THE WARBURG INSTITUTE, LIBRARY AND READING ROOM - Selection of Content & Selection of Formats
Committees
The members of the Warburg Institute formed committees to organize their resources and research, such as on Giordano Bruno12, a late 16th century philosopher.
Aby Warburg was little known amongst scientifics but sought himself to get in touch with them such as Albert Einstein. Aby Warburg sought to find approval about the prehistory of the scientific revolution. Thus, Warburg wasn’t able to understand the scientific research fully and kept a metaphorical understanding of its achievements13.
Gertude Bing was responsible of brainstorming on the themes of the panels and wrote many of the captions. However her commitment to this ambitious project led her to confusion about the existence of some of the images in a certain arrangement.
Exhibitions
Aby Warburg’s use of frames and images from exhibitions started in 1911. Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl worked on many exhibitions which were titled “Bilderreihen” such as the mock-up exhibition for redesigning a department of the Deutsches Museum in Munich in 1927, from which he reused some images, frames and captions on cosmology.
The “Bilderreihen”
The “Bilderreihen”, sequences of five to six unnumbered panels with images used in ephemeral installations, were a sort of “satellites” of the Atlas, floating around his major project (the cosmos). They laid out the themes which Aby Warburg was addressing in the Atlas. The “Bilderreihen” were also using the format of the panels but were larger in size for exhibition instead of being published in a book.
Artefacts
Next to the collections of books and photographs, the Warburg Institute owns a few artefact: an Etruscan liver and engravings.