Studies on Aby Warburg Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing

347 Pages·2023·14.616 MB·English

by  Dorothea McEwan

Studies on Aby Warburg,
Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing
Originally published in German, Italian and French these articles have been
translated into English for the first time by the author, the former archivist of The
Warburg Institute, London. Aby Warburg’s research and writings centred on images,
their origins and metamorphoses, and their explanations and interpretations. The
articles include discussions of Warburg’s academic work with colleagues such as
James Loeb, the American Hellenist and philanthropist, and founder of the Loeb
Classical Library, and with Josef Strzygowski, the Polish-Austrian art historian
of the Vienna School of Art History. Further articles include notes on Warburg’s
Serpent Ritual lecture of 1923; his politico-cultural initiative in 1914–1915; his
work on caricature, in particular the Struwwelpeter topic; and discussions on the
topic of Judaica.
The Viennese art historian Fritz Saxl became his trusted friend and collaborator
helping to gather Warburg’s large collection of books and photographs into the
foundation of an academic institution in Hamburg in the 1920s, and then for a
second time in London in the 1930s. The Warburg Institute has become one of the
world’s leading centres of intellectual history.
Dorothea McEwan was appointed the first archivist of The Warburg Institute
Archive, London in 1993. Her research interests include Aby Warburg and Fritz
Saxl and Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts and Ethiopian history. In 2008 she was
awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, in 2017 she was elected
Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences and in 2021 she was
awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria.
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Variorum-Collected-Studies/book-series/VARIORUM
Studies on Aby Warburg,
Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing
Dorothea McEwan
VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Dorothea McEwan
The right of Dorothea McEwan to be identified as author of this work has
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McEwan, Dorothea, author, translator.
Title: Studies on Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing / Dorothea
McEwan.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Variorum
collected studies ; CS 1109 | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022045337 (print) | LCCN 2022045338 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367769413 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367769444 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003169024 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Warburg, Aby, 1866-1929. | Saxl, Fritz, 1890-1948. |
Bing, Gertrud. | Art—Historiography.
Classification: LCC N7483.W36 M33 2023 (print) | LCC N7483.W36
(ebook) | DDC 707.2/2—dc23/eng/20230113
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045337
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045338
ISBN: 978-0-367-76941-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-76944-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-16902-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003169024
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1109
C O N T E N T S
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xi
Bibliographical references to published chapters xii
List of abbreviations xv
List of figures xvi
PART I
Articles on a selection of Warburg’s main research topics 1
1 Personal and zodiacal. Warburg’s comments on the Palazzo
Schifanoia lecture in 1912 3
2 ‘IDEA VINCIT’, ‘The victorious, flying Idea’. An artistic
commission by Aby Warburg 17
3 A fight against windmills. On Rivista Illustrata, Warburg’s
pro-Italian publishing initiative 41
4 On the origins of the Serpent Ritual Lecture. Motive and
motivation. Healing through remembrance 59
5 The František Pospíšil – Aby Warburg correspondence in
The Warburg Institute 74
PART II
Aby Warburg’s collaboration with James Loeb and Fritz Saxl 89
6 Facets of a friendship: Aby Warburg and James Loeb. Friends,
scholars, relatives, patrons of the arts 91
v
CONTENTS
7 Fritz Saxl and Aby Warburg: appreciation of a friendship.
Evaluating collaboration, tracing contacts to the
‘Vienna School’ 111
PART III
Topics which caught Warburg’s interest 127
8 A trouvaille from The Warburg Institute Archive on
Mandaeism and Gnosticism 129
9 Warburg’s view of Strzygowski as reflected in the Aby Warburg
correspondence 144
10 Bringing light into darkness. Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl
in conversation on Mithras 158
11 Caricature as war effort: Aby Warburg’s ‘new style in word
and image’, 1914–1918 171
PART IV
Judaica 193
12 ‘. . . probably latent antisemitism’ 195
13 Aby to Gisela Warburg: against the ‘pioneers of this-worldliness’ 199
14 ‘What I can represent as a Jew, I can also represent as
a Catholic’. On Alfons Augustinus Barb’s scholarly career
and his change of religion 209
PART V
Struwwelpeter and its many parodies 243
15 Aby Warburg’s interpretation of the Russian translation of
Struwwelpeter and the political parodies Struwwelhitler – A Nazi
Storybook and Schicklgrüber 245
vi
CONTENTS
PART VI
Aby Warburg and Mary Warburg 267
16 The ‘Palazzo Potetje’: Mary Warburg’s triptych 269
PART VII
Interview with Dorothea McEwan 283
17 The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg as seen
through its archive in London and Dorothea McEwan’s
other research interests. Interview by Céline Trautmann-Waller
with Dorothea McEwan, 2 August 2018 285
Bibliography 298
Index 319
vii
P R E FA C E
Aby Warburg, art historian, scholar, founder and director of the Kulturwissen-
schaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW)1 in Hamburg, worked on a great variety of
research topics on cultural history in its widest sense. His collection of books, 55.000
