Aby Warburg: His Study ofRitual and Art on Two Continents

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Kurt W. Forster; David Britt

October, Vol. 77 (Summer, 1996), 5-24.

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

KURT W. FüRSTER

Translated by David Britt

As a young man, intensely concerned in the first few years after his doctorate
with the anthropological basis of the art history of his time, Aby Warburg returned
from a year's military service to the study of Renaissance civilization in Florence.
In his thesis, he had described one pronouncement of Jacob Burckhardt's as
"infallibly" correct; namely, that "Italian festive pageantry in its more elevated
cultural forms" is "a true transition from life into art."l
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 Nussgott, "Portrait eines
Gelehrten, ed. Roben Galitz and Brita Reimers (Hamburg: Dölling 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 I (Leipzig-Berlin: Teubner, 1932), p. 37.

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

The fearful serpent that here

Spits out flame and fire,
Snorts and roars ...2
To the accompaniment of stage machinery and illustrative music that exploit the
mythic terror of the monster purely as a source of dramatic titillation, Apollo van-
quishes the hideous offspring of primeval Nature and thus affirms both his own
power and, simultaneously, the rule of the Medici. There is a smooth transition
from "Dio chiaro e sovrano" [resplendent and sovereign god] to the "fortunate
ville" [blessed villas] and "fortunati colli" [prosperous hills], and the people "went
on their way singing and joyfully returned whence they had come." To restore har-
mony and to guarantee future peace, a blood sacrifice is required, and so Apollo
slays the Python. Victory is total, and terror is banished.
This triumph of imperious light over the primeval forces of darkness is
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 ofWarburg 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."'~
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. lbid., pp. 259-300: "Lo spaventoso serpe: in questo loco vomita fiamma, e foco, e fischia e
rugge ..."
3. Ernst H. Gomhrich, Aby Wmburg, An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), p. 79.
4. See especially Warburg, Schlrmgenritual, mit einem Nachwort von Ulrich Raulff (Berlin: Klaus
Wagenbach, 19R8), p. 65 passim. Hereafter cited as SchlangenrituaL This essay has been translated in
English as Images from the &gion of the Pueblo Indians of North America, translated with an interpretative
essay by Michael P. Steinberg (lthaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Allpage citations are from the
German edition.
5. Warburg was thoroughly acquainted with the researches of Adler, Cushing, Mooney, and Boas;
fundamental for his understanding of Moki dances were the studies of ]esse Walter Fewkes on the
snake ritual at Oraibi ("Tusayan Flute and Snake Ceremonies," in Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology, 1894-95 [Washington, 1897). pp. 273-312, and Nineteenth Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-98 [Washington, 1900). pp. 957-1011, as weil as "A Few Summer
Ceremonials at the Tusayan Pueblos," A]ournal of Ameriran Ethnology and Archaeology 2 [1892]. pp. 38-43.
The Warburg Archive in London [ 46.1.68). holds extensive notes on, and translations of, this last
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 reverted
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 dates
from just a few years before his death.6 How does Warburg's unexpected reprise of
his early interest in Indian culture relate to the renewed scholarly vigor of his last
years? And what were the influences, from whatever sources, that colared his
reflections on the roJe 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 reallife.
At first sight, it is a matter of sheer chance that Warburg's last work before his
visit to America had culminated in his suggestive comments on the Florentine
intermezzo of Apollo and Python, but this acquires a unique significance from the
fact that at the other end of his journey it was once again the serpent that he
encountered-although the nature and symbolic significance of the beast had
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 Maki 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 dangeraus of all animals, the rattlesnake, in such a way as to tarne
it without doing it any violence. The creature readily ... takes part for
days on end in ceremonies that in European hands would certainly
Iead to catastrophe.7
Those Indians were undoubtedly grappling with natural forces and dangers as
great as any personified in the Florentine intermezzo of Apollo and Python. There

mentioned and other articles on Indian rituals. Warburg continued to follow ethnographic research
on "Pueblo Indians" throughout his lifetime). It can serve as an index of the fault lines dividing
modern scholarship that a popular book such as Vincent Scully's Pueblo: Mountain, Vi/lage, Dance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, 1989) Iacks any reference to Warburg.
6. The text of the lecture Warburg gave in the psychiatric clinic of Dr. Binswanger at Kreuzlingen
has been established by Fritz Sax! and Gertrud Bing on the basis of variant versions and notes by the
author. This edited version is reprinted in SchlangenrituaL
7. Ibid., p. 41.
Agastino Caracci. Stageset for third
intermezzo of La Pellegrina. 1589.

