Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents

Author(s): Kurt W. Forster and David Britt

Source: October, Vol. 77 (Summer, 1996), pp. 5-24
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778958
Accessed: 17-04-2017 23:31 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual
and Art on Two Continents*

KURT W. FORSTER

Translated by David Britt

As a young man, intensely concerned in the first few years after his doc
with the anthropological basis of the art history of his time, Aby Warburg r
from a year's military service to the study of Renaissance civilization in
In his thesis, he had described one pronouncement of Jacob Burckh
"infallibly" correct; namely, that "Italian festive pageantry in its more
cultural forms" is "a true transition from life into art."i

His work on paintings by Botticelli and Ghirlandaio had led Warburg to an

understanding of art as deeply tied to historical reality and, indeed, inextricably
bound up with the fortunes of patrons and artists. He traced the evidence that
led him from Florentine Renaissance life to the form of its pictorial representa-
tion. This was partly a counter to his own tendency to melancholia, but at the
same time, he was undoubtedly projecting his own conflicting interests and con-
cerns out of the present and onto the seemingly lifeless terrain of the historical
past.
A fortuitous discovery in Florence gave him an opportunity to gauge the
mythographic and poetic implications of Burckhardt's view of the relationship
between life and art. What he found was a collection of Buontalenti's designs
for the highly artificial intermezzi that were contrived for the wedding of Grand
Duke Ferdinand to Christina of Lorraine in 1588. Warburg's attention was
mainly attracted by the third intermezzo, in which Apollo does battle against the
dragon Python. De Rossi describes with relish the horrors of the action:

* An earlier German version of this article was published in Aby Warburg, Akten des internationalen
Symposiums Hamburg 1990, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass
(Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1991), pp. 11-37. See also my "Aby Warburg's History of Art:
Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images," Daedalus 105, no. 1 (1976), pp. 169-76; and
"Warburgs Versunkenheit," in Aby M. Warburg: "Ekstatische Nymphe... trauernder Flussgott," Portrait eines
Gelehrten, ed. Robert Galitz and Brita Reimers (Hamburg: D611ing and Galitz, 1995), pp. 184-206. I
am currently preparing the English edition of Warburg's Collected Writings (Gesammelte Schriften
[Leipzig-Berlin: Teubner, 1932]), which will be published in the Getty Research Institute's book series
Texts & Documents. Permission to print David Britt's English translation of this essay has been granted
by The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, CA.
1. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften 1 (Leipzig-Berlin: Teubner, 1932), p. 37.

OCTOBER 77, Summer 1996, pp. 5-24. C 1996 Kurt W Forster Translation ? 1996 The Getty Research Institute
for the History of Art and the Humanities.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 6 OCTOBER

The fearfu
Spits out f
Snorts and roars...2

To the accompaniment of stage machinery and illustrative music that exp

mythic terror of the monster purely as a source of dramatic titillation, Apoll
quishes the hideous offspring of primeval Nature and thus affirms both
power and, simultaneously, the rule of the Medici. There is a smooth tr
from "Dio chiaro e sovrano" [resplendent and sovereign god] to the "for
ville" [blessed villas] and "fortunati colli" [prosperous hills], and the peop
on their way singing and joyfully returned whence they had come." To restor
mony and to guarantee future peace, a blood sacrifice is required, and s
slays the Python. Victory is total, and terror is banished.
This triumph of imperious light over the primeval forces of darkn
not without an inner contradiction of its own-even where, as in this case, the
confrontation takes place on the plane of learned allegory, and the forces in play
are tempered by poetry. To so close a reader of Warburg as Gombrich, it was clear
that he did not see the operatic presentation of ancient myths primarily as an
instance of the survival or "afterlife" of antiquity: "On the contrary, the surviving
elements of antiquity were always seen [by Warburg] as a potential threat to
human values, but also as a potential guide towards their expression."3
For family reasons, Warburg traveled to the United States in the fall of 1895.
There, "the emptiness of civilization on the East Coast repelled me so much that
I simply chanced a flight to real objects and to scientific pursuits." More than a
quarter of a century later, this was the justification he gave for his visit to
Washington to consult the collections and the researchers of the Smithsonian
Institution, and for his subsequentjourney to the Southwest, far from any railroad
and as far as possible from the white man's world. "Moreover," he added, "I had
acquired an honest disgust of aestheticizing art history."4
What Warburg observed at Walpi and Oraibi, in northeastern Arizona, and
amplified through a reading of the recent ethnographic literature,5 long remained

2. Ibid., pp. 259-300: "Lo spaventoso serpe: in questo loco vomita fiamma, e foco, e fischia e
rugge ..

3. Ernst H. Gombrich, Ab9y Warburg, An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970),
4. See especially Warburg, Schlangenritual, mit einem Nachwort von Ulrich Raulff (Berlin:
Wagenbach, 1988), p. 65 passim. Hereafter cited as Schlangenritual. This essay has been transla
English as Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, translated with an interpret
essay by Michael P Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). All page citations are from
German edition.
5. Warburg was thoroughly acquainted with the researches of Adler, Cushing, Mooney, an
fundamental for his understanding of Moki dances were the studies of Jesse Walter Fewkes
snake ritual at Oraibi ("Tusayan Flute and Snake Ceremonies," in Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bur
American Ethnology, 1894-95 [Washington, 1897], pp. 273-312, and Nineteenth Annual Report
Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-98 [Washington, 1900], pp. 957-1011, as well as "A Few Su
Ceremonials at the Tusayan Pueblos," A Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology 2 [1892], pp
The Warburg Archive in London [46.1.68], holds extensive notes on, and translations of, th

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents 7

no more than an episode-an episode that left no immediate mark on Warburg's

own academic work. He returned to Florence and there wrote his first key works on
the survival of antiquity in the Quattrocento. It was not until 1923, as an inmate
of the Binswanger psychiatric clinic at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, that he reverte
to the subject of his visit to the North American Indians by way of proof that, like
them, he too could confront reality and overcome the perils that faced him. The
impressions Warburg had gained in America had marked the beginning of his
autonomy as a scholar; the paper in which he presented them at Kreuzlingen date
from just a few years before his death.6 How does Warburg's unexpected reprise o
his early interest in Indian culture relate to the renewed scholarly vigor of his las
years? And what were the influences, from whatever sources, that colored his
reflections on the role of works of art in European society?
In this context, it is certainly not irrelevant that in Arizona Warburg had
reached the remotest point of his geographic and historical experience. Whatever
boundaries may have existed for him, it was on that journey that he overstepped
them, and the symmetry is reinforced by the fact that he took those same
observations as the theme for the overstepping of another boundary; namely, his
return from the clinic to real life.

