Aby Warburg's History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images

Author(s): Kurt W. Forster

Source: Daedalus , Winter, 1976, Vol. 105, No. 1, In Praise of Books (Winter, 1976), pp.
169-176
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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KURT W. FORSTER

Aby Warburg's History of Art :.

Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images

A research institute of international stature and its renowned publication series both
carry the name of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), but his scholarly achievement remains
rather obscure despite a recent "intellectual biography" by Sir Ernst Gombrich.1 His
reputation as an art historian is overshadowed by his fame as the founder of the kultur
wissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg, which became the nucleus of the library at
the Warburg Institute after its transfer to London in 193 3.
The eldest son of a Hamburg banker, Warburg studied art history?then a meth
odologically immature field only recently admitted to university faculties?but decided
against a university career. Not until his last years did he teach, and then only as a
Honorarprofessor, after devoting his entire life to the study of art. His few succinct
publications appear as only the torso of a potentially gigantic lifework in the propor
tions of nineteenth-century scholarship. He concerned himself almost exclusively with
basic problems of cultural history, and he hoped to prepare the way for new and com
prehensive investigations, yet his entire published work fits easily into the 438 pages of
the Italian edition, index and all.2 The original German edition of 1932 was virtually
deprived of impact by the Nazi takeover, and, with one peripheral exception, War
burg's writings still remain unavailable in English some forty years after the transfer of
his research library to London. What little is generally known of Warburg's work
today is almost totally indirect and frequently distorted.
Several of Warburg's topics and some of his methodological queries were pursued
by Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, who are widely considered to have been the
exponents of a supposedly Warburgian iconology in England and in the United
States.3 Some of Warburg's focal themes, such as Renaissance and Antiquity in their
historical dialectic, the mediation of figurai traditions, Netherlandish painting, D?rer,
and astrological and speculative imagery, received extended treatment by both scholars,
particularly Panofsky. However, while Panofsky's approach is often catholic and syn
thetic, Warburg's has an altogether different cast. Comprehensive in concept and criti
cal in its evaluation of evidence, his questions aim at the role of collective memory and
the social functions of art.

Warburg's scholarly ideas reflect uncannily the conditions of his personal life. Far
from blunting the relevance of his achievement, these personal circumstances illumi
nate fundamental issues of historical scholarship. Detachment from the consuming
169

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 170 KURT W. FORSTER

force of events was his aim and virtually his definition of higher forms of social organi
zation, but he could not remain aloof from the historical events and the psychological
turmoil of his lifetime. He shared with the great historians of his time a heightened
experience of evolution, of a tremendous thrust of forces. His sense of the significance of
records in Western culture made every artifact appear as a solidified moment in the
flux of historical life. Warburg's devoted interest in seemingly random records, ephem
era, and trivia led to a form of voracious collecting that bordered on obsession. As an
indefatigable gatherer of anthropological data, Warburg was as much the prey as the
hunter: he wanted to discover the motor forces of historical life, but he could only per
ceive them in terms of the psychological conflicts that drove him on.
The establishment of his library assumed such significance in Warburg's thinking
and the extraordinary labor he invested in its development overreached the mere use
fulness of a scholar's hand-library to such a degree that we may well ask why he
should have devoted so much of his life's energy to it. In 1900, he wrote to his brother,
pleading for a more generous allotment of family funds for his library, that "in the last
analysis we are all rentiers, and terribly interest-minded. ... I would not hesitate for a
moment to enter my library as a financial asset in the accounts of the firm."4 There
was only one real return from the tremendous investment of the library: his research, a
book, which in turn would be reinvested into the gigantic capital of knowledge. War
burg plainly recognized the financial and social conditions of his own scholarship when
he insisted that "we should demonstrate by our example that capitalism also makes the
labor of thinking possible on the broadest basis, as only capitalism is able to provide
it."5 Warburg intended to approach the study of history and of artifacts on the "broad
est basis" indeed. The first condition for his work was to be met by a systematic collec
tion of vast information, the second by a carefully guarded distance both from the object
of historical investigation and from the onrushing life around him.
Warburg recapitulated in the story of his scholarly research and in the growth and
transformation of his library one of the crucial chapters in the changing conditions of
intellectual work. In forming his library he returned almost to the conditions of the
early nineteenth century, to the private scholar who, like Alexander von Humboldt or
the Grimm brothers, furnished his intellectual workshop with books and manuscripts
as the skilled artisan equipped himself with tools and materials. But precisely the work
of Humboldt and the Grimms had done much to establish the industries of knowledge,
the nineteenth-century universities, where material and staff resources escalated into a
scholarly production beyond the individual's scope. For personal reasons, Warburg
was reluctant to take up a university post, and he was also dissatisfied with the working
conditions in institutional libraries. As a pioneering entrepreneur and private investor,
he created his own firm, an intellectual officina which, in the end, went "public" as a
consequence of the political and financial havoc brought on by the Third Reich. Yet,
these obvious circumstances tell only half the story, the other half is as impersonal as
the first is private.
Warburg's stance of the totally committed private scholar recalls the Enlight
enment, just as his preference for books over art objects signals his emancipation from
the values of his high patrician class. The most important aspect of his research library

