Aby M. Warburg. Gertrud Bing

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A. M. Warburg Author(s): G. Bing Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 28 (1965), pp. 299-313Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750675Accessed: 03-05-2015 23:28 UTC

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A. M. WARBURG

By G. Bing*

n setting down his recollections of Aby Warburg,1 a bare six months after his death, and attempting to bring home to his countrymen the personality

of a scholar whose work he admired and who had been his friend for many years, Giorgio Pasquali found himself in a curious situation. It seemed to him strange that, while Warburg's name was familiar to scholarly circles, next to nothing was known of the man himself and his work. '. .. qui da noi', he wrote, 'molti anche tra gli universitari si saranno chiesti se quel nome era, oltre che di un'istituzione, anche di un uomo. Che l'amburghese "biblioteca Warburg per scienza della cultura" era piu celebre del suo fondatore e diret- tore . . . La biblioteca Warburg e gik ora la pi' completa tra le raccolte specializzate di stampati e di materiale iconografico per chi voglia studiare in genere storia della cultura, ma in particolare storia della cultura del Rinasci- mento nostro, fiorentino e italiano . .. Che l'uomo Warburg, il grande ricercatore Warburg, scompaia, scomparisse gi? da vivo, dietro all'istituzione da lui voluta, 6 conforme alle sue intenzioni: egli ha voluto essere innanzi tutto un maestro e un organizzatore, ha voluto che certi suoi pensieri scientifici, non molti forse di numero ma grandi e svolti organicamente, vivessero e fruttificas- sero sopratutto nelle menti dei suoi discepoli ch'egli fin da principio con- siderava collaboratori e destinava successori. Nd e caso che, mentr'egli si 6 per lo pid tenuto pago di pubblicare le sue scoperte maggiori in forma straordi- nariamente succinta e compressa, per lo pii quale resoconto o riassunto di conferenze, le sue idee, ancora lui vivo, siano state eposte nella loro connes- sione organica dallo scolaro che gli era da molti anni pii vicino, Fritz Saxl.'

Pasquali's essay will always be among the finest and most perspicacious tributes paid to Warburg. Certainly, his judgment of Warburg's intentions may have been awry. No scholarly inquiry can ever pass for completed in the eyes of the person who undertakes it, and Pasquali himself well understood how to awaken in his pupils the consciousness that they were the heirs to an inheritance, and that it was incumbent on them to make the fullest use of it. Nevertheless, he had put his finger on a peculiarity of Warburg's fate, which was already apparent then, and has since become more evident. Even his posthumous fame comes more from hearsay than from a knowledge of his

* This article, prepared by the late Profes- sor Bing to serve as an introduction to the Italian edition of Warburg's Gesammelte Schriften (forthcoming from La Nuova Italia, Florence), is a considerably revised version of a lecture given at the Courtauld Institute in 1962. The first nine paragraphs, added by the author in German, have been translated: otherwise the text is printed as she last saw it.

1 Giorgio Pasquali, 'Ricordo di Aby War- burg', Pegaso, ii, 1930o, pp. 484ff.; reprinted in id., Vecchie e Nuove Pagine stravaganti di un Filologo, Florence, 1952. Other personal ap- preciations: F. Saxl, 'Die Bibliothek Warburg und ihr Ziel', Vortrdge der Bibliothek Warburg

1921-22, Leipzig, 1923, pp. Iff. Obituaries by E. Panofsky (Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 1929) and F. Saxl (Frankfurter Zeitung, I929). A. Giorgetti, 'Aby Warburg', Archivio Storico Italiano, lxxxviii, I930, pp. 34Iff.; E. Wind, 'Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung fir die Aesthetik', Zeit- schrift fir Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissen- schaft, 25. Beiheft, 1931, pp. 163ff.; W. Kaegi, 'Das Werk Aby Warburgs', Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 1933, pp. 283ff.; C. G. Heise, Persinliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg, Ham- burg, 2nd ed., 1959; G. Bing, 'Aby M. Warburg', Rivista Storica Italiana, lxxii, 1960, pp. I ooff.

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300 G. BING

writings, and he is one of those authors whose fortune it is, in Lessing's words, to be more often praised than read.

Warburg had himself some experience of both recognition and neglect. In his personality and his conversation there was an exceptional fascination, but no-one in his lifetime would have predicted the fame which he now enjoys, and only a few would have conceded him the right to it. In the years when the history of art was developing into a recognized academic discipline, Warburg must have felt that his preaching was falling on deaf ears. He addressed himself to his task with the zeal of a pioneer, but he was well aware that he had been able to do no more than 'erect milestones', and his confidence that others would follow his lead was his only protection against doubt and indifference. At the end of the First World War the sudden onset of his illness condemned him to years of solitude. On his recovery, indeed, when Saxl's activity had created for him a circle of willing scholarly collaborators, he could feel himself fully understood by those around him, and he earned the enthusiastic respect of a series of young pupils. But he was never to bring home the harvest of those last five years of his life.

After his death, the conditions of the time helped to keep the figure of Warburg in a kind of twilight. His Gesammelte Schriften were published at the end of 1932, in unpropitious times which gravely hindered, if they did not entirely prevent, the circulation of these volumes. Less than a year later, under the pressure of political events in Germany, the Warburg Institute, the foundation for the extension of the work he had initiated, had been transferred to England. The irony of his fortuna is emphasized by the fact that it was this very emergency which helped to give his name greater currency, in that the migration of the Institute to another country, and its incorporation in the University of London, opened to Warburg's closest collaborators a new era of activity, while his friends and pupils acclimatized his approach in centres of learning outside England.