At first sight, it is a matter of sheer chance that Warburg's last work before hi
visit to America had culminated in his suggestive comments on the Florentine
intermezzo of Apollo and Python, but this acquires a unique significance from t
fact that at the other end of his journey it was once again the serpent that h
encountered-although the nature and symbolic significance of the beast h
now swung over to its polar opposite. Warburg described the

most intense form of this magical attempt to approach Nature by way of

the animal kingdom ... among the Moki Indians in the dance with live
snakes at Oraiba and Walpi. . . . For here the dancer and the living
creature form a magical unity, and the surprising thing is that in these
dance ceremonies the Indians have succeeded in communing with the
most dangerous of all animals, the rattlesnake, in such a way as to tame
it without doing it any violence. The creature readily.., .takes part for
days on end in ceremonies that in European hands would certainly
lead to catastrophe.7

Those Indians were undoubtedly grappling with natural forces and dangers
great as any personified in the Florentine intermezzo of Apollo and Python. The

mentioned and other articles on Indian rituals. Warburg continued to follow ethnographic resear
on "Pueblo Indians" throughout his lifetime). It can serve as an index of the fault lines dividi
modern scholarship that a popular book such as Vincent Scully's Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Da
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, 1989) lacks any reference to Warburg.
6. The text of the lecture Warburg gave in the psychiatric clinic of Dr. Binswanger at Kreuzling
has been established by Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing on the basis of variant versions and notes by
author. This edited version is reprinted in Schlangenritual.
7. Ibid., p. 41.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Agostino Caracci. Stage set for third
intermezzo of La Pellegrina. 1589.

SNAKEO DAF Pi 'r t. M ~oo t. u o HAt, ARTZONA, Ai osx 12 H, L

A. F Hammer Snake Dance Ritual of

the Moquis Indians. 1884.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents 9

is, however, one crucial distinction: classical culture could envisage no resolution
of the conflict without a decisive victory for Apollo and a sacrificial death for th
beast; by contrast, at the end of the Indian ceremony the snake could return to
Nature, unharmed.
To the Moki, the snake, which dwells in the folds of the earth, shedding its
skin to live again, represents the earthly form of lightning: celestial energy that dis-
charges from the clouds and dispenses life-giving rain. Of course, Warburg was well
aware that he was not observing an intact Moki practice, but his response casts
considerable light on his own "dialectic of enlightenment." He concluded the pape
he read at Kreuzlingen with some disturbing and mysterious thoughts that must
be understood not as telltale signs of his mental illness, but as hard-won insights
into the nature of culture itself. They have lost none of their relevance today.
Warburg began his concluding remarks by saying that the serpent ritual
showed the "primal state" that modern civilization had undertaken to "refine and
abrogate and replace."8 This unpunctuated sequence of ideas, "refine and abrogate
and replace," anticipates certain phases of present-day cultural evolution. It
implies a historical process, beginning with the "refinement" of sensibility-as
embodied, say, in Art Nouveau-proceeding by way of a dialectical "abrogation,"
as in nascent modernism's annulment of its own premises, and concluding with a
state of "replacement": the media age with all its surrogates and simulations. In a
flowing unpunctuated sequence, Warburg deduced these successive stages from
his own understanding of the "primal state" of all culture as he encountered it-
in however corrupt a form-among the Moki. It is probably inherent in the natur
of this search for origins that it casts far more light upon what follows than on the
origins themselves.
In the white man's America, too, the Apollo and Python syndrome had
taken hold. Warburg remarked laconically, "The rattlesnake holds no terrors fo
the modern America. It is killed; at all events, it is not worshipped as a god. Th
answer it receives is Extermination."9 Far worse, the answer received by the bearers
of the Indian culture was also physical annihilation.
It would be an impertinence, not to say a lapse of taste, to work back from
the symptoms of Warburg's illness to the motifs of his work. But certain of thos
symptoms are directly relevant to his scholarly activities, particularly to his view of
books-of their location in relation to other books, and of their use by the
scholar. Warburg's decision to create his own academic library bore witness to
something more than a combination of youthful enthusiasm and a burning
eagerness to press forward into areas inadequately covered even by the university
libraries of his day. The frequent assertions of Warburg's colleagues that hi

8. Ibid., p. 58.
9. Ibid., p. 58f. As a curious instance of transcultural migration of a ritual practice, one sho
mention rodeo sideshows like the "Texas Snake Handlers." On these occasions, Caucasian cowboys ha
dle rattlesnakes with their bare feet. It is clear that, contrary to the Indian practice, daredevil perfor
mance and the "mastery of nature" have regained their place as the purpose of these public spectacles.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 "Medicine bowl" altar of the Hopi
Indians (after Geertz). 1984.

Ilail~~ -i--':---- .. i--ii-iiiii:ii ::---i--s-i--i-i:-::::_:?-- :--: :- :. :: iiiiiii:_jii :iii i,-iiii~-jiii-iiiii~iliiiii.ssii--i'

;:?--;s:::::::-:~:::::: _:j::_:=i::i-i I-igi-::_::::-:a_,: -- -- -- :--:i-:::-__:

...::-::- .: i- i: -::::--
i-ii?--i --' i-ii-: i- ii iil-i--.: i: I-;
: i:- : -i- ~:
-:iiii:ii-i:-i - -: ..:i -i ....'
-:: :':::-:::-
:ill:i-ii-iii ii:i-i:i:i-i?:-iii
-:- -:j -:- - -::::::::::::::I%(
ii--llii:iii7~,-iji?iii:i:i;i:i:i'i :i;ii-i:i:i--:: ' i'-- - - -- :-?-- -:::: : ::- : : : : :: ::: :-: : ... :
?- :..'_ ii:- --. -i i i . -::- -: : : :--::-:::::-i:::: :_:--:- .-.-': i /ij i:i:i~_:ig i~~iiii-i
':::I-::: -::::-:.::::: --:------- --::;- -I-l::l::::::-__-l-iI-; .. --::--: :-:ii-:-:::-'l:- - -':--::-: -- :-i:-l :-::-:-_-iii:-:i-i:i-.-ii--i::i-:-ii9;i-
-------: -:-:-:r:?::a-
i:i-i-;i-i--i:i:ri?i:i.-:-_ii-iii:ii- ---..
:.::: ::::
iiiiiiiiiiii:iiiiiiii?;ii::':-~ii?li'i? iii: ..: iii-i/i/:ijiii-ijii ....:.: ..:.' ::i ii: -ijl-- ii .. i
.~i,:i:,:.::~r;:::~:;i:i;::-:iiiii-i:i?~?-~..'-~;i-~ji-il~::::::': i~iiii~i~S~iiii _:' . i i i -.-. :
-::::_::-:-_::

