Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods: An Anniversary Lecture

E. H. Gombrich

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 62. (1999), pp. 268-282.

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ABY WARBURG: HIS AIMS AND METHODS

An Anniversary Lecture

E. H. Gombrich

A by Warburg died seventy years ago, on 26 October 1929 in his sixty-fourth year. I was at that time in my second year at Vienna University, studying the history of

art, but I do not think that the news of his death reached me, or that I knew much about him, though my teacher, Julius von Schlosser, had a high regard for his erudition. It was only when I came to England, almost sixty-three years ago, that I was assigned the task to assist Gertrud Bing in publishing the vast array of his drafts and notes. I was to use these after her death in writing Warburg's Intellectual B iograph~,~ and his oeuvre has never been far from my mind. Do not expect a solemn address for the occasion! As indicated in my title, I feel the best tribute I can pay him is to explain to the best of my power, sine ira et studio, how he saw the purpose of art history and the methods it should employ, for I find that people tend to have the weirdest ideas about these aims and methods.

There is no better way of finding out what a writer meant than to attempt to state his meaning in different words, preferably in another language. Now, at last, seventy years after Warburg's death, his collected works have been made available to English readers who have no German.' In my Intellectual Biographj, I have wrestled myself with what Warburg once jokingly called his 'Aalsuppenstil', 'eel-soup style', and so I can appreciate the work of David Britt, author of this excellent translation. I only wish the publishers had also had an elementary consideration for readers, for the texts are enshrined in such a hea\y tome that it needs elephantine strength even to put it on the table. I very much regret that obstacle.

Yet on this occasion I cannot regret the form the volume has taken. It can serve me as a demonstratio ad oculos that I cannot possibly deal with Warburg's oeuvre in one hour. I have to select a detail. Warburg, after all, has often been quoted that 'der liebe Gott steckt im Detail', 'God dwells in the details'.

The detail I have chosen for my presentation is the peroration from his most famous paper, which he delivered at the height of his career in October 1912, at the tenth Art-Historical Congress in Rome: his interpretation of the astrological fresco cycle of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, painted around 1470 (Fig. 8 9 ) . W e explained his discovery that the three figures marking each month are known to astrologers as the decans, or the ten-day divinities, and that the classical gods above, ruling the

1 . E. H. Gombrich, Aby bVarburg: a11 Intrllectual 3. .&by Warhurg, 'Italienische Kunst und Interna- Biograpl~y,London 1970; 2nd edition, Oxford 1986. tionale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara',

2 . Aby Warburg, The Rrne7ual of Pagall A~l t iqzc~ty: (;esammrltr Schriftrn, 1 1 , Le~pzig 1932, pp. qjg-81; C o ~ ~ t r i b u t ~ o ~ ~ s Gombrich, op. cit., pp. 192-5. to the Cultural History of the Europeall X e ~ ~ a z s s a ~ ~ c e ,introd. I(. W. Forster, tr. D. Britt, Los Angeles ~ c j c j c ~ .

ABY WARBURG z69

89. March (Aries), fresco, c. 1470. Ferrara, Palazzo Schifanoia

270 E. H. GOMBRICH

months, described in a poem by the Roman author Manilius, are largely represented in accordance with their descriptions in medieval mythological manuals. I should like to analyse his programmatic conclusion in some detail, and will first quote this very densely-argued text in its entirety, in Mr Britt's translation, and then concentrate on the individual formulations:

My fellow students:- I need hardly say that this lecture has not been about solving a pictorial riddle for its own sake especially since it cannot here he illuminated at leisure, but only caught in a cinematographic spotlight.

Tlle isolated and llighly provisional experiment that I have undertaken here is intended as a plea for an extension of the methodological borders of our study of art, in both material and spatial terms.

Until now. a lack of adequate general evolutionary categories has impeded art history in placing its materials a t the disposal of the-still un~\.ritten-'histor.ica1 psychology of human expression.' By adopting either an unduly materialistic or an unduly mystical stance, our young discipline blocks its own panoramic view of history. It gropes toward an evo lu t iona~~ tlleol?. of its own, somel\,here between the schernatisnls of political 11isto1-y and the dogmatic hit11 in genius. In attempting to elucidate the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, I hope to have sllo~vn 110~.an iconological analysis that can range freely, with no fear of border guards, and can treat the ancient. medieval, and modern ~vorlds as a collerent historical unity-an analysis that can scrutinise the purest and the most utilitarian of arts as equivalent documents of expression-ho~v such a method, by taking pains to illuminate one single obscurity, can cast light on great and universal evolutionary processes in all their interconnectedness. I have not tried to find a neat solution so m11ch as to present a nell- problem, ~vhicll I would formulate as follol\,s: 'To \\.hat extent can the stylistic shift in the presentation of human beings in Italian art be regarded as part of an international process of dialectical engagement with the surviving imagery of Eastern Mediterranean pagan culture?'

