Aby Warburg, or Abraham Moritz Warburg, was a German cultural theorist and art historian. He’s known for founding a private library for cultural studies – the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, which was later moved to the Warburg Institute in London.
The Warburg Institute is notable for its interdisciplinary research reaching across the histories of art, religion and science to anthropology, psychology and religion. The Warburg Institute’s engagement with the superstitious, emotional and irrational elements of cultural phenomena has always been one of it’s distinctive features.
The Warburg Library has distinctive strengths in the fields of Medieval and Renaissance art, Medieval and Renaissance philosophy, the history of humanism and the histories of science, magic and religion as well as a strong and suggestive system of classification.