So it may seem that the republication of Warburg's works, in the country with whose civilization they are first and foremost concerned, and in the language in which he was almost as much at home as in his own, is no more than a belated act of historical justice. Nor is such an act inappropriate at a time when many publishers, not only in Italy, but also in Germany and America, are seeking to repair the broken links with the last generation but one by issuing reprints and translations. The scholarly classics of the turn of the century have come into their own again.

Warburg's case, however, is a little more complex, since the lines of research which appeal to his authority, some of them unconnected with the Institute that bears his name, are so many and various. It is time to redefine his achievement. This was formerly seen as accomplished in the field of Renaissance studies, but now one hears the terms 'Warburg method' and 'Warburgian studies' uttered with a confidence which is not supported by first- hand knowledge of his work. This mere invocation of Warburg's name will not suffice. True, it is not the first time that an author has been obscured by the size of the legacy that he bequeathed to his heirs to be used and augmented. But those who are not satisfied with judging his stature by the influence he has exerted must, as he himself always advised, go back to the sources.


A. M. WARBURG 301

These considerations governed the policy of this new edition. When Saxl wrote his paper of 19222 it had been his aim to demonstrate the coherence underlying Warburg's diverse and seemingly unconnected articles. In the Gesammelte Schrifften these are grouped according to subjects and supplemented by appendices and notes based partly on Warburg's marginalia and partly on the results of subsequent research. The intention was then to bring Warburg's work up to date so that it should retain its topicality. Today, the situation calls for a different approach. The emphasis must be on Warburg's own development as a scholar. To document this clearly, his papers are here printed in the order in which they were published. Some of the riassunti mentioned by Pasquali have been omitted but one article of which only an extract was published in 1932 is here printed in its entirety.3 Nothing has been added to or corrected in Warburg's text, not even where his presentation and conclusions have been superseded by later research. What happened to Burckhardt's Cicerone as it passed through various editions should serve as a warning. Even readers who do not accept Burckhardt's opinions prefer to have his text without a commentary. In the case of Warburg's writings, it must be left to the reader to examine the details critically. What matters is that he should be enabled to follow Warburg's explorations in their bold self-consistency.

To do this we must rid ourselves of certain ideas which can partly be traced to Warburg's own work. He has not made it easy for us to see him in his own time. This does not apply only to his chosen field, the history of art. He, more than any specialist, has drawn on general ideas current in his time and we must look for the sources of his notions in many fields. Thus we tend to accept his descriptive analyses of works of art without realizing that they contain elements of aesthetic doctrines which we thought to have outgrown. When we read his polemics against the autonomy of artistic developments and the unconnected spontaneity of artistic creation, or against the overrating of purely formal criteria for the understanding of works of art, he may seem to us to be tilting at windmills, until we recall that it was he himself who stopped their sails turning. Our own more sophisticated conception of the influence of ancient art is grounded on his refutation of neo-classical dogma. True, some of his attributions and derivations are in need of correction. But we must guard against rejecting his arguments together with these erroneous examples. He was wrong in ascribing Castagno's jousting shield to Pollaiuolo, and in deriving the David figure on it from the Pedagogue of the group of the Niobides, which is much restored and was in any case not found until 1583. But what this illustration was meant to prove was the classical origin of a seemingly unclassical gesture4-and this can in fact be documented from the manuscript tradition, which can in turn be shown to have been known to

2 F. Saxl, 'Rinascimento dell'Antichita', Repertorium fir Kunstwissenschaft, xliii, 1922, pp. 220 ff. A. Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike: Kulturwissenschaftliche Bei- trdge zur Geschichte der europdischen Renaissance. Mit einem Anhang unverdffentlichter Zusdtze, Leipzig/Berlin, 1932. Here referred to as Gesammelte Schriften.

3 'Der Eintritt des antikisierenden Idealstils in die Malerei der Fritihrenaissance', Vortrag gehalten im Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz am 20 April 1914; resume in Kunst- chronik, xxxi, 1913/14, reprinted in Ges. Schriften, i, pp. 173ff.

4 Gesammelte Schriften, p. 625.


302 G. BING

Florentine artists of the Quattrocento, as witness the Codex Escurialensis. The difficulties that remain when we allow for these qualifications are

connected with the interpenetration in Warburg of description and interpretation. He uses an exceptionally condensed language which one feels is created for the purpose and which enables him to make his general point of view show through his formulations without divorcing it from the particular. It is precisely the clinical precision with which he conducts his demonstration on the object that tends to draw attention to itself so that less notice has been taken of the assumptions with which he approaches his material. He felt that it should be possible to demonstrate in specific historical instances how the forms created by man express his inward and outward experience. In what follows, brief reference will be made to some of the questions which Warburg encountered, in particular the role of the coining of images as a process of civilization and the changing relations between the images of art and of language. All the other elements in his inquiries which are now thought to be characteristic, his interest in iconography, his focus on the Nachleben der Antike, are much more means to an end than ends in themselves.