volumes, was transferred to London in 1933 and forms part of the library of The
Warburg Institute in London, a member institute of the School of Advanced Study
of the University of London. His extensive correspondence with scholars in Europe
and America is extant in the archive of The Warburg Institute, some 37.000 letters
and postcards.2 They throw light on the topics in which he was interested, from the
history of the Renaissance in Florence to postage stamps and playing cards, from
art-historical influences of northern European art on southern European art to the
Native American serpent ritual, from the peregrination of astrology from east to
west, through to Reformation pamphlets, satires, caricatures and much more –
all to analyse the creation and shaping to the ‘European mentality’.3
The volume presents material from The Warburg Institute Archive in London.
Warburg is known for having researched the survival of classical antiquity, the area
of research which encompassed the history of literature, religion, astrology and art
history. In lectures and articles Warburg investigated the ‘path ways of culture’,
which found their most important documentation in Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.4
Warburg kept everything: business cards and private letters, scholarly requests
and his correspondence with universities, libraries, archives and publishers in
1 Cf. Diers, M. (ed), Poträt aus Büchern; Galitz, R. and Reimers, B. (eds), Aby M. Warburg; Stockhau-
sen, T. von, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg; Saxl, F., ‘The History of Warburg’s
Library, 1886–1944’. Gombrich, E. H., Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, 325–338.
2 A volume of a selection of Warburg’s correspondence has been published by Diers, M., Warburg
aus Briefen; McEwan, D., Ausreiten der Ecken. Die Aby Warburg – Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz 1910–
1919; Eadem, Wanderstrassen der Kultur. Die Aby Warburg – Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz von 1920
bis 1929.
3 Cf. Warburg, A., ‘Orientalisierende Astrologie’; Britt, D., ‘Astrology under Oriental Influence’,
699–702 and 775.
4 Warnke, M., and Brink, C. (eds), Aby Warburg (1866–1929); Ohrt, R., and Heil, A. (eds), Aby War-
burg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.
viii
PREFACE
Germany and abroad. The archive, therefore, is a rich source in general for the his-
tory of scholarship in Warburg’s time and in particular for researching Warburg’s
own work and the work of his colleagues from 1880 to Warburg’s death in 1929.
In addition, the archive is an important resource for intellectual history in Ham-
burg until its transfer to London in 1933 and the integration of the new institute,
then called The Warburg Institute, in the British academic landscape.
As the author of the original articles and author of this volume, I wish to thank
all the journal publishers for having kindly granted me permission to re-use my
published articles and illustrations in an expanded English version. The original
places of publication for the chapters in this collection are listed with each chap-
ter and in the bibliographical references to published chapters. I wish to express
my gratitude to the Director of The Warburg Institute for allowing me to publish
selected correspondence in the archive in full by authors for which the Archive
holds copyright conditions. All other correspondence is published in agreement
with copyright holders. Where copyright holders have not been established, every
effort has been made to trace them and obtain permission to reproduce their materi-
als. I therefore welcome any enquiry or information relating to copyright holders.
The chapters in this book are based on articles, originally published in German,
Italian and French, and are now presented in an updated English version. They were
the fruit of my work as director of the archive of The Warburg Institute in London
and as a researcher in a number of archives in Germany. Depending on the subject
matter they were published in different specialist journals and book publications in
Germany and Austria, Italy and France. I therefore wish to thank Routledge for their
interest and encouragement to publish these articles in an English-language volume.
The chapters are arranged according to topics, not chronologically. This seemed to me
a more organic presentation but, as of needs, source material is sometimes mentioned or
referenced twice. It goes without saying that a large part of the source material is taken
from Warburg’s and Fritz Saxl’s correspondence, the mirror of their collaboration for
some 20 years. Saxl, perhaps like no one else, with the exception of his librarian col-
league Gertrud Bing, understood Warburg and collaborated with him on many research
topics. All but one chapter are microhistories, research essays on specific questions,
many involving the genesis and legacy of a particular research concern of Warburg’s
or Saxl’s. The exception is the chapter about Alfons Augustinus Barb, who joined The
Warburg Institute only in 1949, but worked on similar topics as Warburg and Saxl.
Over the years and parallel to articles in German, Italian and French, I published
articles in English on Warburg and Saxl, which have also appeared in a variety of
periodicals. A list with titles of these articles is included in the bibliography. They
complement the original articles in German, French and Italian, having as their
point of departure the same source material and the same aim, to produce research
on particular topics which were addressed in the correspondence of both scholars.
In the intervening years a number of topics have been revisited by colleagues and
further developed. For their bibliography, please consult the online catalogue of
the library holdings of The Warburg Institute in London. I would be very happy if
these articles were also republished in one volume one day.
ix