Our sense of wonder at the inexplicable fact of supreme artistic acllievernent can only he enhanced by the a~vareness that genius is both a gift of grace and a conscious dialectical energy. The grandeur of the new art, as given to us by the genius of Italy. llad its roots in a shared deter- mination to strip the humanist heritage of Greece of all its accretions of traditional 'practice', wlletller medieval. Oriental, or Latin. It \\.as wit11 this desire to restore the ancient world that 'the good European' began his battle for enlightenment, in that age of internationally migrating images that 1t.e-a shade too mystically-call the Age of the Renaissance.+

We have in our archive the actual typescript which M7arburg read out in Rome in October 191 2. Since the outbreak of ~var in 1914 considerably delayed the publication of the Acts of the Congress, he was not sent the galleys of these contributions until i g x , when he was confined as a patient in a psychiatric clinic at Kreuzlingen. We also have the galleys which he arnencled for the final publication, and some of these arnend- ments will prove significant, as ~vill his prelirninai-y jottings. (See below, Figs 9 1-3.)

And now for the detail:

Warburg began by addressing his colleagues as 'Kornmilitonen', which Mr Britt translated as 'Fellow Students', though the atmosphere might perhaps demand 'Comrades in Arms'. He then introduced his peroration ~vith an important denial-a

4. rVa1kn1r.g (as in n . z ) , pp. 385-6

2 7 1 A B Y MrARBURG

denial of which we must take note once and for all: 'I need hardly say that this lecture has not been about solving a pictorial riddle for its own sake'-in other words, he explicitly rejected the interpretation of his research as iconographic. You rnay also be surprised, as I was, that speaking in Rome he described what lvas to follow as 'a positivist plea': 'Ich wollte rnir ein positivistisches Plaidoyer erlauben', he said. So he claimed to be a 'positivist'. What he meant, we can only guess. But since, as you rnay remember, he lvas to conclucle by calling the notion of the Renaissance a trifle too 'mystical', he probably wanted to assert that his approach was not mystical, but rational or scientific. He deleted this passage, which does not appear in the published version, and in his jottings (below, Fig. 91) states boldly: 'Revision der kunstgeschichtlicher~ Entwick1ungskategorien'-'revision of the evolutionary categories of art history'. His final text makes it clear ~vhat he intends, ~vhich now states: 'The isolated and highly provisional experiment that I have undertaken here is intended as a plea for an exten- sion of the methodological borders of our study of art, in both material ancl spatial terms.' He condemned art history as it lvas practised by specialists as too narrow in its concentration on what we call the Old Masters, and in this concentration lve read, we have relied on inadequate evolutionary categories-'unzulangliche Entwicklungskat-egorien' which prevented us-and that is important-from providing material for a 'historical psychology of human expression'.

I shall have to devote a considerable part of my lecture to this particular statement which, after all, M7arburg implied lvas the ultimate aim of art histon.

'The historical psychology of human expression ...' The words trip quite easily from the tongue, but ~vhat exactly did Warburg have in mind? 'Historical psychology' is obviously not the sarne as 'the history of psychology', and lvhat exactly in this context is 'human expression'? No ~vonder, you might say, that the book had not been written and never could be written; yet there exists such a book, and we know that Warburg held it in high esteem: I am referring to Charles Darwin's The Expre~sion ofthe Emotions in Man and Animals, published in German in 1872.5When Warburg encountered this work as a young man, he made a note in his diary: 'At last a book that helps me'." Darwin's purpose in writing that book was to offer more evidence for the theory that had made him famous and notorious: the theory of the descent of man from primate ancestors. He wished to describe the facial movements which express our emotions by showing their rnarked kinship with the symptoms of emotional states in animals. As he states in his introduction, Darwin found it 'most serviceable ... to observe infants, for they exhibit many emotions ... ~vith extraordinary force, whereas in after life some of our expressions cease to have the pure ancl simple source from ~vhich they spring in infancy'. For the sarne reason he recommends the study of the insane, 'as they are liable to the strongest passions ancl give uncontrolled vent to them'. Thus, writing about the expression of anger, Darwin writes: 'Our early progenitors, when enraged, would prob- ably have exposed their teeth more freely than does man.'

i\ . l(~~i~ l ~ d ~ I I I I ~ P T Ibri dr?n . l l r ~ t s c h r ~ ~ u n d d r ~ t T h i r r r ~ ~ , etl11 London 1 ( ) ~ 1 ,

5. Charles Dar-ivin, I)?? ,Jnsdruc.k drr Grwliilhsbr7iir- e.g. T h r Exprrrrro?~ of thr Ew10t101tr ~ I L . iltzt~l~alr, ts .J . l'ictor- pp. 14-13.

Carus, Stuttgart 1872, p. 1:3; for. the Eriglisli \el-sion see 6.C;o~nbr-icli.op. cit., p. 72.