A . F. Hammer. Snake Dance Ritual of

the Moquis Indians. 1884.
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art an 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 the
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 weil
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 paper
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 "prima! state" that modern civilization had undertaken to "refine and
abrogate and replace."B 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 "prima! state" of all culture as he encountered it-
in however corrupt a form-among the Moki. It is probably inherent in the nature
of this search fm 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 for
the modern America. It is killed; at all events, it is not worshipped as a god. The
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 Japse of taste, to work back from
the symptoms of Warburg's illness to the motifs of his work. But certain of those
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 his

8. Ibid., p. 58.
9. Ibid., p. 58f. As a curious instance of transcultural migration of a ritual practice, one should
mention rodeo sideshows like the "Texas Snake Handlers." On these occasions, Caucasian cowboys han-
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.
"Medicine bowl" altar of the H opi
Indians ( after Geertz.). 1984.

-t-••"" . ....~·

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 Iife itself.JO 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." II
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
h e 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 hirnself never wrote a book as long as he lived.

10. See Tilmmann von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Architektur,
Einrichtung und Organisation (Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz, 1992); and Salvatore Settis, "Warburg con-
tinuatus; Descrizione di una biblioteca," Quaderni storici 58, 30, 1 (1985), pp. 5- 38.
11 . Gombrich, Alry Warburg, p . 138.
12. While still a student, Warburg declared in a Ietter to his mother ofJanuary 7, 1889: "I need to
lay the foundations for my library and photographic collection; both are expensive but represent last-
ingvalue" (quoted in ibid., p . 45).
Heinrich Müller. Control Room in the Power
Substation Wilhelmsruh. Berlin. 1926.

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 ossif)'
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 orderwas 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."l3 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 rru:nsa of mentallabor 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 ] esse 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; a nd a m eticulous sequence governs those objects
between which interactive forces must operate to e nsure the survival of the

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

tribe.I4 In the same way, Warburg sought to create, by way of experiment, a precise
ordering of reified ideas that would set up a flow of thinking, like a galvanic current.
The library thus becomes a battery, an accumulation of thinking in which, through
books connected "in parallel" by Warburg's ordering principle, the current of ideas
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 canvas, can
serve to invoke forces far older in origin than the practice ofWestern art. In 1886,
a few years before Warburg's visit to the Indians of the Southwest, Wassily
Kandinsky undertook an ethnographic expedition to Siberia and published his
findings.I5 Many years later, in his book of reminiscences, Rückblicke, Kandinsky
had some extremely revealing things to say about the venture.J6
Unlike Warburg's visit to Indian territory, which was made for reasons of
his own and without a scholarly mission of any kind, Kandinsky's expedition to the
Government of Vologda had a clearly defined, professional purpose, which
Kandinsky himself, then a student of law, fulfilled by publishing his observations
in meticulous detail. For Warburg and Kandinsky alike, these studies were isolated,
one-time reconnaissances; for both, the impact of the ethnographic experience
was a paradoxical one, retaining a profound personal significance without
demanding any repetition or academic elaboration. The unexpected insights
that both derived from ethnography, and the lifelong importance of those
insights in their respective artistic and historical work, owe their uniqueness to a
conjunction of great personal significance with complete academic and scientific
in consequence .17
In later life, Kandinsky (again like Warburg) took his own experience of
the last vestiges of archaic life as a theme for autobiographical reflection .18 This
happened in 1913, at the moment when his own increasingly abstract compositions
had carried him across the threshold of a new era, and again in 1936, when, in the
isolation of his Parisian exile, he reached out for historical certainty. Kandinsky's
ethnographic study of shamanistic invocation had afforded him an insight into
the relationship between the wild gallop of the imagination and the control that
the rider can exert through reason, but it had also initiated him into the invocation
of spirits and forms, and this he was able to transpose out of ritual life into the
14. See Armin W. Geertz, Hopi Indian Altar Iconography (Leiden: Brill, 1987), esp. p. 27f: "The altar is
a model, in reduced form, of the cosmos."
15. For the full text of Kandinsky's "Beitrag zur Ethnographie der Sysol- und Vecegda-Syrjänen" of
1889, see Kandinsky, Die gesammelten Schriften 1, ed. Hans K. Roethel and Jelena Hahl-Koch (Berne:
Benteli, 1980), p. 68ff; and also Peg Weiss, "Kandinsky and 'Old Russia'; An Ethnographie
Exploration," in The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, ed. Gabriel Weisberg and Laurinda S.
Dixon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), pp. 187-222.
16. Kandinsky, Rückblicke (Berlin: Sturm-Verlag, 1913).
17. See Claudia Naber, "Pompeji in Neu-Mexico: Aby Warburgs amerikanische Reise," Freibeuter 38
(1988), pp. 88-97, esp. n. 28.
18. Kandinsky compared the gestation of a work of art with cosmic events: "Technically, each work
evolves as the cosmos did-as a result of catastrophe" (Rückblicke, p. vii).
Gerhard Langmaack ( modeled on a
design by Warburg). Reading room in
the Warburg Institute. Hamburg. 1926.

