Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography by E. H. Gombrich Review by: Morris Weitz The Art Bulletin, Vol. 54, No.

1 (Mar., 1972), pp. 107-110 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3048955 . Accessed: 03/12/2012 23:33
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increasingly authoritative balance and formulation. This is particularly true of the author's fourteen crisp and excellent pages on Vasari. So, though Professor Grassi's book lacks the sort of new texts and fresh viewpoints that give a reviewer something to talk about, it will be used. What it offers is a clear summary of received opinion about the history of art criticism; it could be handed to any student who wants something short, un-eccentric and bland. It also provides useful bibliographies of recent studies in the field, particularly Italian ones; as well as the references in the notes there is a vast, forty-four-page bibliography with a thousand or so items at the end of the book, compiled by Vittorio Casale. The most assiduous reader of periodicals will find articles here which he did not know about. It must be said, though, that there are extraordinary omissions of German-language books from both references and bibliography: citations of Karl Borinski's fundamental Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie (1914-1924), for instance, and Hans Rupprich's recent superb and definitive Diirer editions (1956-1969) are lacking. Purchasers should collate, by the way: in the review copy pages 98-99, 102-03, 1o6-07, I10-1II were blank.
MICHAEL BAXANDALL

Warburg Institute

An Intellectual E. H. GOMBRICH, Aby Warburg: Biography,

with a Memoir of the Library by F. Saxl, London, Warburg Institute, 1970. Pp. 376; 65 pls. ?6 The

Professor Gombrich offers this book as a compromise between a rigorous analysis of Warburg's ideas about art and a publication of Warburg's literary remains. Although it represents a compromise to him, the book, at least to one of the readers he addresses those who need and wish an introduction to Warburg's achievements - is a unified, uncompromising masterpiece in its choice of an exegetical approach to Warburg's work, constantly interwoven with selected quotations from the unpublished remains. This is at once a superb intellectual biography, lucidly delineated and profoundly moving, as well as a remarkably sympathetic survey of a neglected chapter in the history of ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as these ideas influenced Warburg. Perhaps the book is even something more: Gombrich's successful attempt to find in Warburg's intellectual life as an art historian a reconciliation of the same forces that Warburg found but could not reconcile in the works to which he devoted his life. The origin of this book, much of it written in 1946-47, is of great, even tragic, interest because of the events surrounding it. Gombrich's account certainly explains his feelings of compromise even though, as I have already suggested, his book does not validate that apologia. The relevant facts are these: when Warburg died in Hamburg in 1929, at age sixty-three, Fritz Saxl, his friend and successor, projected a collected edition of his writings. The first two volumes, containing his published works, meticulously edited by Warburg's devoted assistant, Gertrud Bing, appeared in 1932. Five more sections were then announced: the "Atlas," called MInemosyne;his unpublished lectures and minor essays, plus his "Fragments of a Theory of Expression on Anthropological Foundations"; his letters, aphorisms, and autobiographical records; and a catalogue of Warburg's Library. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, the staff emigrated and the Library was moved to London. (In words different from yet strangely reminiscent of Stefan Zweig's poignant description of the visa-less, passport-less refugees from Hitler's Greater Germany, drifting from consulate to consulate, looking for a place that would receive them, Saxl writes of these more fortunate refugees the contents of the Library: "One day a ship arrived in the Thames carrying six hundred boxes of books plus iron shelving, reading desks, bookbinding machines, photographic apparatus, etc., etc. Ten thousand square feet were wanted to house the Library. Circumstances were favorable; Lord Lee of Fareham had secured accommodation in Thames House, a large office building .... Mr.