.: bl'i:rg:'-i-ii':iiI:'i':'i:i'-:i:-':-i i:i9-i iili;.:':--l:9:iili-ii-i i:--i:'i:-i:

:i:i_:::i:::i:i:::::I::i::i'i'i'i?i:i:-i :i-i?i-i-i:il;i:i iiiii-~ii '--'
:iiiiiiiiiiiiiii':::''?::1Biiiii:::::i:i:::i:i:::i:i:_ ::::::?i:i-i:i:iiiiii. ':-
--,iiiSiiii~ii._;liF.

~i_. ::i-:::-:::~

: ::: i:: iiii::::::i:i:::::i:i:-::_i_

i~iiii- ii:iiiiiieii:i:i.i::_I~::i-,::::: ?i'i? ::::-iii-iii::i:-:-::::-- :- :: i- :?: -:: :-:i -: :i :::
:;-i-i-iiii':li'iiilii,-~-iiiii:iii:l?: ?:-:- :::i::::-:;-- _: -
-,:_:i-:-:::-:,:j,:,_ i--j~;-~-,:::'i:':i: ::;:-:::-:_i:-:--:-:_-:_::::::_ ' :-i-:::-_-_ -_ -i_:_-.:-:' ::
isi~P7i?~ci~'--'':"::-::::i:::: i:::~-i~i~iiiii:i;:i-i:i-:-i-i-iii:i::i? :_---i--:-::--:::: :
-::::;:::-:-:::::::?:-:::-::j:::j:r::::: :--:-::--;--:::---~--_::-?-:i--_-:::- :i:- -- :_::::::::--l-i

i::::::
::::::::::::::::
"'''''''i ::::::::-j:::::::::::::::::
::c_-i-:::-::: ..:.:::.: i:--?:::::
i:i'~'i':-:-:':-:.:''-: j:::j::::j:l::-::.
-:i :::::?-:::-iiiii-i
---'.-:-::::: i:::-:: :..::
::. .. .: ?::::?:? :-::::::?i:-::::-::::::-::_: : it -::-::i:-:-~-_i::--_-
:;.:;__:i:_:::::::
i:::::i~i:i-iiii:i:iiii:ii:ijiii-_:,:iiii:iiii/
. i_:~--eiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii: : : i
:: :::-:--:: ::_:: ::::i-::;i:
:::?::::::::-::- ::-::r::- : --:
::::w??.-, :::::_::~8~psrs::::::: - : ::::i: ..

:i:i-i:iiii;i~il,-ix:~ii a. -iiiisiiiiii i-ii riii-i~:ii -,-:ii::i-i: .-?;:il- ? ...----- -i- .-... j-iiiii-i :: - :: :-:::::: c::: -::-:-:-::__-;:i'--iiii-i-*liiiiiii:i.i
-- - --: : :: ::::i:- -i-i_:i :-i : ::: : i?--:?ii- -iii .-- :-::- -- : : : ---.:-.- -:?--:: _...: :.: :i:i-i-i-i-i:i-:i:i-i:r-i-:
--i- -i- i-ii: ~:':ii'ii-ii: :iii:;ii:i:ii ::::. i:i:i i.i-:i-i :i --
-:?:::-i- :-. ::::-_i-:-::_::i:i::-:-:~ :-i -i:: :i.-:--::--?---:-:- ' : :: :::: ---. ~ . ?::-:-:~-_-:::-:-::: :: :: ::? -
i--:i:i:i ;;i :i:i-i::ii:iiiiiiiii-iii?_:_?l-is--._- i - I i ::: :: :--:--:i--~
:::::i:i-i:-:i:i-i-i;-ii::---i"---~:ii, i~iii:iiii~:i.: i-_:i:::._:i:~ii_-:i--ii i:::--:::-:- ::::::::-l::i:::::- - i :.: :_-:::li-i:--_ii:il:::_-::i-iiii- ,,
--pii::i:i-i-ii.ii:iiii~iilijiij~ili~i ::_:_::_:::::_:::_::_::: : _:_: :_:_ :_ : :
ii:-: :.:. ... i::-ii::i:- - :i - ::i
rTT???l i ::: : - :::
:-:: : -:: :
'; :- ::-
:: -- :1
..
:
- :: .: : : :: I :: c:
: :~-JLa&~ : : -:::: ; r:: : : ::?::
: : -::::i::-:- :?:i:j:::::
- : --- ?:::i:: : i
-- .i:::
: :: i:::i-:i -:: ::::: :
: : : : :?: :.. :..::.:.: .
v; : -:::::--:ii-:- ::
:: ::: :: :.
;; :::,:-::_i:::_
::, :~:' ::;::::::::':j:'::::::::-:-'::ii'liB-
;:i::::::::~:i;ii~i.~.i:iiil:ii,;i~~:i; i:-i:i::i:~iiiiiii;iiaii::iiiii

:i?_::: ::::i-: ?:-:::i ::::::i:-;. -_-j_- :: .:.::.: :? :-:::: -:- PX :: -:::: ::: i:
"":::"":;;;

: ::::::::i:::':l-
i:: i ::I 'Q -:::::
i: :ii; ::l?iiii-iii -::--ii-i-i -i-iiiiii?:-- -:
i~CICI r? ::_:.::: :: ::
--iiiiii-i:_iiiii:iii'i -:: :
i-iiiilii~.? :: i :::::ii':l:::.:?.;_i:-: :::-::-: :
i:ii-:~; ":''''" ~~'"i-~iii:iii-siii~iii-i-~iiii -:::::--i-- :i:i :.: i.i:l ..-.:.
iiiijiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii:iji ii ilii'iiji
iiiii:iiiiiii~iiiiiiiiii:iiiiii iiiiiiiiii ii iiii
i:iiil-i-?;ii-,li:i;iii?i: iiii ii~iii-iiiiiii:i ,ii-:::i:iii:ijiiiii'i'iii-iiiiii'iii'i'ii:iiii
:_i__;_~ll_-ii?ii. -i_-: :~-:i i-i:: iii'iiiiiiiii:ii i-i-i-iiiiil:;i, :.':.' ii:-ii:_i :.i:i::; :::. -:-_- -_:i:, i:,-:?i:iii-iiiiiiii;i:ii:i:ii-:ii- i_:iiiiii 'ii; ii::'ii:iiiiiii: ::::::~:
;::;;