M'arburg had been subject to frequent tantrums, the unrepressed discharge of emotions, and so the book touched a nenJe. Here then is truly a 'historical psychology of human expression', or a history of human expression and its psychological signifi- cance which made an indelible impression on him.

I hope I shall not cause offence if I say that in assigning to art history the task of furnishing material to an as yet un~vritten 'historical psychology of human expression', M'arburg overlooked two vital facts: Danvin rnakes it very clear in his title in ~vhat con-text he used the word 'expression': He calls the book The Expression of the Emotions i n M a n and Animals. He proposed to study the expression in individual animals and how the state of anger or sadness influences the facial muscles or the posture.

Yet it is not with this that art history is concerned, but with images of various kinds, and in regarding images as expression we are introducing an arnbiguity: Who, if I may so formulate the question, is doing the expressing? The maker of the image or more generally, the culture, or society, or what is called the age? And if we refer to such a collective, can an age, a nation or a period have a mental experience?

Of course, in ignoring these ambiguities M'arburg was in excellent company. In his seminal book on History and its Images,' Francis Haskell has shown how this conviction grew, since the eighteenth century, that the art or the style of a period offered a kind of master key to the historian who seeks to enter into the spirit of the past.

I have often quoted in this context the words of the German art historian Carl Schnaase who wrote in 1843: 'The art of ever?; period .. . is something like a hieroglyph, a monogram, in which the secret essence of the nation declares itself. A continuous history of art provides the spectacle of the progressive evolution of the human ~ p i r i t . ' ~ To those who shared this view, Darwin's theory of evolution offered a further temp- tation to look at the progress of human culture, from savagery to civilisation, as a pro- cess of maturation that the new science of psychology could describe and explain.

Warburg had frequented the University of Bonn in the late 1880s during the period when evolutionary speculations were rife. He attended the lectures about the origins of mythology of Hermarlrl Usener, who drew his attention to a book by Tito L7ignoli on myth and science (~Vlitoe Scienza, Milan 18 79), which basically celebrated human reason as a triumph over fear. Animals, the author claimed, cannot yet distinguish between animate and inanimate things, and so they take to flight whenever they perceive move- ment-a dubious proposition, but exemplified by a horse shying when encountering a piece of paper blown by the wind. It is human reason which slowly but surely conquers this kind of fear by exploring our environment and allowing us to dominate it, the ultimate example of this being Newton's explanation of the movement of the heavens. Vigrloli was no Darwin, but his celebration of the triumph of rationality over superstition

7. F. Haskell, H i s t o y cirid i ts 11nngp.s: .Art ~ l l d / h r Rlonogramrn, in welchem sich das geheirne It'esell Iutrrprrtatio~z of the Past , Lolldoll and New Haven der Yiilker, denen sie angelliir-re ...vollstintlig i ~ n d

1993. bestiri~ri~tausspr-icht . . . Eilie fortlaufelide Kulistge- 8. C. Schliaase, G p s c h i ~ h / pdrr Dildrrzd~ri K i i l l s t ~ bpi schichte ge~vahrt daher rugleich eilie hlischaul~lig

drri Altrri, I . Leiprig 1843, p. 87: 'So ist also die Kunst von der- for-tschr-eitelideli Elitwicklulig des r i~e~isch- e i l ie r ]ede~iZeit . . . gleichsam eine Hieroglyphe, eili licheli Geistes.'

ABY W A R B U R G

also made a lasting impression on Warburg, and is still reflected in the arrangement of the Institute's library."

Even more decisive for Warburg, however, was the young historian Karl Lamprecht, who was a fanatical-not to say aggressi~e-proponent of evolutionary psychology. In my Intelbctunl BioCp-ait,/~j of Warburg I d e ~ o t e d more than seven pages to Lamprecht's teaching and its influence on Warburg. I also suggested that Lamprecht's reading of German history must be understood as an attempt to nlodernise a traditional approach by restating it in new, psychological terminology. What Lamprecht aimed at was indeed, to use Warburg's words, to put art-historical observation at the senice of a historical psychology of expression.

In 1882 Lamprecht had published a study of the decorated initials of medieval German manuscripts from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries,1° and here he antici- pated some of this approach which became relevant to our subject and to Warburg. O n pp. 16-1 j of that relati~ely brief publication, from which I show two illustrations (Fig. goa, b ) , he explains why it is that the origin of vegetal ornament presents one of the most interesting problems of art history. It seemed to him that vegetal ornamentation introduced a new epoch in the artistic development of the nation. Up to then decorat- ive ornament was confined to ' the mute play of mathematical elements ... but now

5). See E. H. Gombrich. 'Aby Ti'arburg e I'evol117io- r h ~ i ~ i l ~ r h ~ ~ i ~iebst ~ r l i i t ~ t e ~ ~ z d ~ n z H m ~ i d ~ r h r i / l ~ ~ z ELI,Leipzig nismo ottoce~ltesco', Rrl/cIgor, x1.1~.1$)5)q.pp. 6:15-q(). 1882

