjoined

Warburg and his collection. Historian of collecting practice, Ingrid Schaffner writes “the

process of storing is always one of mirroring and self-evaluation.”114 When not surveying

his material on the Reading Room surfaces or library shelves, Warburg returned to a

central worktable to experiment with thematic sequences. “[Carl] Heise recalled that on

Warburg’s work table there were piles of works who superimposition itself had meaning:

catalogues of ancient works; small objects that, he said, he considered fetishes.”115 His

work tables were the nexus of the conceptual development. Forster writes, “The scholar’s

desk is the site of ritual invocation of those forces that impel, and also those that assail,

human beings within their culture.”116 Warburg’s work tables were the space between

personal and public. Warburg’s attachment to the material arrangements on these tables

was, at times, even maniacal. “Warburg flew into violent rages when an object was

moved on this table.”117 The visual and tangible register of visual information was

imperative to the art historian’s stability. From 1924 on, Warburg externalized his

thought processes through the systematic rearrangement of material objects. Material

became the mediator for the historian’s conceptual ideologies. Why?

113 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 232. 114 Ingrid Schaffner et al., Deep storage: collecting, storing, and archiving in art (Munich: Prestel, 1998)

21. For more on Freud’s theory of archiving information see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian

Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 115 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 235. 116 Forster, “Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual…” 11. 117 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 236.

41

Chapter 4

ATLAS

Asylum Subculture

The asylum’s architectural and political system required Warburg to re-socialize

within new social and political frameworks. The drastically different socialization mental

patients under-go while institutionalized is an affective psychosocial reorientation. For

five years, Warburg suffered from mental illness surrounded by others with similar

complexities. During his long-term stay at Bellevue, Warburg inhabited an insular

society. This society was modeled on outside the asylum walls but modulated by an

oppressive surveillance system. While “The Villa Style” no longer denied patient

participation in a lifestyle akin to a mentally stable individual, the patients were assuredly

unstable. Bellevue’s daily schedule solicited a programmed existence aimed at

reinstituting regulated interaction with fundamental activities. For example, Warburg’s

schedule, as recorded by his nurse, lists basic activities, such as showering and physical

exertion.118 But, the regular was often interjected by the irregular. Warburg bathed and

washed his hands far more than the average individual (fig. 26).119 The sanatorium aimed

to temper this type of behavior by continuously reemphasizing the reacquisition of basic

independent functions. This was discussed in therapy sessions and augmented by

118 Stimilli, Ludwig Binswanger, Aby Warburg: Die Unendliche Heilung 119 Ibid.

42

recreational activities. At Bellevue, like other patients, Warburg had the option of

working in a carpentry shop, weaving room, book bindery, or perhaps even outside the

asylum (fig. 27-32).120 Exercise was essential (fig. 33). At Bellevue, a patient could take

private lessons in language, literature, history, art or music. 121 Activities were

encouraged to be social, interactive, and sensorially stimulating. Bellevue had a special

recreation center which combined each of these elements (fig. 34). Spaces were made

available for patients to continue their previous scientific or artistic work.122 Binswanger

stated, “Here [at Bellevue] we try to avoid forced conformity and schematizing and let

the greatest possible individualization prevail in every respect.”123 Binswanger recorded

that “in the afternoon [Warburg was] usually calm enough so that he [could] receive

visitors, have tea with us, go out on excursions, etc.”124 By the early twentieth century,

this “open-door system” was common practice. “Freedom (within the walls of the

asylum) would be the rule and restraint and confinement the exception.”125 Warburg’s

mental state was, however, on occasion the exception.

Warburg struggled at Bellevue. Just as he had adapted his daily routine to the

space of his new residence, so did his neurosis. Terrors inhabited close spaces outside of

Warburg’s visibility. In 1921, he was still tormented by delusions of political adversaries

hunting his family. He was routinely convinced his family was on the Bellevue

Sanatorium property, in one of the other surrounding hospital villas, where “they were

120 Alanen, Psychotherapeutic Approaches, 46. 121 This paper does not seek to enter the realm of comparing outsider art with Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. 122 Alanen, Psychotherapeutic Approaches, 46. Ernest Ludwig Kirchner completed 22 woodcuts while

hospitalized at Bellevue. [fig. 48] 123 Quoted in Russell, Between Tradition, 35. 124 Ibid. 125 Topp, “Madness, Architecture and the Built,” 244.

43

imprisoned, tortured, awaiting execution or had already be slaughtered.” 126 He was sure

the screams of patients in closed wards were those of this family.127 As a result of the

aggressive state of Warburg’s psychotic delusions, Binswanger assigned him to a closed

ward (no photograph available). Binswanger writes, “Combined with [a very serious

psychosis] was an intense psychomotor excitation, which is also persistently present,

although it is subject to extreme fluctuations. He has been placed in a locked ward…”128

A patient’s assignment to a given ward was “not a reward or punishment, but as an

expression of his general level of social functioning.”129 This guarded enclosure was a

form of physical constraint on the patient (fig. 35, 36).130 “While free, humane treatment

would reduce the need for locked cells… they were needed in reserve, as it were, for

those episodes when a disturbing and destructive patient could be calmed by no other

means.”131 For Warburg’s case, the limited use and number of locked cells reveals the

advanced degree of his madness.