If his method of work strikes us as uneconomical, this is due to his effort to approach his subject from two angles. His published writings stand in no relation to the bulk of materials which he passed in review, the number of documents of which he took notice, the range of subjects into which he made inroads. All over his writings there are traces of wreckage: projects not carried out, promises of articles never written, and ideas which were never developed. Even in his finished articles, the variety of theme is perplexing: Botticelli's mythologies, Burgundian tapestries, Memling's portraits, Florentine engrav- ings, German calendars, the business correspondence between the Medici and their agents abroad, controversies between Reformers and Counter-reformers, Italian grand opera, court festivals and quack medicines which were sold at fairs-the spread of scholarly curiosity is so wide as to obscure the red thread of a leading interest. That many of his published articles are nothing but summaries of occasional lectures looks like a counsel of despair, a compromise between the wish to make his findings known and the reluctance to put them down too hastily before the framework had had time to set in his mind. The only achievement which, within the limits of time and means, embodies the fullness of Warburg's aspirations is his library. In almost seventy years, it has been expanded and in parts adapted to cover modern trends of scholarship. But its organization still follows Warburg's researches. The groundplan which he designed has served as a blueprint to those who followed in his footsteps and whose own work has gone into the fabric as it now stands. One is drawn to the conclusion that Warburg's work has become so consequential because it was left as a fragment, with the fragment's power of testifying to a larger edifice and of challenging the imagination to supplement its details.

The circumstances of Warburg's life do not account for his having left so much unfinished. On the face of it, it had the quiet tenor of a private scholar's existence. Born in 1866, he belonged to a decade in which a surprising number of famous art historians were born.5 Surprising, because at that time it must

5Emile Male 1862, Karl Giehlow and Adolph Goldschmidt 1863, Heinrich Wo61fflin

1864, Bernard Berenson 1865, Julius von Schlosser 1866, Max I. Friedlander and


A. M. WARBURG 303 have needed considerable strength of purpose to become an art historian. Warburg was the eldest son of a long-established family of bankers in Ham- burg and might reasonably have been expected to join the firm. The study of the history of art, in particular, was suspect to his family and certainly not encouraged by the solidly commercial interests of his native city. Nor was his training in that discipline altogether plain sailing. Warburg had gone to Bonn to study under Carl Justi, a competent theologian as well as the author of famous books on Winckelmann, Michelangelo and Velizquez.6 But he seems not to have been fond of teaching and once, when he was unwilling to lecture to an audience of three, Warburg and his two companions had to assert their rights by reminding him of the old rule that tresfaciunt collegium. In the end, when Warburg proposed Botticelli's mythological paintings as the subject of his thesis, Justi expressed doubts of its relevance and Warburg had to strike camp. He had better luck at Strassburg with Hubert Janitschek,7 who gladly accepted Warburg's thesis. It ultimately appeared with a dedica- tion to Janitschek and to Warburg's other Strassburg teacher, the archaeologist Adolf Michaelis8 who deserves to be mentioned here because of his interest in the transmission of classical marbles down the ages. In the years following his university training the graph of Warburg's life shows some odd deflections. The first was an abortive attempt to study medicine. In this way he may have been yielding to a misplaced hope; what he was looking for was a key not so much to the workings of the body as to those of the mind. The second interlude was a journey to the United States in the course of which he visited Pueblo Indian settlements in New Mexico. The effect of this experience on Warburg's scholarly development has been dealt with in a lecture by Saxl.9 After his return to Europe, Warburg, with his young family, settled down in Florence, to a life of intense work in the Archives. That he left it in order to return to Hamburg, where there were no great works of art and not much documentary material to interest him, seems to have been a matter of self- discipline. He had become so much engulfed in the wealth of primary evidence which Florence offers at every step that he had to take refuge from it as from an overwhelming flood. The rest of his life was spent at Hamburg within a deliberately narrowed-down sphere of concerns. He refused several offers of chairs and never accepted public office. He kept in touch by correspondence with a widening international circle of scholars, but when the International Congress of the History of Art of which he had been one of the main promoters met at Rome in 1912 he left it to another man to act as chairman of the German delegation. In Hamburg he enjoyed the respect due to his competence in artistic and educational matters and benefited from his

Campbell Dodgson 1867, Wilhelm V6ge 1868 -see E. Panofsky, Introd. to W. V6ge, Bild- hauer des Mittelalters, Berlin, 1958.

6 Carl Justi, 1832-1912, Marburg and Bonn: Winckelmann, sein Leben, sein Werk und seine Zeitgenossen, I866-72; Velasquez und sein Jahrhundert, I888; Michelangelo, Beitrdge zur Erkldrung der Werke und des Menschen, 19oo00.

SHubert Janitschek, 1846-1893, Prague, Strassburg and Leipzig: Die Gesellschaft der

Renaissance in Italien und die Kunst, I879; Ge- schichte der deutschen Malerei, 1890; Kunstlehre Dantes und Giotto's Kunst, 1892.

8 Adolf Michaelis, 1835-1910I, Greifswald, Titbingen and Strassburg: Der Parthenon, I871; Catalogue of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 1882; Die archaeologischen Entdeckungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1906. 9 'Warburg's visit to New Mexico', F. Saxl, Lectures, 1957, pp. 325ff.


304 G. BING

independence to make himself an advocate of the public-always hot on the trail of official blunders and bridling at every sign of administrative high- handedness. But apart from his researches, his main occupation was the building up of his library. Considering he did it single-handed for more than twenty years, from the untiring reading of trade lists and second-hand book- sellers' catalogues to the allotting of its place on the shelves to every book or offprint, this was no mean job.

This tranquil setting covered an approaching tragedy. It seems likely that all his life Warburg had been aware of a threat to his mental balance. He moved like a man in a dark and dangerous place, his penetration sharpened by an unusual sensitivity to physical and moral dangers. His diaries of the war years 1914-i18 show that, from beginning to end, he was deeply critical of Germany's conduct of the war and uncompromising in his judgment of the consequences brought upon her by her disregard of international law. His illness broke out at the end of the war and kept him confined to an asylum for six years.