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 aby Warburg's history of art 171

lies perhaps in the contradictory nature of its role and purpose in Warburg's work. The
potentially limitless scope of written information and graphic representation contained
for Warburg the historical reality of human development and creation. Consequently,
his library took on the function of a vastly enlarged memory. Warburg considered
man, in body and mind, the living evidence of his own development. Human products,
most compellingly aesthetic creations, told and retold the functioning of personal and
social memory. The fixed and hidden layers of human development, he found, would
be recalled spontaneously and consciously by civilized man. Human expression in its
most encompassing definition, and hence as an anthropological category, became the
central focus of his studies and the true subject category of his library:

Therefore [he explained in 1923] I envisage as a description of the aims of my library the for
mulation: a collection of documents relating to the psychology of human expression. The ques
tion is: how did verbal and pictorial expressions originate; what are the feelings or points of
view, conscious or unconscious, under which they are stored in the archives of memory? Are
there laws to govern their formation or reemergence?6

Why did the long history and wide scope of human expression hold such funda
mental significance for Warburg's analysis of works of art, precisely at a time when the
history of art began to acquire status as an independent academic field with a certain
autonomy of approach? True, its autonomy was largely one of arrogant exclusion,
based on rigid canons of appreciation and an ultimately financial test of value. One
name, that of Bernard Berenson, jumps to mind to contrast with Warburg's at the
time. One could easily draw a network of inverse correspondences between the two
men, but only those that matter in a discussion of Warburg are worth mentioning here.
Significantly, both Warburg and Berenson bequeathed institutes to their profession
which were intensely personal instruments as well as symbolic headquarters for schol
arly camp-followers. Whereas Warburg spent his means to create an instrument of
scholarship, Berenson used his scholarship to become a man of means. At the identical
stage in the development of an art historical discipline, Berenson made a fortune in
authenticating works of art, while Warburg spent his in a demonstration of the collec
tive human origins of every authentic image. Berenson recreated primitive fetishes of
experience in a commercial world, of which, in Warburg's view, photographic snap
shots, postage stamps, and posters seemed to be some of the most pregnant images.
In the context of a searching assessment of art historical approaches, Warburg con
sidered the likes of Bode, Morelli, Venturi, and Berenson to be "hero-worshippers, but
in their ultimate derivations they are only inspired by the temperament of a gourmand.
The neutrally cool form of estimation happens to be the original form of enthusiasm
peculiar to the propertied classes, the collector and his circle."7 Warburg not only
associated ownership of art with luxury; he also considered it an obstacle to a proper
analytical grasp of artifacts. The collector, as much possessed by his treasures as he is
their owner, regresses to the "primitive values" of physical possession.8 This is more
than aversion to the milieu of his family, though aversion it was, too, as Warburg con
fessed in retrospect: "Opposition against property [ownership] and elegance ? la
fran?aise, Alsterufer."9 The Alsterufer, Hamburg's most fashionable patrician address,

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 172 KURT W. FORSTER

stood symbolically for a society that had use for works of art only as investment and as
tokens of social status. For Warburg, however, the individual work of art has value
above all as a record, as a highly complex and productive response of human memory
to a particular situation. The peculiar quality of artifacts lies in their socially mediated
functions (as memory and response), for Warburg learned,

... in the years of work among the Florentine records, ... to understand the work of art as the
outcome of a situation which involved the patron no less than the artist. It is in focusing on a
given commission, and on the solution that emerges from conflicting possibilities which the his
torical situation presented, that Warburg's approach achieved its greatest triumph.10

