THE SURVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY: THE GERMAN YEARS OF THE WARBURG INSTITUTE

This study represents a group history of the scholars associated with Aby Warburg's Renaissance-studies research institute in Hamburg from 1919 until its move to London in 1933. The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, as the Warburg Institute was known before its English re-incarnation, was during the Weimar Republic a center for an energetic group of scholars, which included the art historian Erwin Panofsky, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the classicist Bruno Snell, the historian of art and religion Fritz Saxl, the student of Arabic magic Hellmut Ritter, and, among others, the founder and art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg wrote a form of art history as a more general cultural history and built a library that extended through most of the human sciences. The library was organically structured, a maze which disclosed at every turn Warburg's scholarly principles. It began with the psychology of the symbol, finally the core of Warburg's work. An examination of the human symbol became the central shared concern of those associated with his institute. This study argues that the work of those scholars was marked also by an aesthetic borrowed from the Weimar classicists; their work on the Renaissance was often a reading back of Goethe into the past.; As a group intellectual history, this study examines the various forces acting on the group, describing their setting in as concrete detail as possible. But the study is arranged as four detailed discussions of the work of Warburg, Saxl, Cassirer and Panofsky; for, finally, it underscores the force of individual intellect and the demands of the various disciplines as much as the impact of Warburg's library.