It has been told elsewhere how Saxl saved the library from dispersal during Warburg's absence and turned it into the nucleus of a research institute.10 Warburg returned home to a radically changed stage. With people round him anxious to understand and assist him, he found the courage to envisage a gathering-in of his life's work. He planned a pictorial atlas setting out the history of visual expression in the Mediterranean area, with the title Mnemosyne, the name which he had also chosen as a motto for his library. This work, again, exists only in outline. But Warburg's own assessment of his final years is symbolized by the last entry in his diary. There was an apple- tree in the garden of his home which seemed dead and would have been removed but for Warburg's protest. In 1929, the year of Warburg's death, at the end of October, this old tree had suddenly and unaccountably begun to flower, and the last words in Warburg's handwriting, found the morning after his death, were concerned with it. They were: 'Who will sing me the paean, the song of thanksgiving, in praise of the fruit-tree which flowers so late?'

In view of this tale of frustration one is bound to ask what gave his work its unexpected power of expansion. It remains a fragment if we consider his grasp as measured by his reach. But the aspect which it now presents suggests another image: that of a mine, a central shaft sunk by Warburg from which galleries branch off at various levels right and left, each exploiting a different vein of the same substance. We have to turn to the original shaft to discover the spots which have proved so profitable for tapping.

When Warburg began to work, Florentine art still exercised the attraction which it had held for Pre-Raphaelite taste. The paintings of Botticelli and his contemporaries still had to be cleared of the supposition of their unsophisti- cated spring charm. Warburg was equipped with the great corrective which is Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Italian Renaissance. This is not to say that he accepted all Burckhardt's conceptions. He did not follow him in his

10 G. Bing, 'Fritz Saxl, 1890-1948', Introd. to Fritz Saxl: A Volume of Memorial Essays

from his Friends in England, Edinburgh, 1957, pp. Iff.


A. M. WARBURG 305

presentation of the State as a Work of Art and in the course of time he was to modify profoundly Burckhardt's view of the Development of the Individual. But certain themes to which Burckhardt had drawn attention became War- burg's fields of exploration: Italian festivals, Florentine relations with Bur- gundy, and, of course, the rediscovery of Classical Antiquity. Above all, Burckhardt's sober method of gathering single facts from all types of sources for his picture of the Italian Renaissance remained Warburg's model. A trace of this influence can be seen in Warburg's adoption of one of Burckhardt's leading terms: Life. As a descriptive term for an object it is ill-defined and neither of the two men explains what he understood by it. Its value to them was that it circumscribed the historian's task. It was a reminder that in dealing with the past the historian is faced with a reality as burning and as bewildering to those who lived through it as our own is to us. No sphere of existence must be considered too lowly, too obscure or too ephemeral to provide evidence. The dead relics which are all there is to go upon must be read as the remains of human reactions-reactions, that is, of living men and women to that changing and evanescent reality. This intimate approach is part of the charm of Warburg's presentation. It is also the parting of the ways between him and the practitioners of the History of Ideas and Geistes- geschichte. Warburg knew that ideas are not born and do not procreate by parthenogenesis.

It shows a one-sided judgment of Warburg's achievement when his first published work is said to contain in nuce most of his later discoveries. There is in it much of the beginner's stumbling through an insufficiently controlled mass of evidence." What is true, however, is that through Warburg's own later elaborations it was to become one of his most influential statements. It starts from what then seemed to be an unresolved discord between the true character of mythological figures and the exaggerated linear treatment given them by Botticelli (P1. 44a) and his contemporaries. Far from being considered inappropriate, this style was in fact the fifteenth century's answer to the attempt to find a genuinely classical form. Nor was this solution confined to the visual arts. The running or dancing figures with fluttering garments and blowing hair, called Ninfe, which appeared in pictures, were also abun- dantly described in contemporary poems and used as stage properties on the carri of festival processions. They even made their appearance in Biblical scenes where they could not be necessary to the action (P1. 44b). It had therefore to be assumed that they served a purely stylistic purpose. This, according to Warburg, was the endeavour to render bodily motion through the agitated lines of thin drapery, as the Ancients had shown to be possible (P1. 44c). That we, with our more differentiated knowledge of classical art, now call the style of the model 'late' or even 'decadent' does not alter the fact that in the fifteenth century it ranked as 'classical'. Thus a clean break was made with the accepted notion of classical calm. The dogma to which Winckelmann had given currency was deprived of its validity and the question of what was understood by 'classicism' had to be asked afresh in respect of any given period.

11 Gesammelte Schriften, pp. I ff.


306 G. BING

Another and possibly more far-reaching conclusion is implicit in Warburg's argument. He had placed under observation a single figure as a complete unit of body, posture and drapery, without deducting or abstracting from it any of its stylistic properties. Looked at in isolation from all the contexts in which it occurred, it had turned out to be common to both the literary and the artistic medium. This parallelism is not due to any alleged Spirit of the Age, but meant that the figure belonged to a category of expressive devices of which both literature and the visual arts can make use. In rhetoric, a con- ventionalized form currently employed to bring home a meaning or convey a mood, is called a topos. What Warburg had established, therefore, was the existence of its counterpart in the fine arts. Like many linguistic topoi, the Ninfa had the distinction of being recommended by the Ancients. When Warburg assumed that it was used to enhance the sense of movement, he may have defined its purpose too narrowly. But his interpretation had the merit of being true to the medium which he had set out to investigate. It remains within the limits of our visual conceptions. Movement is one of the qualities of the external world apprehended by the eye and artists had time and again found themselves faced with the difficulty of making it visible. By representing such a convention as a new means for poets and painters to portray more emphatically the appearance of real life, Warburg took his first decisive step away from the naturalistic interpretation of artistic forms.

