Aby Warburg
Jewish by Blood, German by Birth, Florentine at Heart.

1866	13 June, Hamburg: Aby Warburg, the first son of a well-to-do family of Jewish bankers, comes into the world.		Various members of the family had great expectations of Aby: Sarah, his grandmother, wanted him to become a Rabbi, his father Moritz to inherit the M. M. Warburg Bank, and his mother, Charlotte, to be a lawyer. All their expectations were to be deluded very early on.
1879	At thirteen, he gives up his right of primogeniture in favour of his brother, Max, in exchange for a lifelong commitment from him to meet the costs of every book he requests. This is how the "legendary" Warburg Library comes into being, and is sustained financially by the founder’s family throughout his life.		Photograph: Aby (below, left) advancing his hands towards his brother, Max, replicates the gesture with which Esau sells his primogeniture to Jacob for a bowl of lentils. Years later, Max Warburg had occasion to confess that his agreement with Aby was the largest blank cheque in his life.
1886	Aby begins to study History of Art, History and Archaeology at Bonn University, as a student of Hermann Usener, Religious Historian, and of Karl Lamprecht, Psychologist and Historian of Civilisations. He shares their interest in the drawings of children in which they perceive the enduring primitive traces of human perception. He attends Carl Justi’s courses in the history of art, and at the same time pursues his interest in natural sciences and their application to the history of civilisation.		Aby’s move to Bonn signals a reawakening of his senses. He discovers and enjoys the taste of transgression and breaks the rules of Judaism by eating sausages and all kinds of meats rigorously banned from the table in the Warburg household. At university, Aby is instantly able to demonstrate his zeal. One day when Justi refuses to hold a lesson with just three students, young Warburg reminds him of the ancient Latin rule according to which "tres faciunt collegium".
1888	The International Art Exhibition draws Warburg to Munich for the summer term. He joins a group of students about to leave for Florence, where he meets August Schmarsow who arouses Warburg’s interest in gesture and movement, and the connection between spiritual disposition and the concentrated expression of the body. He begins to work on his dissertation the subject of which is movement in images applied to the mythological paintings of Botticelli.		Going to the Florentine art galleries and museums not only gives the young Aby the opportunity to study in depth; during one of these visits he meets Mary Hertz, his future wife.
1889	Following Justi’s refusal to approve the subject of his dissertation, Warburg goes to Strasbourg, to Hubert Janitschek, great connoisseur of the Renaissance. Even here, Warburg carries out all kinds of research. He does not scorn giving an address on the odds in games of chance in a seminar on the theory of probability.		Aby’s multi-faceted personality, his many interests and his great ability to reason logically make him an entrepreneur manqué, to the extent that Max has occasion to observe: "My brother would have been an excellent banker". Aby possessed to an extraordinary degree a flair for the stock market. "I can hear the fluttering of wings of the vultures of failure" is the phrase the Warburgs would not want to hear too often from their brother who was so gifted in prophetic virtue.
1891	Warburg obtains his doctorate with his thesis on Botticelli’s The birth of Venus and Primavera published the following year with dedications to Janitschek and the archaeologist Adolf Michaelis, who also taught Warburg in Strasbourg.
1892	Warburg moves to Berlin to attend courses in medicine. In the same year he also does his military service in the horse artillery.		In the faculty of medicine at Berlin, Aby is acquainted with the works of Darwin. Having read The expression of emotion in animals and men he exclaims: "At last, a book which is useful to me!"
1893	Warburg returns to Florence where he carries out all kinds of research to find new subjects for study, and focuses his attention on festivities in Florence during the 16th century.
1895     1896	The wedding of his brother Max offers a suitable opportunity to go to America. In 1896 he asks the Smithsonian Institute to assist him to travel to New Messico in order to study the Pueblos.
1897	On returning to Germany he spends four weeks in Paris and four weeks in England. On 13 October, despite strong opposition from both families, he marries in a Christian ceremony the Catholic Mary Hertz, painter and sculptress, of good family, with whom he had been having a relationship for over ten years.		13 October — Aby’s parents fail to turn up at their son’s wedding — he is now thought to be degenerate. Max and Olga are the only members of the family who attend.
1898	With his wife, he moves to Florence. He turns down offers of full-time work at the Kuntshalle in Hamburg and at the University of Kiel.
1899	Series of lectures on Leonardo da Vinci at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg.		During one of his sojourns in Florence, he is asked to stand in for a lottery ticket seller. Aby, using his natural inclination to imitate the manners and accents of the Italians, managed to deceive a passer-by, who approached him to buy a ticket.
