Speaking of Lilliput?: Recollections on the Warburg Institutein the Early 1970s

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 1, Winter 2012, pp. 160-173 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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SPEAKING OF LILLIPUT?Recollections on the Warburg Institute in the Early 1970s

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

In 1970 E. H. Gombrich’s intellectual biography of Aby Warburg appeared after an extremely long period of gestation. Gombrich had been brought to London to work on Warburg’s papers in 1936, and by the time the book saw the light of day he had already served for more than a decade as director of the Warburg Institute. The Institute’s publication of a study of its founder by its current director almost seemed to be an official act, perhaps even more than may have originally been intended. Seen in this light, reactions to the work take on greater significance.

Gombrich’s book was greeted by a chorus of criticism that has continued to resonate. Whatever the merits of this critique, his approach has not fit well with interests in the psychological, anthropological, and irrational aspects of War-burg and his writings that the book’s critics mentioned and that are also evident in much of the subsequent flood of literature on him and his circle. Although this reaction may in part have been initiated, perhaps provoked, by Gombrich’s efforts, his reserved response does not accord with much recent writing about Warburg, which at times has approximated even the hagiographic aura that sur-rounds Walter Benjamin, one of his erstwhile correspondents. This discrepancy, however, helps introduce some of the differences between the Kulturwissen-schaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, as it was in its Hamburg incarnation, and the Warburg Institute in the University of London, the research and teaching insti-tution that I experienced from 1970 to 1972.

Common Knowledge 18:1

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1456953

© 2012 by Duke University Press

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61IThe most biting review, which was published anonymously in the TLS, drew a direct contrast between the two. Gombrich himself immediately recognized who its author was — Edgar Wind — and remarked in passing that he was surprised it had not been even nastier. Wind, a member of the Hamburg group, had worked at the Warburg Institute in London when it first came to England, had been a rival for the position of director, and had eventually settled at Oxford, where he was the first professor of the history of art; he was already well known as a critic of the Institute’s personnel and direction. Several phrases in Wind’s review stand out as exemplars of scholarly vituperation. Picking up on the diction of some infe-licitous sentences in Gombrich’s large tome, Wind said that his words betrayed the existence of “a mentality and a milieu that are smaller than Warburg’s” and called another of his statements “Lilliputian” (figs. 1 and 2).1

Wind’s remarks will throw the present essay into stark relief. I have written in reply to an invitation to offer recollections of the Warburg Institute by pro-viding some anecdotes and characterizations of personalities encountered there around 1970. According to Wind’s characterization, these reminiscences might be regarded as no more than speaking of — or even from — Lilliput. For in 1970 to 1972, I was a student in the MPhil program at the Warburg Institute, in what was called “Combined Historical Studies (the Renaissance),” and Gombrich served as my adviser on the thesis completed during the second year of the course.2

However brilliant Wind may have been (and I believe he may have been the most brilliant of the Hamburg circle), his judgment was and remains a matter of taste. It is debatable whether the range of interests and capabilities represented by the group of scholars assembled at the Warburg in London around 1970 was much less than that found in Warburg’s Hamburg in the 1920s. Whatever one’s opinion may be of this matter, and whatever the merits of Wind’s critique, it is dif-ficult to believe that a milieu that included, as members of the Institute, not only Gombrich but Frances Yates, Michael Baxandall, D. P. Walker, A. I. Sabra, and Otto Kurz — and as frequent presences, Michael Podro, Arnaldo Momigliano, Michael Screech, and Nikolaus Pevsner — may in any case be called Lilliputian. Retrospectively, this group might even seem to be representative of a lost golden

1. “Unfinished Business: Aby Warburg and His Library,” TLS, June 25, 1971, 735, printed as “Appendix: On a Recent Biography of Warburg,” in Edgar Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson with a biographical memoir by Hugh Lloyd- Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), quotations at 112.

2. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Theories of Light in Renaissance Art and Science” (MPhil thesis, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1972), subsequently pub-lished in revised and substantially reduced form as “The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 258 – 87 (republished in The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renais-sance [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993], 49 – 78).

