Aby Warburg 150

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CONTENT

9

Foreword

11

Preface

1. Promise 19

David Freedberg Warburg’s Vision From Arsenal to Laboratory

2. Work – Concepts 47

58

Peter N. Miller Kulturwissenschaft before ­Warburg Ulrich Raulff Nachleben A Warburgian Concept and its Origins. Followed by a Letter from Georges Didi-Huberman: La survivance nous divise-t-elle?

68

Andreas Beyer Serendipity and “gute ­Nachbarschaft” Chance and Sagacity in Warburg’s Library

75

Christopher D. Johnson Warburg’s Zwischenraum Between Hieroglyph and Diagram

103

Martin Treml Warburg’s Atlas Disenchanting and Re-Enchanting the World

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CONTENT

3. Work – Themes 121

140

Carlo Ginzburg Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln A Long-Term Historical Perspective Sigrid Weigel ­ otticelli … and back to the Nymph” “From Darwin via Filippino to B The Concept of Umfangsbestimmung, the Role of Energetics, and the Place of Darwin in Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft*

171

Kurt W. Forster The Past in Gestures, the Future in Memory The Leipzig Circle of Physiologists and Warburg’s Construct of Mneme

179

Andrea Pinotti “Chameleon of Energy” Warburg between Neutrality and Neutralization

4. Work – History

6

197

Horst Bredekamp Aby Warburg’s Berlin Ethnology, Friendships, Academic Policy

209

Claudia Wedepohl Genesis without End The Prehistory of Aby Warburg’s Atlas

258

Elizabeth Sears First Contact Panofsky Meets Warburg

286

Uwe Fleckner Manet, Manebit! Aby Warburg’s “Manet and Italian Antiquity” as a ­Psycho-­Intellectual Self-Portrait


Content

5. Legacy 305

Lorraine Daston The Power of Exempla and the ­Epistemology of the Humanities

313

Georges Didi-Huberman Discharged Atlas Three Fragments on Uprising as Pathosformel

319

Quentin Skinner Hobbes’s Leviathan Frontispiece Some New Observations

328

350

357

W. J. T. Mitchell Method, Madness, Montage Anke te Heesen The Desire for Materiality The Beginnings of the Warburg Renaissance and the J­ uxt­apositions of Art and Science, 1975–1989 Marina Warner Arabesque in Action

Epilogue 371

Martin Warnke † Warburg’s Snail

374

My Grandfather at 150

377

Bibliography

424

Index

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FOREWORD

Directors of institutes work, first and foremost, in the future tense. When I was interviewed for the Directorship of the Warburg Institute in 2017, most of the questions began, “What will you do …?” And as soon as I took up the post, I threw myself into drafting a series of documents whose horizons stretched dauntingly far into the distance: an operational plan for the coming year, contributions to the five-year strategic plan for the University of London’s School of Advanced Study and a revised brief for a once-in-a-lifetime renovation of the Institute’s building. However, I was mindful, from the start, of the lessons to be learned from the past and increasingly grateful for the legacies inherited not just from my predecessors in London but from the books, people and projects brought together by Aby Warburg in Hamburg during the first few decades of the twentieth century. It was clear to me, indeed, that the Warburg was one of those institutions whose visions for the future can still be found in the work of its founders. This had been true at my previous job as Director of Research and Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A): during a period of unprecedented expansion, we found that our most radical ideas about display and education were directly inspired by the Museum’s origins in a cluster of institutions created in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This new cultural campus in London’s South Kensington neighbourhood was so closely modelled on Prince Albert’s bold plan that it came to be known as Albertopolis; and when (then Mayor) Boris Johnson sponsored a cultural regeneration project on the site of the 2012 Olympics, where the V&A was invited to build a new museum and collections centre, he called it Olympicopolis in conscious, if somewhat clunky, emulation. Across town in Bloomsbury, we at the Warburg still add new books to the categories devised for the famous four-floor scheme in the original library in Hamburg. We still train students in an approach to images that sees them as part of cultural history and places a premium on primary sources from Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We still host research projects that cut across the full spectrum of arts and sciences. And we still enter the building by walking under the name of ‘MNEMOSYNE’ (the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the Muses), just as the original visitors did when the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg opened in 1926. As we work on the first complete redesign of the Institute’s permanent home in Woburn Square, we have looked to Warburg’s architectural and intellectual blueprints at every turn: in our plans for a project that we are calling The Warburg Renaissance (due to be completed in 2024), there will be echoes of Warburg’s elliptical reading room in the

