History of the Warburg Institute

History of the Warburg Institute is the institute's own account of itself, published by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, tracing its origin as Aby Warburg's private library in Hamburg, its 1933 flight from Nazi Germany to London, and its subsequent standing as a center for the study of the classical tradition and cultural memory. Its strength is direct institutional authority over its own founding facts, the date of its move, the terms of its transfer to the University of London and its present organization, which the institute itself is best placed to state accurately. Its limit is that an institution's own history page emphasizes its founding narrative and continuity rather than critically examining Aby Warburg's own intellectual method or the scholarly debates his approach to image and memory later generated, so a claim about the substance of Warburg's own scholarship, rather than the institute's history as an organization, needs a source engaging that work directly.