In 1933, with books being burned across Germany, a collection of 60,000 art-historical tomes were shipped to England by steamer. Now, ‘the world’s weirdest library’ has reopened after a £14.5-million transformation dubbed ‘The Warburg Renaissance.’
The Warburg Institute examines the movement of culture across barriers (of time, space and discipline) to inspire, inform and connect. It is also concerned with the histories of art and science, and their relationship with superstition, magic, and popular beliefs. Located inside an unremarkable 1950s red-brick building in Bloomsbury, its resources are fantastically historical, philological and anthropological. It is dedicated to the study of survival and transmission of cultural forms, such as the influence of classical antiquity on aspects of European civilisation.
Originally based in Hamburg, Germany, it belonged to the library of Aby Warburg a student of renaissance art and culture, as well as the scion of a Jewish banking dynasty. At the age of 13 he sold his first-born rights to his brother in return for all the books he ever wanted. In 1933, under the shadow of Nazism, the institute was relocated to London, where it eventually became incorporated into the University of London. The original Warburg Library building in Hamburg is now a research institute.
Referencing Good Neighbours
Little-known beyond its predominantly esoteric and art-history circles, the Warburg Institute maintains a research library of more than 350,000 volumes. These volumes, except for a relatively small proportion of rare and valuable books, are kept on open shelves and are accessible to all. The library is notable for its unusual and unique reference system: the books are arranged by subject according to Warburg’s division of human history into the categories of Action, Orientation, Word, and Image.
Had Dan Brown’s fictitious Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, been real, wrote Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, this is where you’d find him. Each book is sorted according to a unique system called the ‘law of the good neighbour’, whereby the volumes above, below and on either side are supposed to inspire serendipitous paths of thought. For example, in the ‘Prophecy of Divinatory Practices’ section, books about fortune-telling are surrounded by texts on comets, monsters, dreams and chess. Others have labels such as ‘Pilgrimage’, ‘Cosmology’, ‘Magic’, ‘Monasticism’ and ‘Mysticism’.
“Aby Warburg said the book you need is always next to the one you’re looking for”, explains Bill Sherman, a professor of cultural history and the institute’s director since 2017. For the past few years he’s been overseeing the £14.5-million transformation of the Warburg – a delicate balancing act between maintaining the institute’s eccentricities and making it fit for modern study.
In addition to its primary purpose as an academic reference library, the institute accepts a small number of graduate students each year. The emphasis of these programmes is on developing interpretative skills in a number of different academic subjects, which follows from the institute’s interdisciplinary mission. Considerable attention is devoted to improving language skills and knowledge of primary sources. It also runs a variety of events which are open to the public, such as explorations of Magic In Art, the European Magic Traditions, and the role of Technology and Transmission.
The Abbey Of Aby Warburg
As an art historian, Warburg had become dissatisfied with an aestheticising approach to art history and was interested in a more philosophical and interdisciplinary approach. While studying the culture of Renaissance Florence, he grew interested in the influence of antiquity on modern culture, and the study of this second life of the Classical World became his life work.
By 1888 he was living in Florence, scrutinising the pagan roots of Botticelli’s motifs. This study of decoding symbols and tracing their evolution developed into a field he named ‘iconology’. In 1904 he acquired an assistant to begin cataloguing his collection of 3,500 books, and within a decade – inside his Hamburg home – he had established ‘a working laboratory’ for scholars, which was listed on the country’s inter-library loan network.
Yet despite being a gifted researcher, Warburg was plagued by bouts of depression and psychosis, and in 1918 he was admitted to an asylum. When he was released after six years, he returned to find that, under the direction of the art historian Fritz Saxl, his collection had tripled in size, and regularly hosted popular lectures. Two years later, he spent a small fortune creating a purpose-built, state-of-the-art home for it.
Warburg died in 1929, before he could finish his magnum opus, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – an attempt to synthesise the transmission of potent symbols through cultures by pinning networks of thousands of images across more than 60 giant wooden panels. Less than four years later, the Nazis rose to power. Following book-burning rallies, and on account of the faith of the institute’s founder and scholarly circle, the Warburg Institute’s work became impossible.
In 1933, with the aid of the industrialist and collector Samuel Courtauld, the building’s 60,000 books, together with its staff, were shipped by steamer to safety in London. In 1944, Warburg’s family signed the institute over to the University of London in return for securing and funding its future. Fast-forward to 2014, and as London rents spiralled, a legal row about the fate of the library reached the city’s courts.
On one side was the university, looking to clarify the terms of the deed signed during the stresses of the Second World War; On the other was the Warburg Advisory Council (and members of the Warburg family), voicing a fear that the institute could lose its identity, swallowed up among the millions of books held nearby at Senate House Library. After 10 days of deliberation, the judge ruled that the deed was iron-clad, and from that decision came £9.5 million, the core of the budget for the recent redevelopment.
The Warburg Renaissance
The overhaul – led by Stirling Prize-winning architects Haworth Tompkins, whose previous clients include the Royal College of Art and the London Library – has seen the building’s old courtyard turned into a modern, climate-controlled reading room for special collections, alongside a 140-seat auditorium. On the ground floor, staff offices have made way for a public exhibition space, one end of which contains Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, a porcelain-bound installation of books dedicated to lost libraries, initially created for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Come January 2025, the other end will host a show examining the History of Tarot, featuring designs by the occultist Aleister Crowley from the Warburg’s own archive.
The library’s novel organisational system has also been tidied up. Bill Sherman explains, “As the collection grew, the integrity of the four floors was lost, and two got spread out over multiple floors. I’ve reinstated the purity of each.” Similarly, the ‘law of the good neighbour’ has remained. As a result, readers are still free to roam (an increasingly rare feature of many modern libraries) and discover recent publications sandwiched between centuries-old texts, some containing the original bookplates of Warburg himself, or other famous faculty members, such as Michael Baxandall, Frances Yates and Ernst Gombrich (who’s long-retired grand piano still stands in a corner of the building).
With as few as 2,000 current members, Sherman hopes to extend the capillaries of the Institute beyond its academic core, “through areas of cultural activity, like residences, commissions and exhibitions, we’re hopefully introducing what the place has to offer to a much wider range of people. Artists and curators have secretly used the Warburg for research for decades. I recently did an event at a gallery where an artist said to me, ‘I have to confess to you, I lied in order to gain access to the Warburg!…’ I don’t want people to have to lie anymore. Ultimately, you shape whatever you’re doing, as you look forward, by looking backwards,” he says. “With the Warburg Renaissance, we’re not just respecting the past, but reactivating it.”
