Aby Warburg
Working papers of Aby Warburg (WIA III)
Aby Warburg was one of the most important art historians of the early twentieth century and a founding father of the disciplines of cultural history and image science (Bildwissenschaft). He published relatively little during his lifetime and left a large amount of working papers.
Our detailed catalogue provides easy access to his (and his family's) personal documents and working papers, including notes, drafts and in some cases proofs and annotated final copies of his texts, as well as lecture texts and occasional writings. This catalogue is still under revision and can only be consulted in the Archive. It is due to go online soon.
In the meantime readers can refer to E.H. Gombrich's Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London (2nd ed.), 1986, in his 'Bibliography' under 'Unpublished Sources', pp. 343-347.
A more complete list is published in Aby M. Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. D. Wuttke, Baden-Baden (3rd ed.) 1992, pp. 585-597. The order recorded by both authors has been revised.
Index Card Boxes (WIA III.2.1)
The index card boxes (Zettelkästen) are catalogued to section-level only and these sections can be searched in the Warburg Institute Archive online catalogue.
Warburg's Activities in and beyond Hamburg (WIA IV)
The Warburg Institute Archive also contains papers pertaining to Aby Warburg's participation, active and passive, in institutions, events, and debates, in and beyond Hamburg.
Click here to download the Catalogue for WIA IV, Warburg in and beyond Hamburg
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was Warburg's last project, the sum of his life's work. The Archive holds the items of the authoritative last series and sets of photographs of the panels of all series. These photographs and the online virtual exhibition are available on our website.
Correspondence
The Archive holds some 38,000 letters written by and to Aby Warburg, his family members, and his collaborators during his lifetime. The collection is particularly complete as Warburg kept copies of almost all of his outgoing letters from an early stage. The Warburg Institute Archive online catalogue lists this correspondence, providing abstracts for each letter and biographical information for many of the correspondence partners. For correspondence to and from The Warburg Institute beyond Aby Warburg's lifetime, please see The Warburg Institute.
Warburg Family Material
The Archive also holds material related to Warburg Family members such as the diaries of Mary Warburg, Aby's wife, which are part of the catalogues listed above. There is also a large quantity of family correspondence, mostly to or from Aby Warburg, and correspondence between other family members, including more distant relatives. The family correspondence is stored as WIA FC to separate it from the general correspondence (WIA GC).