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FOREWORD

Lecture Theatre, which will double our capacity for public events, and a much-needed gallery will restore the Institute’s original mixture of discovery, display and debate. Our work in revisiting Warburg’s legacy has been greatly aided by the efforts of the Institute’s directors (and other staff ) to keep Warburg’s ideas alive in the decades since his death – from Ernst Gombrich’s publication of a comprehensive intellectual biography in 1970, through Peter Mack’s work in securing support for the Bilderfahrzeuge Research Group in 2013, to David Freedberg’s organization (with the Institute’s archivist Claudia Wedepohl) of an international conference marking Warburg’s 150th birthday in 2016. That event was still being talked about when I arrived one year later: it drew the largest audiences in the history of the Institute and featured among its speakers a veritable Who’s Who in the world of Warburg. Here are the people who have done so much to shape our own research telling us how and why Warburg has shaped theirs. Thanks to a new partnership with our old friends at De Gruyter (who continue to publish the official edition of Warburg’s texts, along with most of the monographs and anthologies devoted to his ideas), we are finally able to share the papers from that historic gathering. Taken together, they offer a comprehensive assessment of Warburg’s legacy, with fresh insights into most of his key concepts. They remind us how central Warburg’s work has been to major developments in the humanities and social sciences over the last few decades; and they leave us feeling that the work of interpretation and activation has only just begun. Given Warburg’s own interest in the period whose very name invokes both past and future – the Renaissance – it is only appropriate that we should use this historic occasion to look simultaneously backward and forward. This volume allows us to do just that and, in doing so, is a fitting tribute to the life and afterlife of Aby Warburg. Bill Sherman Director, Warburg Institute

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PREFACE

On June 13–15, 2016, the Warburg Institute held a conference to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Aby Warburg on June 13, 1866. Entitled, like this volume, Aby Warburg 150: Work, Legacy and Promise it attracted more people to a conference at the Institute than ever before; and many more were able to follow the event online through live streaming (a first in the history of the Institute). This was tribute in itself to the continuing power of Warburg’s thought and intellectual ideals. Though we aimed at a diversity of scholars in the broad Warburgian area, we regretted not being able to invite all those who have made profound contributions to the understanding of Warburg’s thought, his promise and his ever more influential afterlife. We were happy that several members of the Warburg family were able to join us on this occasion as well and that John Prag, Aby Warburg’s grandson, concluded the event, imagining what his grandfather would have made of it – a very personal contribution we are equally happy to include in this volume. Good fortune allowed us to organize the conference so that its first day fell precisely on Monday, June 13, 2016. The stars were auspiciously joined and the Warburgian Planetenkinder came together in London. They came to discuss not only Warburg himself, but the relationship between images and memory, superstition and science, stasis and movement, movement and emotion, expression and pathos, expression and repression – all well-known Warburgian themes, but ever more relevant to our times. Had Warburg himself been present he would have been pleased that in the spirit of the then recently formed Bilderfahrzeuge Research Group at the Institute we remained alert to the travels of images, symbols and motifs across cultures.1 He probably would have been more explicit than most of our speakers were about the presence of the non-canonical, the exotic and the barbaric in the civilized and about how such elements provide the energy for the emergence of new and ever more vital forms. He would have been still more alert to what he would have described as the polar tensions that characterize all cultural transformations and how such tensions are resolved or not; and he would undoubtedly have had ready hypotheses for the cultural sources and predicates of religious and political difference.2

1 The Institute will always be grateful to the German Ministry of Education and Research and the Max Weber Foundation for their generous subvention of this programme at the Institute, as well as the role of Professors Andreas Beyer, Horst Bredekamp, Uwe Fleckner and Gerhard Wolf in conceiving and setting it up and securing a continuation of the project in 2018. 2 In the Laboratorium which he believed his arsenal of books could become, in which he, together with a