:::::::_:i:;i:.::ll'--'l-_ril-l~iil-:-i
ii~~iiiiiiXa;l:~::%i~I~;BiOBi-~iii~~ia, -:--:-: -_:_:_ ::::-::: .-.:; ::: :?:::i: -:----:::: : : : : _ : : : :-:: ---.-- .:.. :..- ::::-:-::_.-:i::::_:_i::?i::-:.-?-:i::;:
- ~P.

library was an achievement that could-and, by way of compensation, must-be

ranked with the best of his scholarly work, strike me as expressions of a rather
conventional view. We have it on Warburg's own testimony that, to him, the
arrangement of the books was a crucial matter to which he devoted constant
effort. From the very start, Warburg's commitment to his library was total and
passionate-this mental construct was as necessary to him as life itself.'0 His very
hair turned gray in the process. As he wrote to his brother at the age of thirty-
seven: "I have acquired 516 books in the course of the past year.... But then, in
the past year I have also acquired at least 516 gray hairs."l"
As is so often the case, the joke reveals how much he was in earnest. It is no
exaggeration to say that Warburg's treatment of his books-for every one of
which there was a gray hair and which he always regarded, collectively, as his
"investment" 12-was well-nigh fetishistic. This becomes apparent in a variety of
ways, notably in the shifting, but always purposeful, systems according to which
he arranged them, and in the principle of hidden affinities that made the
grouping of his stocks into an objective correlative for a conceptual order. This
is all the more surprising in that, apart from three exiguous volumes in paper
covers, Warburg himself never wrote a book as long as he lived.

10. See Tilmmann von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Architektur,
Einrichtung und Organisation (Hamburg: D611ing and Galitz, 1992); and Salvatore Settis, "Warburg con-
tinuatus; Descrizione di una biblioteca," Quaderni storici 58, 30, 1 (1985), pp. 5-38.
11. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, p. 138.
12. While still a student, Warburg declared in a letter to his mother of January 7, 1889: "I need to
lay the foundations for my library and photographic collection; both are expensive but represent last-
ing value" (quoted in ibid., p. 45).

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Heinrich Midler Control Room in the Power
Substation Wilhelmsruh. Berlin. 1926.

.... i: - : :::iii-: . ................ - ----------

o i : _::- ::: :--i- i~::---::__-~- :::-: i _:,i-iiii :.: iii-iiiiii::i-. :-i::

Is-

/ / /iiiiii

.................

....................... ii~iiii!!i..... .. ............ ..... yeeeiiiii~ii~iiii

The unique value that he assigned to the book among all the products of
civilization reflects the illustrative and, indeed, denotative function performed by
books and the whole bibliographical apparatus within the edifice of Warburg's
thought. This is why the arrangement of his books could never be allowed to ossify
so long as his thoughts were still on the move. Warburg associated the physical
location, the ubi, of books with the irreducible rightness of things and their
significances-as is clearly shown by the converse, the agonies he suffered when
that order was disrupted. Carl Georg Heise tells us that Warburg "fell into frightful
states of agitation if certain trifling objects on his desk were moved out of place ...
or, to put it astrologically, if their mutual aspects were changed."13 To disturb the
relative positions of objects was to call into question their very nature and
derivation: their quid and their unde.
The library, which demanded a building of its own, and the scholar's desk,
which as the mensa of mental labor signifies a ritual site of mental sacrifice, present
positive analogies with the world of primitive religious ritual. We now know for
certain-and Warburg, too, was well informed on the matter, thanks to detailed
studies by Jesse W. Fewkes and others published shortly before and after his visit to
Black Mesa-that the so-called altar superstructures of the Hopi are based on a
coherent scheme. They represent the cosmic forces that preside over Hopi life and
destiny: the heavens unfold in six segments, separated by corncobs; lightning
serpents frame the altar; and a meticulous sequence governs those objects
between which interactive forces must operate to ensure the survival of the

13. Carl Georg Heise, Pers6nliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg (New York: n.p., 1947), p. 42.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 12 OCTOBER

tribe.14 In th
ordering of r
The library
books conne
is induced to flow. The scholar's desk is the site of a ritual invocation of those

forces that impel, and also those that assail, human beings within their culture
Not only the scholar's desk, but also the painter's paper and canv
serve to invoke forces far older in origin than the practice of Western art. In
a few years before Warburg's visit to the Indians of the Southwest,
Kandinsky undertook an ethnographic expedition to Siberia and publi
findings.15 Many years later, in his book of reminiscences, Riickblicke, Ka
had some extremely revealing things to say about the venture.16
Unlike Warburg's visit to Indian territory, which was made for rea
his own and without a scholarly mission of any kind, Kandinsky's expeditio
Government of Vologda had a clearly defined, professional purpose,
Kandinsky himself, then a student of law, fulfilled by publishing his obse
in meticulous detail. For Warburg and Kandinsky alike, these studies were
one-time reconnaissances; for both, the impact of the ethnographic exp
was a paradoxical one, retaining a profound personal significance w
demanding any repetition or academic elaboration. The unexpected i
that both derived from ethnography, and the lifelong importance
insights in their respective artistic and historical work, owe their unique
conjunction of great personal significance with complete academic and s
inconsequence.17
In later life, Kandinsky (again like Warburg) took his own experi
the last vestiges of archaic life as a theme for autobiographical reflection
happened in 1913, at the moment when his own increasingly abstract com
had carried him across the threshold of a new era, and again in 1936, when
isolation of his Parisian exile, he reached out for historical certainty. Kan
ethnographic study of shamanistic invocation had afforded him an insig
the relationship between the wild gallop of the imagination and the contr
the rider can exert through reason, but it had also initiated him into the invoc
of spirits and forms, and this he was able to transpose out of ritual life i