Kiwa at Pueblo Bonito (ajler F Waters ).

NewMexico.
14 OCTOBER

work of the artist. In 1935, when Kandinsky reflected on the basic elements of
his own paintings, he did so in the invocatory words of a shaman: "Black circle-
distant thunder, a world in itself that seems to care for nothing, a withdrawal into
itself, a conclusion on the spot. A 'here I am' spoken slowly and a little coldly."l9
Kandinsky's imagery did not all spring, as has often been supposed, solely from his
youth in the city of Moscow, with its celebrated evening twilight and its polyphonic,
polychromatic life-there was surely something in him that was far older and went
far deeper. In Siberia, and in certain sleepy country areas of Germany, Kandinsky
responded, with an ethnographer's sharpness of vision, to the archaic, "magical"
Strangeness of what he saw: "It was an unreal joumey. I feit as if in defiance of all
the laws of nature some magical power had carried me, century by century, deeper
and deeper into the past."20
As a student, Kandinsky had imagined that ethnography would give him
"the soul of the people";21 later, in both the Rückblicke and the "Toile vide ..." he
considered the painting itself as the place of evocation of cosmic forces: "Painting is
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, ward for ward.
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 ofinductive thought. In 1928, the faithful Fritz Sax! put it thus:
Ever since his retum from a visit to the U.S.A. in 1896, which played a
decisive roJe 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 camprehend 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, Rückblicke, p. v.
21. Ibid., p. vii.
22. Kandinsky, "Toile vide ...", p. 117.
23. Warburg, Schlangenritual, p. 25.
24. Ibid.
25. Fritz Sax!, "Warburgs Besuch in Neu-Mexico," reprinted in Aby M. Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften
und Würdigungen, ed. DieterWuttke (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1979), p. 317.
 Technical equipment in Warburgs Library. 1926.
(Photo courtesy Dieter Langmaack.)

We should take care, however, not

to see this kind of thinking exclu-
sively in Enlightenment terms, as a
progression away from magic and
toward science, away from the
daimon and toward the logos-a
progression of the kind frequently
outlined, and persistently argued,
by Gombrich. In his own person,
Warburg suffered the catastrophic
contradictions that spring from
the mechanical and ideological
subjugation of primitive forces. His
ideas may seem to tie themselves in
philosophical knots, but this in
itse lf bears witness to a painful
truth: the exigencies of culture
are inherently irresolvable. This
represents the precise point of
contact with the thinking of Freud,
to whom Warburg was anything
but close, but whose approach to a
cri tique 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 la te fifteenth-century Florentine art-and Ghirlandaio's Sasse tti 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-historicalliterature 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
d escribes 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 tagether 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.
16 OCTOBER