1o. K. I.amprrcht, I~zitial-Or~znmentili 1711. h ~ r d ~ \ XIII. Jnhrh~rrid~rtc: I ' i r~ uridvirr;~g fii fel~i, m ~ i \ t ~trrrir

German power of visualisation (die deutrrJl~ AnscJlnz~ungrkrft) had grown to such a level that it could no longer be satisfied with inert elements. It turned to Life, to organisms, and to plants .. . The world of plants is easier to grasp than that of animals because plants do not move ...' This change in the style of initials confirmed, in Lamprecht's view, a general law of evolution in the artistic creativity of a nation, which exemplifies what he calls the law of progress, leading from the easily intelligible to what is harder to grasp."

You will note that Lamprecht's explanation is largely circular: he assumes that a new style of initials reveals a new mentality, and he is confident that it confirms what he calls 'the law of progress'. His idea of the evolution of the mind from the simple to the complex has been subsequently contradicted by all anthropological observations; nor can we overlook the colossal difference in time scale between the evolution of honzo sapiens described by Dar~vin and the progress of human culture from its first traces to modern technology. For too long it was uncritically accepted that the so-called primitive tribes encountered by explorers and anthropologists stood on a lower mental rung of the ladder of evolution than we do. It took the great ethnologist Franz Boas to write in 192j,in the preface to his classic volume on Primitive Art: 'there must have been a time when man's mental equipment was different from what it is now, when it was evolving from a condition similar to that found among the higher apes.' But 'that period', he emphasises, 'lies far behind us and no trace of a lower mental organisation is found in any of the extant races of man .. . some theorists assume a mental equipment of primi- tive man distinct from that of civilised man. I have never seen a person in primitive life to whom this theory would apply ... the behaviour of everybody, no matter to what culture he may belong can be understood only as an historical growth.'

What Boas asserted, and what has meanwhile been frequently repeated and con- firmed, is the fact that it is the culture that moulds the mind, not the mind that is expressed in culture. The language, rituals or art of a tribe are not the symptoms of their mental lives, they are the sources of their conscious experience.

The difference between these two interpretations can perhaps be illustrated by referring to an experiment Warburg inspired during his brief excursion to the reser- vations of the American Indians. He had asked a teacher to read a little tale to the children, in which a thunderstorm occurred, which they were to illustrate. His expec- tations were not disappointed: most of the Americanised children drew the modern, conventional zig-zag lines, but two boys depicted lightning in the form of a serpent." What Warburg sought to investigate here is, of course, how lightning was imagined. He looked for the mental picture-the Vo;orrtrllz~ng,in Lamprecht's terminology-behind the drawing.

i i . 'Bisher hatre iriali sich des stuiriirieli Spiels a111 ehesteii iiffnen, ihre a~issere Er-scheini~ng ist ri~atheri~atischerEler i~e~i te einfacher als die der Tier-welt, ist dauerlid ewig ulld fiir die Oriiarnentik be- dient . . . Aber- jetzt war- die deutsclie ;\iischa~uiiigs~raft iuiwaiidelbar uiid daher Ieichter irri Bild 1vieder7~- kiinstlerisch bis 211 eilleiri Grade gewachseii. deiri die gebeii, als die ~vechselliden Be~vegungsforrne des \'erarbeituiig toter Elemente ilicht rnehr geniigte: Tieres.' sie waildte sich an das I ,ebe~i . an die Orgaiiisirieii. 1 2 . (;oiribrich. op. cit., p. 9 i , pl. ioa. Hier- mlisste sich die Pflan7enwelt dem \'erstandnis

A B Y WARBURG 2'7.5

It is an ingenious experiment which offers plenty of food for thought. But would not Lamprecht, and presumably also Warburg, have begged the question if they con- sidered that a child's drawing was an exact depiction of his mental image of lightning? A moment's introspection will make you suspect such a tidy conclusion. At least, my own mental image if I hear the word 'lightning' spoken, is both intense and elusive. I could no more pin it down in a drawing than I could describe it. Is it not more likely that the tribal myths influenced the boy's drawing than that the drawing reflected his mental images?

I fear that by now you will think that I have 'come to bury Warburg, not to praise him!' But I promise that by the end of my lecture we shall reach more solid ground under our feet.

