Aby Warburg (1866–1929)
Author of The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity
About the Author
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Works by Aby Warburg
La Naissance de Vénus & Le Printemps de Sandro Botticelli : Etude des représentations de… (2003) 13 copies
Per Monstra ad Sphaeram: Sternglaube und Bilddeutung. Vortrag in Gedenken an Franz Boll und andere Schriften 1923 bis… (2008) 8 copies
Recuerdos del viaje al territorio de los indios pueblo en Norteamérica: 94 (El Árbol del Paraíso) (2018) 4 copies
Aby M. Warburg Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde im Hamburger Planetarium ; [Wien: Akad. d.… (1993) 2 copies
Il mondo de ieri. Lettere 1 copy
Gesammelte Schriften 1,2 Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike : kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte… (1998) 1 copy
Opere. Con CD-ROM vol. 2 - La rinascita del paganesimo antico e altri scritti (1917-1929) (2008) 1 copy
Werke 1 copy
Frammenti sull'espressione = Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde (2011) 1 copy
Dossiê - Aby Warburg 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Warburg, Aby
- Legal name
- Warburg, Abraham Moritz
- Other names
- Warburg, Aby M.
- Birthdate
- 1866-06-13
- Date of death
- 1929-10-26
- Burial location
- Y 10, Familiengrab Hertz, Ohlsdorfer Friedhof, Ohlsdorf, Hamburg-Nord, Hamburg, Germany
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Germany
- Birthplace
- Hamburg, Germany
- Place of death
- Hamburg, Germany
- Cause of death
- heart attack
- Places of residence
- Hamburg, Germany
Florence, Tuscany, Italy - Education
- University of Bonn (1886-1888)
University of Munich
University of Strasbourg (Ph.D, 1891)
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (1888) - Occupations
- art historian
cultural historian
library founder
professor - Relationships
- Warburg, Paul Moritz (brother)
Warburg, Edward M. M. (nephew)
Warburg, Max Moritz (brother)
Warburg, Felix Moritz (brother)
Warburg, Olga (sister)
Warburg, Louisa (sister) (show all 8)
Warburg, Fritz Moritz (brother)
Warburg, Katharine (sister) - Organizations
- Warburg Institute
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg - Short biography
- Abraham "Aby" Moritz Warburg was born to a devoutly religious Jewish family of well-to-do German bankers in Hamburg. He declined to enter the family business and instead studied art history, archaeology, history, and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Munich. He wrote his 1891 dissertation on Botticelli. Warburg moved to Berlin to study medicine and did his military service. His interest in psychology led him to anthropology, and in 1895 he toured the southwestern USA to observe Navajo and Pueblo traditions. In 1897 he married the artist Mary Hertz, with whom he had three children, and went to live in Florence, Italy. After studying and writing about the Italian Renaissance, he turned his attention to the German Reformation and then to the scientific revolution. His private library for cultural studies, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, was later moved to the Warburg Institute in London, which officially opened in 1926.
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Statistics
- Works
- 49
- Members
- 380
- Popularity
- #63,551
- Rating
- 4.3
- Reviews
- 1
- ISBNs
- 84
- Languages
- 11
- Favorited
- 2
From 1925 until his death in 1929, the great German art theorist and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on an ambitious, unprecedented project he called the Mnemosyne Atlas: a series of 63 large themed panels, each featuring a constellation of images―postcards, maps, adverts, reproductions of artworks―that trace the migration of symbols from antiquity to the present. His goal was to show how certain gestures and icons repeated themselves across history, constituting what he called a “pathos formula”―that is, an enduring emotional metaphor. Warburg had the panels photographed, conceiving of their ultimate incarnation as being in book form―but never completed the atlas.
Warburg has become famed for many things―founding the discipline of iconology (what would now be called visual studies); his incredible library (and its idiosyncratic organization); his photographs of Hopi Indians; and the august institute in London that bears his name. But the greatest, most mythical aspect of his legacy is the Mnemosyne Atlas, which is to art history what Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is to cultural history―an incomplete, collaged modernist epic attempting to comprehend the patterns of history and human emotion through flashes of insight that circumvent discursive thought.
Artists, theorists, writers and curators as various as Gerhard Richter, R.B. Kitaj, Joan Jonas, Charlene von Heyl, Giorgio Agamben, Marina Warner, Ernst Gombrich and Hans Ulrich Obrist have all paid homage to this mythic entity in different ways; many books have been written about it, and many exhibitions themed around it. Since Gombrich was tasked with its recreation in 1937, several scholars have attempted editions of the Atlas, all using Warburg’s indistinct, nearly illegible photographs. Now, for this major publishing event, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have done what long seemed impossible, searching the 400,000 images in the archives of the Warburg Institute, identifying those from the Atlas and reconstructing Warburg’s panels, rendering the Atlas visually accessible to the world for the first time.… (more)