In a series of analytical steps, like concentrically expanding rings around the arti
fact, Warburg attempted to reconstitute its original context through historical research.
His models were less the contemporary art historians in their prejudiced and partial
examination of historical records than the great historians of his day, Heinrich
Brockhaus and especially Robert Davidsohn. In Jakob Burckhardt he criticized the
often parallel but unconnected treatment of history and of art, and, with major publi
cations of the early nineteen-hundreds, took up where Burckhardt left off with his
Beitr?ge zur Kunstgeschichte von Italien (published posthumously in 1898). Burck
hardt had compiled a useful but rather mechanical account of the portrait genre during
the Renaissance to which Warburg responded with a concise essay on Portraiture and
the Florentine Bourgeoisie (1902). He set the prominent appearance of local patricians
among the saintly actors in the frescoes of Florentine chapels in connection with the
almost totally forgotten practice of placing life-size wax figures as votive images in
churches. In these conflicting traditions?pagan dedication of images, on the one hand,
and the devotional context of Christian imagery, on the other?Warburg recognized
fundamental contradictions of a particular historical moment and place; contradictions,
moreover, he felt to be so essential to the dynamics of the Renaissance and of recent
times that he explored them in a series of further essays on Francesco Sassetti's Last
Will and Testament (1907) and on the cultural exchanges between North and South.
Of all of these studies may be said what Warburg recognized as the unfulfilled promise
of Burckhardt's own research, namely, that the historian "did not avoid the labor of
investigating the individual work of art in its direct connection with the background of
its time in order to interpret the ideal or practical exigences of real life as its 'causal
ity.' "n The driving question of why a work of art resulted in its particular form and
quality demanded an answer. Memory, as the abstract sum total of human history,
gave an ever changing response to different situations. With the concept of response
Warburg sacrificed one of the most cherished notions of academic art history in his
time, the concept of autonomy for both aesthetic values and artists. Theories of an
independent formal development of art?typified by W?lfflin's Renaissance and
Baroque of 1888?and narrow explanations of formal qualities as a mechanical result
of conventions, material properties, or preferences of taste came under close scrutiny.
By contrast, a true history of artistic production needed to recognize both the full spec
trum of artifacts?and Warburg rarely tired of inveighing against the arbitrary selec
tion of objects according to traditional aesthetic categories?and their instrumentality

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 ABY WARBURG S HISTORY OF ART 173
within a cultural context. Without its cultural context the work of art is homeless,
stranded in an alien setting or in a neutral repository.
Warburg's brand of Kulturwissenschaft was not satisfied with an explanation of
works of art as mechanical derivations from the material basis, nor with their dis
tillation into a pure history of ideas. In both he criticized the fabrication of false conti
nuities and the arbitrary identification of causes. A proper kulturwissenschaftlicher
approach would need to take account of the fact that culture is generated from material
bases and that it produces ideas, but this production of culture is, for him, determined
neither by material processes nor by ideas. He felt that the entire economy of cul
ture came down on a psychic balance sheet with the total biological heritage, the social
liabilities and expressive expenditures of man oscillating around a precarious equilibri
um.

It dawned on Warburg that historical thinking involves a dual reflection : the p

tration of its object from the past, and the recognition of the historian's own time
contingency. He realized that, as a historian, he reproduced the object of his study
a temporal and cultural distance, a distance which translates itself into a difference
stage and process within the continuum of history. If this process is taken seriously,
any meaning that artifacts may hold must be defined from the fundamental dualit
historical knowledge?that is to say, artifacts either carry meanings that are r
structed within the context of the society which produced them, or they acquire s
cance in the thinking of the historian and in the experiences of his contempor
These two meanings are separable, though they are always connected in the hist
recognition of their difference. Warburg confessed in the last year of his life (192
"often, it appears to me, as if I derived [meaning] from the realm of images i
autobiographical reflex as a psychohistorian of the Occident."12
Today, we may have difficulties with Warburg's view of vast historical processes
a kind of psychomachia, but there is no denying that he sought to render these con
of human experience and history in highly specific and amply documented inst
Art historical analysis, as Warburg envisaged it, would restore to the frozen a
lated images of the past the dynamics of the very process that generated the
hoped to comprehend them as the witnesses to an otherwise irretrievable ph
human development. In the course of history, he argued, man developed instru
of defense against an aboriginal angst. By means of external control he made h
toward an internal emancipation from his fears and beliefs. As a student of Da
Warburg considered the acquisition of culture a very gradual process, but doubted th
the territory of freedom and mental control was a permanent gain. His Enlightenm
view of scientific advance was tempered by a profoundly pessimistic evaluation of t
dialectics of human progress.
The constitutive characteristic of culture in Warburg's view, a sense of distance
control, faintly recalls the aloof social tone of the Hamburg patriciate. For War
critical detachment was a personal necessity, not simply a legacy of his class. H
detachment from the real and threatening power of natural and political forces was
constant peril, and the rapidly growing technology of his day rekindled ancient fea
Warburg's mind. In 1895-96, during a trip across the United States, Warburg