Though not apparent at first sight, this is one of the points at which Warburg also arrived in his discussion of Ghirlandajo's portraits in the Sassetti Chapel in Sta Triniti (P1. 44d). Except for Lorenzo's portrait, which is mentioned by Vasari, they had up till then remained unidentified. Warburg recognized Lorenzo's children and certain members of his household12 and amplified his description with letters and reports bearing upon their relations with one another and with Lorenzo. From this combination emerged a lively picture of the circle nearest to Lorenzo's private life, and it would seem that the portraits, together with the realistic little view of Piazza Signoria in the background, could safely be taken as a period piece reflecting the contemporary scene. Had this been Warburg's only aim, he would have followed the procedure of eighteenth-century antiquarians whose great merit it was to have interpreted costumes, tools, domestic equipment in terms of habits of living. It is in this sense that anthropologists still speak of the material culture of peoples or tribes. For the historian there is much to be gained from this method, as long as he is lucky enough to have the objects themselves to deal with. In drawing upon their representations in works of art, however, it is often forgotten that their value as evidence is modified by their being translated into a remoter sphere of reality. Warburg's use of antiquarian methods is one of the features by which he dissociated himself from the formalistic distinction, widely made at his time, between monumental and applied arts. But his interpretation was based on a more involved course of reasoning than that of the antiquarians. Decorations were, for him, neither a means to convey an abstract significance nor the result of man's incorrigible urge to cover empty surfaces. The ornaments of tournament banners, tapestried bed hang- ings or marriage chests are inseparable from the functional character of such

12 Ibid., pp. Ioff.


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a-Pisanello, Bacchantes. Oxford, Ashmolean Mus. (pp. 3o9f.)

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b-Lamentation of the Magdalen. Titian, Entombment. Venice, Accademia (detail) (P. 310)

Photo: Alinari

c-March. Ferrara, Palazzo Schifanoia (p. 311) d-Lament for Adonis. Mantua, Palazzo Ducale, Sarcophagus (detail) (p. 310o) This content downloaded from 190.17.206.151 on Sun, 03 May 2015 23:28:11 UTC

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

A. M. WARBURG 307

objects as tools of daily life and must therefore necessarily give some indication of the particular occasions and the personal intentions which they had served. This is a test which, in Warburg's opinion, must also be applicable to monumental art. If the portraits in Sta Trinith could have been classed as donors' portraits it would have been simple. But the fact that the sitters had themselves represented standing and moving about in the confident height of their full stature called for a more particular explanation. Such an explanation was suggested by the life-size votive figures of wax which contemporary custom allowed to be hung up in the churches.13 Their extreme truth to life, down to the real clothes in which they were draped, allowed the grateful recipients of some divine favour to feel that they were approaching the source of grace in person. The same feeling impelled Lorenzo and his companions to have their likenesses painted in the margin of a sacred scene. But instead of obtrud- ing their crude effigies in the round they observed a more discreet distance: they approached the holy persons only through the medium of painted semblances.

The run of this argument bears some resemblance to Warburg's treatment of the Ninfa. It meant that Ghirlandajo's naturalistic style, as well as Botti- celli's classicism, had to be assessed on its own terms. As soon as an artistic manifestation is considered in the light of its individual setting, criteria of style lose their fixed meaning. In both cases Warburg arrived at this conclusion by trying to delimit the area open to visual representation. As a measure of visible qualities his 'greater or lesser distance' of the portraits is as good a term as the 'movement' of the Ninfa. This is not the place to go fully into the sources of Warburg's frame of reference. Only two names may be mentioned. One is Gottfried Semper, a towering figure in the art theory of the late nineteenth century, who had analysed ornament in terms of its power to convey movement. The second is Adolf von Hildebrand, like Warburg a devotee of Florence, who had written on the stylistic effects resulting from a widening or lessening of the imaginary space between a work of art and the spectator.14

This last point was further elaborated by Warburg on the theme of Flemish portraiture. The preference of Florentine merchants for having their portraits painted by Flemish masters, which had been noticed by Burckhardt and others, was part of a widespread taste for Flemish art, which also led to the commissioning of vast lengths of Flemish tapestries and the collecting of Flemish panel paintings in private houses. When Warburg describes the trade in such objects through the agency of Medici representatives engaged in their banking business, adding unpublished letters from these exiles in Bruges and Brussels to the principals at home, he again seems to have nothing in mind but to penetrate as closely as possible into the realities of life. Once again, this setting is only the jumping-off ground for art historical conclusions. They refer to the artistic significance of another of the concepts with which we bring order into our impressions of the visible word: space. Warburg's concern with

13 Ibid., p. 99. 14 Gottfried Semper, I803-79; architect, chief works in Dresden, Ziurich and Vienna: Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten,

I86I-63. Adolf von Hildebrand, I847-1921 ; sculptor: Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, 1893, etc.


308 G. BING

it has nothing to do with the modern preoccupation with the aesthetics of three-dimensional representation. It is, on the contrary, part of his attempt to understand differences of style as responses to psychological requirements. His argument is based on the contrast between the close-up view in Flemish pictures and the Florentine art of the altarpiece, which needs to be viewed from a distance. In dwelling on the Flemish mastery in reproducing the heaviness of precious dress materials,15 Warburg makes the rather endearing remark that it was likely to be appreciated by Florentine patrons who were themselves yarn dyers and silk manufacturers. But his real point is that heaviness is a quality which in reality can only be perceived at close approach by the sense of touch. Its pictorial illusion acts upon the spectator as if he were himself drawn into the picture-much like the effect of a reflection in a mirror where the viewer always finds himself in the same space with the image. It satisfies his sense of his own identity while making him feel that he is also part of his proper surroundings.

