This essay finds its departure point in a title page that Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929) drafted for his lecture on the Pueblo Indians. Through the labyrinthine thought pathways evidenced by this much-amended and overwritten typescript, it explores the relation between reason and mania in Warburg's thought specifically and in humanistic scholarship more generally. Composed in 1923 while Warburg was committed to the Bellevue mental sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, the title page, and the lecture that it attempts to name, belong (...) to their author's profound and influential meditations on the defensive function of rituals and symbols. More practically, the lecture was intended, by its successful drafting and delivery before an audience of inmates, doctors, and professional colleagues, to prove Warburg's sanity and secure his release. Through an investigation of the outbreak and symptoms of Warburg's psychosis, which uncannily prefigure real historical terrors, this article represents the lecture as (in Warburg's words) a powerful “seismograph” of the European soul. Placing us at Warburg's writing desk at the pivotal moment of the author's cure-by-writing, the title page also illuminates the legacy of Warburg's Library, today at the core of the Warburg Institute in London, since the crisis that the page documents — larger than Warburg's personal one — still lies at the heart of humanistic scholarship as it attempts to grasp the essence of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of Walter Benjamin's famous essay, “Unpacking My Library”, this article, by the Librarian of the Warburg Institute, tells the story of the many times that the Warburg Library has been packed and unpacked. First it was the private collection of Aby Warburg, later a public institution, originally in Hamburg and then in London from 1933 to the present. This essay also explores the various ways in which books have been — and continue to be — acquired by (...) the Warburg Library, including publication, donation, recommendation, and purchase. Each of these methods is not only discussed but also examined in light of Benjamin's account of the acquisition of his own library. Moreover, Benjamin's view that collections lose their meaning when they cease to be personal is challenged by the example of the Warburg Library, which has been transformed from a private collection containing around 15,000 books in 1911 to a public institution today housing over 350,000 volumes, while still maintaining its unique character. (shrink)

This article draws together two works created in late fifteenth-century Mantua. Although radically different in kind, they were borne from the same acts of violence: Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna of Victory and a responsum about Jewish religious law by Rabbi Joseph Colon. Mantegna’s altarpiece, painted to commemorate the bloody battle of Fornova as a Gonzaga victory, was paid for by Daniele Norsa; Norsa, a Jewish banker, was accused of destroying a prior Christian icon and ordered to finance the new altarpiece as (...) reparations for this crime, under threat of death. Colon’s responsum addressed the permissibility of creating a Christian image under duress—idolatry being one of the sins for which a Jew must sacrifice their life rather than transgressing. We explore the remarkable artistry and distinct craft practiced by the painter and the rabbi—image making in the one case, legal reasoning in the other—as modes of describing, interpreting, and creating reality. Both works address problems of religion and idolatry, faith and coercion, victory and violence, and triumph and lament. Together they reveal the dynamics of a fascinating iconoclash, a conflict of culture waged over the struggle between making and breaking images. (shrink)