14. See Armin W. Geertz, Hopi Indian Altar Iconography (Leiden: Brill, 1987), esp. p. 27f: "T
a model, in reduced form, of the cosmos."
15. For the full text of Kandinsky's "Beitrag zur Ethnographie der Sysol- und Vecegda-Sy
1889, see Kandinsky, Die gesammelten Schriften 1, ed. Hans K. Roethel and Jelena Hahl-Ko
Benteli, 1980), p. 68ff; and also Peg Weiss, "Kandinsky and 'Old Russia'; An Ethn
Exploration," in The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, ed. Gabriel Weisberg and L
Dixon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), pp. 187-222.
16. Kandinsky, Riickblicke (Berlin: Sturm-Verlag, 1913).
17. See Claudia Naber, "Pompeji in Neu-Mexico: Aby Warburgs amerikanische Reise," Freib
(1988), pp. 88-97, esp. n. 28.
18. Kandinsky compared the gestation of a work of art with cosmic events: "Technically,
evolves as the cosmos did-as a result of catastrophe" (Riickblicke, p. vii).

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Gerhard Langmaack (modeled on a
design by Warburg). Reading room in
the Warburg Institute. Hamburg. 1926.

-i-j~l:-~ b~iiii.:i: -iiiii-iii:::i__i; .... .... ..;-:

i-iiii~i-i~i~-~-i-i~i-i~i--i-i-:i -_-ill:-!s:-il:-I::?i-ii-'i--ii ::--.-::-:::: ...:.-a ~ -iii-. ... .... ... . .......... . . ..... . ....iiiiiiiiii"iii

. ..... .... .... :::---:: ---::::'iiii-cii:ci ";ji~~iii i-i:ii-j~ _ ij-i ~ :::::::::::::i:: :::::::::::::-:::::::: :::::::,

~?n:iiiniii-iiiii :l?'---: iiiiiiiiiiiii- ii:i~~:: -- :--:::m: AM

:------:-~:---i:iiiiii ::: :::: :::-''N::-
IV: :-:::-:~-::----::-:--?-:-_-

-_::~:.::-:-_: -i--_j':_iiii niiiil 14iii

i~r~iii~i~9,:s~j l~i-ii-~ ~ ~iiiii-i~ ii--:_:,:::::: :_i-::-::::::-:-::~i~~ii-ARi

Kiwa at Pueblo Bonito (after F Waters).

New Mexico.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 14 OCTOBER

work of the
his own paint
distant thund
itself, a concl
Kandinsky's im
youth in the c
polychromatic
far deeper. In
responded, w
strangeness of
the laws of na
and deeper int
As a student
"the soul of t
considered the
a thunderous collision between different worlds, destined to create, in and from
the conflict between them, the new world that is the work."22 A condensed, formu-
laic, clenched definition to which Warburg might have subscribed, word for word.
Kandinsky was oppressed by a question that also haunted Warburg: "are intuition
and logic equal partners in the production of the work? This important, apparently
simple, but truly complicated question is now taking on a crucial significance."23
Warburg reduced his own observations of the serpent and rain-making rituals
to a pithy formula: "Here magic and technology collide."24 In this context, he
defined the purpose as "the provision of food for society." Transposed to his own
library, this would become "feeding the individual mind," with rituals of invocation
that sought to unite the rapidly proliferating resources of technology-photography,
slide projection, international library services, telephone, pneumatic dispatch-
with the magic of inductive thought. In 1928, the faithful Fritz Saxl put it thus:

Ever since his return from a visit to the U.S.A. in 1896, which played a
decisive role in his life, he had been conscious of a profound debt to
the American ethnologists .... His experiences there placed him in a
position to recognize and to comprehend the existence of this dual
nature of truth, and to understand that to people in the age of the
Renaissance, no less than to the Indians, there are two largely indepen-
dent realms of fact: the world of rational experience and that of magic.25

19. Kandinsky, "Toile vide ...", Cahiers d'Art 10, 5-6 (1935), p. 117.
20. Kandinsky, Riickblicke, p. v.
21. Ibid., p. vii.
22. Kandinsky, "Toile vide ..", p. 117.
23. Warburg, Schlangenritual, p. 25.
24. Ibid.
25. Fritz Saxl, "Warburgs Besuch in Neu-Mexico," reprinted in Aby M. Warb
und Wiirdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1979), p. 317.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Technical equipment in Warburg's Library. 1926.
(Photo courtesy Dieter Langmaack.)

We should take care, however, not ::::::::::- ?:'-?-:-----:-::-:

i:::::i:i: : ':: : i:? : ::?:i, i: ~I-? i;: -: -:s:;:?j?~~

to see this kind of thinking exclu-

~-~li:::;':'::: ::-:::::I:'":::~~

sively in Enlightenment terms, as a

::: :::: :i::i:i:i-ji
: :: ::::::: ::: ':i:-:i:i:i:
:::::;::::-

~::~:?:D-?:i::-: j:-::::-:i::: _-_:::--::-::~:::-- ::~-

progression away from magic and

:-:?:::;::
:::::::::: :i: ::: : :: ?: -:.:-::B::`::
iai:ii-iii- i:i: ii:-~iii:i i::: -::.-: iiiiii:iiii.%:iii-iiiiiiiiii':~ii

R-:'i-~_-:~:-:---:::-:::-:: : -: i:::::_ :---:::?i?--:- i~:~B:bZ~~

toward science, away from the ::..:.

.-::-:.- :
:ic:-:::::

:i:::::; ::;:::?:-: ::?:

daimon and toward the logos-a

::iii:iiiiii:i::i i::
::::::::::i:::::

progression of the kind frequently !-?::-::::: ::

:i:il-::::-::l::::::::
?:::-:_::?:::::- :
:.:.::::I:1

outlined, and persistently argued,

-i-i-:,iii

i:::::.:. ::: :
::....

by Gombrich. In his own person, :: :

:ii::j:::::i:::: :::;:: : : : :::-::;-:: --

Warburg suffered the catastrophic :::::::: :::::::: ::::::.,-i ?' :---::: ::~:: ::
i-i:i:i -:-:::::::-:ii
:? ::::::-:

contradictions that spring from

::: :-ii---i:i-ii.:::::::
i:i- i:ii'-:i ii-ai~iiiiiii'~
?ii::??i':i:il~i:-iii ii::;:l-:,:-:i ?'ii-l':';i:'-'i?::':

the mechanical and ideological

::::i:-i:.::::

subjugation of primitive forces. His

:iliiiliiiiiliii

ideas may seem to tie themselves in

philosophical knots, but this in
itself bears witness to a painful
truth: the exigencies of culture
:2: ::-:::::::::::

.i:i:i iii iiiiiiii' -:l:i ?-i

::::::,:::j::: ::.: -:

are inherently irresolvable. This

iiiii--:iii-

: ..:.....

