Ernst H. Gombrich

Aby Warburg
Eine intellektuelle Biographie
VOLUME 212

One of the Twentieth Century’s Most Wide-Ranging Intellectuals

“A citizen of Hamburg at heart, Jewish by blood, Florentine in spirit,” as he described himself, the art historian and cultural scholar Aby Warburg (1866–1929) was one of the most wide-ranging intellectuals of the twentieth century, whose thinking transcended disciplinary boundaries. No wonder, then, that new generations keep rediscovering his work as well as his life as a scholar; most recently, he was a lodestar of the so-called Iconic Turn and a key inspiration for the French theorist Georges Didi-Huberman; his perspective on visual culture also anticipated contemporary artistic practices. “Not so much the history of his life as an intellectual biography” was what Ernst H. Gombrich proposed to lay out in a magisterial study that was published in 1970 and subsequently translated into multiple languages. The first to attempt a full biographical portrait, he had also undertaken a comprehensive review of Warburg’s papers, and his book made most of the unpublished writings and drafts accessible to researchers, documenting them in excerpts. Gombrich’s biography was contentious from the start: his colleague Edgar Wind, for one, censured “considerable misjudgments.” Yet the book arguably still stands not only as a key contribution to the Warburg scholarship, but also as a model of biographical writing that, instead of shoehorning its hero into a conventional narrative pattern, reads his work, and especially his private notes, to retrace the meandering and contradictory course of his thinking. It is now available for the first time in an unabridged German translation.

Ernst H. Gombrich (b. 1909, d. 2001) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost art historians. A scion of the Viennese educated bourgeoisie, he left for London in 1936 to work at the Warburg Institute, which he led from 1959 until 1976. His best-known book is The Story of Art, published in 1950.