Early life
Aby Warburg was born the first son of a prominent Jewish family of bankers, known as the Warburg family1, in Hamburg in 1866. At this time Hamburg, a city of merchants, was not thought of as a setting for an intellectual movement2. However it developed into a new centre for humanities at the turn of the 19th century.
At the age of thirteen, Warburg was convinced of his future as an art historian and, despite parental obligations, struck a deal with his younger brother Max to pass over the inheritance of the family business on condition that he agreed to supply the elder Warburg with as many books as he required. Max Warburg was therefore one of the key figures in providing financial support for his brother’s projects.
Academic studies
From 1886 to 1888 Warburg studied under Carl Justi3 at the University of Bonn. Then he attended Hermann Usener’s course on comparative mythology—a crossroads in his intellectual formation that would have far-reaching consequences for his conception of art history and, more specifically, his ideas about morphology and symbols. He also attended the courses of the historian Karl Lamprecht, whose notion of historical change, as partially driven by psychological factors, would resonate everywhere in Warburg’s thought. Warburg was greatly influenced by Jacob Burckhardt4’s notion that the viewer’s psychology was, more than aesthetics, the decisive factor in understanding the artwork. In 1888 Warburg went to study under August Schmarsow in Florence, where he was able to visit many of the works that would dominate his scholarly thinking for the first time5.
The years succeeding his graduation with a doctoral thesis on Botticelli’s mythologies were devoted to research in the archives of Florence, so as to build up a detailed picture of the intellectual and social milieu of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle6. Aby Warburg’s education in Italy certainly shaped his interest in key transitional periods7 such as Antiquity and the Renaissance where knowledge was speeding up and made things come to fruition. In these contexts, he pursued the definition of symbols, between the abstract and the concrete, with regards to psychology and anthropology. His emphasis was less on philosophy8 although Nietzsche9, Kant, Fichte and Cassirer10 influenced his belief in the freedom of thought and expression.
The Research Institute
Aby Warburg’s first library was built in his private home in Hamburg in 1903. He organized his books so as to facilitate his research on the effects of antiquity on modern European civilization in all its aspects - social, political, religious, scientific, philosophical, literary and artistic11. In 1921, the private collection was turned into a research institute by the art historian Fritz Saxl, who had joined Warburg in 1913.
The Warburg Library
As his amount of books grew, he appointed the architect Gerhard Langmaack under the direction of Saxl to custom build a library for the the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) (Warburg Library of Cultural Studies) in an adjacent house between 1925/26. The library provided more storage space, a modern infrastructure and an elliptical reading room for lectures and committees. Warburg had become a great proponent of the latest technology in library science and of art-historical research and presentation. On one hand, Warburg and Saxl developed a library classification system. On the other hand, he composed his theories in the “Bilderreihen” and the Mnemosyne Atlas in collaboration with Fritz Saxl and Gertrude Bing. Saxl, Warburg’s deputee and acting director, also followed his interest in mythology and astrology; Bing, a trained philosopher, was not pursuing her own research.
The Warburg library was not organized by alphabet or subject but by topics characterized by ‘elective affinities’, the secret intimacies that Warburg himself intuited between its volumes. In the 1920s, this system of categorization evolved into the letter and digit system over four floors and differentiated itself from the traditional library classification systems. The UCD system, using multiple pressmarks, can be understood as a global uniform system which suits the profession of the librarian. The Warburgian categorization system, using a single pressmark, is conceived to engage scholars and researchers with the resources presented in the library. The single pressmark is made up of three letters, the first standing for the general topic. This categorization of content into interconnected topics parallels and complements the categorization of content into countries and regions. Within each category, content is organized chronologically