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The overriding aim of the conference was to achieve a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and purposes of cultural history. Not just art history or image history or history of science, but a cultural history that is explicitly global while never renouncing the granularity of the local. With contributions ranging from analyses of Aby Warburg’s work, of his influential terms and concepts and through particular events and moments in his life through to the methodological impact of his thought, the present volume maintains the legacy of this remarkable event. The difficulty of translating the term Kulturwissenschaft, so closely connected with Warburg’s name, is discussed at the beginning of this volume. It is the subject of Peter Miller’s essay, which looks at its use by nineteenth-century authors, including Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Dilthey. Miller discusses how the notion of a materialist science of culture (as complementing the science of nature) first emancipated itself from Hegelian philosophy and further into an integrative science of life, a process which could perhaps be called the beginning of interdisciplinarity. Ulrich Raulff explores the origin, meaning and translation, indeed the semantics, of another term nowadays closely associated with Warburg yet not coined by him: Nachleben. Its multi-facetted meaning, Raulff believes, becomes palpable only on the micro-level of Warburg’s descriptions and is thus always determined by context. Among several other Warburgian terms and concepts discussed in this volume is Warburg’s metaphorical gute Nachbarschaft; it stands for the character of Warburg’s unique shelving system which distinguishes the Warburg Library from all others to this day. Andreas Beyer looks at the epistemological value of the so-called good neighbourhood, arguably inspired by Horace Walpole’s neologism “serendipity” and the idea it captures. Christopher Johnson considers both the epistemological and methodological value of the metaphorically condensed term Hieroglyphe, very much personalized by Warburg, as well as his idiosyncratic process of visualization through similarly condensed diagrams; according to Johnson, the latter was crucial for his thinking process and, finally, became a fundamental device for Warburg’s Bilderatlas. In his contribution Martin Treml explains the nature of the same Bilderatlas Mnemosyne as a reflection of Warburg’s way of thinking and his performative manner of demonstrating. If these authors address both the origin and the epistemology of certain terms and related concepts as well as their methodological repercussions, all closely associated with

group of like-minded scholars, would be able to pursue his experiments, or Versuche (or what he called his Vorversuche), and in which art history would be merely a part of a total history of images and, indeed, be equated with Kulturwissenschaft, he hoped that aside from its scholarly worth “the public” would “grasp and support the meaning of the KBW as a vital element in the reconstitution of European civilization (Warburg 2012a, p. 119)” (die Bedeutung der K.B.W. als lebenswichtiges Element für die Wiederherstellung der europä­ ischen Zivilisation, noch in ganz anderem Masse von allen begriffen und auch unterstüzt wird (Warburg 2010a, p. 692)). It would, he believed, also be possible to realize, as he put it at the end of his book on Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten of 1919/20, that the images and words he collected, “just a fraction of what could have been used, can be regarded as hitherto unread records of the tragic history of freedom of thought in modern Europe (Warburg 1920, p. 70)” (als bisher ungelesene Urkunden zur tragischen Geschichte der Denkfreiheit des modernen Europäers aufzufassen (Warburg 2010h, p. 485)).