Samuel Courtauld and the Warburg family in America promised to provide the funds," page 337.) In spite of the new burdens imposed upon them, Saxl and Gertrud Bing persevered in their efforts to complete the projected edition of Warburg's work. Most importantly, Saxl consulted Ernst Kris in Vienna in 1935, and it was Kris who asked Gombrich to go to London with the possibility of helping Gertrud Bing edit the papers. Gombrich came to London in 1936, looked at parts of the projected "Atlas," some of the notes, drafts, jottings and notebooks. He recalls: "The problem of how to edit papers of this kind seemed to me formidable" (page 3). In any case, the invasion of Austria, the War, and Gombrich's six year stint at the B.B.C. prevented him from accepting this daunting assignment. Nevertheless, during this enforced absence from the Institute, he became convinced that Warburg's literary remains "should not be published so much as used in a presentation of his ideas" (page 3). It was with this aim in mind that he composed much of the present book, in 1946-47. After some resistance on the part of Gertrud Bing to Gombrich's plan for a detached presentation of Warburg's work, she agreed to write a biography of Warburg that would then be supplemented by Gombrich's volume on Warburg's ideas. Nothing came of this, however; her wholehearted assistantship to Henri Frankfort, the successor of Fritz Saxl as Director of the Warburg Institute and then her own assumption of the Directorship, among other reasons, prevented her from writing the biography. Her death in 1964, the encouragement of C. G. Heise, a former friend and pupil of Warburg, about the draft, and Gombrich's own conviction that Warburg's life and work should be joined led to the completion of Gombrich's manuscript and the book under review. Since Gombrich has written an intellectualbiography in which he has chosen to enter only into those personal details and traits that directly impinge upon the development of Warburg's ideas and since he narrates this evolution chronologically, I shall serve the reader best by following his exposition in the same order. Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg on June 13, 1866, the son of a banker. He was the eldest of seven children. Three of his brothers became eminent bankers. At the age of six he was very ill, recalling later that his dreams were haunted by grotesque illustrations from a book by Balzac. When he was ten, his mother became gravely ill; he remembers her being carried on a litter and compares the journey to the Stations of the Cross. It was also during this illness that he became estranged from the Jewish religion, meeting his suffering at her pain by contravening the dietary laws and reading stories about the Red Indians: "The emotion of pain found an outlet in fantasies of romantic cruelty. This was my inoculation against active cruelty .. ." (quoted on page 20). When he was thirteen (his brother Max relates in his memorial address of December 5, 1929) he got Max to purchase his birthright in exchange for Max's promise to buy him all the books he ever wanted. This promise, Gombrich notes, has become part of the Warburg legend. Warburg attended a Realgymnasiumbut soon decided on a career in the history of art. An early reading of Lessing's Laokoon caught his imagination, Gombrich writes, especially in its concern with "the problem of the expression of suffering, of restraint and abandon in extreme emotional states, which was bound to strike a chord in the mind of a highly strung adolescent, much given to tantrums" (pages 23-24). The whole problem of the legitimacy of emotional the visual art excess, or violent movement and gesture-pathos-in which had been Lessing's fundamental concern, became Warburg's as well. At the age of twenty Warburg went to the University of Bonn. There he encountered Henry Thode, whose emphasis on the Renaissance as an acceptance of Nature and Beauty seen as God's creation impressed him; Carl Justi, known for his interest in the relation between Northern realism and Italian Renaissance borrowings from antiquity; Hermann Usener, who lectured on mythology and in particular on Tito Vignoli, the Italian philosopher, who had attempted a theory of mythology based upon associationist psychology; and Karl Lamprecht, whose approach to history was psychological, according to which historical periods