Warburg participated in multiple worlds at the sanatorium: his illness, the

programmed therapy and recreation schedule, and the subsidiary defiance of those

asylum systems through redefining his immediate environ. At Bellevue, Warburg was

exposed to the curious underlife of patients. Once a patient entered a mental institution,

he or she was expected to undergo a series of adjustments in order to comply with the

new societal structure posed by the asylum. Both a pseudo-self-sustaining colony and

“make-do” imaginary world, Warburg’s hospitalization was a complex re-socialization,

126 Konigseder, “Im ‘Bellevue,’” 83. 127 Konigseder, “Im ‘Bellevue,’” 84. 128 Russell, Between Tradition, 35. 129 Goffman, Asylum, 149. 130 While the Villa System promulgated patient freedom, the necessity for means of containment, such as

the straight jacket and locked cell, was not removed. 131 Topp, “Madness, Architecture and the Built,” 245.

44

which asked that he participate in usual behavioral activities, like working and exercise,

at the surface level.

In his work Asylums, Erwin Goffman argues all patients develop ways to deny or

circumvent the asylum regulations to attain a sense of autonomy. The long duration of

Warburg’s stay in asylums was rare; it attests to both the severity of his neurosis but also

his full integration into asylum life and its primary and secondary adjustments.132

Goffman uses the term “secondary adjustment” to define a “habitual arrangement by

which a member of an organization employs unauthorized means, or obtains

unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organization assumptions as to what

he should do and get and hence what he should be.”133 Goffman proposes that there

exists, below the surface of the social and authoritarian mechanisms a set of adjusted

practices called an underlife.134 This adjustment of the prescribed patient lifestyle was

enacted in various ways, including the imaginative redefinition of relationship between

objects, or “make-dos.”

Moths and Make-dos

“Make-do” objects were a form of freedom and reimagining of an assigned visual

world. Goffman claims “in every social establishment participants use available artifacts

132 Roy Porter and David Wright, The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 77. “Two thirds of those who were hospitalized

remained for fewer than three months, and if long hospitalizations (more than a year) existed, there were

rare.” This statement is, however, based on data pulled from public as opposed to private institutional

records for Swiss asylums. 133 Goffman, Asylum, 189. 134 Goffman, Asylum, 188. This system operated in direct insubordination of the control imposed by the

institutional framework. In Asylums, Erwin Goffman concurs that “every organization… involves a

discipline of activity, but [my] interest… is that at some level every organization also involves a

discipline of being- an obligation to be of a given character.” He states, “my object here is to examine a

special kind of absenteeism, a defaulting not from prescribed activity but from prescribed being.”

45

in a manner and for an end not officially intended, thereby modifying the conditions of

life programmed for these individuals. A physical reworking of an artifact may be

involved, or merely an illegitimate context of use.”135 “Make-do” objects were often

small, portable items. A patient might place a towel under a washstand and pretend it was

carpet while using the washstand as a make-shift reading desk.136 The height and design

of the washstand and texture of the towel approximate the form of the desired object.

Figure 37 illustrates a turn-of-the-twentieth century asylum washstand located in an open

ward. Next to it, Figure 38 illustrates a contemporaneous writing desk of roughly scale.

The two are corroborated in the mind of the patient. Toilet paper is another example of a

“make-do.” Toilet paper was sometimes neatly folded and carried on one’s person as

paper or Kleenex.137 The toilet paper was used as a writing tablet, allowing the patient to

record ideas when they chose. In both these examples, the patient associates the hospital

object with an object and experience exterior to the asylum wall. Other anecdotes exist

where there is not such a proximate formal association between object and intention. In

the hands of a mentally ill patient, the “make-do” object could take on a highly

imaginative relationship to its referential object. For example, a blanket, when drawn

over oneself, could constitute sheltered, personal space where the patient would find a

sense of control.138 Equally as abstract, during a neurotic fit, a patient might hold up a

book in defense. The book served as a shield against attackers or assailants who existed

in the patients mind. “A patient uses make-do objects and artifacts to achieve

135 Goffman, Asylum, 207. 136 Goffman, Asylum, 208. 137 Goffman, Asylum, 209. 138 Goffman, Asylum, 247.

46

“gratifications he might otherwise not obtain.”139 They are able to fulfill an emotional

lack and find comfort by recreating an experience using “make-do” objects with similar

forms. This process also reveals the patients interest in completing a normal behavioral

activity but on their terms, reasserting a form of control over their environment.

Warburg had a special form of “make-do”: living objects with whom he spoke

about the assailants he feared hunting his family. Warburg collected moths in his room.

Binswanger wrote, “[Warburg] makes a cult of the small moths and butterflies, which fly

at night in his room. He talks for hours with them.”140 The moth, as object, took on

multiple meanings and eventually became an emotional conduit. The moths became a

projection of Warburg’s attempts at caring for his loved ones, including himself.141

Family members, nurses, and Warburg treated the moth’s health as a mediating object

through which psychic information could be relayed. In a letter from Aby Warburg to his

wife Mary, dated July 1st, 1921, Warburg wrote in blunt, asylum-mandated graphite,

about “a moth which flew into his room; Warburg did not want it to die by flying into his

night light; he shooed it away; it landed on the floor and Warburg hoped it might live, but

it had died; [Warburg] finds this ‘symbolic’; ever creature around him seems to

suffer.”142 In this sense, the insects became linguistic brokers in Warburg’s verbalization

of his neurosis. Four days later Mary responded to Warburg in an even, prosaic tone.