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­ arburg’s work and legacy, others look at more comprehensive principles of his new apW proach to images and its roots in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sciences. Carlo Ginzburg explores the origins of the fundamental Warburgian idea of the Pathosformel (and its so-called inversion). He compares both Charles Darwin’s and Aby Warburg’s reception of an observation by Joshua Reynolds regarding the ambivalence in the expression of frenzy. A re-evaluation of the relevance of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is one of the central aspects of Sigrid Weigel’s essay on the role of Warburg’s early theoretical ruminations for his work of late 1920s. She gives particular attention to the notebook Warburg labelled “Symbolism as Determination of Scope” (Symbolismus aufgefasst als als Umfangsbestimmung) and its relation to the notes for his Mnemosyne project. How Warburg imagined the workings of memory by exploring the theories of contemporary sciences such as Wilhelm Ostwald’s works on energy and Richard Semon’s idea that memory is a re-activation of experience – a connection between past and presence, similar to that between magnetic poles – is Kurt Forster’s topic. Also looking at Warburg’s reception of scientific theories, Andrea Pinotti discusses the relevance of the concepts of Polarität [polarity] and Neutralität [neutrality] for his ideas. He sheds light on the pre-history of these notions in discussions about the nature of allegory and symbol and their later association with electromechanics. Moving to significant episodes in Warburg’s life, Horst Bredekamp adds Berlin to the map of relevant places. He discusses the occasions when Warburg was in close contact and/ or collaboration with Berlin institutions and their arguably “liberal” representatives. The exchange with ethnographers of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde and its impact on Warburg’s work is his main focus. Another crucial Berlin contact, the eminent art historian Adolph Goldschmidt (who in 1912 succeeded Heinrich Wölfflin on his Chair at the FriedrichWilhelms-­Universität) and his circle, is also the starting point for Elizabeth Sears’s essay. She analyses the first contact between Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, at the time one of the members of Goldschmidt’s seminars, on the occasion of a Hamburg visit in 1915. Her meticulous reconstruction of the event, which took place at Warburg’s library, is the basis for her analysis of its implications for iconology, the method which made Panofsky famous. Uwe Fleckner then follows Warburg’s specific interest in the Modernist painting of Édouard Manet. His point of reference is Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, rejected by the Salon of 1863, whose central group – as Warburg’s friend Gustav Pauli found out in 1908 – was inspired by Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s Judgement of Paris. Fleckner sees a culmination of Warburg’s ideas, sparked by the painting, in his devising of a five-panel sequence of images in April 1929, demonstrating how their clusters tell the story of an evolution towards enlightenment, the Enlightenment and Impressionism. The last group of essays pay tribute to Warburg’s legacy. Georges Didi-Huberman takes his Denkfigur of the Pathosformel as point of departure for comparing several cases of the representation of political “uprising” (the gesture of raising a fist). He reflects on the anthropological status of gestures as well as the relation between the physical and the political. W. T. J. Mitchell surveys assemblages of images in the context of art history, anthropology, cinematic production, surveillance and forensic science. His aim is to uncover both the logic and the flirtation with the a-logical and symptomatic in metapictures of pictorial totalities. Taking

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Warburg’s legacy in a different direction, Anke te Heesen looks into postmodern museology, namely the attempt to represent fields of knowledge through a combination of art, science and philosophy. She analyses three examples – Harald Szeemann’s Junggesellenmaschinen, Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s Les Immatériaux and Jean Clair, Cathrin Pichler and Wolfgang Pircher’s Wunderblock – to explain how modernity shaped the human psyche and revolutionized exhibition techniques between the 1970s and the 1990s. Quite distinct from these “examples” is Lorraine Daston’s analysis of the epistemological power of the “exemplum” as such in the human versus the natural sciences. She explains how the exemplum works as a technique for rendering the universal in the specific and demonstrates, by way of three different examples, how the exemplum works to generalize through patterns of analogies. Quentin Skinner’s “example” is the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651, which he revisits in his essay. Skinner discusses one particular element of the print – the triangular shape of the motive of crozier and sword – and offers a new reading of this motif. Quite differently from Andreas Beyer, yet returning to Warburg’s pertinent ideas, Marina Warner takes Warburg’s unique shelving system as the point of departure for her reflections on the nature of the arabesque (including its historical meaning) as an expressive mode of interconnectivity and motion and of endlessness without a centre. Our own contributions will also be found in these pages. One (Freedberg’s) sets out what he believes to be the most important and influential aspects of Warburg’s work, some relatively neglected and others not at all. It offers a view of the implications of Warburg’s vision for a radically new Bildwissenschaft for the future of our disciplines. The other (Wedepohl’s) provides an archival reconstruction of the arduous development and multi-faceted revival of Warburg’s life project, the “large book”, which in his last years became the Bilderatlas M ­ nemosyne. Finally, the late Martin Warnke, who was instrumental in re-establishing Warburgian scholarship in Germany in the 1980s and, in the 1990s, in regaining the Warburg Haus at Heilwigstraße 116 in Hamburg for the academic community, recounts the voyage of Warburg’s snail-shaped paperweight from his desk back to the Warburg Haus – the building originally opened in 1926 as the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg; a copy of the same snail is now held in the London Institute, a memento of Warburg’s workplace. Aby Warburg used his native German in a highly innovative and creative manner, including metaphors and the adoption of a distinctly scientific terminology. Language was arguably a means to convey the theoretical notions he never published independently from his studies. “Nothing makes one concentrate on an author’s meaning more surely than an attempt at reformulation, and even the frequent discovery that a translation is impossible usually helps to focus attention on the implications of this difficulty”, Ernst Gombrich noted in the introduction to his Intellectual Biography of Warburg, and, earlier, Gertrud Bing had drawn attention to “the changing relations between the images of art and language” in Warburg’s work.3 Since there are too often no exact equivalents, to be as faithful to Warburg’s ideas as possible, we have chosen to keep Warburg’s neologisms, coinages and other terms we thought were crucial to his thinking untranslated. For the same reason we have decided to maintain the 3 Gombrich 1970, p. 15; Bing 1965, p. 302.