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could be best understood in terms of collective psychology: each of these scholars profoundly influenced Warburg in his formative years, Gombrich says, in his lucid exposition of their respective theories and contributions. The strongest influence, Gombrich adds, was Lamprecht: "The interest in psychology, the wide evolutionary perspective, the determination to see and investigate all manifestations of culture impartially and to class art and artefacts among them, the interest in periods of transition for what they can tell us of the psychological dynamics of culture - all this and more ... remained with Warburg" (page 37). Warburg's first paper, written for Kekule von Stradonitz, deals with the representations of the fight between the Lapiths and Centaurs from Olympia to the Parthenon. Here for the first time Warburg writes on a subject that he was never to neglect, the drapery that ". .. flutters as if in passionate excitement" (quoted on page 38). In 1888, Warburg went to Munich where he heard A. Riehl lecture on Renaissance art. From there he went to Florence to study Masaccio under August Schmarsow, who was also much concerned with gesture and expression. It is this concern and the link between primitive mentality and violent bodily expression, as they led to Warburg's statement of the problem of the role of antiquity in Renaissance art, that Gombrich next explores. In the Brancacci Chapel, under the tutelage of Schmarsow and starting from Vasari's interpretation of Florentine painting as a steady progress toward naturalism, Warburg detailed not only the differences between Masolino and Masaccio but was assigned also the task of contrasting Masaccio's naturalistic innovations with the ornamental, decorative elements of quattrocento relief. These elements recalled the draperies of the ancient battling centaurs and raised doubts for Warburg about Lessing's strictures as well as about Vasari's theory. Painting, too, of the quattrocento, especially by Filippino Lippi and Botticelli, represented movement in fluttering veils and garments. How, Warburg asked himself, were these deviations from the static and naturalistic to be explained; and, more important, how were they to be reconciled with Vasari and nineteenth-century Vasarian views of the Renaissance ? Warburg entertained one hypothesis, best stated by Anton Springer, that these deviations were inspired by a desire to emulate the pleasing forms of antiquity, but he finally rejected it mainly because it conceived of antiquity as an idealizing influence, leading to calm beauty, a conception that did not satisfy his own feeling that these deviations went deeper than the gratifications of the hedonic. Warburg submitted his thesis on Botticelli in 1891, concentrating on the Primavera and the Birth of Venus. Instead of investigating the predilection for ornamental drapery, he asked how Botticelli and his patrons saw antiquity. In this connection, Warburg traced the theme of the "Birth of Venus" to Poliziano who in turn had derived it from Ovid. Both poets talked of fluttering garments and flowing locks. It was Poliziano, Warburg concluded, who influenced Botticelli here; antiquity, thus, offered graceful or passionate movement rather than static serenity to Botticelli. The significance of these "accessories in motion" - their role in the Renaissance what they revealed about the impact of antiquity and indeed their importance in the creation of art altogether, Gombrich adds, never ceased to occupy Warburg. The Birth of Venusalso raised the problem of the isolated female figure who receives Venus on the shore. For Warburg she is the Goddess of Spring as well as a representative figure of what the quattrocento referred to as "Nympha." In his discussion of the Primavera, Warburg again associates some of its themes with contemporary literature and, more innovatively, relates the maidens with the flowing garments to Florentine pageantry as well as to Leonardo's injunction to show the true size of the limbs of "nymphs and angels who are represented in very thin garments driven and pressed by the blowing winds." This idealized female figure in motion fascinated Warburg all his life. He remained ambivalent toward it as he was toward the expression of passion and movement in the Laocoon and in the rapes of the Parthenon metopes: were they and the antiquity they embodied an enslavement or a liberation ? In 1892 Warburg went to Berlin to study psychology and medi-

