Aby Warburg

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Botticelli's The Birth of Venus

Botticelli's Primavera

Aby Moritz Warburg (13 June 1866 – 26 October 1929) was an influential art historian.

He was born in Hamburg to the famous Warburg banking family. However, he had little interest in the family business and chose instead to devote himself to academic studies. He studied in Bonn, Munich, and in Strasbourg, focussing on archeology and art history, but also medicine, psychology, and the history of religion. His doctoral thesis was on Sandro Botticelli's two paintings "The Birth of Venus" and "Primavera".

He worked in Florence producing studies on single works of art and their wealthy patrons and spent time on the Hopi Indians in 1896 to conduct and ethnological study.

On his return to Europe he founded a library, the Kultur-wissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, to serve both as a private collection and as a resource for public education. It has been said that his thesis served as the guiding document for the mission of the library. He also undertook an extensive trip to the United States to document the Native Americans and their mystic traditions using photographs and text.

He suffered from depression and symptoms of schizophrenia, and was hospitalized in Ludwig Binswanger's neurological clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in 1921. He was released in 1924 after demonstrating his sanity by giving an extended academic lecture to doctors and fellow patients. He returned to work at the KBW for the remaining five years of his life, producing preliminary material for the never-completed Mnemosyne Atlas, always aware of his precarious state of mental health. On the day of his death by heart attack, he responded to a doctor asking after his health: 'All well - from the neck down.'