Finding that the impact of the Burgundian fashion on Florentine art was most extensively documented in the graphic arts, Warburg next submitted these to his usual realistic scrutiny. Prints were cheap; unlike panel paintings they existed in more than one copy; they were easy to transport and, while being self-contained as pictures, they were 'tools' in that they could be pasted on containers of various kinds as meaningful decorations. Like feuilles volantes, these mobile sheets carried the latest news in imagery from place to place, and Warburg was one of the first to notice that here for once Italy was on the receiving end of the line.16

We may doubt if he was right in identifying the figure of a youth in an elaborate Burgundian livrea in one of these prints with Lorenzo.17 We have become sceptical of the fashion of his day to detect topical allusions practically everywhere in works of art and no longer rely quite as firmly on emblems and motti which are apt, after all, to be transferred from one person to another. But with that limitation Warburg's reasoning remains valid. Since we have reason to suppose that on occasion clothes of this type were really worn, the print might have been regarded as another case for a simple translation of visual data into terms of contemporary life. But this temptation is effectively foiled by the Ninfa appearing on an equal footing with the Bur- gundian swell. Warburg's second example, which has since become a stock- in-trade, shows the same coincidence of the two types of costume which is a well-known feature of much popular Florentine Quattrocento art. The dancing girl on a calendar leaf, smothered in heavy Burgundian array, and her counterpart, whose dress alla ninfale and winged head-dress help her to get off the ground (P1. 44e and f), proved that his conclusions had come full circle.18 The discovery enabled him to make a further step in interpretation. The two styles of presenting the human figure, one true to life, the second classicizing, each answered a particular purpose, one serving to lift the object of the representation into a more exalted sphere of existence than the other. It was not simply meant as a pretty metaphor when Warburg spoke of the Florentine butterfly emerging from the Burgundian chrysalis. He had put

15 Gesammelte Schriften, p. I 13. 16 Ibid., p. 184.

17 Ibid., pp. 81-82. 18 Ibid., p. 86.


A. M. WARBURG 309

his finger on the point where the realistic Flemish style was about to give way to the idealizing classicism of the High Renaissance.

This was the occasion for one of Warburg's most fruitful observations on the historical level. He had not only given a convincing explanation of the clash of the two styles in Florentine painting, but, by the same token, had succeeded in putting into perspective the puzzling masquerade of classical gods, kings, heroes and sages in Burgundian dress with their names inscribed next to them to be recognized. This mode of presentation is far from deserving the epithet 'naive' so often applied to it. Warburg coined for it the para- doxical expression 'antichith alla franzese', and saw in it a most powerful bar on the road to the purer sources of classical art. But this disparaging judgment also implied the recognition that classical antiquity was not simply there to be rediscovered. No less than from the debris that covered the monuments, it had to be dug up from the layers that had settled on it by the agency of its transmission. Ludwig Traube,19 in Warburg's words 'the Grand Master of our Order', had demonstrated this principle in his own field of palaeography. He had taken scribal mistakes as indications of the periods and countries by way of which classical texts have reached us. Now classical imagery, with its Burgundian interlude, appeared on the same plane. It demonstrated the real value of the classical tradition as a point of observation. The historical moment can be viewed with a double pair of lenses: one focused on the face which it actually presents, the other trained on the routes by which knowledge of the past has been acquired. The story that every age tells, deliberately or by implication, of its own remoter antiquity, sheds a reflected light in both directions.

It had been in his handling of the Ninfa that Warburg first developed his mannerism of lifting a figure from its formal context. Whether he realized it or not, he had the sanction of the fifteenth century for it. It corresponded to a habit of visual selection by which classical marbles were seen as a succession of isolated figures (P1. 45a), thus throwing the postures into high relief, fit to be copied or re-used.20 Though there is no suggestion in Warburg's discussion of Duirer's Orpheus21 that the artist had drawn on such a model for his main figure (which is in any case not likely because the whole composition is based on a Greek invention) Warburg sensed in it an overriding concern with gesture. The frequent use of similar highly emphatic gestures in a wide range of Renaissance works of art led him to class them together in a group for which he coined the word 'Pathos formulae'. They brought home to him what role the recurrent classical motifs held in the process of image-making. His term for them implies that he thought of them as conventions like the Ninfa, but with a wider spread than any individual figure-however often used-could have. It also implies that they were held together by a common expressive purpose rather than formal similarity. What is made visible by them is not a quality of the external world like movement, distance or space, but a state

19 Ludwig Traube, I86I-1907, Munich; philologist: Karolingische Dichtungen, 1888; 0 Roma Nobilis, 1891i; Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti, 1898; Nomina Sacra, 1907; and others.

20 B. Degenhardt and A. Schmitt, 'Gentile da Fabriano in Rom und die Anfiange des Antikenstudiums', Miinchner Jahrbuch der Bil- denden Kunst, 3. Folge, ii, I960, pp. 59-151. 21 Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 445ff.


310o G. BING

of the emotions. We are here treading on dangerous ground. Perhaps nothing has been as hotly disputed as the power of the Fine Arts to render the emotions. Lessing's Laocoon, a book which admittedly had set off Warburg on his way as a young man, is an attempt to distinguish between the means of emotional expression open respectively to the visual and the literary medium. But of more immediate help to him was Charles Darwin's conception of gestures as diminished traces left behind from purposeful and forcible actions performed in the past.22 The gestures of classical art remount in their first coinings to a period when the re-enactment of the myths was a deeply stirring ritual reality. They are still able to call forth a corresponding emotional response, even in the attenuated form of pigments and marble in which they have come down to us. Warburg, in his search for a phraseology adapted to the properties of sight, called them the superlatives in a language of gesture, pictorial formulations charged with a maximum of experience (P1. 45b and d). It will be noticed that here we have another hint of an analogy between the visual and the literary communicative modes.

