35 Facts About Aby Warburg

Aby Moritz Warburg was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, a private library, which was later moved to the Warburg Institute, London.

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg into the wealthy Warburg family of German Jewish bankers.

Aby Warburg's ancestors had come to Germany from Italy in the 17th century and settled in the town of Warburg in Westphalia, taking on the town's name as their family name.

Aby Warburg was the first of seven children born to Moritz Warburg, director of the Hamburg bank, and his wife Charlotte, nee Oppenheim.

Aby Warburg showed an early interest in literature and history.

The second eldest son, Max Aby Warburg, went into the Hamburg bank, and younger brothers Paul and Felix entered banking.

Max Aby Warburg established the Aby Warburg family bank as a global player.

Aby Warburg did not want to be a rabbi, as his grandmother wished, nor a doctor or lawyer.

Aby Warburg met with resistance from his relatives, but he forced through his plans to study art history.

Aby Warburg famously made a deal with his brother Max to forfeit his right, as the eldest son, to take over the family firm, in return for an undertaking on Max's part to provide him with all the books he ever needed.

In 1886 Aby Warburg began his study of art history, history and archaeology in Bonn and attended the lectures on the history of religion by Hermann Usener, those on cultural history by Karl Lamprecht and on art history by Carl Justi.

Aby Warburg continued his studies in Munich and with Hubert Janitschek in Strasbourg, completing under him his dissertation on Botticelli's paintings The Birth of Venus and Primavera.

Aby Warburg was now interested in applying the methods of natural science to the human sciences.

Aby Warburg's study introduced into art history a new method, that of iconography or iconology, later developed by Erwin Panofsky.

Aby Warburg's first stop in his travels was Mesa Verde to see the Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings.

Aby Warburg continued on to visit a number of Pueblo villages in New Mexico before stopping in San Ildefonso, where he had the opportunity to photograph a traditional Antelope dance.

In Cochiti, Aby Warburg convinced a priest and his son to illustrate their people's cosmology; their drawing highlighted the importance of meteorological phenomena and serpents to their cultural worldview.

Aby Warburg had first heard of this tradition through discussions with Mooney, and although he never witnessed the dance firsthand it remained influential to his writings about the Hopi.

In Oraibi, the last stop in southwestern voyage, Aby Warburg attended and diligently recorded his experience at Kachina dances.

Aby Warburg ended up reviving his travel notes for his-famous 1923 lecture on the Hopi snake dance ritual.

The lecture became the grounds by which Aby Warburg was released from his psychiatric treatment at the Bellevue Sanitorium.

In 1897 Aby Warburg married, against his father's will, the painter and sculptor Mary Hertz, daughter of Adolph Ferdinand Hertz, a Hamburg senator and member of the Synod of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Hamburg, and Maria Gossler, both members of the traditional Hanseatic elite of Hamburg.

Aby Warburg occupied himself with Botticelli's engagement with the Ancients evident in the representation of the clothing of figures.

In 1902 the family returned to Hamburg, and Aby Warburg presented the findings of his Florentine research in a series of lectures, but at first did not take on a professorship or any other academic position.

Aby Warburg rejected a call to a professorship at the University of Halle in 1912.

Aby Warburg became a member of the board of the Volkerkundemuseum, with his brother Max sponsored the foundation of the "Hamburger wissenschaftlichen Stiftung" and the foundation of a university in Hamburg, which succeeded in 1919, and at which he took up a professorship.

Aby Warburg had manic depression and symptoms of schizophrenia, and was hospitalized in Ludwig Binswanger's neurological clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in 1921.

In December 1927, Aby Warburg started to compose a work in the form of a picture atlas named Mnemosyne.

Aby Warburg died in Hamburg of a heart attack on 26 October 1929.

Mnemosyne Atlas was left unfinished when Aby Warburg died in 1929.

Aby Warburg is considered one of the major benefactors of the humanities during the turn of the 20th century.

New interest in Aby Warburg was sparked by the publication of Gombrich's biography, which was published in England in 1970 and only printed in a German translation eleven years later.

Aby Warburg introduced Iconology as an additional research method besides the then prevalent Formalism.

Concepts like Denkraum or the well-known Pathosformel have developed a life on their own and are often used in a way Aby Warburg did not intend.

The research into Aby Warburg was sparked in the course of the Iconic turn.