“Mary explains that is it is not Warburg’s fault that a moth had died in his room; it was

139 Goffman, Asylum, 200. 140 Konigseder, “Im ‘Bellevue,’” 84. 141 The letters intimate, the moths were also his allies against fictive attackers and evil nurses. 142 WIA GC/35629. Quotation is the English line-by-line abstract of this letter completed by Warburg

Institute Head Archivist Dorathea McEwan. Warburg’s handwriting during the Kreuzlingen years is

exceedingly difficult to decipher. Unlike the Stimilli publication Ludwig Binswanger, Aby Warburg: Die

Unendliche Heilung, letters between Warburg and Mary during the Kreuzlingen years have not been

transcribed.

47

attracted to the light of the lamp.”143 On July 20th, 1921, a beetle and moth entered

Warburg’s room. He tried to save them, but in vain.144 July 27th, 1921, Warburg claimed

moths were being placed in his space by the sanatorium staff.145 Two weeks later, he

laments a lost moth that had been in his room for days.146 November 1st, 1922, Warburg

writes Mary that he is very lonely, “nobody visits him, not even the insects, one a little

moth was in the room the previous day.”147 Warburg’s reliance on the moths is

prolonged. July 15th, 1923, Warburg wrote Mary that Ludwig Binswanger had not seen

Warburg that morning, because Warburg was in the bathroom; he was fixated “on two

moths, one a poplar hawk moth, which were in the bathroom, but gone after Warburg

returned after lunch; [Warburg] does not know whether it was good that he tried to save

them” (fig 26).148 The lives of moths were directly associated with Warburg’s mental

status. On July 24th, 1922, nurse Lydia Krauter wrote to Mary Warburg: “this day is a bit

complicated, because a dead moth lay in the room and was taken away by a bird who had

come in through the window; [Lydia] is sure that Warburg will write Mary a long letter

about it all.”149 Using Goffman’s rubric, Warburg used the insects as company and

confidants in the absence of trusted persons in the asylum and objects to protect and

adore while he is institutionalized.

Warburg’s “make-do,” the moth, is an anomaly his letters; the majority of letters

to his wife reference anticipated subjects: health, medicine, birthdays, anniversaries,

143 WIA GC/35635 144 WIA GC/35666 145 WIA GC/35679. “Warburg has seen another moth on the floor of the bathroom, put there by Fr. Wieland

or Nurse Frieda.” 146 WIA GC/35701 147 WIA GC/36577 148 WIA GC/37023 149 WIA GC/37634

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photographs Warburg would like, his opinion of nurses and doctors (often negative),

things he needs. A typical sequence of subjects is found in a letter from Aby to Mary

dated October 10th, 1921 follows as such: Warburg does not want Nurse Frieda and

Binswanger to make decisions; he dislikes Binswangers influence on his colleagues;

people lie to him; Nurse Frieda made a huge fuss about a moth in her room; Warburg is

otherwise calm; He has not been given sedatives for one week, and eats chocolates

instead.150 This makes the mention of moths and his odd association between moth and

love all the more poignant.

The psychological transfer of signification onto objects regardless of their context

or original purpose in mental asylums is accounted for in Warburg’s theory of

Pathosformel, where forms serve as capsules for collective, timeless sentiments. The

form and content of objects was treated similarly by Freud. Freud proposes that the

location of meaning in a dream, memory, or special object entails going in search of the

collective or individual past whose traces remain in the text itself.”151 “Through an

examination of the formal, visual and temporal structures of the symptom, and such

psychoanalytic concepts as repression, the return of the repressed, displacement, conflict

and compromise, the Freudian symptom emerges as a critical paradigm for understanding

Warburg’s history of images as a psychopathology.”152 In the asylum, reviewing the way

a patient formulated object meaning was a method towards understanding their specific

neurosis. “According to psychoanalysis there exists a distinct symbolic method whereby

150 WIA GC/35828 151 Sarah Kofman, “Freud’s Method of Reading: The Work of Art as a Text to Decipher,” The Childhood of

Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 58. 152 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Dialektik Des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom Paradigm,” Art

History 24:5 (2001): 621.

49

certain images… are of invariably the same symbolic significance. We then find

psychoanalytic literature referred to ‘objective’ properties- such as the long shape that

such things as sticks, snakes, or knives have in common with the phallus; the plasticity

that softish materials such as clay or mud have in common with feces.153 Warburg’s

philosophy and Freud’s treatment of the object in psychoanalysis supports Goffman’s

anecdotal evidence of patient misidentification and reformulation of object meaning. The

insects form as living organism may have been the sole associative leap between “make-

do” and referent for Warburg. Their biology allowed for the merger of insect with friend.

In a mental asylum, the personalization of space entailed associating meaning with

objects based on something other than intended purpose or contextualized usage.154

Patients learned how to find meaning in forms as opposed to intended content. The

mental asylum prompted a patient to draw emotive association objects through

approximate formal synchronicities. In the next section, I argue the act of redefining

object use in the mental institution is the equivalent act of cross-contextualizing material

in Warburg’s Atlas construction. The psycho-kinesthetic process which produces asylum

“make-do” and the Atlas panels confirms Warburg reached systematic synthesis through

a learned engagement with objects at Kreuzlingen.

The Mnemosyne Atlas

In the mid-1920s, Warburg was prepared to publish on Pathosformel, the

methodology; a shift had occurred in Warburg and in Warburg’s thought process. In his

153 Needleman, Being-in-the-World, 66. 154 Kofman, “Freud’s Method…” 75. Freud and Warburg both purport that what is true of the individual

past is also true of the collective past; like Warburg, Freud believes it is possible to uncover the way

history is structured symbolically in a work of art. Art functions as specific memory which makes

possible the reconstruction of the author's fantasies.