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original German titles of his works whenever they are quoted by the authors of this volume. It remains for us to thank those people and institutions who helped us make the conference and this volume a success. We are grateful above all to those of our colleagues at the Warburg Institute who helped to prepare the conference from the very beginning and then worked hard to ensure that everything ran smoothly, in particular Catherine Charlton who helped us to marshal all the relevant Institute resources. Without the generous grants from the Max Kohler Stiftung, Martha Pulvermacher Stiftung and Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research / Bilderfahrzeuge Project and the Warburg Haus neither the conference nor the publication of this volume would have become a reality; for the latter our thanks are also due to the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. Thomas Gaehtgens was especially helpful in suggesting the funders we needed. No one could have been more enthusiastic about publishing the proceedings of Aby Warburg 150: Work, Legacy, Promise, than Katja Richter, Editorial Director at De Gruyter Arts, whose constant belief in the importance of this project was an inspiration from the beginning onwards. Anne Simon was a the most attentive, careful and gentle copy editor who helped us with much dedication to prepare this volume. Many thanks to Elizabeth Sears, too, who was absolutely instrumental in helping with linguistic revisions. Both conference organizers and editors are especially grateful to Bill Sherman, who took over the reins of the Institute at a critical moment in its history and, with the help of Madisson Brown, ensured that this volume finally saw the light of day. We fervently hope that his faith in this project, as well as that of all who have supported it from the very beginning, will be justified by the inspiration provided – we hope – by this record of the memory of the life and work of Aby Warburg. David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl



1. PROMISE



DAVID FREEDBERG

WARBURG’S VISION From Arsenal to Laboratory*

1. An Issue of Translation The subtitle of this essay could just as well have been “Kunstgeschichte als Kulturwissenschaft”, but while the first term translates easily into English, the second, like so many others in Warburg, does not. Indeed, the lack of suitable – and suitably nuanced – English translations for some of his favourite terms, many of which will appear in the following essay, is one of the obstacles to a fine-grained understanding of his work. When it comes to the noun Kultur­ wissenschaft [the science of culture] and the adjective kulturwissenschaftlich (as in the title of his famous library, for a start: the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg) we are left with a seemingly unbridgeable divide between what English speakers call the humanities and the sciences, and between two almost irreconcilable epistemologies. In German, the term Kulturwissenschaft conveys a greater confidence in the possibility of reducing at least something of the complexity, messiness and apparently infinite variability of context to a semblance of order, analytic precision and communicability across boundaries – whether geographic, cultural, spatial, temporal or epistemological. While Warburg desired to achieve what we might now think of as a more scientific form of cultural history and inter- and intra-cultural relations, his ideas in this direction were much less clearly articulated than those regarding the history of images and their transmission across space and time. Even so, there can be no question that for Warburg Kunstgeschichte [history of art] was to be conceived of as a form or even a subdivision of Kulturwissenschaft. Although he certainly would not have had the same confidence in reason and in the defining analytic role of the falsification of hypothesis as his great successor, E. H. Gombrich, Gombrich’s own biography of Warburg was more clearly attuned to this ambition of Warburg’s than most other commentators, despite the * This essay is based on my introduction to the conference, Aby Warburg 150: Work. Legacy. Promise, held on June 13–15, 2016, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Aby Warburg. Without the help of Matthew Peebles, Nomis Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, this adaptation and expansion of my text on that occasion would not have been possible. I am particularly grateful to my co-organizer Claudia Wedepohl, not only for her help in making the conference the success it was, but for the enormous contribution she has made over the years to making the archives available and adding to our knowledge of the meaning of Aby Warburg’s published and unpublished work. I should emphasize, however, that many of the interpretations of Warburg’s meaning and potential I offer here are wholly my own; and even if I would not admit that these are solely the product of my imagination, I would certainly confess that they are dreams – dreams which, I hope, have passed not through the gates of ivory, but of horn.