Enter, through a trap, three little princes and their professor--

learned in all matters pagan, privy dancing-master to the nymphs of
Tuscany-together with a witty domestic chaplain and a court bal-
ladeer, all ready to perform the introductory intermezzo. As soon as
they reach the top step, even the confined space still occupied by St.
Francis, the Pope, and the Consistory will be taken over as a setting for
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
vigoraus 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 weil 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 see it-it
can never be plumbed, once and for all. As a document, the work of art is so overde-
termined as to be incapable of any final, unequivocal definition. This in itself means
that, as cultural products, works of art must, in the words of Burckhardt, "have an
incessantly modif)'ing and disrupting effect on the established institutions oflife."30
However, there is more to the meaning of a work of art than the sum total of
what artists, patrons, advisers, and members of the public have in mind. A work of
art can unexpectedly bring to light an origin, something long forgotten. Warburg
scrutinized paintings for those figures which by their presence and their actions
create a discontinuity, those whose physiognomy and gesture are among those
"fragments" from which, all his life, he hoped to distill a historical "science of
expression." Ultimately, he was working toward a psychohistorical interpretation
of human destiny based upon the corpus of documentary evidence supplied by
art-or, to use his own term, from the Urkunden.
Warburg had a sixth sense for telltale faults and discontinuities in works of
art. Far from identifying artistic quality with aesthetic homogeneity, Warburg was
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 aspect of
works of art.
30. Jacob Burckhardt, Über das Studium der Geschichte, ed. Peter Ganz (Munich: Beck, 1982), p. 276.
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 votive images.
Warburg had a flair for all those areas-and there were many of them in
Renaissance culture-that can be summarized under the heading "ephemeral
art." It was an age when wide sections of the population came into contact with
nonreligious art in the guise of printed ephemera, theater, and pageantry. Hence
the symptomatic value of such art. Theater and ephemera provided the receptacles
for things that the polished and discriminating practice of high art either
excluded or passed over in silence.
However subsequent researchers may choose to evaluate, amplify, or correct
Warburg's assessment of such phenomena, one thing remains clear: it was his
achievement to have ventured into such areas at all. He did so neither in a spirit of
condescension nor with the whimsical self-limitation of the specialist in, say, tin
soldiers. With care and with great sensitivity, he probed into just those marginal
regions where an earlier cultural practice had remained alive, and this in itself
meant that the models to which he owed most were those of anthropology and
ethnography rather than those of art history.
When Warburg describes the fetishism of Florentine votive waxworks and the
positively totemistic way in which they were once installed en masse in one of the
most popular churches in Florence, two converse historical forces are in operation.
On one hand, Warburg is evoking a radically different spatial configuration that
existed within the church at the time of the Renaissance-an experience that can
be reconstructed only through archival research. On the other band, certain
varieties of modern ephemeral art, instead of being dismissed as merely vulgar,
are permitted to emerge as the last residues of a "fetishistic iconic magic"33 with
a profound religious dimension. A practice that we tend to dismiss as "barbaric,"
31. Warburg. Gesammelte Schriften 2. p. 478.
32. Gombrich. Warburg, p. 223.
33. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften 1, p. 118.
18 OCTOBER

and as both unworthy and incapable of cultural sublimation, thus releases a

repressed aspect and simultaneously brings to mind the forgotten origins of alt
cultural practice. Samething that strikes us as "alien" turns out to Iead us back to
home territory, but on an older and more complex human Ievel.
Warburg was, so to speak, practicing ethnology on the Europeans. On the
seemingly familiar terrain of the Florentine Renaissance, he succeeded in recalling
to consciousness a form of practice that was once vividly alive-but for that very
reason transient-and in comprehending it in terms of its own historical dynamic:
"It is only this lawful and persistent survival of barbarism, with wax effigies set up
in church in their moldering fashionable dress, that begins to cast a truer and a
more favorable light on the inclusion of portrait likenesses on a church fresco of
sacred scenes."34 Warburg would not be the disciple of Burckhardt that he is if he
had failed to furnish us with the archival documentation that alone can make a
historical epoch speak. The "Portraiture" study contains a copious documentary
appendix in which he quotes from a novella by Francesco Sassetti the passage in
which Sassetti criticizes the votive figures as "una idolatria" and adds that "I who
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 uneavering-in place of some clear-cut conception of the pensee
sauvage-the tangled life-forms of a pratique sauvage, such as he hirnself 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 tobe 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.