50

article, Aby Warburg’s Pentimento, Davide Stimilli points out subtle and indicative

differences between Warburg’s work pre and post-institutionalization. From the early

1900s to Kreuzlingen, Warburg works from “microscopic to microcosmic,” but in 1925

Warburg turns from a “microcosmic to macrocosmic” lens.155 In his early writing and

the medium-based plan for an atlas (pg. 17), Warburg used details to discern specific

generalities pertaining to individual works or genres. Post-Kreuzlingen, Warburg used the

“microcosmic” characteristics of images to determine pendants on his library shelves and

on Mnemosyne Atlas panels. His desire was to represent a macrocosmic, cohesive image

theory.156

The Mnemosyne Atlas is a direct response to Warburg’s struggle to publish a

theoretical manifesto. In lieu of an essay, the Atlas was to be a diagrammatic, object-

based representation of Pathosformel. The year after his discharge from Bellevue

Sanatorium, in 1924, Warburg began plans for the Mnemosyne Atlas to be a mass-scale

project to map space and time in visual motifs (fig. 39).157 The Atlas is a series of panels

that chart thematic motifs Warburg felt represented ubiquitous human expression. Images

are linked vis-à-vis the Nachleben of classical Gebärdensprache, kinetic, gestural

155 Stimilli, “Pentimento,” 173. This method is hinted at in the Attalante essay and solidified in the Boll

lecture. 156 Sears, “Warburg Institute Archive,” 33. She is citing Tagebuch 130-1). In 1925, Warburg presented a

lecture at the University of Hamburg titled “The Significance of Antiquity for the Stylistic Change in the

Italian Art of the Early Renaissance” (“Die Bedeutung der Antike fur den stilistischen Wandel in der

italienischen Kunst der Frührenaissance”), the general subject of his work since 1886. In 1927, Warburg

announced a 1927-1928 winter semester course titled “Übungen zur Methode einer kunstgeschichtlichen

Kulturgeschichte” (Exercises on an art historical cultural science methodology). Concurrently, in August

of 1927, Warburg considered starting a journal titled “Hamburgische Viertelsjarhschrift fur

Kunstgeschichtliche While the publication of this journal did not come to pass, the initiative speaks to

Warburg’s willingness to aggregate knowledge through established intellectual parameters in a more

concrete format than his pre-institutional days. Kulturwissenschaft.” 157 Huisstede, „Der Mnemosyne-Atlas. Ein Laboratorium,“ 130–171. The Atlas was begun in 1924, but

substantial work on its construction began in the summer of 1927. “Mnemosyne” is the word for Memory

in Greek, and “Atlas” is often used in German where English would use the world “Album” (Forster,

“Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 46)

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figurations repeated in visual material.158 Physically, the Atlas is an assemblage of two

thousand images grouped onto panels. The tafeln (panels) were made from dark cloth was

tightly fixed to a light metal frame.159 Warburg used tacks or metal clasps to pin material

to the canvas. Images used in the Atlas were drawn from material Warburg collected over

the course of his career. Warburg intended to publish four volumes of photographed

panels with explanatory text. Today, the panels exist only in photographic form. There

are three extant sequences of the Atlas. The first and second sequences are in photograph

albums at the Warburg Institute Archives. These sequences were photographed, but not

reproduced and within months rejected by Warburg. The third, letzte series is the most

widely cited.160 This photographic project is the closest Warburg achieved to a holistic

presentation of the Mnemosyne Atlas.

Across the Atlas, Warburg maps what he identifies as visual symptoms of psychic

expressions over an expansive dialogic time. Panel A opens the letzte series. It includes

only three objects: a map of the heavens, a map of Western Europe, and a family tree of

the Tonabuoni, one of the great Florentine families living in Flanders (fig. 40). Philippe-

Alain Michaud proposes “the three images represent the circular movements of the stars,

the sublunar universe in which the fifteenth-century Florentine bourgeoisie lived, and the

process of generation and corruption, creating a strange diagram of the organization of

158 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 283. 159 Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “The Last Plates of Warburg’s Picture Atlas Mnemosyne,” Art History as

Cultural History: Warburg's Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International,

2001), 185. 160 Martin Warnke, Claudia Birnk, and Aby Warburg, Der BilderAtlas Mnemosyne (Berlin: Akademie

Verlag, 2008). This includes all plates from the final series. A projected 50-70 more plates were

intended. The Atlas is incomplete due to many factors: Warburg’s early death, the perpetual mutability of

the conceptual expressions, the photographic as a static record, the anticipated evolution of our visual and

cognitive space, and the invited metamorphosis of our interpretation over time.

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the cosmos.”161 The three objects are each diagrammatic arrangements of information

manifest in cosmic, geographic, and genealogic models. They are united by a basic

Nietzschean principle, “the will to organize.”162 The objects speak to the breadth of

Warburg’s temporal interests. They confirm his statement, “Antiquity, the Middle Ages,

and the modern age are in fact one interrelated epoch.”163 Within the Atlas’ collective

epoch exist panels displaying anthropomorphism, paganism and Christianity, the

definition of symbol, astrology, and mass. The principle two interconnected themes in the

Atlas are the vicissitudes of the Olympian gods in the astrological tradition and ancient

figures reappearing in post-medieval art and civilization.164

Warburg’s Atlas is not linear, but trans-chronological, trans-contextual, and

emphatically based on emotions conveyed by forms. In this sense the panels, although

numbered, are not ordered teleologically. Many scholars have attempted to name explicit

panel themes, an effort executed first by Gertrud Bing. Most recently, Christopher

