Aby Warburg—bibliophile, scholar, library founder—has become known as one of the most original and brilliant art historians of the twentieth century. Born in 1866 as the eldest son of a leading family of bankers, he purportedly turned his birthright over to his younger brother Max in favor of committing some of the family’s vast financial resources to scholarship, assembling a library that later formed the nucleus of the Warburg Institute in London.

In 1932 Warburg’s collected works—all of his essays published during his lifetime along with manuscript notes in his working copies—were published in German in two volumes. This new translation marks the first time these seminal volumes have been made available in their entirety in English. As an art historian, Warburg looked beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which the art was practiced, its social and cultural contexts, and its conceivable historical meaning. In particular, he often contemplated the meaning of the revival of antique motifs and the imitation of antique institutions in art, particularly during the Italian Renaissance. He eventually defined a unique parallel relationship: the contemporary Northern European’s attraction to the Italian Renaissance was to him much like the fascination that antiquity held for painters and other artists during the Italian Renaissance.

• Introduction by Kurt W. Forster
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• Editorial Foreword by Gertrud Bing
• VOLUME ONE
  • Antiquity in Florentine Bourgeois Culture Addenda
    • Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring (1893)
    • Sandro Botticelli (1898)
    • The Picture Chronicle of a Florentine Goldsmith (1899)
    • On Imprese Amorose in the Earliest Florentine Engravings (1905)
    • The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie (1902)
    • Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to His Sons (1907)
    • Matteo degli Strozzi (1893)
    • The Commencement of Building Work at the Palazzo Medici (1908)
    • An Astronomical Map in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence (1911)
    • The Emergence of the Antique as a Stylistic Ideal in Early Renaissance Painting (1914)
  • Exchanges between Florentine and Flemish Culture Addenda
    • Artistic Exchanges between North and South in the Fifteenth Century (1905)
    • Flemish Art and the Florentine Early Renaissance (1902)
    • Flemish and Florentine Art in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Circle around 1480 (1901)
    • Rogier van der Weyden’s Entombment in the Uffizi (1903)
    • On a Florentine Painting That Ought to Be in the Exhibition of French Primitives (1904)
    • Peasants at Work in Burgundian Tapestries (1907)
  • Antiquity and Modern Life in Renaissance Pageantry
    • Two Scenes from King Maximilian’s Captivity in Bruges on a Sheet of Sketches by the So-Called Master of the Housebook (1911)
    • Airship and Submarine in the Medieval Imagination (1913)
    • Piero della Francesca’s Battle of Constantine in the Watercolor Copy by Johann Anton Ramboux (1912)
    • Medicean Pageantry at the Valois Court in the Flemish Tapestries of the Galleria degli Uffizi (1927)
    • The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589 (1895)
    • Contributions to the Cultural History of the Florentine Quattrocento (1929)
• VOLUME TWO
  • Italian Antiquity in Germany
    • Durer and Italian Antiquity (1905)
    • The Gods of Antiquity and the Early Renaissance in Southern and Northern Europe (1908)
    • Church and Court Art at Landshut (1909)
  • The Olympian Gods as Astral Daemons Addenda
    • Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara (1912)
    • On Images of Planetary Deities in the Low German Almanac of 1519 (1908)
    • Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920)
    • Astrology under Oriental Influence (1926)
  • Occasional Writings on Public Cultural Issues
    • American Chapbooks (1897)
    • The Mural Paintings in Hamburg City Hall (1910)
    • Art Exhibitions at the Volksheim (1907)
    • A Specialized Heraldic Library (1913)
    • A Newly Discovered Fresco by Andrea del Castagno (1899)
    • Speech on the Opening of the Kunsthistorisches Institut at the Palazzo Guadagni, Florence, 15 October 1927 (1927)
    • In Memory of Robert Munzel (1918)
    • The Problem In Between (1918)
• List of Illustrations
• Bibliography
• Index

Little known in his lifetime, Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has come to be considered one of the most original and brilliant art historians of the twentieth century.

Kurt W. Forster was Full Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology, from 1993 until his reitirement in 1999. Born and educated in Zurich, he studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Zurich, rounding out his studies in Florence and London. He taught at Yale University (1960-​67), Stanford University (1967-​82), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before taking up the directorship of the newly established Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. There he inaugurated a broadly-​based program of research and publications, to which he has contributed with his English edition of Aby Warburg’s Collected Writings, to be published in the series Texts & Documents.

Since 1987 David Britt, formerly an editor of art books at Thames & Hudson in London for more than twenty years, has been translating full-time. His translations in the Getty Research Institute’s Texts & Documents series include titles by Aby Warburg, Friedrich Gilly, and Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières.

“Warburg (1866–1929) was a preeminent influence in the development of 20th-century art history. A disciple of Jacob Burckhardt, he believed that art history studies focusing solely on stylistic elements were incomplete and thus developed an approach similar to the Kulturwissenschaft of turn-of-the-century anthropologists. From his studies of Renaissance Florence, he began to question the resurgence of pagan symbols in 15th-century Italy, which led to a focus on the influence of antiquity on modern European civilization. That focus then became the center of his personal library (and the core collection for the Warburg Institute). The 1932 edition of the first two volumes of Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings) has just been reprinted, but this impressively large tome is its first translation into English. The text is dense and the illustrations are the modest sort commonly used 60 years ago, but the content is of extraordinary value to scholars of Renaissance art.” —Library Journal

“Warburg’s achievement . . . should now reclaim its position as central to our understanding of the aims and the methods of art history. His voice can be heard anew with the clarity, the purpose, and the authority of its original expression.” —New Republic

“Finally allow[s] English speakers to read for themselves the complex, cantankerous, minutiae-driven scholarship.” —Bryn Mawr Classical Review

“The fascinating details and complexity of Warburg’s life are masterfully recreated.” —CAA Reviews

“With its richness of cross-reference and documentation, this handsome book is an essential addition to any scholarly library, and one that will be treasured by individual purchasers.” —Foreword Reviews