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Aby Warburg (1866–1929): Reiterating the Pathways of Antique Traditions

A by Warburg once called himself a “scientific private banker.” He was, in other words, an unorthodox scholar with the privilege of being independently wealthy. This created a conflict with his ambitions for an academic career. Even though Warburg was well connected and recognized for his original contributions to iconography, he remained an academic outsider throughout his life. His eccentric intellectual production challenged not only art historical scholarship in many ways: Warburg’s scholarship was interdisciplinary, anti-formalistic, cosmopolitan in outlook—and Warburg was Jewish at a time when German-speaking academia was predominantly anti-Semitic. He understood himself, as a famous quote reveals, as “Hamburger at heart, Jew by blood, Florentine in spirit.” Until the late twentieth century his work as art historian was hardly recognized. For decades Warburg’s research library was considered his main scholarly achievement. However, after a period of latency, interest in his work emerged across the disciplines. Since the 1980s, there has been something of a Warburg renaissance, sparked by art historian Ernst Gombrich’s (1909–2001) pioneering intellectual biography that finally made Warburg into a classic. Today, Warburg’s idiosyncratic oeuvre inspires scholars across the disciplines, including those in art history, curatorial studies, and history and even those in studying literature, memory, media, and culture tout court. Some of his original coinages—“afterlife,” “pathos formula,” and “image vehicle” (Bilderfahrzeug), for example—have become buzzwords in debates among humanists around the globe. Warburg’s rejection of the aestheticism of connoisseur art criticism and his understanding of iconography or the classical tradition between an original notion of cultural history and memory have become models for many humanists who follow the example of studying the afterlife of antiquity in visual and literary culture.