Johnson orients the third and last series according to groups presenting like impetus:

1. Panels A, B, C: cosmological-genealogical prologue

2. Panels 1, 2, 3: classical cosmology

3. Panels 4,5,6,7,8: classical “pre-stamping” of artistic “expressive values”

4. Panels 20, 21, 22, 23, 23a, 24, 25, 26, 26, 28-9: transmission and degradation of

Greek astronomical though in Hellenistic, medieval Arabic, medieval and

Renaissance European astrological imagery

161 Michaud, Warburg and the Image in Motion, 242. 162 Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2003)143. In his analysis of Warburg Joseph Mali includes a particularly bizarre journal entry by

Warburg where he analogizes his identity to a multiracial tree and describes his efforts define cosmic

order. “In his meditations at Bellevue, Warburg … describes himself: ‘But now, in March 1923, in

Kreuzlingen, in a sealed institution, when I find myself a seismograph made of pieces of wood stemming

from a growth transplanted from the Orient into the nourishing north-German plain while carry a branch

inoculated in Italy, I allow the signals that I have received to be released from me, because in this epoch

of chaotic defeat even the weakest one is beholden to strengthen the will to cosmic order.’” 163 Quoted in Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” 2. 164 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 283.

53

5. Panels 30-49 (incl. 41a): the “after-life” of classical “expressive values” in

Renaissance, mainly late quattrocento art

6. Panels 50-41, 52-56: “inversion,” ascent, and descent in Renaissance, mainly

cinquecento art through Manet

7. Panels 57, 58, 59, 60, 61-64 (1 photo?): Virgil, Durer, Rubens, and the northward

translato

8. Panels 70-75: Baroque excess and Rembrandt’s mediation of the same

9. Panels 76-79: final “inversions”: advertisement and transubstantiation165

This breakdown shows that, while a general progression through time exists, the

numerically greater panels display greater temporal diversity than the earlier panels,

combining ancient and contemporary images on the same panel or tafel.

The Atlas’ images are edited versions of their original objects. For Warburg, the

real context and scale of each photographed object is not as important as its association

with other images on a particular panel. For example, in a detail of panel 77 two images

are pasted together on a white backing. On the left is a painting of St. Jerome extracting

the thorn from a lion’s foot. Next to the photo, is a man watching a lion behind caged

bars gesturing, perhaps, to Mussolini and the present state of religious and political

affairs in Italy. In this pair, Warburg posits an image theory which equates classical

painting and modern visual representation, including advertising and documentary

photography. Chronology and context are marginalized to propose an identical human

impulse. Like a patient negates the original intent of an object for a “make-do,” a general

formal quality can support a claim to shared meaning.

Like the repurposing of moths as confidants, Warburg has few common

denominators for his selection of idiosyncratic objects. There is a habitual attention to

cultural and temporal diversity, but, a paradoxical disregard for object context, function,

165 Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 2012).

54

or reproduction. In associating images, Warburg looked to the surface of the form. With

Warburgian theory the motif— be it vegetative, figurative, or abstract— signaled the

content. Action became the signifier of a particular emotion. This is apparent in the

variations in material and scale of objects affixed to Panel 32, which Bing records as the

panel for “Grotesque” (fig. 42). 166 Here in a detail, one can see an ivory chessboard with

Moorish, Venetian, and Flemish stylistic features, a fresco of Moorish dancers on a house

near Turin, a print of a sleeping business man whose goods are stolen by monkeys, and

two vases depicting the identical subject: clandestine monkeys robbing unsuspecting

businessmen (fig. 43). Warburg does not discriminate between architectural elements,

sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, or diagrams in a hierarchical manner. The

depicted subject supersedes the specificities of the object. This is comparable to

Warburg’s methodological contribution to a shift from essentializing, categorical

divisions of art, such as the Enlightenment or Antiquity, to an interdisciplinary, dynamic

inclusion of social, perceptual, spatial and cross-cultural vernaculars of representation.

A major contribution of the Atlas is its illustration of historical continuity in new

parameters. In lieu of definitive eras or movements, Warburg seeks to find contemporary

phenomena within historical precedent. In Plate C, Warburg assembles a group of seven

images. A “cosmographicum” from 1621 is abutted by a 1905 diagram of planetary

rotations. Below is Kepler’s proposal for the orbit of Mars. Then, to the right, is a modern

invention of man: three dirigibles circling the globe (fig. 44). The left depicts the dirigible

over Japan, the far right over New York. The movement across geography and time is

166 Warnke, Der BilderAtlas Mnemosyne, 54. Warburg’s notes for this panel: “Groteske. Tanz um die Frau

im Mittelpinkt. Voeu du Paon. Quasarina. Affenbecher. Groteske de Affen. Tanz der Frauen uum die

Hose. [ch. Tanz des Priesters, Tod des Orpheus]. Great als Vehikel”

55

implied both in the transition from Japan to New York. The same movement from image

to image is Warburg’s imbrication of twentieth-century and Renaissance technology onto

the same panel. Here, both are figured side-by-side in place and space; Warburg

privileges their congruent motivations as opposed to their temporal disassociation.

Medium is another significant Atlas characteristic. The Atlas materials are culled

from Western and non-Western art, decorative objects, scientific and technological

treatise, magazines and household products. Contemporary paraphernalia appears in 10

panels, either in the form topographic photographs, newspaper images, or, the most

untoward, toilet paper roll covers. The sources are both contemporaneous and historical.