Let us move on from what Warburg considered the aim of art-historical studies, that as yet unwritten 'historical psychology of human expression', and turn to his criti- cism of method:

'By adopting either an unduly materialistic, or an unduly mystical stance', we read, 'our young discipline blocks its own panoramic view of history. It gropes toward an evolutionary theory of its own, somewhere between the schematisms of political history and the dogmatic faith in genius.' I suppose it is the schematism of political periodis- ation by dynasties or rulers M'arburg finds unduly materialistic, while the dogmatic faith in genius he finds too mystical to yield any results. He constrasts these inadequate approaches with his own in a long sentence which I must read again in its entirety:

I n a t tempt ing to elucidate t h e frescoes i n the Palazzo Schifanoia i n Ferrara, I h o p e t o have s h o ~ v n h o ~ ia n icoilological analysis that call range freely, wi th n o fear o f border guards, and can treat t h e anc ien t , med ieva l , and m o d e r n rvorlds as a c o h e r e n t historical unity-an analysis that c a n scrutinise the purest and the mos t utilitarian o f arts as equivale~l t document s o f expression-how such a m e t h o d , by taking pains t o i l lumina te o n e single obscuri ty , call cast l ight o n great and universal evo1utional)- processes i n all their i ~ l t e r c o n ~ l e c t e d ~ ~ e s s . '

Mark that we are told again that we can throw light on 'great and universal evolution- ary processes' by disregarding the present historical divisions between 'the ancient, medieval and modern worlds', and also by disregarding the dogma of works of art as the products of genius and regarding the most utilitarian artefacts as 'equivalent docu- ments of expre~sion'.~:? Surely the 'universal evolutionary process' Expression of ~vhat? ~vhichart history so far excluded from its purview. Actually what had concerned him in his lecture, he reminds his public, is a new problem ~vhich he wants to formulate as follows: 'To what extent can the stylistic shift in the presentation of human beings in Italian art be regarded as part of an international process of dialectical engagement with the sumiving imagery of Eastern Mediterranean pagan culture?' A 'dialectical en- gagement' is how Mr Britt chose to translate Warburg's 'Auseinandersetzungsprozess'. An ingenious choice, but one which is not easily understood.

1 g . 111 rrly entt-v 011 'Stvle' in the Intprnntiottcrl were pt-esen-ed, h e xvould be able to reco~lstt-urt from L ~ l r ~ c l o p d i n NelvYork 1968. xv. p.oj'tlt~.Yocz111 . Y C ~ P I I ~ P J , it its social organisation. I-eligio11. err. See H. Kulkn, 358, I quoted the rlnini of the Xustt-ia11 at-rhitect hdolf Adolf L o u , L'ie~lna10:31, p. 2 5 .

Loos that if only a s i~ lg le hutton of a lost civilisation

276 E. H. GOMRRICH

Perhaps I may turn here to an earlier translation by Peter Wortsman, in an an- thology published by Gert Schiff in 1988, who speaks of 'an internationally conditioned process of disengagement from the surviving pictorial conceptions of the pagan culture of the eastern Mediterranean peoples.' '4

If I read Warburg correctly, he hoped to have explained the stylistic shift in the representation of human bodies in Italian art-the achievement of Raphael and other masters-as somehow the result of a reaction to the surviying imagery of the eastern Mediterranean pagan cultures.15

Warburg asked what is called a 'rhetorical' question, and we see that by answering the suggestion in the affirmative he has come to the conclusion that it was indeed the debased tradition stemming from the Orient exemplified in the astrological imagery in the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia that gave the artist of the High Renaissance- Raphael or Peruzzi-the impulse to search for the true source of classical beauty in their rendering of mythology. It may be a surprising conclusion, but that it meant a great deal to M'arburg is shown by the fact that he repeats it in his final paragraph: 'Our sense of wonder at the inexplicable fact of supreme artistic achievement can only be enhanced by the aLvareness that genius is both a gift of grace and [as Mr Britt put it] a conscious dialectical energy.'

The text Mr Britt had in front of him reads: 'Auseinandersetzungsenergie'-an individual coinage by M'arburg which is indeed impossible to translate. It turns out that this coinage was an afterthought of Warburg's, inserted into the galleys ten years after he had spoken in Rome. It replaced various makeshift solutions which obviously had not satisfied him.

he was looking for ~vas a term he could use in contrast to the concept of genius, a concept about which he had certain reservations. He constantly encountered it in both academic and popular monographs on artists, and he rightly felt that i t explained nothing. In his original jottings (Fig. 9 i ) he had experimented with three polarities: Intellect and Genius; Analysis and Synthesis; Mysticism (~Vjstik)and Work. It was the last ~vhich he chose for the text he intended to read in Rome, ~vhich ran: 'Dass Genie Gnade ist und zugleich Arbeit erfordert', 'genius is a blessing, but i t also demands ~vork'. A formulation that not surprisingly again failed to satisfy him in the long run. The correction he inserted in his typescript (Fig. 92) and presumably read out in Rome was 'Ereignis im Zusammenhang', 'event in context', meaning presumably that genius is not enough, unless eyents are fayourable; and finally in the galleys (Fig. 93) he replaced this by 'Auseinandersetzungsenergie', which meant really 'the power to react'. Raphael-or perhaps Peruzzi-had the strength to react against the corrupt and corrupting images of medieval astrology and to replace them by the solid, beautiful bodies taken from classical art."'