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age: issues discussed in the academy still maintained a broader public interest, many bright young students in English and American universities still chose to follow pursuits that did not lead to great remuneration, and within the academy itself the humanities were still respected, often as highly as were other fields of study. All comparisons aside, several of the figures mentioned (Gombrich, Yates, Baxandall, Momigliano) have certainly had a great impact on scholarship, even if others (Pevsner, Podro, Sabra) may have had a more limited, though definite, effect on particular fields.

To be sure, this vision of a golden age may be an effect of the golden haze that seems to settle over memory as the years advance. But then, would this observation be any less true of Wind, who penned his review in his seventy- first year, more than forty years after Warburg’s death (and who himself died in the year his review was published)? And would these recollections of mine be any less valid than those stemming from the familiarity claimed by Wind and on which he relied in part as the basis for his critique?

Figure 1. Sir Ernst

H. Gombrich, OM,

fourth director

of the Warburg

Institute

(1976–90),

in front of

the Woburn

Square Institute

building, London.

Courtesy of the

Warburg Institute,

London

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IIAs director of the Warburg Institute, Gombrich presented its public face. He was probably its best known figure at the time. He had been and continued to be honored in many ways (including with a knighthood in 1972), which no doubt lent the institution a certain public prominence, nationally and internationally. Although the Warburg Institute has gained a firm place in the annals of academic history and was also important locally for the cultural history of Hamburg until 1933, it is unlikely that the institution had obtained such broad public recogni-tion before Gombrich’s tenure or indeed that it has enjoyed anything comparable since his departure.

Gombrich was doubtless a formidable figure, a person of many facets. Whatever others may have experienced, I found him generous and helpful with ideas and suggestions; indeed he pointed to the direction (the investigation of light rather than space in painting) that I should take in my research at the Institute. In later years, I also witnessed his kinder side.3 It has frequently been

3. One moment worth recording occurred a decade and a half later, when my then five- year- old daughter asked him if he knew German and, while playing on the floor

of his office, sang German nursery songs with him. We had other pleasant encounters at his house when I later took her there.

Figure 2. Edgar Wind.

Courtesy of the Warburg

Institute, London. With

Rudolph Wittkower,

Wind cofounded The

Journal of the Warburg

and Courtauld Institutes

in 1937. In 1955 Wind

was elected to the first

professorship of art

history in Oxford.

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64 remarked, moreover, that Gombrich was not interested in contemporary art,

but that was not my experience of him: he did write on some twentieth- century artists (evident throughout his copious bibliography) and was on friendly terms with others. For example, he introduced me to the artist/writer/curator Lawrence Gowing, perhaps because of Gowing’s interest in Vermeer, and we three certainly talked about paintings when we met. Regardless of one’s judgment of what kind of modern art Gombrich liked, the range from Kokoschka to Gowing must be recognized as rather broad.

Still, though Gombrich was much involved at the time, in conversation and in classes, with the articulation of his own view of cultural history — subsequently elaborated in several essays — it cannot be said that he represented the full diver-sity of approaches, attitudes, and interests found in his time at the Warburg, for these were as wide as the Library’s founder had envisioned.4 Gombrich was a prominent presence at the public lectures, seminars, and other events connected with the Institute, but he by no means directed all that went on in the building. In particular, he did not seem to dominate the academic program. His involve-ment in teaching the MPhil course was limited to conducting the seminar in which students in the doctoral and MPhil programs presented their research. (The PhD was entirely a research degree.) I recall being his only advisee during my years there, which was fortunate for me, and he otherwise supervised just a few doctoral candidates

Tellingly, the only course that Gombrich did choose actively to teach (over a period of two terms) was an introduction to iconography. In this class, Gom-brich expressed his differences with Warburg and his circle, most immediately Erwin Panofsky, for whom Gombrich always voiced respect, even when their interpretations differed.5 Warburg had coined the term “iconology” in its mod-ern usage,6 and among other books Panofsky had written was his influential Stud-ies in Iconology.7 The decade of the 1960s had been a high point for iconography, as is evident in the pages of the Art Bulletin; Gombrich expressed the opinion that iconological interpretations had got out of hand.8 In 1970 and 1971, he was

4. Ernst Hans Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); for subsequent elaboration, see, for example, the essays collected in Gom-brich, The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon, 1999).