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 hirnself 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 Iayout
of art-historical books. It certainly had incidental parallels in the experimental
publications of the 1920s, such as those of the Dadaistsand 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 ofWarburg'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 Iike-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 späten 19.
Jahrhunderts," in Bilder aus der neuen Welt (exhibition catalogue), ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Munich:
Prestel, 1988), pp. 100-107.
Francesco Alegiani. Trompe l'oeil still
life. Circa late nineteenth century.
Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents 21

Warburg. Mnemosyne Atlas. 1929.

alternative interpretations. The extreme fragme ntation of the images instantly

calls into question the meaning of the association between them. Here, as H egel
put it in the Enzyklopädie, 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 contraHing 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 high er plane of imagination, "on which the
intellige nce identifies its own general notions with the specific identity of the
image and thus e ndows [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 H eget, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss 10,
ed . E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 264.
38. lbid.
22 OCTOBER

indeed, it exerts its control over existing figurations in a way that endows them
with new, "sign-giving" qualities.
Warburg's work on the Mnemosyne Atlas precisely coincided with the age of
pictorial montage, as practiced by Schwitters with the "crumbs of daily detritus,"39
or as displayed on a large scale by Lissitzky at the Pressa exhibition in Cologne in
1928 and the International Photo Exhibition in Stuttgart one year later. Many
more examples might be cited, and, conceptually, all share two points of affinity
with the graphic mantage that Warburg assembled on his panels: first, the radical
fragmentation of traditional image content, and second, the equally crucial
involvement of the "symbolizing fantasy." I first mooted this idea in an article in
1976;40 and I found confirmation, and far more besides, in Werner Hofmann's
essay "The Human Rights of the Eye."41
Clearly, in the Mnemosyne Atlas Warburg was putting into practice his own
conviction-expressed long before-that "the extremes of pure and applied art
should be studied, as documents of expression, on an entirely equal footing."42
Other aspects of the undertaking, however, also demand consideration, aspects to
which art historians have tended to react with some embarrassment. One aspect of
images-in the context of the Atlas, as elsewhere-is that they turn from being
Abbilder, or representations, into reproductions. Their instrumental purpose of
representing (something) recedes behind the simulation of other images. As the
scope of historical scrutiny is widened to encompass the entire globe, a change
overtakes the status-and with it every aspect of the evaluation-of art itself.
Here, too, Warburg was bringing to fruition one of Burckhardt's prophetic
insights. In the introduction to his course of lectures titled "On the Study of
History" (1868), Burckhardt wrote:
And now Iet us reflect on the magnitude of our indebtedness to the
past, which as a mental continuum is among our supreme mental
possessions. No expenditure of effort or resources must be spared in
collecting anything that might in any way assist in furthering this
study.... The attitude adopted by each succeeding century to this
inheritance constitutes a form of knowledge in its own right: that is,
something new, which the next generation will add to its inheritance
as something that has passed into history.... The bondage of custom,
etc., imposed through symbols, is something from which only the
awareness of a past can free us.43

39. Merz 21, erstes Veilchenheft. Eine kleine Sammlung von Merz-Dichtungen aller Art von Kurt
Schwitters (Hannover: Merz, 1931), p. 115.
40. "Aby Warburg's History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images,"
Daedalus 105, no. 1 (1976), pp. 169-76.
41. Die Menschenrechte des Auges: Über Aby Warburg, ed. Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken, and Martin
Warnke (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980), pp. 85-111.
42. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften 2, p. 479.
43. Burckhardt, Über das Studium, p. 50.
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 hirnself 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 represented
by the Warburg library. It was intended-as Warburg told the curatorial board of
this library two months before his death-to be a contribution to the process of
"exploring the function of personal and social memory."46 What Warburg meant
by memory was something highly dynamic and not at all the passive garnering of
layers of generalized content. In 1924, in a letter to Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, he
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, commutability-

and consider the function that the library has for the researcher, who converts its
static electricity into a current and makes it arc, learning to harness the lightning,
the ambivalent serpent power, in analogy to the cultural process that he is striving
to understand.
In the plans for his institute that absorbed all Warburg's energies, such ideas
found expression in spatial terms. Saxl teils us that "Kepler, who replaced the circle

44. Hege!, Enzyklopädie 10, p. 264.

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

with the geometrical ellipse and thus defined the orbit of Mars," was to Warburg
"a figure symbolic of those forces that create mental space."48
This mental space took shape in the surrogate form of the oval reading
room of the Warburg library. But in the same year, 1926, the central building of
the Wilhelmsruh transformer station of the Berlin electric power utility also
assumed a pronounced elliptical shape. The power company's serried ranks of
gauges were replaced, in the library, by the numberless storage cells of historical
memory.
This cantrast 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 langer encountered
in anthropomorphic or biomorphic form but as infinite waves, ruled by man at a
tauch of his hand."49

48. Reprinted in Aby M. WarbU1g, ed. D. Wuttke, p. 314f.

49. Warburg, Schlangenritual, p. 59.