cine. As Gombrich notes, it was a logical step, for Warburg's interests were already converging on "the basic psychological mechanisms which might account for the existence of religion, of art, and of science within the context of human evolution" (page 67). Once again Vignoli's work (Myth and Science) became important. And once more Gombrich gives a fine account of this philosopher's ideas. It was particularly Vignoli's explanation of the role of fear in projection that impressed Warburg, especially Vignoli's conception of human evolution as a victory of rationality over irrational fears. Darwin's The Expression of Emotion in Animals and Men (read already in Florence) came to the fore, especially Darwin's thesis about the evolutionary chain of purposive movements in animals leading to expressive movements in man. F. T. Fischer's notions of a symbol as a visual image and of the image as a substitute for the word suggested a new dimension to Warburg's study of the image in which symbol and meaning are linked by deep psychological forces. Symbolism, Warburg began to see, was "an aspect of human culture in which the irrational was still very close to the surface. It was the task of a scientific 'psychology of culture' to analyse and explain this form of irrationalism which pervades both religion and art" (page 75). Fluttering drapery, thus, became an image that had to be explained not only thematically but psychologically. Also, at this stage of his career, Warburg's research into pageantry (as depicted in some drawings by Buontalenti devoted to theatrical performances) further deepened the problem of his assessment of the role of antiquity. Classical myths, Warburg saw, could be progressive in some and degenerate in other of these drawings. In other words, .could drag art down or Warburg now realised that "antiquity... lift it up" (page 86). What, then, is the true significance of antiquity for our civilization - threat or guide to human values ? It was this question, Gombrich points out, that led to the central problem of the Library that Warburg was to establish. In 1895 Warburg went to America. Repelled by the emptiness of civilization that he found on the East Coast, he enjoyed only the Smithsonian Institute and his trip to the Indian reservations of the Southwest. He saw among the Indians of New Mexico a phase of civilization that corresponded to his vision of early Greek paganism. In 1897 Warburg married Mary Hertz, a painter he had met ten years before in Florence. Together they left Hamburg to set up a home in Florence. Once there, Warburg returned to his Florentine research; Leonardo became a focal point. Warburg saw in Leonardo an artist who, unlike Botticelli, had resisted the temptations of fashion. His greatness was to be found in his unity of serene inward beauty and rapid dramatic agitation. Antiquity in particular served Leonardo not only in its drapery but in its canon of Vitruvian proportion. And behind Leonardo's classic style, Warburg proclaims, is his Besonnenheit (restraint, detachment, poise) that is the supreme virtue. The "Nympha" also came to the fore. Warburg began a playful correspondence with his Dutch friend A. Jolles on this subject, the pretense being that Jolles had fallen in love with the "Nympha" in Ghirlandajo's fresco, The Birth of the Virgin, in Santa Maria Novella. Jolles contrasts the servant girl ("a classical nymph?") with the respectable Florentine ladies depicted. She reminds him of Salome, Judith, the young Tobias. Who, he asks, is she? Where does she come from - this embodiment of passion ? To this Warburg replies that she is a beautiful butterfly which eludes his grasp. (Gombrich adds: "The confession could stand as a motto to Warburg's collected papers," page IIo.) However intense her attraction, Warburg cautions his friend, it must be balanced by an equally intense love of understanding her. It is this conflict between the aesthetic and the historical, Gombrich says, that became the true subject of Warburg's drafts on the Tornabuoni frescoes. How, Warburg asked, can the "Nympha" - the embodiment of Renaissance paganism-- be related to or reconciled with the religious attitudes of the period ? Giovanni Tornabuoni, unlike Francesco Sassetti, had gotten approval from the Dominican monks of Santa Maria Novella for his program; the pagan elements, therefore, Warburg reasoned, cannot be incompatible with the religious. Yet the frescoes,

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Warburg insisted, are un-Christian. Why, then, a "Nympha" in the world of Tornabuoni and Ghirlandajo? Warburg offered several answers, finally tentatively settled on the view that these frescoes contain elements which represent different facets of Renaissance mentality. In particular, the "Nympha" is the classical "Victoria," both acceptable to Renaissance mercantile respectability as a part of its ancestry but also, as was "Victoria" to the Romans, as an outlet for elemental passions. Indeed, she symbolizes "the eruption of primitive emotion through the crust of Christian self-control and bourgeois decorum" (page I25). In Botticelli, the figure in violent motion is extraneous; in Ghirlandajo, she serves as a liberation from humdrum realism. Both antiquity and the Renaissance, once more, for Warburg, pointed to something deeper than the history of style. Warburg's interests in quattrocento patronage also flourished. Research into certain inventories of the period revealed surprising trends of taste: for Northern tapestries, for panni dipinti, and for Northern devotional art. Nor only Florentine patrons but her artists as well were equally impressed by the North. This facet of Renaissance taste, Warburg found, was not regarded as inferior; nor could it be interpreted as a mere freak. Consequently, the whole traditional picture of the early Renaissance was falling apart; as Gombrich writes, "On the one side there was the rebirth of the grand manner, the return of passionate expression in movement and gesture sanctioned by pagan antiquity, the world of the 'Nympha' and all it stood for; and on the other the intriguing signs of allegiance to the mediaeval values of Burgundy as exemplified in the tapestries allafranzese, the panni dipinti with their riotous vulgarity, the devotional art of Netherlandish donors' portraits, and finally the transference of chivalrous pageantry to Florentine soil. Here was an equation to tax the ingenuity of Warburg's historical psychology" (page 137). Next Gombrich traces Warburg's alternative hypotheses about this seeming clash of forces in the Renaissance: that Gothic realism was an impediment; that it was a catalyst; that it was an ally. Warburg struggled with all three, never abandoning the idea of the Renaissance as a liberation from the medieval. What had to be repudiated, he came to realize, was the metaphor of the clash of forces in favor of the notion of a harmonizing of opposites. His paper on Francesco Sassetti's Last Will and Testament, the result of his search for and discovery of the document, illustrates best Warburg's hypothesis of compatibility. The will is medieval in its conception of loyalty to clan and to family honor. Fortuna also finds a place in it, as it had on Giovanni Rucellai's impresa where she is represented as a pagan nude; and as it had appeared on many of the business contracts of the Medici: "Col nome di Dio e di Buonaventura." Warburg also perceived this same reconciliation of medieval, pagan and modern in the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinith. The study of astrological imagery was Warburg's next great interest. Although it transcended his Renaissance concerns, one aspect of it did relate to the Renaissance: "the return of the gods to Olympus in all their original humanity and beauty" (page 187). An equally impressive application of this interest in the stars was to his study of Dtirer's Melencolia, in which he anticipated some of the findings of Saxl and Panofsky and prepared the way for Panofsky's magnificent iconographical reading in his The Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer. Warburg's contributions to astrological imagery established his public reputation as well as his association with Fritz Saxl; but it also brought him back to his earlier concern about the emergence of rationality from irrational fears. Astrology, he saw, was a paradoxical amalgam of rational and magical thought; it plotted mathematically the course of the planets while at the same time it conceived of the stars as powerful demons who dominated man. The war broke out in 1914. Warburg's futile efforts to influence the course of events led him, by way of an interest in political propaganda, to the German Reformation and to Luther, in whom he saw another great liberator. Fascinated by the crude prints and woodcuts of the period, Warburg raised the question of a connection between them and Diurer. Diirer, Warburg says, both capitulated to and transcended magic fears, especially in the Melencolia, where he