5. This respect was expressed in his reaction to Panofsky’s The Iconography of Correggio’s Camera di San Paolo (Lon-don: Warburg Institute, 1961). Playing the role of Confi-dent Integrity, one of the personifications that Panofsky had identified in the fresco, Gombrich wrote to Panofsky, addressing him with his nickname “Pan” and saying that, though he was honored to publish the book with the War-burg Institute’s imprimatur, he did not believe a word of

it. Gombrich said he meant to soften the blow by writing to Panofsky in Latin.

6. See W. S. Heckscher, “Genesis of Iconology,” in Stil und Überliefung in der Kunst des Abendlandes. Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Bonn, 1964, 3 vols. (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1967), 3:239 – 62.

7. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).

8. The opinion as I report it here is what I wrote down in my notes; the words may be mine, but the thought was Gombrich’s, at least as I interpreted it.

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65preparing the response that is incorporated in his book of essays on iconography:

its revisionist introduction was subtitled “The Aims and Limits of Iconology,” which was the spirit in which he taught the course.9 That spirit has had further repercussions for the staffing and eventually the future direction of the Warburg Institute.10

On the other hand, Gombrich reacted affirmatively to research directions that Warburg and his cohort had suggested but that had not evoked much inter-est at the time (indeed would not do so until fairly recently). Gombrich offered a brief introduction to astrological iconography that induced such positive stu-dent responses that he then agreed to teach a class on Renaissance astrology.11 This memorable class, which he conducted together with Otto Kurz, presented what I now realize was a comprehensive and accessible summary of Ptolemy and Manilius and their reception. Kurz and Gombrich also spent a fascinating ses-sion casting Gombrich’s horoscope. Kurz provided the perfect complement to his old friend in this seminar, and elsewhere as well. They were the two scholars who then possessed professorial rank at the Warburg. While Gombrich had ideas about everything, Kurz knew about everything. If Kurz nodded off at lectures, Gombrich apologized, “Don’t mind him, he’s just an old- fashioned polymath.” But Kurz would also wake up suddenly with an apposite remark or comment, often arcane but completely accurate, in one instance a quotation from an Egyp-tian Book of the Dead. A perfect moment occurred when Kurz interjected a com-ment about esoteric Buddhist practices in reference to a discussion of European religion; when asked by Gombrich where he had obtained his information, Kurz replied, “from your son” (Richard Gombrich, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford from 1976 to 2004).

As one admiring student wag wrote on a bulletin board, “Die Kunst ist lang, doch Kurz ist unser Leben.” Kurz had been Librarian of the Warburg Institute and obviously knew the contents of its stacks exceedingly well. He was probably more familiar with the Library’s holdings than anyone else at the time, including Wind. Kurz is otherwise closely to be identified with the fabric of the building: he had drawn up the admonitory mottoes that still adorn the walls on Woburn Square (including such legends I remember as “Otiosis locus hic non est. Discede

9. Ernst Hans Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), see 1 – 25.

10. Although a full account would require another exten-sive discussion, I believe that Gombrich’s sympathies helped lead to the initial appointment of Charles Hope (over David Freedberg, long before he had written The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989]) to a posi-tion at the Warburg. Hope ultimately succeeded Gom-brich as director.

11. The reaction of Michael Baxandall appears in his contribution to this issue of Common Knowledge, as well as in Episodes: A Memorybook (London: Frances Lincoln, 2010), 120. There, he professes little interest in astrology (although he knew it to be “the first classic subject mat-ter of the institute”), an attitude contrasting with that of Gombrich and Kurz, who in this regard were truer to Warburg.

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66 morator”). As a scholar Kurz is perhaps best known for his collaboration with the

art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris.12 On his own, Kurz wrote on a wide variety of subjects: in one volume of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes he published articles on tapestries after Bosch and on Mogul miniatures. In another year, he published in various places essays on Koran stands, Turkish dress, ancient Mexican amulets, and the Alexandrian world chronicle (among other topics). His grasp of the literature of art history is illustrated by his addi-tions and commentaries to the second and third Italian editions of the standard survey and bibliography compiled by Julius von Schlosser, who had been the teacher not only of Kurz but of Gombrich and Kris as well.13