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 174 KURT W. FORSTER

special attention to two peculiar aspects of American culture: popular magazines and
the tenaciously surviving culture of Indian tribes. In his study of Pueblo ritual in New
Mexico, he detected "the essential character of the conception of causality among the
'primitives,' . . . the 'corporalization' of the sense impression."13 The modern historian
of Warburg's persuasion, on the other hand, would comprehend historical causality in
a "de-corporalized," analytically distanced reading of symbolic representation.
The coexistence of two totally different cultures on the American continent, a
primitive and an ultramodern one, alerted Warburg to a potential loss of detachment
and distance that threatened to throw man back to a newly "primitive" state. This
"dialectic of Enlightenment"14 froze in Warburg's memory into the following con
frontation on a snapshot he took in 1896 :

I was able to catch with my camera in the streets of San Francisco the conqueror of the serpent
cult and of the fear of lightning, the heir to the aboriginal inhabitants, the gold-seeking intruder
into the land of the Indians. It is Uncle Sam with the top hat proudly striding along the road in
front of an imitation classical rotunda. High above his top hat there stretches the electric wire.
By means of Edison's copper serpent he has wrested the thunderbolt from nature. The Ameri
can has no fear of the rattlesnake. He kills and exterminates it but certainly does not worship
it. . . . Lightning imprisoned in the wire, captive electricity, has created a civilization that does
away with paganism. What does it put in its stead? The forces of nature are no longer conceived
as anthropomorphic or biomorphic shapes but rather as infinite waves obeying the pressure of
the human hand. By this means the civilization of the machine age destroys what science,
emerging from myth, had painfully conquered, the zone of contemplation that became the zone
of reasoning. The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, Franklin and the Wright Broth
ers who invented the dirigible aircraft, are the fateful destroyers of that sense of distance who
threaten to lead the globe back into chaos.15

If these words have a strangely anachronistic ring and, at first sight, the appearance of
doubtful logic, they become terribly real if we think of the technicized warfare of 1914
18, of the holocaust of the Second World War, and of the threat of total annihilation
through atomic warfare. Modern technology permits greater control and distance?in
Warburg's words a more spacious zone for thought?but it has also abolished all
escape from the threat of total destruction.
It is tragically fitting that the advance of the First World War and the collapse of
Germany cost Warburg his sanity. As the war spread, he abandoned virtually all
scholarly work in a desperate effort to cope with the course of events on the level of
information, that is, at a distance. His friend and pupil Carl Georg Heise recalled that
Warburg daily "concentrated all his energy on gathering clippings from the seven most
important newspapers, foreign ones among them as long as he managed to obtain
them, and to jot down . . . brief but telling comments" on the events.16 In its futility,
Warburg's "insane" effort reflects the utter incomprehensibility of events, and in its
desperate persistence, the necessity to cope with them in the hope of discovering their
causality. If an explanation could be found, then an element of logic would render in
terms of the mind what defied human comprehension.
In 1923, after Warburg had regained his mental balance and recovered his ability
to do research, he embarked upon another gigantic project, long prepared by many
earlier efforts and curiously reminiscent of his compulsive gathering of information

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 ABY WARBURG S HISTORY OF ART 175
during the war years. He attempted no less than an atlas of expressive human gestures
through pictorial and diagrammatic records extending to the most recent news photo
graphs and including ancient and medieval reliefs, Renaissance paintings, and even
postage stamps. Far from merely compiling similar human gestures through their his
torical transformation in pictorial records, Warburg was keenly responsive to ambi
guities and even reversals in their function and meaning. He was too much a historian
of material culture to fall into the trap of the iconographers. Even in its physical for
mat, the preparation for the Atlas of Memory abandons the customary linear discourse
of the book. Warburg arranged photographs and reproductions on large screens in
order to establish the historical recurrence of key figures and gestures in polythematic
patterns. He recovered on the large scale of history the small and seemingly ephemeral
vocabulary of human expression. In a rather surprising analogy to financial notions, he
explained his ideas on collective memory to members of the Hamburg Chamber of
Commerce:

He spoke of the gold reserves of suffering of which our civilization disposes and compared the
ancient heritage to a mint or "savings bank" whose issues were backed by the archaic passions
of which they bore the stamp.17