transforms Saturn as a demon into a visual image of man in active contemplation. Just as Panofsky later was to find in the Melencolia a self-portrait of Durer the artist, so Gombrich finds in Warburg's analysis of the Melencolia Warburg's own self-portrait: of a soul in torment over the struggle between fear and reason. With the breakdown of Germany in 1918, in conjunction with more personal causes that Gombrich chooses not to explore, Warburg finally succumbed to the demonic and his own nervous breakdown in 1918. In 1923 he started to recover, so much so that he secured permission from his doctors to deliver a lecture on Serpent Ritual, which was based on his American experiences. The notes, Gombrich says, "contain, in effect, the most explicit formulation of Warburg's general ideas which he ever attempted," (page 216). Here is Gombrich's summary: "The idea that man's primeval reaction to the universal terror of his existence underlies all human attempts at spiritual orientation is basic to Warburg's later thought. The history of civilization is for him a history of the fight against the monster, against the compulsive reflex of cause projection. It is not a fight that can ever end in a clear-cut victory. The idea of the tangible cause and its compelling force is tragically rooted in our minds - we cannot hope ever to escape it, all we can do is to purify and sublimate this reaction into something more spiritual, more human. In this act of spiritualization of man's primeval phobic reactions lies our hope of salvation" (page 223). In 1924 Warburg returned to Hamburg. Saxl, with the family's approval, had transformed the private library of Warburg into a public institution. Warburg started lecturing again. A new interest in Rembrandt emerged. Rembrandt, Warburg pointed out, rejected the Baroque for the values of classical art. Like Diirer, like some of the quattrocento Florentines, Rembrandt had used antiquity for spiritualization and not, as others had done, for empty pathos formulae that represent action for its own sake. "Every age," Warburg concluded in a memorable phrase, "has the renaissance of antiquity it deserves" (quoted on page 238). From 1927 on, the notion of social memory - especially those traditional elements that the artist can surrender to or conquer became more important to Warburg. A new influence was felt, not Jung, as one might expect, but Richard Semon's Mneme (I908), in which book he coined the term "engram" as a name for the traces that affect living matter. For Warburg, Semon's engram corresponded to his symbol: both are preserved energies, to be activated for good or ill. In Gombrich's words: "It is, above all, the waves of religious enthusiasm in primitive ritual and Dionysiac frenzy which crystallize in symbols or 'engrams' of permanent significance. Herein lies the importance of 'Dionysiac' Greek antiquity for our Western civilization" (page 243). This notion of the charged symbol at last enabled Warburg to satisfy his deepest intellectual drive for a biological, psychological, social - a monistic - interpretation of the Renaissance: specifically, as the reactivation of social memories. These social engrams, which supplanted individual gesture and movement, can be discharged positively or negatively - "as pagan maenad or Christian Magdalen" (page 248); hence, they are neutral, as indeed, it followed, is the whole tradition in art. Not only the artist but the historian, Warburg says, is sensitive to these "dynamograms," these unseen influences from the past. The historian, in particular, is a sounding instrument of different cultures. In this connection, Gombrich quotes from one of Warburg's 1926-27 seminar notebooks on the two great historians, Burckhardt and Nietzsche. Here are some of Warburg's comments on them, too marvelous to go unquoted: "... What type of seer is Nietzsche? He is the type of Nabi, the ancient prophet who runs out into the street, tears his clothes, cries woe and perhaps carries the people with him ..." "Nietzsche wooed Burckhardt very much. Burckhardt turned away from him like someone who sees a dervish run through the streets ofJerusalem . .." "One teaches and transforms without demanding, the other is demanding because transforming and makes use of the ancient orgiastic techniques of the chorus leader" (pages 256-58). Warburg's last great project was his "Atlas" entitled Mnemosyne. Anticipated by his theory of social memory which in turn