Warburg’s material includes the central and the marginal. The spectrum of material may

point to Warburg’s search to explain the present through the ambitions of the past.167 In

all senses, his work sits in that reciprocal space between canonical and aberrant.

Beginning this thesis with a study of archival method was necessary to establish

how the library and the Atlas refined and rectified Warburg’s capricious theories through

concrete means. In the Atlas, Warburg begins his most eloquent and well-executed

scholarly publication. But, the Atlas is, on many fronts, quite incomprehensible. The

meaning of associative image pairings on panels is often elusive; it is difficult to dictate

the impetus and concluding theme. Panel 77 is exemplary. In terms of Warburg’s

arrangement of objects, there are various arguments for either a top left to bottom right

reading or a centripetal image-to-image reflexivity where one can enter the theme from

any period or perspective. Warburg’s imae clusters are codified yet collaged,

167 Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” 89-103. This thesis is echoed in Giorgio

Agamben’s writing on Warburg’s post-institutional years.

56

interpolations of various genres and periods. What the universal expression is, is

frequently unclear. On alternate plate 77, he pairs images of a Roman coin with an

advertisement for matte facial crème (fig. 45). Above the Roman coin is Delacroix

painting next to a contemporary golfer. Practically speaking, the textual notations left by

Warburg are fragmentary. Here, Warburg’s annotation is little more than identification. It

reads: “Delacroix Medea u. Kindermord, Marke: Barbados – Quos ego tandem,

Frankreich– Semeuse, Arethusa. Nike und Tobiuzzolo in der Reklame. Hindenburg-

Denkmal als umgekehrte Apotheose, Goethe ‘24 Beine.’”168 This text reveals the Atlas’

intimate, indeed inseparable, relation with Warburg’s thoughts because, to the outsider,

his prose is barely comprehensible. If he draws connections to the images on the above

panel, the viewer still has much to fill in for themself.169

Learning to read the Atlas then becomes a methodology within itself. Scholars

writing on the Atlas are divided roughly into two camps, those who begin with the

physical object versus those who start with metaphysical expectations. The

interchangeable images have been described as precursors to cinematic sequencing,

binomial slideshows, engrams, indexical texts, and scrapbooks.170 Each suggestion

168 Warnke, Der BilderAtlas Mnemosyne, 128. 169 Warburg was writing text to accompany the Atlas but this will prove to be of little help those without

extensive knowledge of Warburg’s notes and theories. Because the Mnemosyne Atlas paired images to

form “meanings… enshrined in aphoristic formulas, he filled page after page with variants of his own

formulaic terms” (Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 47). Der

Entdamonisierungsprozess der phobisch gepragten Eindruckerbmasse, der die ganze Skala des

phobischen Ergriffenseins gebardensprachlich umspannt, von der hiflosen versunkenheit bis zum

morderischen menschenfrass, verleint der humanen bewegungsdynamik auch in den stadien, die

zwischen de Grenzpolen des orgiasmus liegen dem Kampfen, Gehen, Lauden, Tanzen, Greifen, jenen

Pragrand unheimlichen Erlebens, das der in Kirchenzucht sufgewachsene Gebildete der Renaissance wie

ein verbotenes Gebiet, wo sich nur die Gottlosen des freigelassenen tummeln ansah (Forster,

“Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 47, image). 170 The concept of engram is discussed in Schoell-Glass, “The Last Plates of Warburg’s Picture Atlas

Mnemosyne.” The relationship between engram – the image of a memory – and the Atlas panels is

interesting. A caption for the 1928 Stenglaube und Strnkunde exhition (Atrology and astronomy) at the

57

fosters a different engagement with the material. One argument proposes the spatial

arrangement on the panel was of paramount importance to Warburg as a signifier of the

relative association between forms: “In their material configuration, and their repetitions,

the way in which certain panels, and all the phenomena of inscription ended up leading

Warburg’s research into the description and analysis of forms. With the Mnemosyne

Atlas, Warburg established ‘an iconology of intervals’ involving not only objects but the

tensions, analogies, contrasts, or contradictions among them.”171 Michaud argues space

between materials bore meaning. “Confronting the tabular deconstruction of the panels,

the viewer must recreate the trajectories of meanings, the highlights, by focusing on the

spacing of the photographs and on the difference in size among the printed images that

correspond to variations of emphasis.”172 Thus while the images were, as Saxl put it

“pieced together like a mosaic,” they were also highly codified.173 In a contrasting

manner, Christopher Johnson argues that “while furnishing detailed, objective evidence

of metamorphoses over time, the sequence of photographs in Mnemosyne function as a

living museum of visual metonymies, a latter-day memory palace, in which we can

immediately experience antiquity’s literal and figurative ‘afterlife.’”174 While calling the

Atlas a living museum risks viewing the panels as art objects ripe for visual analysis,

Hamburg Planeterium decribed engrammatic experience in other context: Warburg writes, “…the

extraction of specific groups from the unfathomable host of stars, and their naming after spirits and

animals, is not a game but man’s attempt to gain his bearings with-in chaos, to acquire a coherent mental

image of it.” (quoted in Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 27). Warburg writes the

ordering of information within the inifinite multiplicities of matter is man’s attempt to form an engramme

of the world. The Atlas is thus a tool to acquire knowledge, to order, a tangible platform which

PRODUCES an intangible, cerebral real. Alternatively, this process of comparing multiple images

reflects the burgeoning trend in showing dual images on slide projector commonly associated with

Wolfflin. 171 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 244. 172 Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 246. 173 Forster, “Introduction,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 47. 174 Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, xi.