:`:::-::-::_::::

represents the precise point of

contact with the thinking of Freud,
iii~:iiiiii

to whom Warburg was anything

but close, but whose approach to a
critique of civilization he never-
theless recapitulated.26
Such contradictions underlie most of the work that Warburg did in the fruitful
years before World War I. This was the time when he looked at the principal
works of late fifteenth-century Florentine art-and Ghirlandaio's Sassetti and
Tornabuoni fresco cycles in particular-with eyes whose acuity not only ensures an
uncommon freshness of approach but affords the reader a mental image of what
Warburg saw that is animated throughout by a vivid abundance of learning.
Warburg's writing is poles apart from the would-be poetic, descriptive prose
endemic to the art-historical literature of the first half of the century. How tersely
he makes his points, and how shrewdly he balances his interpretative equations!
In one passage from "Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie" (1902), he
describes the celebrated fresco by Ghirlandaio in Santa Trinita, in which, as a
parallel manifestation to the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule, Lorenzo il
Magnifico appears together with his family:

It is time for a scene-change. The contemporary backdrop, painted with

the Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia de' Lanzi, has already been lowered
into place; the Sassetti stock company is waiting in the wings for its cue.

26. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag,
1930), p. 136.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 16 OCTOBER

Enter, thro
learned in al
Tuscany-tog
ladeer, all re
they reach t
Francis, the
secular diversions.27

In such passages Warburg interweaves the threads of an essentially prephoto-

graphic, verbal "redrawing" of the paintings with the stout filaments of his own
complex preoccupations. The resulting interpretation constantly fastens on points
of conflict, though he recognizes in the paintings themselves an "abundance of
vigorous life."28 He marries the contrasting strands by transforming the seemingly
self-sufficient, purely aesthetic character of the work of art that is enveloped in the
toils of his engrossing description into "something quite different." This something,
which transcends the mere presence of the work, is no web of the artist's spinning,
nor, indeed, has it anything to do with the viewer's perspicacity in spotting flaws
in the weave. It derives, solely, from the effort of understanding that Warburg
regards as essential to Kulturwissenschaft. In fact, this "something quite different" is
none other than the awareness that works of art are documents.29
Warburg was undoubtedly well aware of the ambiguity of the word "document"
in this context; by definition, the work of art itself is the Urkunde, the "document"
whose historical coordinates the researcher undertakes to define. But the work's

depth of meaning fluctuates according to the preoccupations of those who s

can never be plumbed, once and for all. As a document, the work of art is so ove
termined as to be incapable of any final, unequivocal definition. This in itself m
that, as cultural products, works of art must, in the words of Burckhardt, "hav
incessantly modifying and disrupting effect on the established institutions of life
However, there is more to the meaning of a work of art than the sum total
what artists, patrons, advisers, and members of the public have in mind. A w
art can unexpectedly bring to light an origin, something long forgotten. W
scrutinized paintings for those figures which by their presence and their a
create a discontinuity, those whose physiognomy and gesture are among t
"fragments" from which, all his life, he hoped to distill a historical "scie
expression." Ultimately, he was working toward a psychohistorical interpre
of human destiny based upon the corpus of documentary evidence supplie
art-or, to use his own term, from the Urkunden.
Warburg had a sixth sense for telltale faults and discontinuities in wor
art. Far from identifying artistic quality with aesthetic homogeneity, Warburg

27. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften 1, p. 115.

28. Gombrich, Warburg, p. 119.
29. Warburg's term is Urkunde, pointing up, as it does, both the archival and the archaic as
works of art.
30. Jacob Burckhardt, Uber das Studium der Geschichte, ed. Peter Ganz (Munich: Beck, 1982), p. 276.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents 17

aware from his student days that the irruption of motion into a rigid pictorial
organization, or the physiognomic and gestural accents within the picture, might
disclose the presence of something accessible only to a "historical psychology of
human expression."31 He therefore examined with particular insistence the
multifarious and multivalent relationship between pagan antiquity on one hand
and Christian worship and imagery on the other: the way in which pictorial
formulas conveying uninhibited motion introduced an invigorating-but also an
equivocal-element that was equally likely to reinforce the image or to shatter it.
Gombrich-though he ultimately parted company with Warburg-expressed this
point with great precision when he concluded from Warburg's thought "that the
primeval reaction of man to the universal hardships of his existence underlies all
his attempts at mental orientation."32
Warburg's study of votive and donor portraits in Florence was a corrective
to the then-prevalent, sanitized image of the Renaissance as an age of refinement
in art. He recalled how the church of Santissima Annunziata had once looked

like a gigantic storeroom, crammed with thousands of wax votiv

Warburg had a flair for all those areas-and there were many of th
Renaissance culture-that can be summarized under the heading "e
art." It was an age when wide sections of the population came into con
nonreligious art in the guise of printed ephemera, theater, and pageantr
the symptomatic value of such art. Theater and ephemera provided the
for things that the polished and discriminating practice of high a
excluded or passed over in silence.
However subsequent researchers may choose to evaluate, amplify, or
Warburg's assessment of such phenomena, one thing remains clear:
achievement to have ventured into such areas at all. He did so neither in
condescension nor with the whimsical self-limitation of the specialist in
soldiers. With care and with great sensitivity, he probed into just those
regions where an earlier cultural practice had remained alive, and this
meant that the models to which he owed most were those of anthropo
ethnography rather than those of art history.
When Warburg describes the fetishism of Florentine votive waxwork
positively totemistic way in which they were once installed en masse in
most popular churches in Florence, two converse historical forces are in
On one hand, Warburg is evoking a radically different spatial configura
existed within the church at the time of the Renaissance-an experienc
be reconstructed only through archival research. On the other hand, c
varieties of modern ephemeral art, instead of being dismissed as merel
are permitted to emerge as the last residues of a "fetishistic iconic mag
a profound religious dimension. A practice that we tend to dismiss as "b

31. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften 2, p. 478.