The sheer quantity and constant flood of images in modern times may aptly parallel
the financial consequences of inflation. If Warburg had listed photography?a form of
vastly expanded memory storage?among the instances of qualitative advance in mod
ern scholarship,18 he may have realized, a quarter of a century later when embarking
upon the Mnemosyne Atlas, that the dialectics of progress had optimized his means of
mapping the historical development of mimetic language, while the increasing uni
formity and inflation of images threatened to wipe out large expanses of collective
memory. In a very immediate way Warburg attempted a scholarly salvage operation
of European culture. Like Marcel Proust, who in his recherche du temps perdu docu
mented at a distance a world which was subjectively lost before it was actually
destroyed, Warburg recovered, in the face of imminent collective amnesia and vast
future destructions, the history of human emancipation in his own "psychohistory."
Mimetic and gestural language he considered the very medium of historical continuity.
As he put it, in 1903, in distinguishing his own approach from that of other art histo
rians, "the conditions and limitations which are rooted in the mimetic nature of
man"19 were to be the subject of his analysis. The plastic arts constitute the only con
crete record of man's mimetic activity outside his own collective memory. Warburg
sought to do no less than break the code of his cultural heritage at a time when much of
that heritage had paled and fractured, and, with the world wars, was to be physically
shattered and perverted.
With the Atlas of Memory, Warburg responded to his urgent experiences of the
fragmentation of culture and, through his intense work in Rome (1928/29), he sought
to counteract his profound sense of loss. In organizing the material for the Atlas, his
conceptual means, and to an extent his graphic arrangement of images, were similar to
those of Schwitters' collages, his scope and interpretative goal nothing short of Proust's
or Robert Musil's, but any individual's inadequacy to such a task tragically illuminates

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 176 KURT W. FORSTER

the unfulfilled social mediation of that very culture. The personal effort of the historian
recalls, once again, the dual reflection of historical thought: He and his ideas are as
contingent as the object of his study. Only to the extent that he perceives his own condi
tions will he be able to develop a critical understanding of the true conditions of past
life. With the abortive project for the Atlas of Memory, Warburg may have realized
that both the culture of his class and his own single-handed salvage operation were his
torically doomed. In the very subject of his study?the social mediation of expressive
human communication and the transformation of its language?he seized upon the
failures and achievements of collective memory in history. It would be difficult, indeed,
to define a more comprehensive theme for the study of cultural history in the twentieth
century.

References
xAby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography (With a Memoir on the History of the Library by F.
Saxl), (London, 1970), hereafter cited as Gombrich, Warburg.
2 Aby Warburg, La rinascita delpaganesimo antico . . . , ed. by Gertrud Bing (Florence, 1966), here
after quoted as Warburg, Rinasdta.
3While salient traits of Panofsky's scholarly physiognomy betray the stamp of Warburg's work, his
basic substitution of a history of themes for the earlier history of styles has yielded less and less in terms of
actual historical understanding. After a long interval, art historians are now returning to a critical histori
cal analysis of the circumstances and conditions of artists and, hence, to the historical mediation of aesthetic
values. The development of modern historiography pivots around ideas of change as a result of forces at
work within society itself. By expansion of the concept of process and production, the modern historian rec
ognizes anything a civilization has brought forth as a product rather than as a dense and self-contained
object. As he reproduces that object in his thought, he aims to recover the motives for its creation. These
arguments necessarily embed the artifact in a context and thereby restore to it a condition of historical
understanding. Being mainly concerned with ostensibly dense and self-contained objects, art historians
have been slow in abandoning the notion of artistic autonomy (cf. my "Critical History of Art, or Trans
figuration of Values?", New Literary History, III [1972], pp. 459-70).
4Gombrich, Warburg, pp. 129f.
5Gombrich, Warburg, p. 130. Gombrich's translation of Warburg's German appears not entirely
accurate in its rendition o? Denkarbeit?a significant term?as 'intellectual achievement.'
'Gombrich, Warburg, p. 222 (with a slight variation in the English translation).
7Gombrich, Warburg, p. 143.
8See Gombrich's discussion of Warburg's distinction between physical and conceptual grasp (greifen
and begreifen) in Warburg, p. 252 : "It was by refraining from grasping in order to contemplate that man
became truly human. This necessitated a mastery of the immediate impulse. An interval for reflection had
to be interposed between the stimulus and its natural response."
'Gombrich, Aby Warburg zum Ged?chtnis (Hamburger Universit?tsreden, No. 34), (1966), pp. 25f.
10Gombrich, Warburg, p. 315.
1'Warburg, Rinasdta, p. 112.
12Gombrich, Warburg zum Ged?chtnis, p. 34.
l3Gombrich, Warburg, pp. 90f.
14Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkl?rung (Amsterdam, 1947).
15Gombrich, War b?rg, p. 225.
16Carl Georg Heise in Hamburger Universit?tsreden, No. 34 (1966), p. 43.
17Gombrich, Warburg, p. 250.
18Warburg, Rinasdta, p. 112.
19Gombrich, Warburg, p. 114.

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