• '

  The story of one of the most influential historians of art and culture of the 20th century reveals a man of many identities – public intellectual, ethnographer, shrewd academic administrator and founder of a library – who still struggled to assert his place in the world.

  '

  Financial Times, ‘The Books to Read in 2024’

• '

  Hans C. Hönes’s masterly study is a sure guide to the faltering steps followed by Warburg in the development of his “nameless science”, during a life that variously embodied the spirit of the age and drew on his billionaire connections to struggle against it.

  '

  TLS

• '

  Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work . . . It is meticulously researched, with Hönes’s own position as a lecturer in art history at the University of Aberdeen enabling him to describe Warburg’s professional tussles with ease and expertise, though the author carefully avoids too many excursions into academic theory that might have been off-putting for the general reader. It is also beautifully produced by Reaktion, a publisher that specialises in art books, with many illustrations here reproducing excerpts from Warburg’s notebooks and his working drafts, along with the various forms of iconography that interested him.

  '

  Australian Book Review

• '

  "Aged 13, Aby renounced his role as heir to the Warburg banking business, on condition his younger brother would buy him every book he ever wanted. Against expectations, this Jewish outsider, mentally and physically fragile, too unruly to accept academic discipline, laid the foundations for modern art history: a heroic tale.

  '

  Financial Times, 'Best summer books of 2024: Visual Arts'

• '

  At last, Aby Warburg has the biography he deserves. Hans C. Hönes gives us the man behind the myth and provides the guidance needed to make sense of one of history’s great sense-makers.

  '

  Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute

• '

  Hans C. Hönes becomes a ghostbuster for the phantoms of Aby Warburg. No book to date has so consistently analysed the highs and lows of the biography and intellectual journey of today's most famous art historian. Warburg's new ideas for an interdisciplinary and cross-temporal art history beyond all border–guard mentality are explained in detail alongside German culture and science, with Warburg's dispute about his Jewish ancestry and with the struggle of art history to be finally recognized as a scientific discipline.

  '

  Ulrich Pfisterer, Professor of Art History at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and Director of Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

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  This learned, lively book illuminates the life and work of Aby Warburg, the sphynx-like impresario of erudition who was one of the creators of modern humanistic scholarship. Hans C. Hönes explicates Warburg's scholarship, his career and his life-long efforts at self-fashioning with skill and insight.

  '

  Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University

• '

  [A] meticulous, ideas-driven biography. . . . Hönes is an admirably lucid guide to his subject’s twisting course and the thickets of German intellectual politics.

  '

  Financial Times

Chapter 1: A Life in Retrospect
Chapter 2: Becoming an Art Historian
Chapter 3: Travels in the World of Symbols
Chapter 4: Voices from the Past
Chapter 5: Itineraries: Warburg’s Destiny
Chapter 6: Hamburg: The Making of a Public–Private Scholar
Chapter 7: Fighting Border–Guard Mentality
Chapter 8: In Turmoil: Reassembling Life
Chapter 9: The Tower
Chapter 10: ‘Mnemosyne’: Warburg’s Curtain Call
Chapter 11: Alpha and Omega

References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Hans C. Hönes is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen. He has written extensively on art historiography since the eighteenth century, and has published books about Heinrich Wölfflin and British antiquarianism, among others.