14. (;wrnan b':sc~~son Art History. ed. G. Schiff, New im Siiden u n d irn Not-den' (Deceniber 1908; s r e Ehrk 15188, p. 2 3 2 . Combr ich . op . r i t . , pp . 18 7-91), of which I give an

15.T h e rriost explicit of TVat-burg's stntenients or1 extract in the h p p e ~ l d i x belorv, p. 281. Ausei t~cr~~drrsr t :ur~g 1 6 . See belolv, p. 281. is to bt. f o u n d i r i t he lecture ell- titled 'Die antike GZitte~xelt tuld die Friiht-ennissance

ABY WARBURG

91. Warburg Institute Archive, 111.82.3.2, p. I

~7~ E. H. GOMBRICH

Das e n t h u s t a s t i s c h e Staunen vor dem unbeere i f l i ahen Ereig-

n i s k u n s t l e r i s c h e r G e n i a l i t a t kann nur an Gefiihlssturke zu-

nehmen, wenn w i r erkennen dass das Genie Gnade 1st und zu-

g l e i c h ~ ~ % ;leue%<e S t i l , den uns das ki inst ler ischa

Genie I t a l i e n s bescher t h a t , wurzelte i n dem s o z i a l e n Willen

z u r E n t s c G l u n g griechisc!.er Hunwnitat aus 3729v%

-1a te in i scher Pre!$&?"Mit & q l i l l e n zur ~ G t i t u t i m der An-

t i k e begann "der gu te Europiier" se inen Kmpf urn Aufklarung

i n jenem Z e i t a l t e r i n t e r n a t i o n a l e r Rilderwmderung, dns w i t

-etwas a l l z u mystisc&Te Rpoche der Renaissance nennen.

92. Warburg Institute Archive, 111.83.1.2, p. 37

urn Aufklarung in jenem Zeitalter intemationaler Bilderwande~ng. das wir - etwas allzu mystisch - d ~ e Epoche der Renaissance nennen.

93. Warburg Institute Archive, 111.83.2. I , p. 17

And so to Warburg's conclusion: 'The grandeur of the new art, as given to us by the genius of Italy, had its roots in a shared determination to strip the humanist heritage of Greece of all its accretions of traditional "practice", whether medieval, Oriental, or Latin. '

But remember that this art-historical observation only gains full validity in the light of an as yet unwritten 'historical psychology of human expression'. Warburg had no doubt as to what it was that shift in style expressed: 'It was with this desire to restore the ancient world that "the good European" began his battle for enlightenment, in that age of internationally migrating images that we-a shade too mystically-call the Age of the Renaissance.'

Quod erat demonstrandurn. The idea that the Italian Renaissance was the vanguard of the modern age was surely familiar to Warburg; after all it was the message of Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy of i 860. Alas, in the seventy years that have passed since Warburg's death, our pride in being Europeans has been dealt a devastating blow. At the same time we have also had to learn utterly to distrust national, racial or cultural stereotypes. This is also the reason why I here ventured, in this lecture, to criticise Warburg's faith in the 'historical psychology of human expression'. It was this faith that led him to interpret the images of Oriental astrology which he had

ABY WARBURG "is

encountered at Ferrara as tell-tale symptoms of cultural decline, as a penersion of the classical heritage from which the Renaissance had to rescue mankind. But when he speaks of 'medieval, Oriental or Latin practice', referring to the performance of magic rites, his confidence in the historical psychology of human expression has surely led him astray. You cannot tar whole civilisations with the same brush. It so happens that at the time when I was busy on this lecture I received a review essay from Hanlard, written by our former colleague, Professor Sabra," that deals with the efforts of Arab astron- omers to rectify the errors of Ptolemy's cosmology, and to make it mathematically more consistent with celestial mechanics. This alone exempts me from the need to remind you further of all the advances and inventions we owe to the East.

Widespread as was the notion of a collective psyche in Warburg's period, in his case the tendency had very deep roots: he was inclined to find his personal conflicts writ large in the history of mankind. After his recovery from his mental illness, he once jotted down the remark that he suspected some of his historical preoccupations to have originated in what he called an 'autobiographical reflex'.lH

Interestingly enough, this undeniable element does not vitiate the main results of his interpretation of the frescoes: the presence of the &runs and the influence of Manilius and the nlythological manuals. But it also colours much of the remaining back- ground that led him to identify the Orient with the dark forces of the mind. Briefly, he had convinced himself, on rather shaky evidence, that the bizarre oriental astrological images he had encountered in Ferrara-such as the first decan of Aries, as an angry man with a rope-were really corrupted versions of the astronomical constellations which the Greeks had identified with mythological figures such as Perseus.1" letter written to his wife from Kreuzlingen confirms that what he saw as their restoration to pristine beauty appeared to him like the lifting of an evil spell.")