32. Gombrich, Warburg, p. 223.
33. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften 1, p. 118.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 18 OCTOBER

and as both
repressed asp
cultural prac
home territo
Warburg wa
seemingly fa
to consciousn
reason transi
"It is only th
in church in
more favorab
sacred scenes
had failed to furnish us with the archival documentation that alone can make a

historical epoch speak. The "Portraiture" study contains a copious docum

appendix in which he quotes from a novella by Francesco Sassetti the pas
which Sassetti criticizes the votive figures as "una idolatria" and adds that
write these lines once saw a man who had lost a she-cat and who vowed, if he
should ever find her again, to dedicate her image in wax to Our Lady of Or San
Michele; and so he did."
That piece of kitsch, the votive image of a lost and found cat, represents a
popular pagan religious practice untouched by Christian doctrine and yet
domesticated by the clergy. Warburg was always on the trail of pagan survivals
of this kind. By uncovering-in place of some clear-cut conception of the pens~e
sauvage-the tangled life-forms of a pratique sauvage, such as he himself had
pursued all the way across America, he was able to offer a new basis for the
understanding of the artist's work.
He thus steered clear of the suspiciously wide gap that yawns, in many art-
historical studies of the Renaissance, between the practice of art-with all its
contingencies, superstitions, and conventions-and the impeccably high-minded
information that is to be found in the philosophical and literary sources. It might be
worth reflecting, too, whether the unbalanced emphasis on the universality of Neo-
Platonic art theory, which dominated Renaissance studies for decades, might not
have owed its persistence precisely to its ability to carry the mind effortlessly over
those yawning gaps without drawing attention to the incongruities of the material.
It is one of those curious contradictions and reversals that happen in the
scholarly world-the destiny of methodologies, as it were-that, in the minds of
American art historians in particular, Warburg's name and that of his epony-
mous institute have come to be associated with iconographic nitpicking and
anemic typological speculations. Warburg's own infirmity-both metaphorical
and psychological-was if anything the very reverse of this; it arose from the fact
that every issue of consequence that can be isolated within the study of artistic

34. Ibid., p. 100.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents 19

practice remains impossible to resolve in terms of its anthropological context.

Indeed, the more narrowly the issue at hand is defined and circumscribed in
terms of its contingent historical reality, the more urgently it seems to cry out
for an explanation.
The conclusion Warburg drew from this has continued to influence the
evaluation and understanding of his entire project, and particularly his last
major work, to which he devoted the time that remained to him after his return
from Kreuzlingen-the Mnemosyne Atlas.35
In this undertaking everything is idiosyncratic, starting with the method
itself. Warburg was intent on tracing certain perennial motifs of motion, based on
gestural and physiognomic formulas, that constantly renew their freshness of
expression not least through the replication of those formulas. It was evident that
in this survey of figurative formulas Warburg was allowing himself far greater
latitude in the choice of material than had ever been customary in art history.
Here, cheek by jowl, were late antique reliefs, secular manuscripts, monumental
frescoes, postage stamps, broadsides, pictures cut out of magazines, and old master
drawings. It becomes apparent, if not at first glance, that this unorthodox selection
is the product of an extraordinary command of a vast field. Criticism is disarmed,
and yet the principle of graphic arrangement on panels more closely resembles
the techniques of the illustrated magazines of the interwar period than the layout
of art-historical books. It certainly had incidental parallels in the experimental
publications of the 1920s, such as those of the Dadaists and Ozenfant.36
The Atlas panels share their didactic and demonstrative purposes with
countless propagandist publications, exhibitions, and posters. They have parallels
in the Bauhaus, in Le Corbusier's Esprit Nouveau, and in the polemical assemblages
of Hannes Meyer. In terms of technique, Warburg's panels belong with the montage
procedures of Schwitters and Lissitzky. Needless to say, this analogy implies no
claim to artistic merit on the part of Warburg's panels, nor does it invalidate that of
Schwitters's or Lissitzky's collages; it simply serves to redefine graphic montage as
the construction of meanings rather than the arrangement of forms.
Certain features of the work are immediately apparent, notably the frag-
mentary nature of the chosen examples and the fact that their groupings invite

35. The weighty torso of the Mnemosyne Atlas which Warburg assembled and left unedited is now
being restudied and prepared for publication under the directorship of Martin Warnke, Horst
Bredekamp, Michael Diers, Kurt W. Forster, and others. See also Peter van Huistede, "Der Mnemosyne-
Atlas: Ein Laboratorium der Bildgeschichte," in Aby M. Warburg: "Ekstatische Nymphe ... trauernder
Flussgott," pp. 130-71, and my article "Warburgs Versunkenheit" in the same volume, pp. 184-206.
36. By confronting a panel from Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas with a trompe l'oeil painting by the
scarcely known Roman painter Francesco Alegiani (active in the later years of the nineteenth century),
I am suggesting a profound affinity between the frequent appearance of "found images"-in the form
of ephemera, clippings, reproductions, and the like-in later nineteenth-century painting and the
mutation in the status of images in general. For fascinating examples of the trompe l'oeil genre and its
significance in America, see my "Abbild und Gegenstand: Amerikanische Stilleben des spiten 19.
Jahrhunderts," in Bilder aus der neuen Welt (exhibition catalogue), ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Munich:
Prestel, 1988), pp. 100-107.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Francesco Alegiani. Trompe l'oeil still
life. Circa late nineteenth century.

To
1' 0 Se.
w5
? WE-

ji

Sm loss

N Own
?x
OW

:.R

. .. .. ......
&

. . .........

My

77. NQ
..........

........... MAO
'PINE
AOK? "M

.. ........

too

DAN!
.. .... . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "S 20

....... ... .........

...... . . .....
.... ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. ..... ..... . '..

tow.. .. ......

. . . . . . . . .....

HMO~ la.
tam am ?:1
...........

ad Hamm

........... ............. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... Yfi

......

Ems
Y,
.. ................. ..

jumm"Mm.
. . . . .......... ..

g.,

......... ......

TE

....................

Am-

10

mZm

ilk .....

V., ZU

Ems W.,?
Am"w- so Bill OU.-

INTO
w.ggg 2
'Or . . . . . .

Ems,
M's
M-1 1*10VF?

. ..........

..........

