Warburg Institute

Aby Warburg, a member of the wealthy Hamburg banking family who devoted his life instead to art history and cultural scholarship, spent decades assembling a private library organized not by conventional subject headings but by what he called the law of the good neighbor, shelving books together according to the associative connections between the ideas they addressed rather than strict disciplinary categories, a system meant to encourage unexpected intellectual connections during research. Warburg's scholarship focused increasingly on how the imagery, symbols and ideas of classical antiquity survived and were transformed as they passed through medieval and Renaissance culture, a subject that led him deep into the history of astrology, magic and divination as vehicles through which ancient ideas persisted into later periods.

Warburg suffered a severe psychological breakdown during and after the First World War and spent several years in a Swiss psychiatric clinic, during which his assistant Fritz Saxl took charge of the library and, in 1921, formally reorganized it as a research institute, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, giving Warburg's idiosyncratic collection and method an institutional structure with a permanent staff and a program of publication and public lectures. Warburg himself resumed direction of the library after his recovery and continued to lead it until his death in 1929, by which time the Hamburg institute had become an internationally recognized center for the study of cultural and intellectual history using methods Warburg had pioneered.

Fritz Saxl, who had effectively run the institute since Warburg's illness and resumed full direction after his death in 1929, recognized the mounting danger the rise of the Nazi party posed to an institute closely associated with a prominent Jewish family and to a scholarly method the regime's cultural politics found suspect, and he began arranging the library's relocation out of Germany well before Hitler's 1933 seizure of power made the danger acute. The library and institute, comprising some sixty thousand volumes along with photographic archives and staff, were shipped from Hamburg to London in 1933 and 1934, an operation funded partly by British sympathizers concerned to save the collection, and the Warburg Institute continued its work from London under Saxl's direction through the remainder of the 1930s and the Second World War.

The Institute became a School of the University of London in 1944, formalizing its position within British academic life after more than a decade as an independent refugee institution, and it has remained a constituent part of the University of London ever since, now housed within the University's School of Advanced Study alongside other specialist humanities institutes. The Warburg Institute continues today to maintain Warburg's original library classification system and his interdisciplinary approach, sustaining a strong ongoing research program in the history of magic, astrology, alchemy and related esoteric subjects as part of the broader study of the classical tradition's survival in Western culture.