Tracing a symbol of research and of a community in exile

The Warburg Library, founded in Hamburg by the art and cultural historian Aby Warburg, conducted pioneering collective research in the 1920s on the history of images and the enduring power of symbols. Its logo, KBAW, was originally Warburg’s own bookplate, designed as a monogram combining the name of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) with his initials (AW) [Fig. 1]. When the Library moved to London following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, its directors, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, sought a new insignia – distinct from that of its founder who had died in 1929 – that would symbolize the research materials and methods of the Warburg Institute in exile.

The new emblem displays the Latin inscription Mundus–Annus–Homo (World–Year–Man): it reproduces an engraving from the first printed edition of Isidore of Seville, a polymath of the 6th–7th centuries and major compiler of ancient traditions. The circular diagram designed by the author correlates the four elements of the world (mundus) – air, fire, earth, and water – with the cosmic cycle of the four seasons of the year (annus) and the humours affecting Man (homo) in relation to the degrees of cold or heat, and of humidity or dryness. This reference to human character-types derives from the doctrine of the four temperaments transmitted through the Aristotelian tradition [Fig. 2a]. Isidore’s circular diagram depicts a tetradic set which associates – from right to left – air with spring and blood as the life force (aer / ver / sanguis); fire with summer and yellow bile, the cause of anger (ignis / æstas / colera); earth with autumn and black bile as the source of melancholy (terra / autumnus / melancolia); and finally water with winter and the phlegmatic humour (aqua / hiems / flegma humor).

Following Warburg, Saxl had come across this figure while studying the iconological context of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514). In an eponymous study published in 1923 with Erwin Panofsky, he refers to Isidore's De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things) as a work that bridges ancient cosmologies and the belief in the influence of the planets on human temperaments.[1] According to Saxl, much of the secular imagery of the Middle Ages draws upon this author. Together with Bing, he engaged KBW collaborators to trace illustrated editions of Isidore's works. A project for expanded research on melancholy in the history of natural philosophy, religion, and art, joined by the young Raymond Klibansky, then began to take shape. The undertaking continued after 1934 in London, where a rare first printed edition of De natura rerum (1472) [Fig. 2b] was discovered, presumably in the library of the Royal Astronomical Society. This discovery provided the source for the Mundus – Annus – Homo xylograph, later chosen as the Institute’s emblem.

The Institute’s early publications in London feature this diagram in miniature as a logo – in the series Studies of the Warburg Institute, edited by Saxl since 1936, as well as in the Journal of the Warburg Institute, founded by Edgar Wind and first published in 1937 [Fig. 3]. The new logo clearly builds upon Warburg's inquiry into the highly symbolic nature of imprese – scholarly or bookshop insignia.[2] A typical example of the correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm in Renaissance symbolism, this diagram has been one of the key devices for transmitting concepts relating the cosmos to human character-types. It bears traces of earlier historical layers – Greco–Roman and Eastern – and has undergone numerous variations. It includes a directional dimension based on the cardinal points or the four winds, and a temporal dimension with the cycle of the four seasons, which is associated with the ages of man and his character-types. (The latter also tend to break into allegorical figures of their own – as in Dürer’s famous engraving which reanimates, in a striking reversal, the ancient link between melancholyand genius.)

The collective project on representations of melancholy harks back to the long underlying significance of Isidore’s tetradic scheme and shows that it also persists in popular calendars, as well as in illustrated scholarly treatises. The volume in the making points in particular to the Septem planetae series engravedby Gérard de Jode in 1581. While the correspondence between the elements Air – Fire – Earth – Water and the humours blood – yellow bile – black bile – phlegm is preserved in allegorical form, the frontispiece substitutes the cycle of the planets for that of the seasons [Fig. 4]. Here, the planets control temperaments and, like the Roman divinities whose names they retain, they influence man's destiny –melancholy is the fate of those born under Saturn. But this account of the "afterlife" of Isidore's scheme was to remain unknown for a long time, as the German publication of the collaborative work by Saxl, Panofsky and Klibansky, completed in the summer of 1939 under the title Melancholie und Saturn, was curtailed by the war.

In 1958, a plaque engraved with the circular emblem would be affixed to the entrance pediment of the Warburg Institute building on the campus of the University of London [Fig. 5]. It was Bing, the Institute's director at the time, who supervised the installation, thus giving a counterpart to the MNEMOSYNE inscription on the interior lintel of the former Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg. It also took all her diplomatic skill to overcome the long dispute with Panofsky over the appropriateness of an English publication of the collective work on melancholy – Saxl had died in 1948 – under the editorship of Klibansky. It was not until 1964 that the monumental Saturn and Melancholy, which contains the source of the Institute’s emblem, finally appeared, credited to the three authors. As an allusion to the tetradic scheme, the dust jacket of the book reproduces the frontispiece Septem Planetae.[3]

Lastly, Klibansky included the engraving Mundus–Annus–Homo itself [Fig. 6a] – previously only Isidore’s text had been quoted – in the expanded German edition of the work in 1990. Thus concludes the project envisioned by Warburg 70 years earlier – which, through the genealogy of the emblem, embodies the history and exile of the singular research community gathered around the Hamburger KBW. In London the preserved original arrangement of the Warburg Library has been summarized in a tetradic diagram modelled on the Institute’s circular emblem [Fig. 6b]. It shows how the Library's division into four sections – Image, Word, Orientation, Action – does not refer to an ascending hierarchical structure, but to a range of ever-open cross-disciplinary relationships between the visual arts, literature, religion, magic and science, and social history.

The Warburg Library’s display of knowledge by the "good neighbour" principle – as suggested through its circular scheme – was inspired by that of ancient cultures, which predate the division between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ established by the Western scientific and technical revolution. This type of arrangement, in which magical practices and the natural sciences stay side by side, contributed to a delinearisation of thought that lay at the heart of the Warburgian enterprise. Its mapping of the afterlife of polytheistic representations may, in this sense, contribute to forge new paths linking the history of images and the arts to a critique of linear thinking – which is also called for today by many Indigenous nations.[4]


Philippe Despoix, Professor at the Université de Montréal / Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyaang 
The author of K. B. W. – La bibliothèque Warburg, laboratoire de pensée intermédiale, Presses du réel, Dijon-Montréal 2023

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