It was the vicarious experience of this liberation which he treasured in the works of the Italian Renaissance, a liberation he himself so fervently hoped for.

But it is not this personal element alone that determined Warburg's vision of the history of' art. 'All history is contemporary history' said Benedetto Croce, and in Warburg's case he may well have been right.

Warburg, whose wife was an artist, lived through a stylistic revolution at least as radical as the Italian Renaissance. His career coincided with what we call the birth of modern art. In his youth he had written a little playlet which you find summarised in my biography," in which he pokes fun at hatred of modern art, at the philistine who insists on the meticulous rendering of detail. Later on, he champions such innovators as the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and the painter Arnold Bocklin, whose mythological fantasies he specially admired.

the U n i ~ e r s r : PI-oblelri Sulving. a n d Kinrmatic hfudrling as Thelrirs p. 5 2 . of Arabic hstrunori l> ' , Pr~-~,f'rrrf,cctivri 011 .Yclriztr, vr. I 998 . e o . TTVO rxtr-acts fr-om this letter- a r r given in the pp. 288-330. Appendix b r lu~v . pp. e 8 1-82.

I j . h.I. Sabra, 'C:ontig~~ring hporr t ic , History uf Ideds', in E p i c s of O U I - Titnu, L.ondon ICJ$)I.

18. Gurilt~rich. op . cir., p, gog. 2 I . Gulrihrich. op . cit., pp. 93-1. I $1. For IVar-burg's un.rvillingness tu givr u p this

claring c o n j e c t ~ ~ r r see my paper o n 'Rrlati\isril in t h r

280 E. H . G O M B R I C H

It was the opening words of the Schifnnoia lecture which finally led me to look for this connection with contenlporary art, where he states: 'To us as art historians, the Roman world of Italian High Renaissance art represents the successful conclusion of a long process in which artistic genius emancipated itself from its medieval illustrative servitude.' ('. . . den endlich-gegluckten Befreiungsversuch des kunstlerischen Genies von mittelalterlicher illustrative Dienstbarkeit.'). He meant to allude to the influence of mythological manuals in the Middle Ages (see Appendix), but as a general propo- sition, setting off the art of the Renaissance against that of the Middle Ages, it is still a puzzling proposition, for we have since been conditioned by those who are falsely called 'Warburgians' to look precisely for intricate humanist programnles in Renaissance paintings, and nobody can overlook the element of illustration in Raphael's Farnesina frescoes which illustrate the story of Psyche from Apuleius.

But it was in M'arburg's time, of course, that the word 'anecdotal' had become a term of abuse, and that Salon painting was condemned lock stock and barrel for its literary tendencies. Warburg was at work on the Schzjanoia paper between 1go8 and i g i 2 . IS it a coincidence that these years witnessed the final overthrow of traditional values? When in 1953 I was asked to give the Ernest Jones Lecture to an audience of psychoanalysts, I chose as my topic the revolution of these years. I contrasted a Salon painting of the Birth of Venus by Bouguereau with Picasso's Demoiselles dxvignon, and clainled that the one could not have taken shape without the other.

It was only decades later that I realised that, in making this assertion, I was applying one of Warburg's ideas.

I do not want to be misunderstood. I do not claim that Warburg necessarily knew of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, but that Picasso possessed to an unusual degree what Warburg called 'Auseinandersetzungsenergie', the power (and the will) to react against prevailing trends. It seems to me that Warburg's own reaction against the current emphasis on continuous stylistic evolution in art history was grounded in his experi- ence of the dramatic break of the art of his time. Nobody living through this period in France or Germany could have remained unaware of the intense reaction among the young generation of artists against the debased style of bourgeois taste, which was denounced as 'Kitsch'. Whatever Warburg's aims and methods may have been in 1912 ,

his determined non-conformist stance and intense desire to revise the notions with which art history had operated for too long can still arouse our admiration.

Warburg Institute

ABY WARBURG

Appendix

1 . T h e serenity of Renaissance a r t as the result of a hard struggle (Auseinandersetzung) Extracts from Warburg's lecture of 1908"

But what has the Italian Renaissance to do with these abstruse allegories o r , worse even, with senseless astrological practices? Do these not lie below the threshold of naive autochthonal serenity, able to disregard that drear). tangled lore and simply to look up with unspoilt senses to the marble images which had risen from the earth and which enabled the progeny of their creators to repeat or to re-create the more exalted language of their ancestors by an act of sheer artistic intuition?

I am confident that reflective and trained historians will not feel that I have spoilt their pleasure and deprived them of their faith in the achievements of the early Renaissance if I try to prove to them that that age first had to liberate the serene Olympians from scholastic and non-visual erudition and heraldically rigid astrological pictograms in a deliberate and difficult struggle with a fossilised late antique tradition which we wrongly describe as medieval.