58

Johnson readily identifies an experiential element incited by the panels.175 A

psychological dialogue crosses in front and in between images. Johnson argues,

“Warburg’s visual metaphorics [in the Atlas panels] creates a mutable space of and for

contemplation, a Denkraum (thought-space), that still calls for interpretation, not only

because of its fragmentary, elliptical qualities, but also because of Warburg’s intellectual

nomadism, that is, his disdain for disciplinary, conceptual, and chronological

boundaries.”176 This proposes the interim between images is the space of psychological

response. Warburg lays out clusters of images to be received by a viewer. The viewer

associates those images as a singular symptom of Warburg’s Pathosformel programme.

But what if, as is often the case, Warburg’s aggregations require constructing connections

between forms so obscure, so unexpected, that the intended expression was only

comprehensible to Warburg? What is the explanation for a fish advertisement and a

Delacroix? A checker-board and monkeys? I argue these paired objects were meaningful

to Warburg and that his process for choosing visual material was derived directly from

asylum object subculture. Warburg located meaning between images on the Mnemosyne

Atlas panels using the same associative process of “make-do” asylum possessions. Like

patients redefined known objects to meet their desires, Warburg selected these diverse

materials to express a singular, similar dynogramatic emotion. This offers an important

nuance to Warburgian scholarship. Although Warburg states his work diagnoses the

schizophrenia of Western Civilization from its images, he actually begins with an

established expressive content, an identified Pathosformel. Warburg then searches for

manifestations of prescribed thema within his collection of artefacts. The Atlas illustrates

175 Johnson begins his publication by describing the formal qualities of the Atlas photographs. 176 Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, xi.

59

Warburg’s deliberate process of searching for material to justify a concept. Warburg

works from theory to image, not image to theory. This same will to make tangible a pre-

disposed desire is enacted in the creation of “make-dos.”

60

Chapter 5

CONCLUSION

Over the course of his lifetime, Warburg’s work shifts from the close reading of

antiquarian details to the formalization of his cultural science of art history,

kunstgeschichtliche Kulturwissenschaft. A holistic comprehension of Warburg’s

organizing principles, mental status, and habitus prior to the culminating library and Atlas

reveals the subtly and longevity of this transformation. The unique power-structure and

socialized underlife of sanatorium architecture and subculture lies at the fulcrum of the

transition from interior to exterior, incoherent to presentable, microscopic to

macrocosmic in Warburg’s scholarship. The principle force in the creation of a working

system was a haptic and tactile research process. Immediately post-institutionalization,

Warburg began to use material objects – his book collection and the Mnemosyne Atlas –

to represent his work. The library’s panoptic plan and tactile catalogue facilitated the

transfer of theory to materiality. Similarly, through a rapport with moveable and

reproduced objects, the Mnemosyne Atlas gave Warburg a sense of control and

organization over his methodology. “The plates… which may be flatted, combined,

reshuffled, superimposed, redrawn” were under Warburg’s will.177 Burdened with a mind

177 Schoell-Glass, “The Last Plates,” 186.

61

that could never quite escape its own particularities, materials provided the modality to

achieve consistent coherence. Warburg could then dominate what had before dominated

him.178 Engaging the tangible world and allowing for interpretative definitions, borders,

correlations between objects anchored Warburg. The interaction with objects in his

archive, asylum, and Atlas define his work. This essay highlighted this paradigm and

further added credence to the asylum years as integral to Warburg’s approach to visuality

and visual culture. It is not just Warburg’s theoretical constructs, but his haptic, tactile

attention to materials which sets the stage for a century of art historians who question the

barrier between object and psyche, material and context, image and referent.

178 Schaffer, Deep Storage, 21. See Sears, “Warburg Institute Archive,” 49 for citation of following letter:

Warburg wrote to Saxl, Sept. 5, 1928 and warned him of the dangers of an overemphasis on “finding” in

the archive- that suddenly all material becomes important and the archivist may lose himself. The curse

of Midas. Sears summarizes Warburg’s words “the gold contained in such [archival] finds was not

necessarily apt for intellectual synthesis.” Warburg was mentioning his own mental breakdown, a malady

which the library and Atlas could never quite overcome.

62

FIGURES

Fig. 1 The Reading Room with Mnemosyne Atlas panels, Kulturwissenschaftliche

Bibliothek Warburg, Hamburg, ca. 1929 (Photo: The Warburg Institute, London)

Fig. 2 Example of Zettelkästen interior, Warburg Institute Archives (Photo credit:

Warburg Institute, London)

63

Fig. 3 Zettelkästen, Warburg Institute Archives (Photo credit: Warburg Institute, London)

Fig. 4 WIA [III.71] “Pathosformel Schemata,” foliation 3, ca. 1905-1911, Warburg

Institute Archives. Foliation number 7 on top right and trimmed pages on right

margin depict book within book.