It was thus appropriate that Kurz taught the seminar on research tools. Designed to provide a foundation for Renaissance studies, the course ranged from practical suggestions to discussions of the basis for such research in the accomplishments of Cassiodorus. The final meeting of this class demonstrated that Kurz’s name was completely inappropriate as a description of his competence. In the penultimate session, Kurz had requested that students ask him about any research problem they might have, and he returned a week later with answers to all queries, with full bibliography. His geographical and linguistic range was fur-ther on display in a course titled “Geographical Discoveries and Their Impact.” Long before global or world history, let alone world art history, had gained in popularity — William McNeill was one of the few proponents of world history at the time — Kurz offered students a cultural history of the world, albeit from a European perspective.14 His approach was hardly Eurocentric, however. In addi-tion to reading Arabic and Chinese and many other Eurasian languages, he dem-onstrated that he was familiar as well with Amerindian tongues: at one point, he identified a text as a Nahuatl codex and read some of it aloud.

Another figure at the Warburg who stands out in my memory for vari-ous reasons was Michael Baxandall. Although he afterward gained great renown, Baxandall was a junior member of the staff in 1970 and had not yet published any of the books for which he would become famous. He had been assigned to be my adviser, so I had more personal contact with him than other students did. I remember Baxandall then, and in subsequent encounters, as sublimely diffident.

12. Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). The English translation has an introduction by Gombrich, who later assisted Kris, and is thanked as a friend in the original introduction by Kurz and Kris.

13. Julius von Schlosser, La letteratura artistica: Manuale delle fonti della storia dell’arte moderna, trans. Filippo Rossi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1956 [2nd ed.], 1964 [3rd ed.]). Kurz’s own bibliography appears in a pamphlet (“Otto Kurz, 1908 – 1975”) published on the occasion of his

funeral, September 18, 1975. See also Ernst Hans Gom-brich, “Otto Kurz, 1908 – 1975,” Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979): 719 – 35, reprinted as “The Exploration of Culture Contacts: The Service to Scholarship of Otto Kurz (1908 – 1975),” in Tributes: Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984), 235 – 49.

14. William Hardy McNeill, The Rise of the West: A His-tory of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1963).

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15. I cannot recall if this data file was on cast shadows, on which I wrote my MPhil thesis and an article (see note 2 above) and on which, two decades later, Baxan-dall published a book, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Ernst Hans Gombrich simultaneously published a book on the same subject — Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in West-ern Art (London: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995) — which, though a much slimmer volume than Baxandall’s, was both more gener-ous and broad in its response.

16. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350 – 1450 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Paint-

ing and Experience in Fifteenth- Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).

17. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renais-sance Germany, 1475 – 1525: Images and Circumstances (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).

18. Allan Ellenius, De arte pingendi: Latin Art Literature in Seventeenth- Century Sweden and Its International Back-ground (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell, 1960). Rensse-laer Wright Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967), also appeared before Baxandall’s work on the topic. (Lee’s essay had been pub-lished originally in Art Bulletin 22.4 [December 1940]: 197 – 269.)

When asked for some direct advice, he would most often reply, “I can’t say.” When asked for direct information, he would reply, “I know nothing about that.” I recall distinctly that in one case this reply came as an answer for information on a subject on which I noticed not much later that he had already assembled an entire file of data.15 He taught only one class in the program, but, in retrospect, what a class it was! — a seminar titled “Rhetoric, Language, and Criticism.” Bax-andall’s first two substantial books were then in preparation and were published during the years I was at the Warburg. The course adumbrated the argument of Giotto and the Orators, which I regard as his best book, and also anticipated his famous Painting and Experience.16 The subtitle of the latter specifically calls it a “primer”; Baxandall described it also as a potboiler, by which he meant that he wrote it just to keep things going while he was working on what he regarded as his magnum opus, his book on German limewood sculpture. Looking again at class notes, I can see now that this attitude was probably not just a matter of modesty but that the ideas he was trying out in Painting and Experience were being devel-oped more thoroughly into a larger discussion of questions of style in the sculp-ture book.17 Although, as I learned later, his approach to rhetoric and painting was not new — it had been anticipated, as Baxandall acknowledged, by the great Swedish scholar Allan Ellenius, who himself had worked at the Warburg — it was applied in fruitful and original ways to the development of what Baxandall later called inferential criticism.18

My analysis of these relationships is, as I say, retrospective: they were, as I recall, but dimly comprehensible in the seminar. Baxandall’s classes were excru-ciatingly dry, presenting what often seemed to be obscure material without much contextualization. A paragon of reticence, Baxandall would lecture without per-sonal affect or accentuation, or he would have us write (rhetorical) periods, or he would analyze some photocopied texts in a cursory manner — I recall discussion of some pages from an edition of progymnasmata, which seemed to be pulled out at random. Only a decade later did I realize what he was driving at, and how

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68 important, and useful for my own work, Baxandall’s class and insights had been.