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explained for him the symbol as the counterpart in the collective mind of the engram in the individual nervous system; aided by a new tool of presentation - the display of photographs on a screen that Saxl had suggested to him; deepened by Warburg's study of astral symbolism and by his new scholarly investigations of, among other artefacts, postage stamps, on which he found classical motifs; prepared for by lectures on his new insights into the "Nympha" (one of which lectures changed Kenneth Clark's scholarly life) as well as into Manet's Dejeunersur 1'herbe(which he traced back to antiquity) - all of these interests, Gombrich says, converge in his magnumopus, of which he left only a fragment. As projected, the Mnemosynewas to be a picture atlas, composed of screens with photographs pinned on them. Its nucleus was the screens illustrating the vicissitudes of the Olympian gods in the astrological tradition and the role of the ancient pathos-formulae in post-medieval art and civilization. When Warburg died there were forty such screens with their nearly one thousand photographs. In addition, there were supporting fragments of texts, the most coherent of which had been dictated to Gertrud Bing in Rome for an earlier lecture. It was this "Atlas" that Gombrich saw when he came to London in 1936. Since the photographs could be unpinned and repinned, the screens allowed for all sorts of kaleidoscopic permutations. It was with these permutations that Warburg experimented in testing his philosophy of bipolarity. "The fact that every image seemed charged with conflicting and contradictory forces, that the same 'pathos formula' spelt 'liberation' in one respect and 'degradation' in another, made it most difficult for Warburg to present the complexity of his historical view in discursive language" (page 285). The Mnemosyne took shape in the late i92o's. It was of course a recapitulation of his life work but Warburg meant it to be more, a kind of basic vocabulary of human passion that would illumine recurrent themes, such as the "Nympha." The drafts themselves that were to accompany the photographs, difficult as they are, require at least paraphrase and summary: basic in these drafts are ideas about art and science in relation to emotion and memory. The polarity of passion and contemplation becomes the key to the essence of art which, like science, "opposes the chaos of onrushing 'phobic' impressions and thus contributes to that sense of detachment which is the essence of civilization" (page 290). The early emphasis on the liberating force of pagan gestures consequently shifts in the Mnemosyne to the spiritual sublimation of these impulses. The "Nympha" in partiular, to which a whole screen is devoted, and which earlier had been a liberating force to Warburg, now becomes "Miss Hurrybring," "the hurrying victory-bringer," represented not only by Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, but by Raphael, Agostino Veneziano, and even a snapshot of a modern Italian peasant, among others. She too is now seen as a neutral (not intrinsically liberating) force, capable of being transformed, inverted, or debased. Mnemosyne as "Memory," Gombrich sums up, is truly a fitting title for such a project. "It shows the memories of a scholar's life as if they were woven into a dream" (page 302). Having meticulously detailed Warburg's work and achievements in the course of this inexhaustibly informative and absorbing biography, Gombrich reserves his final chapter for an assessment. He sums up Warburg's major contributions to scholarship in the history of art, the greatest being Warburg's "focusing on a given commission, and on the solution that emerges from the conflicting possibilities which the historical situation presented..." (page 315). However we may evaluate Warburg's philosophical interpretation of his findings, that he made important discoveries in the history of art, especially in his studies of images, Gombrich says, cannot be disputed. It remains a major achievement along with the Library and the inspiration he gave to others, such as Saxl and Panofsky. Though he was not committed to iconography and certainly did not conceive it as a substitute for formal analysis, he contributed to it through his own interpretation oficonology as the study of the "interaction of forms and contents in the clash of traditions" (page 3I13). Ironically, too, in spite of his emphasis on social memory, his particular research studies, in their accent