64

Fig. 5 Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, tempera on panel, ca. 1483-85, Galleria

degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo Credit: Google Art Project)

Fig. 6 Warburg and his Brothers, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Hamburg,

1929. (Photo credit: Warburg Institute, London.) From left: Paul, Felix, Max,

Fritz, and Aby

65

Fig. 7 Bellevue Sanatorium Advertisement (Reproduced in Henri Bersot, Que fait-on en

Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

Fig. 8 Ludwig Binswanger, ca. 1960. (Photograph reproduced in Karger Gazette, Basel ©

2010)

66

Fig. 9 The Villa System Plan, Herisau Sanatorium, Switzerland, photograph ca. 1936

(Reproduced in Henri Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et

mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

Fig. 10 Map of Bellevue Sanatorium. (Source: Warburg Institute Archives)

67

Fig. 11 View of Bellevue Villa, ca. 1857 (Image reproduced in “Psychiatrie in

Binswangers Klinik ‘Bellevue’” Diagnostik - Therapie - Arzt-Patient-Beziehung)

Fig. 12a Bellevue Sanatorium, ca. 2000 (Source: Goldinger Residential Brokerage,

Kreuzlingen, Switzerland)

68

Fig. 12b Bellevue Sanatorium, ca. 2000 (Source: Goldinger Residential Brokerage,

Kreuzlingen, Switzerland)

Fig. 13 Villa Maria, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated. (Source: Archivio Universita di

Tubingen, reproduced in Stimilli, Ludwig Binswanger, Aby Warburg)

69

Fig. 14 Binswanger Family Residence, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated (Source:

Psychiatrie in Binswangers Klinik “Bellevue” Diagnostik - Therapie - Arzt-

Patient-Beziehung).

Fig. 15 Parkhaus, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated (Source: Archivio Universita di

Tubingen, reproduced in Stimilli, Ludwig Binswanger, Aby Warburg)

70

Fig. 16 Map of Bellevue Sanatorium with landscaping, undated (Source: Stimilli, Ludwig

Binswanger, Aby Warburg)

Fig. 17 Isolation cell, Prangins Sanatorium, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri Bersot,

Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

71

Fig. 18 Straight jacket, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse

pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

Fig. 19 Dining Hall, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated (Source: Archive of Tubingen

University 442/364)

72

Fig. 20 Entrance hall with reading room (left) and entrance to dining room (right),

Bellevue Sanatorium, undated (Source: Archive of Tubingen University 442/364)

73

Fig. 21 Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, façade, Heilwigstrasse 116,

Hamburg, 1926 (Source: Warburg Institute, London)

74

Fig. 22 Gerard Langmaack, 1st Plan of Bibliothek Warburg, 2/9/1925 (Reproduced

Tilmann von Stockhausen, “Warburg und Schumacher” pg. 393)

75

Fig. 23 The Reading Room, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Hamburg, ca.

1930 (Photo: Warburg Institute, London)

Fig. 24 Gerard Langmaack, sketch for Bibliothek Warburg Reading Room with Alcove,

interior view, winter 1926 (Reproduced Tilmann von Stockhausen, “Warburg und

Schumacher” pg. 393)

76

Fig. 25 Restored sunroof, Reading Room, Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg,

Hamburg (Source: Warburg Institute, London)

Fig. 26 Private bathroom, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated (Source: Archivio Universita di

Tubingen, reproduced in Stimilli, Ludwig Binswanger, Aby Warburg)

77

Fig. 27 Basketweaving, Bellelay asylum, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri Bersot, Que

fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux?)

Fig. 28 Making paper bags, Königsfelden Asylum, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri

Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne:

Huber, 1936)

78

Fig. 29 Working with horsehair, Rheinau Sanatorium, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri

Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne:

Huber, 1936)

Fig. 30 Fieldwork, Rheinau Sanatorium, working in the fields, before 1936 (Reproduced

in Henri Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et

mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

79

Fig. 31 Book bindery, Bel-Air Sanatorium, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri Bersot,

Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

Fig. 32 Braiding straw, Prefargier Sanatorium, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri Bersot,

Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

80

Fig. 33 Outdoor exercise, Le Landeron asylum, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri

Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne:

Huber, 1936)

81

Fig. 34 Recreation center, Bellevue Sanatorium, undated (Source: Warburg Institute

Archives, London)

Fig. 35 Observation ward, La Friedmatt Asylum, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri

Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne:

Huber, 1936)

82

Fig. 36 Observation ward, Rosegg Asylum, before 1936 (Reproduced in Henri Bersot,

Que fait-on en Suisse pour les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne: Huber, 1936)

Fig. 37 Washbasin, Freidmatt Sanatorium,

Observation ward, before 1936 (Reproduced

in Henri Bersot, Que fait-on en Suisse pour

les malades nerveux et mentaux? Berne:

Huber, 1936)

Fig. 38 Petite Roll-Top Writing

Desk, ca. 1900.

83

Fig. 39 The Reading Room with panels from the Mnemosyne Atlas, ca. 1929 (Photo:

Warburg Institute, London)

84

Fig. 40 Aby Warburg, Panel A, Mnemosyne-Atlas, 1929 (Photography © Media Art Net)

85

Fig. 41 Aby Warburg, Panel 77, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (Photograph: Warburg Institute,

London)

86

Fig. 42 Aby Warburg, Panel 32, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (Source: Media Art Net)

87

Fig. 43 Aby Warburg, Panel 32, detail, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (Source: Media Art Net)

88

Fig. 44 Aby Warburg, Panel C, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (Photograph: Warburg Institute,

London).

89

Fig. 45 Aby Warburg, Plate 77, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (Photograph: Warburg Institute).

90

Fig. 46 The Reading Room with panels for the Rembrandt Lecture, 1926 (Photo: The

Warburg Institute, London)

Fig. 47 Postcard, interior view of Cell House, New Illinois State Penitentiary at

Stateville, near Joliet, Il.

91

Fig. 48 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Head of Dr. Ludwig Binswanger and Little Girls, ca.

June, 1918. 320 x 400 cm. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

92

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