I was pleased to be able to tell him so when he lectured at Princeton in the 1990s; he said that he had recognized the influence.19

Although Gombrich, Kurz, and Baxandall were nominally all art histori-ans — their classes were as close as one could come to art history in the program —even Baxandall’s approach to art history was presented in a way that could be called oblique at best. I recall that he would talk in private about our common interests in art history almost as if I were a coconspirator. While students were encouraged (required, really) to take paleography with Julian Brown (and were urged to study languages as they had been used in the Renaissance, such as Neo-Latin — I chose on my own to learn Dutch and Hebrew), no such requirement led to the study of visual imagery — and even the iconography class was not strictly visual in content. I do not mean that the study of art history and artworks was being actively discouraged: Gombrich indeed urged me to look at as many paint-ings as I could while preparing my thesis, which was as heavily an exercise in science and art theory as in actual artistic practice. But, since I had come with degrees in history and in a program called “History, the Arts, and Letters” from Yale and wished to learn more details about art history per se, I had to audit classes offered by Birkbeck College, University College, and the Courtauld Insti-tute. Despite the myth of “interdisciplinarity” at the Warburg and the purported aim of the Library, these distinctions definitely meant something, at least as far as the basic preparation of students was concerned.

Baxandall’s close friend Michael Podro came down (or as one says in England, up) from Essex to give a seminar, titled “Problems in Cultural His-tory,” that established another kind of atmosphere, though no more welcoming. Although Podro was then completing his own insightful book on aesthetics and art theory, he effectively offered little taste of it.20 His seminar presentations were extraordinary: he would speak in a grand, histrionic style as if he were giving the Slade Lectures at Cambridge, whereas he was talking to six or seven students in a seminar, with whom he did not seem much interested in communicating. In any case, without warning, explanation, or any further communication from him or anyone else, then or later, Podro just simply stopped coming to class in the middle of term.

A. I. Sabra exhibited a much different attitude toward teaching, the acquisi-tion of knowledge, and indeed philosophy. An amiable man, Sabra had received his earlier education in Alexandria, Egypt, and was an expert in Arabic science.

19. Since I have elsewhere been critical of Baxandall and especially of his treatment of German art, I am again happy here to acknowledge how important his class was for my own work.

20. Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).

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21. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, Theories of Light: From Descartes to Newton (London: Oldbourne, 1967).

He had come to London where he studied philosophy of science with Karl Pop-per at the London School of Economics. Sabra’s dissertation, later a book, was on seventeenth- century optical theory.21 At the Warburg, he taught a marvelous seminar on science and cosmology. This course started with classical antiquity and pursued the path of astronomical studies in the Greek, Roman, and Islamic traditions up through their descendants in the seventeenth century. Because of positive student response, Sabra continued his class into a second term, and there-after for several terms offered an extracurricular course on the history of optics, which pursued a similar trajectory to that followed in his class on astronomy and cosmology.

Sabra offered more than a rich and nuanced view of perennial questions in the history of science; he provided insights into key questions of epistemology, as seen through the philosophy of science. Pierre Duhem and Alexandre Koyré were not the only figures with whom one had to reckon, but also Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Thomas Kuhn, among others. Even if the philosophical writings of these three important thinkers were not specifically assigned, I felt compelled to read them. Not only did their work represent an alternative to the neo- Kantian approach of the earlier Warburg circle — and in Popper’s case, an approach that was obviously more in keeping with Gombrich’s sympathies — but also their way of thinking had implications for the philosophy of history and for questions of periodization that clearly affected the framing of teaching and research at the Warburg. Sabra taught that, in the world of Islam, scientists had received, adapted, and changed views inherited from antiquity. He specifically argued (in a perhaps Kuhnian rather than Popperian way, though in any case not a way owing much to Aby Warburg) that a break had occurred in views of cosmology and optics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that optical and astronomical theories needed to be explained in terms of changes in epistemology as well.