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many criticisms levelled at it. The severest critic of Gombrich’s biography, Edgar Wind, might have been still more so, but unfortunately he never fully set forth his views on this matter.1

2. Nachleben: Gombrich and Warburg To understand what the Warburg Institute became and how it differed from Warburg’s vision for the future of his Library, one must begin with Gombrich and work backwards. His brilliant and famously lucid contributions to the history of art, iconology and the psychology of visual perception were critical for the development of the London Institute. He was a master of the Nachleben der Antike, the afterlife of Antiquity up to and including the twentieth century. His vast learning was well equipped to deal with this key Warburgian concept, but his vision of the afterlife of Antiquity was more restrained than Warburg’s. Less imaginative than Warburg and wary of the irrational turns which Nachleben could take, Gombrich reinforced a positivist tendency at the Institute that had already set in with his Warburgian predecessors Fritz Saxl (Director 1929–1948) and Gertrud Bing (Director 1955–1959) almost from the moment they arrived in Britain in 1933. Gombrich’s own thought – or at least his ways of thinking – stood at odds with the ­irrepressible imagination of Warburg himself.2 He and his successors frequently regarded Warburg’s imaginativeness as too little constrained by reason. Both he (as early as 1971) and Charles Hope (as late as 2016) told me that Warburg’s writings were too confused to be suitable for neophyte students of cultural history. No wonder, then, that Warburg’s keenly dialectical approach to the history of culture (and the epistemological athleticism it sometimes entailed) should have receded in prominence at the London institute named after him. Gombrich’s high rationalism, his suspicion of anything in German intellectual culture which he believed might have contributed to the rise of National Socialism, his commitment to a Popperian vision of science and its implications for the history of art,3 his emphasis on 1 Many of them appear in his still unparalleled essay “Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and Its Meaning for Aesthetics” (Wind 1993); first published as “Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für die Ästhetik” in 1931, shortly after Warburg’s death; and in his famously acid 1971 review in the Times Literary Supplement (Wind 1971) of Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography (Gombrich 1986, first published in 1970). For a slightly more sceptical take on Wind’s view of Warburg, see Ginzburg 1989a. For a broader contextualization of the concept of Kunstwissenschaft in Warburg and his Hamburg circle, see Ulrich Raulff’s typically perceptive “Von der Privatbibliothek des Gelehrten zum Forschungsinstitut” (Raulff 1997). 2 On Gombrich, Warburg, and the Warburg Institute, see especially Ginzburg 1989a; Wedepohl 2015; Freedberg 2018. 3 This commitment is openly expressed throughout much of Gombrich’s work, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Art and Illusion (Gombrich 2000, first published in 1960). It is here that he declares his epistemological debt to Popper most explicitly, especially with regard to the centrality of the role of hypothesis and falsification in science. For him, as for Popper, science proceeds on the basis of the establishment of hypotheses that necessarily take precedence over the recording of sense data and remain provisional until they are shown to be clearly capable of refutation. As for Constable, so for Gombrich, “painting is a science, of which pictures are its experiments” (Gombrich 2000, p. 33). As is now well known, central to Gombrich’s

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