We must leave it open whether Darwin's derivation of the meaning of gestures can still be accepted. But the notion of maximum values of expression to which it led Warburg, confirmed him in his view of the purposeful adapta- tion of artistic conventions and, with it, in his understanding of cultural traditions. There is nothing to indicate that fifteenth-century artists using a pathos formula intended to express their own emotions-no more for that matter, than when they rendered the worlds of fable and religious imagery. They might or might not be imitating a certain style-that must be decided on the merits of each case. But at all events they insinuated themselves into an existing tradition, and that involved a deliberate choice. Tradition, for Warburg, was not a stream on which events and people are borne along. Influences are no matter of passive acceptance but demand an effort of adjustment, 'eine Auseinandersetzung' as Warburg put it, which includes that of the present with the past.

That this is a matter not only for artists and writers but for anyone faced with the need of personal expression-especially in deeply emotional or highly formalized situations of life-is demonstrated by the choice of classical formulae made by Francesco Sassetti in decorating his funeral chapel. Warburg's supporting literary evidence is focused on one classical figure, the goddess Fortuna, which also appears as a pictorial symbol. Her invocation may cover a variety of attitudes, submission in Sassetti, self-assertion in Rucellai, worldly wisdom in Ficino. But her meaning is fixed, she always stands for destiny confronting individual worth. A different assessment of the expressive value of symbols is called for by the figures appearing in the frieze round Sassetti's sarcophagus. If we were to assume that they carry the meaning generally attributed to them, the Centaurs,23 stamping their hooves and flourishing slings, would stand for the destructive forces of nature or unseemly passions, and the scene of lamentation, taken from a Roman Meleager sarcophagus, would in its violent gesticulations far surpass the degree of mourning consonant

22 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals, 1872.

23 For the centaurs, see Gesammelte Schriften,

pp. 153-55; for the lamentation scene, ibid., pp. 154-58.


A. M. WARBURG 3"I with the death of a Christian believing in Resurrection. They were chosen, not for the sake of their conceptual content, but on account of their very intensity. The heightening effect of formulations derived from antiquity which Warburg had noticed in the Ninfa and certain classical gestures, here adds a plus-sign to Sassetti's scale of expression. It was his sense of his own vigorous temperament, the quickened awareness of the pulse of life, which had found an outlet in his choice of symbols.

Such an interpretation seems to reaffirm Burckhardt's one-sided description of the New Man of the Renaissance. It might look as if Sassetti had adopted the heroic attitudes of classical antiquity along with its formulae. In fact, Warburg's answer was much more ambiguous, and the way in which he proved it belongs to his most distinctive observations. The four roundels over Sassetti's and his wife's tombs, representing scenes of Roman public life copied from Imperial coins, are painted en grisaille.24 This translation of the object of a representation into a minor grade of naturalness is meant to express remoteness. The line of Warburg's argument is similar to that which led to his analysis of the Flemish style, but it is in the reverse direction. While admitting Roman realities to a place near his tomb by way of exemplars, yet Sassetti did not want them to encroach too far on him. The scales in the balance of old and new styles of expression were still even, and, as Warburg says, the time had not come for the extravagant gestures of Roman battle sarcophagi to penetrate into the representation in the Vatican of Christianity's victory over paganism.

It must now be explained how the astrological images are linked in Warburg's mind with the images which we discussed so far. Against the assumption that he became interested in them for their iconographical im- portance we have his own word that his aim was not the solution of a rebus. But the alternations of suppression and revival of the belief in stars provide a startling example of the monumental transmission of classical conceptions, and Warburg's manner of presenting it has since given rise to the charting of a good many stretches and incidents along the road. Astrology was a case for the only trait which might be called Warburg's 'method' to come fully into its own. The single figures which he had pursued in their various modifica- tions had come to mean to him 'images' or (from the point of view of their application) 'symbols' par excellence. He had observed their mobility and independence of time and place, and their wanderings had proved to be a measure of cultural influences. In astrological imagery isolated figures, pagan gods in disguise, were pushed about under the dictation of rules unconnected with their intrinsic meaning. The manner in which they circulated is both typical and easy to follow. For long periods of time they had, with few exceptions, been known only by descriptions. In this they resembled the images of the mythographers which had preserved the classical stories under the cloak of moral interpretations and which had finally reached fifteenth-century Italy as 'antichith alla franzese'. In the Schifanoia calendar frescoes (P1. 45c) certain details of posture and costume were clearly attributable to the lan- guages into which the texts had been translated.25 Apart from the vagaries

24 Ibid., p. I57. 25 Ibid., pp. 467ff.


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of transmission the change from discursive language to a picture meant to be taken in at a flash has had its share in the metamorphoses of the gods.

A second point relates to the character of the astrological figures qua images. In distinction to the learned nature of mythography the greater vitality and wider diffusion of astrology shows that it was the concern of many. It catered for those hoping it might be possible to explore the future and learn about their own position in the scheme of things. These were also the questions with which Sassetti and Rucellai had been confronted. But they were able to have recourse to selected classical formulae which had been deemed fit to express their hopes and fears. There was no such choice of symbols for the believer in astrology. The images were a system of agreed signs, spread over the sky at fixed distances. Their meaning was decided beforehand and they could only be read as good or bad. Warburg made no bones about his dislike for such manipulation of the ancient images. But as yet he refused to allow astrology to have the last word. Raphael, he said, was still to achieve the re-integration of the gods with their old dignity.