Was hat aber die italienische Friihrenaissance mit so spitzfindiger Allegorie oder gar mit sinnlosen astrologischen Praktiken zu tun? Liegen diese nicht unter der Schwelle naiver autochthoner Heiterkeit, die tlber jenen abstrusen Wust hinwegsehend, einfach mit frischen Sinnen zu jenen dem Boden wieder entstiegenen Marmorbildern aufblickte, die sie -die Nachkommen-befahigten, die hohere Sprache der Vorfahren ohne weiteres durch kiinstlerische Intuition zu wiederholen und doch neu zu schaffen?

Ich glaube, nachdenklichen und historisch geschulten Kopfen nicht die Freude und den Glauben an die Verdienste der Friihrenaissance zu nehmen, wenn ich zu zeigen versuche, dass die Friihrenaissance erst nach einer bewussten und schwierigen Auseinandersetzung mit der fossilen spatantiken Tradition (die wir falsch- lich die mittelalterliche nennen) den heiteren Gotterolymp gleichsam erst entschalen musste aus scholastischer anschauungsloser Gelehr- samkeit und heraldisch erstarrter astrologischer Bilderschrift.

[Gombrich, op. cit., p. 1891

2 . Two extracts f r o m a let ter written by Aby Warburg to his wife

f rom Kreuzlingen, 15 December 1923 (Warburg Institute Archive, 83.5)

In my contribution I was only able to hint at the fact which now seems to me most pro- foundly moving: The magical transformation of the luminous Greek divinities into demons of the dark, to be conjured up to d o man's bidding. The first Decan is a wonderful example of this. That is why I wrote in your copy 'A fairytale from the real world', and at the top: 'On the metamorphosis of the heathen gods'. The first chapter would have to be called 'Perseus', for, as I proved, it is he who is

" See a h o ~ e ,p. 2 76 n.15.

Ich habe in der Abhandlung nus andeuten konnen, was mir jetzt das Ergreifendste zu sein scheint, die Verzauberung der lichtwandigen (wendigen?) griechischen Gottheiten zu fin- steren Damonen, die man beschwort. Der erste Dekan ist dafiir ein wunderbares Beispiel. Darum habe ich in Dein Exemplar hineinge- schrieben: 'Em Zaubermarchen aus der Wirk- lichkeit', vorn dariiber 'Zur Metamorphose der Heidengotter' . Das erste Kapitel mtlsste lauten 'Perseus', denn e r steckt, wie ich

revealed to be the man girt with the rope. Thanks to Teukros from Asia Minor, he was next to transform himself into a dark-skinned Egyptian sacrificial priest-see the Tavola Bianchini*'-depicted on a table intended for astrological prognostics (for that is what I take the Tavola Bianchini to b e ) , at the head of the procession of the 36 Decans, and, accord- ingly, he appears on the hermetic amulets of Hellellistic medicine, .. .

... This, then, is the problem: How did this ... ragged, wrathful man, banished by the power of the magic ringstone to the inhospitable nether regions, regain his joy as a liberator, and acquire his winged sandals, the magic hood, the sword and the Medusa-head, and thus release the rock-chained sacrificial victim? This is the renaissance, the re-generation, through re-remembrance (transformation), of the djinn (the gho.rt of the Kabbala) into thr hero of antiquity. Who was it who delivered the deliverer from the banishment of the magic ring?-A motif from fairyland, and, at the same time, the sum total of European intel- lectual history in the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

nachwies, in dem Mann mit den1 Strickgurt; er hat durch den Klein-Asiaten Tcukros zunachst-vgl. die Tafel Bianchini-sich in einen dunkelfarbigen agyptischcn Opfcr-priester vei-wandeln mussen, der auf astro- logischell Wahrsage-Loostafeln (dafiir halte ich die Bianchini-Tafel) den Aufmarsch der 36 Dekane anfiihrt und dementspi-echend in der herrnetischen Sfedizin des He l l en i sm~~s auf Heilsteinen erscheint, ...

... Das Problem ist also: M'ie bekoriimt der aus dem Ringstein herausbeschworene verzau-berte zerlumpte zornige Mann, der in der unheimlichen Zwischenregion hausen muss, seine Befl-eierfreudigkeit wieder, seine Flugel sohlen die Tarnkappe, das Schwert lind das Haupt der Medusa, urn die an den Fels geketteten Opfer zu befreieil? Kenais- sance, Lliedergeburt durch Kuckerinnerung [[Umwandlu~lg]] des Dschinnen (kabb. Gespenst) rum antiken Heros. TYer crlost drn durch die Sfagier in dell Kingstein gebannten Erlosel-? Ein Marchellmotiv und zugleich der ganze Inhalt der europaischen Ceistes- geschichte im Zeitalter der Renaissance und Reformation.

" 1llusr1-atedill Ll'al-burg (as in n . n ) , fig. lo<).