on individual people and images, destroyed the pervasive generalities of Geistesgeschichte,in whose place he put Kulturgeschichte. "Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail" Warburg had noted as one of the mottoes of his first seminar: it is in the minutiae, not in the spirit, of the age, that one seeks, as he found, the reality of history. Warburg's one great, all-consuming weakness, if it is a weakness, Gombrich concludes, was his rejection of formal style analysis. Committed as he was to the study of influences, he was unwilling to see the history of art as the slow evolution of conventions of representation. This refusal explains his virtual neglect of medieval art and, through that neglect, the inadequacy of his ideas about the Renaissance. "He never considered a stylistic explanation of why the images of twisting bodies in the grip of passion which the Renaissance took over from Hellenistic art could not have been simply absorbed into the vocabulary of the Middle Age ..." (page 309). Even Warburg's early problem about billowing forms is a stylistic one. These forms were not confined to Florence; they were a fashion that originated in the North as part of the development of Late Gothic. In stressing themes rather than conventions, Warburg was misled in his studies of Botticelli and Ghirlandajo. Warburg "was, therefore, thrown back on his own conceptual apparatus to account for the hiatus between Hellenistic and Renaissance representations" (page 309). Nevertheless, Gombrich concedes, Warburg's conviction that it is the historian's task to penetrate beyond the description of stylistic changes to the kind of resonances he sought "may yet be valid" (page 32o0). Whether Gombrich has written a definitive intellectual biography of Warburg, I am not competent to judge. But I have no doubts that he has definitively answered Saxl's question (page 4) about who would want to read a biography of Warburg and, in answering that question, that he has composed a tribute to the life of a mind and, through it, a tribute to the whole humanistic and humanizing discipline of art history. My great reservation is that although Gombrich shows but does not state that Warburg, as an art historian, dedicated to the detachment of understanding Besonnenheit- did achieve the harmony of the conflicting forces of reason and emotion he could not reconcile in the works he studied, and although he discusses Warburg's estrangement from the Jewish religion, he does not pose the question of the relation between Warburg as liberated Jew and Warburg as a liberated art historian who, in his fight against the aesthetes and the Nietzscheans, attacked both the debasement and perversion of art. There must be a connection and since Gombrich's book is in part a chapter in the history of ideas, the connection in Warburg and in others who came before and after Warburg is important and well worth exploring, if only because it points to one possible form of Jewish identity with the values of Besonnenheitand Wahrheit which may be as authentic a life-style as other, more orthodox, forms of commitment. WEITZ MORRIS

BrandeisUniversity

ROSENBERG, JAKOB

OnQualityin Art,Criteria of Excellence, in Fine Arts, Past andPresent(The A. W. MellonLecture

1964, Bollingen Series xxxv, 13), Princeton, Princeton Press. Pp. 264; 4 color pls., 164 black-andUniversity white ills. $Io.oo

The subject of this book is, or ought to be, of the first importance in our field. Like it or not, we are all involved in making discriminations and drawing conclusions which involve the differing quality of works of art. There are, however, surprisingly few art historians today who address themselves to the problem head-on as Jakob Rosenberg has done. The reasons are perhaps obvious. First, we think of our work as basically objective and scientific, and secondly, the professional students of problems of quality, the aestheticians, have offered us little help or incentive. If economics has been called the dismal science, aesthetics, with its endless discussions of what is beauty, might well be called the irrelevant, at least to the concerns of those who deal daily with particular works of art.

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