1900-02	In Florence, together with the Dutch journalist, Andrè Jolles, he plans to write an epistolary style novel on the theme of the nymph. In 1902 he writes two fundamental articles: one on the last wishes of Francesco Sassetti and one on the fate of Memling’s Danzig triptych.		Despite the considerable artistic ability of his wife Mary, a talented sculptor, Aby refuses all his life to pose for a marble portrait, adding that he would do so only if she would execute a life-size equestrian statue
1904	He leaves the house in Florence and moves to Hamburg with his family. He tries to gain a professional position but fails because Paul Clemen, Justi’s successor, believes that Warburg, who is thirty eight years of age, has not published sufficiently for his age. Despite this, he is offered a chair at Breslau University, which he turns down. He also turns down the chair at Halle University in 1912.
1908-09	He studies history of mythography and astrology in depth. He gives a lecture on The world of the ancient gods and the early Renaissance in the South and in the North. He buys a villa in Heilwigstrasse, Hamburg, and moves there with his family and his books. He begins to work as a Privatgelehrter, (freelance lecturer). He gives a lecture on representations of the planets based on his study of Franz Boll’s Sphaera, a canonical text on Arabic and Hellenistic astrology.
1910	First encounter with the young Viennese art historian, Fritz Saxl. He is acquainted with his studies and notes on illustrations in astrological manuscripts.		When the shy Saxl suggests that Aby hand him his materials on astrology in order to abandon a sphere of study which was too vast, Warburg replies: "Problems are not resolved by passing them on to others".
1912	Warburg is one of the promoters of the International Conference on art history held in Rome. It is here that he gives a lecture, considered the baptism of Iconology, the subject of which is an interpretation of the frescoes in Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, based on the Arabic and Indian tradition. The title of his lecture is Italian art and international astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. Fritz Saxl is appointed assistant and researcher.		On the eve of the conference Aby is very tense. He shares a room with Karl Heise, a friend of long standing and director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. Karl is concerned because Aby cannot sleep and orders a cup of hot milk. Aby explodes in a fit of rage and throws a paperweight against the pendulum clock in the room. He then screams at Karl that "one does not disturb servants after midnight".
1913	Warburg is nominated honorary professor of art at Hamburg University.
1914-18	During the First World War, Aby Warburg concentrates all the activity associated with his library on the filing of media reports on the course of the war. The conflict which divides Germany, the country of his birth, and Italy, his country by adoption, causes him serious inner turmoil.		The collection and filing of articles on the war becomes an out and out obsession for Warburg. Every day, his children, Max, Marietta and Frede are recruited as soon as they return from school and, armed with scissors, are forced to help their father in this new enterprise.
1918-23	Warburg has a mental breakdown, and suffers from phobias, obsessions, and hallucinations which in 1919 lead him to be hospitalised in Doctor Binswanger’s clinic, in Kreuzlingen. At the request of Max Warburg, Aby’s brother, Fritz Saxl assumes the management of the library and from 1919 starts to transform it into a place of research accessible to everyone. .		Saxl, remembering Warburg’s years at Kreuzlingen, observes: "In the afternoon the professor talks about Luther. In the afternoon he writes wonderful pages on astrology and magic. During the morning he had been a man who believed in magic, and in the demonism of inanimate things".
1923	In the psychiatric clinic at Kreuzlingen, Aby Warburg gives a lecture in which he recalls the experiences of his journey to New Mexico. His study of the serpent ritual of the Hopi Indians proves to his doctors that he is fit to leave hospital. Despite the success of the enterprise, Warburg does not want the text of his lecture to be published. In a twist of fate The serpent ritual would be his first work to be published in English.		On the eve of his lecture on the serpent ritual at Kreuzlingen, Aby confides in Saxl that his success as a speaker is inversely proportional to his success as a writer and that the lecture on the serpent ritual would never be an essay, only words and improvisation.
1924	To celebrate Aby’s homecoming, Saxl has a panel installed in the library on which he affixes photographs which relate to the themes to which Aby had dedicated his efforts until that time. This procedure becomes Warburg’s main instrument of reflection, and gives birth to Mnemosyne, Atlas of the memory.
1925	Warburg gives his lecture in memory of Franz Boll, The influence of the Sphaera Barbarica on the orientation of the western universe
1926	He inaugurates the new building for the library which now has 458899 books. He works on various preparatory editions of Mnemosyne, a work which was conceived in several volumes.		The project of the new library is assigned to various architects who, one by one, exasperated by Warburg’s demands, resign. In the end, the architect Alexander Shumacher designs an avant-garde building with elevators for books, twenty eight telephones for internal communication alone, and a pneumatic postal system.
1928-29	He travels to Italy and visits Rimini, Rome, Ostia and S. Maria Capua Vetere. On 19 January 1929, Aby presents the Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome, with some plates from his Mnemosyne project on which he continues to work. On 26 October, after his return to Hamburg, Aby dies of a heart attack. .		11 February 1929, Rome, is the day of the signing of the Lateran Treaties. To the great consternation of Gertrude Bing and Franz Alber, his now indispensable nurse, Aby disappears for the entire day. After reappearing towards evening, he reveals that he has been in St. Peter’s Square and declares that he has had the opportunity of a life-time - he has participated in the repaganisation of Rome".