This armour of belief in progress broke down when Warburg began to deal with the flood of astrological prognoses used in the battle for and against the Reform of the Church. He discovered that the falsification of Luther's horoscope, issued by his enemies, was upheld by his followers, each party firmly convinced that the evidence of the stars was on their side.26 This ambiguity is the very essence of astrological images. They possess a measure of objectivity because they are the remnants, however distorted, of the Greek conception of a rational universe. The network of star figures had served to separate the confused impressions of the sky and put them into a calculable order. But this effort of the intellect was thwarted by the delusion that the heavens were amenable to private ends. Greek anthropomorphic thinking had made it possible for the star figures to have become demons who might be trapped into compliance by a clever divination of their intentions from their movements in the sky. The astrological images, therefore, had a stake in logic, operating by distinctions, as well as in magic which relies on the felt connection between man and the objects of his perceptions. This double aspect interfered with their self-evidence. They had to be interpreted by the spoken or written word of the adept. With few exceptions, like the Schifanoia frescoes and Chigi's ceiling in the Farnesina, the place of astrological images was in the graphic arts. Here they could be accompanied by texts, and conversely the belief in them was fed by the printing press, in that it supplied the demand for it to serve topical purposes.

But even this was not Warburg's main point. He had watched images in operation and had hoped to find out from this consultation on the spot to which cues they responded. His search had been prompted by a keen sense for the psychological play of demand and supply. From the specific requirements of the artist using the conventions proper to his own medium-as with the Ninfa-Warburg had arrived-in the case of Sassetti-at the use of symbols to widen the individual's expressive capacity. The astrological images ministered to the desire of all men to find their bearings in the universe-sich im Weltall zu orientieren. But the secret of their power was such that even the

26 Ibid., pp. 490ff.


A. M. WARBURG 313

Reformers, in Warburg's eyes fighters for the freedom of conscience, had fallen into their snares. Warburg's answer was that we have been saddled with an ambiguous inheritance. Classical antiquity itself had been caught in the pendulum between an Olympian and a demonic view of the world. The astrological images had helped to build up an ordered universe fit to be contemplated from afar, but on the other hand they had descended from their places in the sky to become the tyrants of our daily lives. In Warburg's words, they had been the means of widening the space between man and the world and at the same time of destroying it.

Warburg had used the same terminology of withdrawal and approach in his readings of Lorenzo's portrait, in contrasting the idealizing with the realistic style, and in defining the effects of grisaille painting. He leaves us in no doubt that his sympathies were in every case on the side of the distanced view. In the ambiguity of the astrological images he now discovers that there are two ways open to man of dealing with the natural world, by abstraction or by union. The decision between them can never be final. Warburg sounds a note of profound compassion when, seeing the substance of each man's personal task reflected in the course of history, he writes: 'Athens must ever again be rescued from Alexandria.'

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http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle Contentsp. 299p. 300p. 301p. 302p. 303p. 304p. 305p. 306[unnumbered][unnumbered]p. 307p. 308p. 309p. 310p. 311p. 312p. 313Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 28 (1965), pp. 1-362Front MatterLogical and Mathematical Symbolism in the Plato Scholia, II. A Thousand Years of Diffusion and Redesign [pp. 1-13]A Twelfth-Century Defence of the Fourth Figure of the Syllogism [pp. 14-28]Byzantinism and Romantic Hellenism [pp. 29-43]Gregory the Great, the Destroyer of Pagan Idols. The History of a Medieval Legend concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature [pp. 44-65]A Castilian Tradition of Bible Illustration. The Romanesque Bible from San Milln [pp. 66-85]A Twelfth-Century Manuscript from Winchcombe and Its Illustrations. Dublin, Trinity College, MS. 53 [pp. 86-109]The Iconography of the Four Panels by the Master of Saint Giles [pp. 110-144]Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda, 1422-1432 [pp. 145-162]The Medals of Pope Julius II (1503-1513) [pp. 163-182]Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras [pp. 183-204]Eros and Anteros or Reciprocal Love in Ancient and Renaissance Art [pp. 205-208]Bibles Franaises Aprs le Concile de Trente (1546) [pp. 209-222]An Unknown Chapter in the Life of John Dee [pp. 223-257]A Rembrandt Problem: Haman or Uriah? [pp. 258-273]The Medal against Time: A Study of Pope's Epistle To Mr Addison [pp. 274-298]A. M. Warburg [pp. 299-313]NotesEmpedocles's Fiery Fish [pp. 314-315]The Hero with Two Swords: A Postscript [pp. 316-317]A Serbo-Byzantine Betrothal Ring [pp. 317-319]The Breviary of Saint Louis: The Development of a Legendary Miracle [pp. 319-323]The Salamander in Van der Goes' Garden of Eden [pp. 323-326]The Solitary Bird in Van der Goes' Garden of Eden [pp. 326-329]Some Seventeenth-Century Miniatures from the University of Cracow [pp. 329-331]De Lineamentis: L. B. Alberti's Use of a Technical Term [pp. 331-335]Excerpts from the Codex Huygens Published in London in 1720 [pp. 336-338]Poussin's Marine Venus at Philadelphia: A Re-Identification Accepted [pp. 338-343]The Woman of Sestos: A Plinian Theme in the Renaissance [pp. 343-348]Back Matter [pp. 349-361]

Documents

Aby M. Warburg. Gertrud Bing