Although Sabra left London for Harvard in 1972 (as I also did), his stay at the Warburg seems important for several reasons. First, he started a tradition of instruction in the history of science (and not just the occult sciences or astrology) that has been continued at the Warburg Institute through Charles Schmitt and Charles Burnett (in the latter case also with a distinctive interest in Arabic sci-ence) and that does seem to mark a difference from the earlier Warburg ethos. Second, Sabra’s conjectural rationalism is noteworthy because, like Gombrich’s, it suggests a break with the earlier Warburg group. Finally, although others had demanded close textual analysis, Sabra also personified a reasoned empirical approach, which fit well with the atmosphere of the Institute around 1970. All of these points deserve more extensive discussion than is allowable here.

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0 D. P. Walker dealt with a much different area of interest, as I learned when I presented a report on Ficino’s views of light to a somewhat puzzled Sabra in the seminar on optics. More in keeping with an older Warburg subject, but again approached in a personal manner, Walker conducted a stirring, if difficult, class on Florentine Platonism, based on close readings of texts. As might have been expected, given both the content and the instructor — who was the author of an important book on “spiritual and demonic magic” — the seminar had much to do with such matters as Orphica and the transmigration of the soul.22 Deeply eso-teric at times (and replete with references to Iamblichus on mysteries), Walker’s Florentine Platonism class was followed by a wonderful seminar originally adver-tised as “French Platonism” but realized as “French Reformation.” This class hardly concentrated exclusively on religious controversies. Its distinctive literary bias came in part because the great Rabelais scholar M. A. Screech took over the seminar for a few weeks. Beyond Rabelais and several (to me) obscure authors, Marguerite de Navarre and Marot became topics of discussion for Screech and Walker. Screech adumbrated his basic interpretation of Rabelais in a formula (“laughter at the foot of the Cross”) that he would come to use in a book published twenty- five years later.23 Walker presented similar readings of Rabelais as a serious joke, while delving for profundities in other authors. (This represented a radically different tack than the direction that was to be taken following the inspiration of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais, which had just been translated.)24 Only in reviewing my notes for this class have I realized that its approach to serious jokes has become important for my own recent work on Arcimboldo.25

Closely related to Walker’s readings were those of Frances Yates, an inspir-ing figure. Walker was reputed to play violin duets with Yates, and they surely had a sympathy of approach. A great scholar herself, Yates frequently acknowledged her reliance on Walker’s deep scholarship. Dame Frances, as she later became, had, alas, just stopped teaching the year I arrived in London. Nonetheless, she remained very much a personality around the Warburg, much a topic of conver-sation, and a figure at tea. Reported to wear yellow socks on Plato’s birthday, she otherwise contributed to the air of Neoplatonic (or Hermetic) enthusiasm that inspired certain spirits of the place. While I did not have much opportunity to converse with her, I must have read most of what she had written in those years. It certainly inspired my own work, as is shown by the approach I took to a much

22. Daniel Pickering Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958).

23. M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Lon-don: Penguin, 1997).

24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

25. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still- Life Painting (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 2010).

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1different geographical area in my own dissertation.26 When I did have the chance a few years later to talk with her, she seemed to agree with my interpretation but had overlooked Giuseppe Arcimboldo, on whom I had begun writing. I was described as floating out of the room.

There were many other figures at or around the Warburg who did not provoke such reactions, not in me at least. My reservations may have to do with my interests, as much as with theirs. In any event, either they did not leave as much of an impression on me or I did not have substantial contact with them. In the former category were the librarian J. B. Trapp — a conversation with whom at Yale had fortified my interest in the Warburg but who was busy in London with Library business — and D. S. Chambers, who perhaps mattered more to students, since he offered as many as three courses: on the Renaissance papacy, on Venetian society and government, and also one called “Social and Political Ideas,” which focused on the somewhat unexpected topic (for a field then dominated by the paradigm of the bourgeois Renaissance) of aristocracy. Of these empiri-cally based classes, the most stimulating perhaps was the one on aristocracy. The second category — of personalities around the Warburg whom I cannot really claim to have known — includes scholars such as Rudolf Wittkower, who, in the year of his death, I merely glimpsed across the card catalog; Pevsner, who intro-duced himself to me; and Momigliano, whose Piedmontese accented English I could hardly understand. In my ignorance (before I learned Slavic languages, and before I knew who he was), I thought Momigliano might even have been of Eastern European origin, as was the very learned Christopher Ligota, a senior librarian who helped me with some Polish texts.

As for what this instruction had to do with the Library itself, I can say only that the resources of the building provided a marvelous basis for research. There may be much appearing in these pages about the organization of books on the shelves. In practice, what I found most useful was the presence of offprints and occasional papers intermingled with books. Their continuation may be threatened regardless of what happens to the Library. I also found the librarians — especially John Perkins, along with Ligota — to be immensely helpful. Since leaving the Warburg, I have only occasionally returned. My interests have led in other geo-graphical directions and away from the resources concentrated there. I have given but one lecture in the building. When Vivian Nutton invited me to a conference he had organized on the history of medicine for the Wellcome Institute, now

26. My doctoral dissertation, completed in 1976 (degree awarded from Harvard in 1977) and published as Variations on the Imperial Theme in the Age of Maximilian II and Rudolf II (New York: Garland, 1978), directly acknowledges the inspiration of Yates, specifically that of the essays collected in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

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27. See Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “American Voices: Remarks on the Earlier History of Art History in the United States and the Reception of Germanic Art His-torians,” Ars 42.1 (2009): 128 – 52; also in Journal of Art Historiography 2 (June 2010): www.gla.ac.uk/arthistoriog raphy.

28. For example, Baxandall’s caustic comments (in his memoir Episodes: A Memorybook) about John Pope-

Hennessey do not correspond with my sense of the man. I was friendly with Pope- Hennessey while I was a student in London, and I found him both then and later to be cor-dial. I observed no game- playing in his behavior toward me, or toward my spouse when I introduced her to him. The difference between Baxandall’s reflections on Pope- Hennessey and mine may be a matter of temperament.

transformed, I asked to speak at the Warburg, which was nominally a cosponsor. Nevertheless, much that I learned at the Warburg in those years has stuck with me and has informed my interests in many ways. I imagine that this may also be true for other students who were there at, or closely after, the time that I was, either in the MPhil course or doing their dissertations or doctoral research. Just to mention art historians whom I remember, this group includes Elizabeth Crop-per, Helen Langdon, Alex Potts, Andrew Saint, Sarah Stevenson, Peter Parshall, and Keith Moxey; I met Valerie Fraser later. This is a varied group, all of whom have had distinguished careers.

IIIEdgar Wind’s critique raises another challenge. Personal recollections or per-sonal familiarity may have merit, as may institutional memory, at least as a cor-rective in historiography.27 But our opinions and experiences may differ, and so may our memories.28 What, then, is the use of eyewitness accounts in history? What is the value of personal memory or institutional memory, or even the cul-tural memory, that Aby Warburg called Mnemosyne?

A Warburgian aftermath suggests some of the problems involved. Soon after I came to Princeton in the later 1970s, I was allowed to rent a university- owned house at 116 Prospect Avenue. R. W. Lee, cited above, who had a pro-digious memory, especially for literature, and was a good friend of Panofsky’s, assured me that this was also the first house in which Panofsky resided when he settled in Princeton after leaving Hamburg. Lee came over one evening and related how he had first met Panofsky in the very living room where we were then sitting, and how they had discussed Spenser’s treatment of the Three Graces. W. S. Heckscher, who had been one of Panfosky’s last students, confirmed the identification of the house when he too came for a visit. Like Rens Lee, Heck-scher became a good friend and was endowed with a phenomenal memory for details that at least equaled Lee’s. Heckscher said that he had spent his first night in Princeton, fresh from his own arrival from Hamburg, in a guest room on the third floor of the same house, then occupied by Panofsky.

The problem is that Panofsky’s correspondence reveals that he lived at 114

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29. Wind, appendix to Eloquence of Symbols.

Prospect Avenue. Unless the street numbers had been changed in Princeton, Heckscher and Lee’s very precise memories were both wrong in at least one par-ticular detail. They had visited Panofsky in the house next door. One wonders what to make of this mistake, especially given that the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg had been located next door to Aby Warburg’s own house, one located at 114 Helwigstrasse, and the other at 116 Helwigstrasse. One point of contention in Wind’s review of Gombrich is the origin of Warburg’s famous adage, “Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail.”29 What details are right in all these recollections is for the reader to determine.