AM

o'

'U, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ego'

0_0

F MUNOZ

ell
gan, -Kx

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents 21

:~ifi

:?:-':':'::':::-:::?:::;::::::::::?:-iii
:::::: ::::~:: ,~,::ii:iji-i:i;iiiiii?i:':"::'':''''' :':':::':::-::::--
::'::::' ::?::: :::?:?:?:::?:
: ::i ::_:_:i:::i:ir::i :.:.:: :::l--:-ii:i:::i::_l
:::':::??-:-:i':i:::::?:::::::::?::
-::i::i:i::i:i,:_;:i:i:i::?::: ::::::
-:::::::i:::-

~ii:i:ii~iiiii:iii
:- :iii :iiii

i:i:i:::
?::::::::::::: :: ::
::- :. ::: _:iiiiiiii
~.?:?;r
:::-:::'

: : :

ii:_i:?i': liiiiiii-; .:ii::ii-i::iii'iliI:i:iil-ii:i-ii:iili i-i-:.::':c':i:i?:::':: ::': ii:::: i::::-i:i?--::: -?::l':i:: i:i

:::::::::::::::-i:i.-:i:i:::-:i:_:_:i:i: :::::.:::::::: :
:::::::::: ?:i:.;.:i::i:l::- ?:__::::::::i:::i:i_?::_ :i:i::i:i8

_ii-i--:ii:i:

Warburg. Mnemosyne Atlas. 1929.

alternative interpretations. The extreme fragmentation of the images instantly

calls into question the meaning of the association between them. Here, as Hegel
put it in the Enzyklopddie, the imagination "does not merely recall to light the
images contained within it but relates them to each other and in this way elevates
them into general notions. On this level, the imagination thus appears as the
activity that associates images."37
This associative activity controls the images, but only until they start to resist
association and demand to be organized under such varied criteria as age, type,
size, or origin. Then the controlling force must be ready to make out a case for
itself or else remain content with decorative or formal arrangement. The purpose
of the control becomes manifest on a higher plane of imagination, "on which the
intelligence identifies its own general notions with the specific identity of the
image and thus endows [these notions] with an imagic existence."38
The general notions to which Hegel refers are those that Warburg has
extracted as fragments from the infinite image-continuum and has assembled in
"montages" designed to make visible the accumulated strata of collective traditions
of imagery. This is the third plane, which Hegel called that of "symbolizing and
sign-giving fantasy." As such, it extends both to analytical and to formative activity;

37. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss 10,
ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 264.
38. Ibid.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
22 OCTOBER

indeed, it ex
with new, "s
Warburg's w
pictorial mon
or as display
1928 and th
more examp
with the gra
fragmentat
involvement
1976;40 and
essay "The Hu
Clearly, in
conviction-
should be st
Other aspect
which art hi
images-in th
Abbilder, or
representin
scope of his
overtakes th
Here, too, W
insights. In
History" (18

And now le
past, whic
possessions.
collecting a
study.... Th
inheritance
something
as somethin
etc., impos
awareness o

39. Merz 21, er

Schwitters (Han
40. "Aby War
Daedalus 105, n
41. Die Mensche
Warnke (Frank
42. Warburg, G
43. Burckhardt

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents 23

In Warburg's case, this "awareness of a past" extended far beyond the customary
conception of pictorial traditions, sources, models, and imitations, and reached
down, with conscious reference to Hegel, into the deep groundwater of culturally
mediated visual conceptions or "notions." From his categorization of memory and
its operations, Hegel himself concluded that "no one knows what an infinity of
images from the past sleeps within; from time to time they may chance to awake,
but it is impossible, as we say, to bring them to mind. These images are thus ours
only in a formal sense."44
This insight was Warburg's point of departure when he took the form of
expression-which continues to exist in the absence of any knowledge of its
content and subject matter-as the object of his wide-ranging investigations.
This was a perspective that largely leveled the conventional distinctions and
entrenched value judgments that encumbered the art history of his time. They
were replaced by what Walter Benjamin, referring expressly to Warburg's achieve-
ment, called "the hallmark of the new investigative spirit," namely, "feeling at
home in borderline areas."45

The Mnemosyne Atlas was a bonus, as it were, on the investment repres

by the Warburg library. It was intended-as Warburg told the curatorial boa
this library two months before his death-to be a contribution to the proc
"exploring the function of personal and social memory."46 What Warburg m
by memory was something highly dynamic and not at all the passive garner
layers of generalized content. In 1924, in a letter to Wilamowitz-Moellendor
reverted to the idea of the "symbol in the rhythm of cultural history":

We are entitled, are we not, to treat what we call symbol as a function

of the social memory; for it gives rise to the organ of transmission-
whether inhibitory or impulsive-that operates in between the kinesis
of instinctual passion and the order of cosmological theory to create
both consciousness and the will to attain the sound mental balance
that is the noblest of all civilizing forces.47

Note the use of the idea of "transmission"-- Umschaltung, switching, commutab

and consider the function that the library has for the researcher, who conv
static electricity into a current and makes it arc, learning to harness the lig
the ambivalent serpent power, in analogy to the cultural process that he is s
to understand.

In the plans for his institute that absorbed all Warburg's energies, such i
found expression in spatial terms. Saxl tells us that "Kepler, who replaced the

44. Hegel, Enzyklopadie 10, p. 264.

45. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 3, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhdiuser (Fran
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 374.
46. Reprinted in Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewahlte Schriften und Wiirdigungen, p. 308.
47. See Martin Jesinghausen-Lauster, Die Suche nach der symbolischen Form: Der Kreis um die kult
senschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1985), p. 313.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 24 OCTOBER

with the ge
"a figure sym
This ment
room of the
the Wilhelm
assumed a p
gauges were
memory.
This contrast between symbolic, speculative magic and technological,
instrumental mensuration brings to mind once more the titanic conflict that
ultimately took its revenge, in a sense, on Warburg, who had always striven to
bring it under control. He knew well that the "lightning caught in the wire,"
"captive electricity," would call forth a completely new culture that would succeed
in its ambition of subduing the "forces of Nature," although perhaps at fatal cost to
itself. As Warburg concluded, "these forces of Nature [are] no longer encountered
in anthropomorphic or biomorphic form but as infinite waves, ruled by man at a
touch of his hand."49

48. Reprinted in Aby M. Warburg, ed. D. Wuttke, p. 314f.

49. Warburg, Schlangenritual, p. 59.

This content downloaded from 93.137.12.57 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:31:11 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms