10

Botticelli Recovered

This was the first of three René Wellek Library lectures, given at the University of California at Irvine in 1983. I wrote it at a time when there was a general interest, and much dispute, about the nature of canons, arguments about why works of art and artists dropped out of or into these mysterious containers. The present piece takes Botticelli as an instance – there are many others – of an artist once highly valued, then disregarded, and then restored, sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes even with veneration, to the notice and respect of those who care for such matters. It was an attractive idea to do some amateur art history before going on, in the next chapter, to think about a fairly secure member of the literary canon, namely Hamlet.

My interest in the life and work of Herbert Horne had preceded the writing of this piece, and was acquired from the late Ian Fletcher, at the time the supreme authority on the ‘decadent’ poets of the late nineteenth century. I was also indebted to the Warburg Institute, to the late Ernst Gombrich and to Joe Trapp, himself an animated catalogue of that extraordinary library, and the dedicatee of the lectures when they appeared as Forms of Attention in 1985 (University of Chicago Press).

 

Habent sua fata libelli, and so do paintings. The works of Botticelli were ignored for centuries; indeed it has been said, by the historian who has described with most authority the circumstances of his resurrection, that ‘probably no other great painter, so far, has endured so long a period of neglect’ as Botticelli.¹ He died, as Michael Levey puts it, ‘at an awkward moment for his reputation’; but many artists have done that, and risen again much more promptly than Botticelli. He was already, it seems, sinking from his zenith in the last years of his life, probably because by comparison with Leonardo and Michelangelo he was old-fashioned, even deliberately archaistic. Vasari, upon whom continuance of fame so much depended, took an evolutionary view of the art of painting, and although his Life of Botticelli did something to preserve at least the name of the artist, he could not have thought him comparable with the very great men of the next generation, and the biography is defective and perfunctory. Botticelli’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were overshadowed by their great neighbours, and when they were noticed at all it was mostly by way of unfavourable comparison. Fuseli was not exceptional in criticizing their ‘puerile ostentation’.² The Dante illustrations could not be admired until Dante himself again came to be so, and indeed they had to wait some time even after that event. In short, the oblivion into which this painter fell soon after his death was so close to being total that one might suppose it could be dissipated only by some extraordinary development in the history of taste.

And that is what occurred. The Primavera and The Birth of Venus emerged from obscurity and were hung, in 1815, in the Uffizi.³ The side walls of the Sistine Chapel began to be noticed, even by some admired. In 1836 Alexis-François Rio published De la poésie chrétienne, a book containing passages in praise of the Sistine frescoes; it was translated into English in 1854, and Levey thinks it induced Ruskin to look for the first time at Botticelli. (One unpredictable consequence of his doing so was the painter’s important appearance in A la recherche du temps perdu.) Meanwhile interest in Botticelli grew faster than accurate knowledge of him, and a collection might contain ‘“Botticelli” by all sorts of people – but none by Botticelli.’⁴ Among the painters, Burne-Jones was an admirer in the early Sixties. Conventional opinion was still easily shocked by the intrusion of pagan themes into Quattrocento painting; but the advocacy of Burne-Jones and, later, of Rossetti encouraged the avant-garde.

There persisted, in the Sixties, a widely shared opinion which must seem surprising to us, that Botticelli limited his appeal by preferring ugly women. A solid history of painting published in that decade described these women as ‘coarse and altogether without beauty’.⁵ The first Englishman to find a way of correcting this view was Swinburne in 1868. What had hitherto been called clumsiness was now transformed into a ‘faint and almost painful grace’, and those ugly faces took on a ‘somewhat lean and fleshless beauty, worn down it seems by some sickness or natural trouble’.⁶ Botticelli’s archaisms, his unnaturally sad Madonnas, were no longer faults. Fitted into a later historical tradition, and a modern programme for painting, he was on the way to joining the list of artists who had a special relevance to the modern world. Of this tradition Mario Praz was later to write much of the history in his book The Romantic Agony.

In 1870 Walter Pater published his famous essay, later reprinted with little change in The Renaissance (1873).⁷ Though it coincided with, and in considerable measure caused, the great vogue of Botticelli, Pater’s essay is cautious enough to remember the familiar strictures. ‘People have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli’s work’, he says, and ‘his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.’ Nevertheless Botticelli is still ‘a secondary painter’, and needs a certain amount of justification. There are Madonnas, Pater admits, who might seem ‘peevish-looking’ – they conform ‘to no acknowledged type of beauty’. It could even be said that there is ‘something in them mean and abject … for the abstract lines of the faces have little nobleness … and the colour is wan’. He sees these Madonnas as detached, uninvolved in their role, like the ‘Madonna of the Magnificat’, to whom ‘the high cold words’ of that canticle mean little. Nor do the pagan Venuses escape this strangeness. ‘Botticelli’s interest,’ says Pater, ‘is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico’s saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna’s Inferno, but with [sic] men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.’⁸

Yet The Birth of Venus reminds him of Ingres, which makes it modern; and there is also in this painter a strong Greek feeling, as of the modern world’s first look back at the forms of antiquity. Moreover, the visionary quality of Botticelli significantly resembles that of Dante; and finally, he is a true manifestation of the wonderful early Renaissance. In a sense all these claims may be resolved into one, the claim to modernity. The modern includes a new appropriation of Greek art, of Dante, of the newly valued Quattrocento. All that disparate history comes together here, which is why one can find in Botticelli a modern ‘sentiment of ineffable melancholy’. His goddess of pleasure, ‘the depositary of a great power over the lives of men’, is modern in that manner, and the Madonnas are modern in being saddened rather than pleased at what is happening to them. And so Botticelli, who depicted ‘the shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers’ in a representation of Venus, becomes a modern painter.

Released at last from his historical oubliette, he was celebrated as new, as unacademic, as having affinities with the Japanese art that was now pouring into Paris and London by the tea chest. The cult was the subject of jokes in Punch and in Patience. Cheap reproductions abounded. But although he grew popular he made on the art of the period an impression that would last into a later modernism:

Her present image floats into the mind –
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it,
Hollow of cheek as if it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

Now firmly established in his new setting, Botticelli was accorded a position of eminence from which he was unlikely ever to be completely dislodged. He owed his promotion not to scholars but to artists and other persons of modern sensibility, whose ideas of history were more passionate than accurate, and whose connoisseurship was, as I have said, far from exact. At this stage exact knowledge had no part to play. Opinion, to some extent informed, required, at this modern moment, a certain kind of early Renaissance art; Botticelli, along with some contemporaries – though first among them – provided it. Enthusiasm counted for more than research, opinion for more than knowledge.

I shall now give some account of a man born about the time of the great Botticelli revival, and strongly influenced by Pater as well as by Morris. His part, therefore, was rather to reinforce and secure than to establish Botticelli’s fame. Herbert Horne’s is not a famous name, and he was denied even a brief entry in the British Dictionary of National Biography. Most of our information about his life has been assembled by Ian Fletcher, upon whose published and unpublished work I here to a considerable extent depend.⁹ Born in 1864, Horne was pretty exactly the contemporary of Yeats and Arthur Symons. Like them, he studied at no university, but he had very early acquired an expert knowledge of several arts. He was also a precocious and successful collector. Soon he became a follower of Pater. At eighteen he went to study design with the architect and designer A. H. Mackmurdo, founder of the Century Guild, which was dedicated to the unification of the arts. Horne became co-editor, with Mackmurdo, of the journal called The Century Guild Hobby Horse, which tried to bring on this unification by publishing new poetry along with articles of artistic and antiquarian interest. Horne himself was painter, bookbinder, architect and designer, an authority on furniture and ancient musical instruments, a remarkable collector of English eighteenth-century painting, and a poet.

Horne seems to have been a rather chilly and disagreeable man – if we are to believe Arthur Symons, a surly, even sinister figure, a successful but dispassionate womanizer, and a secret homosexual. An unpublished poem, reported by Fletcher, speaks of the poet (aged about twenty) as containing in his person ‘the torrid and the frigid interwove’, a combination reflecting his conviction that ‘the poetic nature is the marriage of Heaven and Hell’. The line about the torrid and the frigid recurs in a half-amorous set of letters now in the library of the Warburg Institute, and Fritz Saxl took it as the key to the whole character of Horne, whom he greatly admired. From these letters we may also learn that in 1885 Horne was working at ‘verse, painting, designing down to drainpipes’, and also painting on a settle an allegorical panel with the Tree of Knowledge and Death in a thornless rose bush. He expresses an admiration for Parsifal, though not for The Ring, the former perhaps suiting better with a certain rather vague religiosity in the poetry he was writing. With considerably more animation he professes himself keen on the music halls, wishing some rich patron would rent him a stall at the Gaiety.

This ambition will seem odd or vulgar only to people unfamiliar with the preoccupations of artists and aesthetes at this period. Horne was always serious about the arts, and very nearly supreme among them was the art of the dance. His interest in the Gaiety and in the Alhambra was by no means entirely a matter for lusty hours of leisure. Of course, one object was to pick up the dancing girls; but there is something distinctive about the aesthetics of such activities. The poet Ernest Dowson was grateful to Horne for taking the risk of publishing his poem ‘Non sum qualis eram’ in The Hobby Horse; and he respected him as the benefactor of Lionel Johnson, and the host of the Rhymers’ Club, established in January 1891; but he found him so formidable that he was uneasy about dining alone with him.¹⁰ I mention this to provide some context for Dowson’s account of a meeting with Horne and his great friend the artist Selwyn Image (Slade Professor of the History of Art at Oxford) at the back door of the Alhambra on a doubtless chilly night in January 1890. They introduced Dowson to ‘several trivial choryphées’. ‘There was something grotesque’, he goes on ‘in the juxtaposition. Horne very erect & slim & aesthetic – and Image the most dignified man in London, a sort of cross in appearance between a secular abbé and Baudelaire, with a manner de 18me siècle – waiting in a back passage to be escort to ballet girls … I confess, this danseuse-worship escapes me!!,¹¹

But here Dowson, not his friends, is out of step. He holds himself immune to ‘danseuse-worship’, which was, among his peers, an important cult at the time. The dance was associated with the Mass as well as with the poetic image, and from Lo‘ie Fuller and Jane Avril to Nini Patte-en-l’air, dancers were adored; respectable clergymen as well as artists and professors waited for dancing girls in back alleys, since the ritual required it.¹² The cult was by no means unrelated to that of Botticelli’s enigmatic Venuses. (I do not know whether E. H. Gombrich’s conjecture that the central figure of the Primavera – identified by most, though not all, commentators as Venus – is ‘dancing with a slow halting step’ had any antecedent in the Nineties.)¹³ At all events, a quantity of poetry was dedicated to the dance and to dancers; there were many set pieces on Javanese and other exotic dancers, especially by Arthur Symons, and many on Salome. Out of this movement, and after great transformations, came the dances and dancers of Yeats and Eliot. Waiting in that back alley, Horne was doing nothing out of character for a Nineties artist, a painter of settles, an admirer of Parsifal, a lover of Botticelli.

Yeats, like most people who knew him, had reservations about Horne and Image (whom Horne, facetiously no doubt, described as ‘the gem of this dim age’); he thought them ‘typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance’; but he admired Horne, too, for his ‘conscious deliberate craft’. Like Saxl after him, he praised the church Horne built near Marble Arch on the model of the cathedral at Pietrasanta in Tuscany (it was destroyed by bombing, like most of Horne’s buildings in London). And he credited Horne with ‘what I must lack always, scholarship’; he was one of those, said Yeats, who helped to teach him that ‘violent energy, which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a few minutes the nervous vitality, and is useless in the arts’.¹⁴ Yeats is writing with the aid of hindsight, knowing of Horne’s later achievements, patient and monumental; the burning of damp faggots was, as it turned out, more suited to the work Horne was born to do than any display of genius that burns itself out.

However, for the time being he went on with other tasks, painting settles, cretonnes, fenders, harpsichords; designing and binding books (he published a study of bookbinding in 1894); working as an architect; editing Jacobean plays and Herrick; collecting paintings; writing poems. When Verlaine paid his famous visit to London and Oxford it was Horne who helped Symons to look after him; he was right in the middle of contemporary poetry. His own slim volume, Diversi Colores, with his own typography and design, was published in 1891, the year of the Rhymers; it has forty-odd pages of poems strongly influenced by Campion, Herrick, and madrigal verse, with some fairly warm liturgical pieces and some cool love poems. On this evidence Horne was but a small poet; and Ian Fletcher makes only small claims for the verse that remains in manuscript. It is absolutely of its historical moment. Horne was a gifted minor artist at the centre of his world. At his house in Fitzroy Street artists of all kinds gathered: Fletcher lists Dowson and Johnson, Sturge Moore, Yeats, Sickert, Walter Crane, Augustus John, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Arnold Dolmetsch (who built the harpsichord Horne decorated), and Roger Fry.

But this phase of his life was ending. He grew more and more interested in antiquarian matters, and the files of The Hobby Horse show it. He became an authority on the restoration of old buildings, on book illustration, on fifteenth-century woodcuts. He added to his remarkable collection; as Fletcher remarks, the building of it with such slender resources must have required ‘a certain ruthlessness and detachment’.¹⁵ He quarrelled with Mackmurdo; The Hobby Horse died; and the aesthetic phase was over. Horne grew more and more interested in Italian art. He began to spend much time in Florence, and published a scholarly article on Uccello, but his main interest was Botticelli.

In 1908 he sold a considerable part of his English collection to Edward Marsh; most of it is now in the National Gallery in London. Horne used the proceeds to buy and restore an old palazzo in Florence, acquired in 1912. On his death in 1916 he left Casa Horne to the city of Florence, with provision for its upkeep; but the endowment was spent on unsuccessful investments. The Museo Horne may still be visited, though the most important of its contents have been moved to the Uffizi Gallery.

During these years in Florence Horne applied himself with remarkable dedication to the writing of a long book on Botticelli, and a second volume on the scuola; until very recently this second volume was supposed never to have been written, but I am told by Professor Fletcher that it has been found in the Museo Horne. Its publication will be an event of importance. Long before he moved to Florence, Horne, as Yeats tells us, was ‘learned in Botticelli’ and ‘had begun to boast that when he wrote of him there would be no literature, all would be but learning’.¹⁶ And Horne’s Alessandro Filipepi called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence (1908) might seem to justify that claim. It is regarded by modern art historians as one of the finest books ever written about a Renaissance painter; Sir John Pope-Hennessy, in his preface to the facsimile reprint of 1980, says that it ‘has stood the test of time better than almost any other book about art history’, and that ‘all subsequent Botticelli scholarship depends’ on Horne’s.¹⁷ Fritz Saxl admired it for its austerity, for Horne’s unweaving of the frigid from the torrid; for, says Saxl, he writes ‘accurately and disinterestedly in a frigid style which almost obliterates the personality of the author’. To such self-discipline, to the suppression of that ‘torrid’ streak, we owe, according to Saxl, ‘an unimpeachable piece of historical scholarship’.¹⁸

It would be unreasonable to expect such a book to be very ‘torrid’; it is primarily concerned with fact, with correct attribution and description, with offering the world an authentic Botticelli instead of the apocryphal figure it had come so much to admire. Such work demands a proper coolness of manner. Its power derives mostly from pertinacity of research – few documents have been added to those unearthed by Horne in his tireless quest through the Florentine archives – and from a habitual accuracy of eye. And Arthur Symons remarked that when Horne ‘sat down to write something dry and hard came into the words’.¹⁹ Yet I cannot think the book quite as frigid as Saxl and others have found it.

As to its design and typography it is, as one would expect of a work by Horne, an object of beauty – a book which could not have been as it is had there not been that movement in the visual arts and crafts in which Horne had been apprenticed and played a part. And the prose of the book has a sort of pedantic vivacity, a modernist archaism, that seems very much the proper style for the man; an ‘aesthetic’ style, but qualified by a pride in accurate learning. Of course, Horne is conscious of an intention to correct the notions that had grown up with, and fed, the taste for Botticelli. He is quite hard on Pater, a main contention of whose essay ‘turns on the mistaken attribution to Sandro of the Palmieri altarpiece’;²⁰ and he explains those ‘peevish-looking Madonnas’ who conform ‘to no acknowledged type or obvious type of beauty’ as ‘school-pictures … in which the imitators of Botticelli exaggerate his mannerisms’,²¹ but which have come to be regarded as typical of the master himself. Indeed, Horne suggests that it was the resemblance between such pictures and the fashionable second-rate art of Burne-Jones that ensured their popularity. However, Pater had some excuse; Horne also explains that in 1870, when the essay appeared, ‘Botticelli was nominally represented at the National Gallery by three Madonnas of his school, two of them being “Tondi”, and the only genuine works by him then in the collections, passed under the names of Masaccio … and Filippino Lippi … . No wonder the attendant angels depress their heads so naively’.²² And Pater, with all his errors, wrote what Horne regards as ‘still the subtlest and most suggestive appreciation of Botticelli, in a personal way, which has yet been written’,²³ a work therefore intimately related to ‘the peculiarly English cult of Botticelli, which now [in the 1880s] became a distinctive trait of a phase of thought and taste, or of what passed for such, as odd and extravagant as any of our odd and extravagant time’.²⁴ Pater is one of the two dedicatees of Horne’s book. Its main purpose, he assures us, is the accumulation of information, but especially connoisseurship. We may think it in some sense also the tribute of a sardonic personality, now matured, to the affectations and enthusiasms of his formative years; a rejection of the nonsense, of the false modernity, in terms which nevertheless accept the rightness of the valuation put upon Botticelli in ‘our odd and extravagant time’, and pay to the achievement of those years the compliment not only of the dedication to Pater, but also the greater one of a style that still acknowledges Pater. Like Yeats’s, Horne’s prose always remembers that master, conscious as it is of its own elegance and exactness, conscious too of its possession (proper also to the true though not the phantom Botticelli) of an aria virile to which Pater’s could lay no claim.

Again and again we find, in this work supposed uniformly severe and scholarly, traces of Paterian taste and manner. Of the Adoration of the Magi Horne writes that it is the driest and most naturalistic of the works: ‘nowhere is Botticelli’s peculiar temperament obtruded into the painting; its grave and reasonable beauty nowhere disturbed by those “bizzarie”, that “strangeness in the proportion”, by which such works as the “Spring” and the “Calumny” are distinguished’.²⁵ More strikingly, he says of the Primavera that ‘in no picture which possesses the sentiment of beauty at all in the same degree, are there so many forms and traits so far removed from the accepted ideas of beauty … In conception antique, solemn, religious; in expression modern, as it then was, Florentine, bizarre, fantastic … He derives the subject matter of his picture wholly from antiquity; but of Greek or Roman sculpture, or painting, he knows little or nothing; nothing, at any rate, that can hinder or distort his vision. And so just that which chilled or destroyed Post-Raphaelite art, served only in Botticelli to quicken his vision of the world around him.’²⁶ It seems doubtful that the insight could have found just this expression if Pater had not come beforehand. The same may be said of Horne’s account of the picture of St Augustine in the Ognissanti, which takes up Pater’s observation of Botticelli’s ‘Dantesque’ quality and gives it precision, at the same time emphasizing what Pater did not understand, the aria virile thought by his contemporaries to be the painter’s distinctive trait: ‘We, at the present day, are apt to think that “undercurrent of original sentiment” which runs through his works, and even the exaggeration of that sentiment in the many works of his school which pass under his name, as the distinguishing character of Botticelli’s manner; but for the Florentines of his own day this forcible, this Dantesque air, which in the fresco of St Augustine is first clearly shown, this aria virile as the Florentines themselves called it, was that which distinguished his work, from the work of his disciples and contemporaries’.²⁷ Horne will even ask tentatively whether the secret of the painter’s greatness may not be that the modern view of him – as a visionary painter – and the contemporary view, which admired his virility, might be ‘from their several standpoints, equally true’.²⁸ But then the historian in Horne prevails. When restorations have reduced the original force of a painting by inserting passages that are sweeter, or ‘prettified’, as in the ‘Tondo of the Magnificat’, he is sure that the ‘misfortune … has contributed not a little to the extraordinary popularity of the picture’. ²⁹ When Pater finds in that painting the bizarre interest of a heretical Virgin, he may be credited with ‘an exquisite personal revery’ but he has also done some harm to the truth³⁰ Similarly, the ‘cadaverous’ colour, as Pater called it, of The Birth of Venus is entirely the consequence of the deterioration of the pigment.³¹

It cannot be doubted that when it came to a choice between ‘that modernity of sentiment and interpretation which is apt to distort our perception’,³² and the historical fact, Horne consciously chose the latter. If Ruskin finds ‘strangeness and gloom’ pervasive in Botticelli’s work, that is only because the aria virile would seem so to ‘a critic who, in reality, took as his criterion in all questions of painting, the refined and gentle art of the English landscape painters, and the English Pre-Raphaelites’.³³

It is interesting to watch Horne at his business of tracing the emergence, in Botticelli’s manner, of the virile air. He is no mere archivist, and can command that air himself, as in his vivacious and pure-styled account of the Pazzi conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1478. His excuse for dwelling on the event was that, after the failure of the plot, Botticelli was commissioned, in accordance with custom, to make effigies of the condemned or executed conspirators. He put them in a fresco above the door of the old Dogana, but after a more successful coup some years later they were destroyed. However, the need, in these works, to emulate the naturalism of Andrea da Castagno, who had done the like before him, gave Botticelli a new ‘rugged power’³⁴ which thenceforth showed up in his other work, first in the St Augustine of 1480; the Sistine frescoes, painted before 1482, show it fully. To the expression of this conjecture Horne brings a rugged power of his own, in sharp contrast to the period prose he had left behind him.

All the same, he sees Botticelli as growing increasingly mannered and nervous as his fame was eclipsed by the new school and his line of life crossed by that of Savonarola; he reverts more and more, ‘not only in method, but in design and sentiment, to that tradition of Giottesque painting, from which he had so largely derived his art’.³⁵ And here, perhaps, is another excuse for those who, during the revival, got Botticelli wrong. There is an element of truth, after all, in both Ruskin and Pater; Botticelli has his ‘discordant traits’, his bizarrerie, his ‘amatorious sweetness’, and his archaisms.³⁶ In any case they played a part in restoring to our attention what Horne is willing to call ‘the supreme accomplishment of modern art’.³⁷

It might be reasonable, then, to characterize Horne’s effort as an attempt to modify what had become the stock responses of modernity to this painter without completely denying his affinity to the relatively ignorant enthusiasts who preceded him; he wished to give to languid revery an exactness of registration, a precision that it lacked, though he did not wish altogether to disperse its achievement. If he held it at a critical distance, he also mistrusted the more pretentious minuteness of academic art history. If the aesthetes exaggerated Botticelli’s sense of ‘loss or displacement’,³⁸ the professors could be nastily vainglorious: ‘Professor Schmarsow has informed us exactly which of the figures of the Popes [in the Sistine frescoes] were painted by Melozzo; but as I am unable to follow the arguments of the egregious Professor, not having studied in the Academy of Lagado, I must leave his conclusions undiscussed’.³⁹

And it is true, after all, that the professors had little or nothing to do with the revival of Botticelli. It was the work of opinion, never to be observed without its shadow, ignorance. And it was Horne, no professor – he had never studied in any academy whatsoever – who did most to reinforce opinion with knowledge, and so give to his subject, not immunity to future loss of regard, but certainly a new standing, a new attitude in the flow of time.

 

Aby Warburg, born in 1866, was Horne’s junior by two years, and also a child of the decade that made Botticelli’s revival an accomplished fact. His origins were very different; the son of a Hamburg banker, he was destined to be head of the firm, but he became a scholar instead, and a remarkable one. E. H. Gombrich’s admirable ‘intellectual biography’ of Warburg⁴⁰ gives one a rather intimate view of an education that was wholly different from any that could be got, then or now, in Britain or the United States, and certainly a world away from the quite informal training of Horne. Warburg was the pupil of great men now largely forgotten – of Hermann Usener, remembered perhaps because of the phrase ‘momentary deity’, and the championship of Ernst Cassirer; of Karl Lamprecht, Anton Springer, Carl Justi; and of that August Schmarsow who inadvertently irritated Horne.⁴¹

Most of Warburg’s teachers assumed that the findings of modern science ought to be applied to the humanities. They were affected, one way or another, by Hegel, but also by evolutionary theory, and by the tenacity of the primitive – the manifestations, in the life of an evolved civilization, of images or of behaviour that originate in some residual or atavistic layer of the individual mind or of the race, or simply of civilization. Lamprecht, whom Gombrich describes as the most influential of Warburg’s masters, divided cultural history into five periods, each a further displacement of the primitive ‘symbolic’; and Springer was interested in the ways in which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance looked at classical antiquity. It was he who called this the study of ‘das Nachleben des Antike’, an expression later strongly associated with Warburg.

Usener’s quest for ‘spiritual traces of vanished times’ in later cultural epochs,⁴² and the many other rather similar kinds of research in the latter half of the century, may suggest a quite different variety of fin-de-siecle preoccupation than those of Horne and his circle. These scholars were concerned with the construction of theories intended to have great explanatory power. One naturally thinks of a much greater man, Freud (though Warburg himself did not care to do so) as one concerned also with the relation of the primitive, and of primitive symbols, to civilization. I shall return briefly to Freud and his relevance to these questions in my third lecture; here I mention him only as a name more familiar than the others who sought something like total historical explanations, though they looked primarily to art for their evidence of symbolic survival.

Warburg himself sketches systems in his notebooks, but the pattern of the interests underlying them is clear and persistent; he rarely allowed his theoretical speculations to escape from his notes, and he was pained by the difficulty of reconciling them with his observations. As Gombrich delicately explains, Warburg’s psychological constitution was such that he must have been especially interested in the idea that history demonstrates a progress from an archaic state of terror, and that symbols or images proper to that early state may recur under civilized conditions, but purged of their original dionysiac horror.⁴³ This lifelong sufferer from anxiety therefore had a personal motive for studying not only the survival of antique forms, but also the evolved conditions under which they might later manifest themselves. Springer had taught him that just as the historian has always to interpret the past from his own historically limited position, so too ‘the object of interpretation – in the case of art – is itself a reinterpretation of some earlier source’.⁴⁴ Warburg accordingly combined a perpetual interest in the recurrent transformations of ancient symbols with minute research into the social and pictorial circumstances of their reappearances. He did not forget what Lamprecht had taught him – that all artefacts are evidence; and he knew that there was nothing in the history of thought - whether of art, religion, magic, or science – that was in principle irrelevant to his enquiries.

Like most ambitious thinkers, he used other men’s thoughts and systems of ideas as stimulants rather than as schemes he might or might not adopt; he was not looking for something ready-made, but for hints, for the stimulus that might give rise to a brainwave of his own. The ‘afterlife of antiquity’ became his own subject – not in the old manner, the manner of Winckelmann, who thought of the classical influence as calm and idealizing, but instead as the memory of what had been tamed and put to human use. Images which had their origin in archaic terror, he believed, would recur in more reassuring contexts; they would then encapsulate the mentality of another epoch.

‘God dwells in detail’ was a motto of Warburg’s;⁴⁵ but his observation of detail, his choice of interests, depended upon a larger need for a theory that would accumulate symbolic recurrence in changing historical conditions. After the First World War he spent six years in an asylum; on his return to work in 1924 he was still looking for a theory of transindividual memory. He found help in the doctrines of Richard Semon,⁴⁶ which concerned engrams or memory traces in the individual, and he extended this notion so that he could think of recurrent forms and symbols as engrams or traces in the memory of a culture. Artists make contact with these mnemic energies, and the history of art can be seen as a history of reinterpretations, updatings of these symbols, in the course of which they are purged of their original ecstasy and terror. In this way, he said, ‘humanity’s holdings in suffering become the possessions of the humane’.⁴⁷ He could, for example, compare Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe with the sarcophagus that, through Renaissance intermediaries, is its source, and call Manet’s picture the transformation of a ‘phobic engram’.⁴⁸

Such ideas have a practical value quite apart from any interest they may have as theories; they provide methods of studying detail, and of choosing which details to study. In 1893 Warburg wrote his thesis on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring. How did Botticelli and his patrons imagine the antique? To answer these questions calls for detailed knowledge of such matters as the relations between artists, patrons, and humanists. Warburg provided some of the answers, especially with respect to the literary sources of these paintings, and though there are many rival proposals for the programmes of the works, this early study of Warburg continues to be cited and, usually, endorsed.⁴⁹

On the face of it, nothing could less resemble the essay of Pater, or even the assured connoisseurship of Horne, than this piece of German art history. Yet Warburg certainly had, in common with Horne, a fastidious dislike for the new vulgar cult of the Quattrocento and especially of Botticelli – indeed, for all that Horne meant to exclude when he told Yeats there would be in his book on Botticelli ‘no literature’. And perhaps they had something more positive in common.

Warburg observed in the running female figure of the Primavera, the breeze blowing her dress against her body, a specific classical motif – an instance of the Nachleben of an antique form, which also constituted a sort of emancipation from the stiff northern fashions of contemporary Florentine taste. The literary source of the poem – Ovid, as mediated by the contemporary poet Poliziano – offers a similar modern version of the antique; but the visual image has a special suggestiveness. The female figure with agitated drapery, as it sometimes occurs in late fifteenth-century art, was named by Leonardo the ‘Nympha’, and Warburg borrowed the word.⁵⁰ Long before, Hippolyte Taine had singled out for admiration a figure in Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the nativity of St John the Baptist in Santa Maria Novella. ‘In the “Nativity of the Virgin” the girl in a silk skirt, who comes in on a visit, is the plain demure young lady of good condition; in the “Nativity of St John” another, standing, is a medieval duchess; near her the servant bringing in fruits, in statuesque drapery, has the impulse, the vivacity and force of an antique nymph, the two ages and the two orders of beauty thus meeting and uniting in the simplicity of the same true sentiment.’⁵¹ But Taine goes on to admit that such pictures, though interesting, lack skill, lack action and colour, belonging as they do to the dawn or first light of the Renaissance. Warburg did not feel the need to make these Vasari-inspired concessions; Ghirlandaio’s Nympha interested him so much that he projected a study of the motif.

In a partly facetious correspondence of Warburg’s with a friend equally interested in the Nympha, she is compared with Salome, who danced ‘with her death-dealing charm in front of the licentious tetrarch’, and also with Judith. ‘There was’, as Gombrich says, ‘something in the figure which struck the two students of art as the embodiment of passion’; and although Gombrich finds an explanation for this enthusiasm in the resemblances between the Nympha and the ‘new woman’ of Warburg’s own time, and the call for less restricted movement in sport and in dancing, he also affirms that ‘none of Warburg’s published writings bears the stamp of the fin de siècle and of the fashionable Renaissance cult of those years to anything like the same degree as this abortive plan’. The Nympha, whether in Botticelli or in Ghirlandaio, was an embodiment of Renaissance ‘paganism’, an ‘eruption of primitive emotion through the crust of Christian selfcontrol’, or perhaps an instance of their being made ‘compatible’, a word borrowed by Warburg from Herbert Spencer.⁵²

‘Have I encountered her before?’ Is she a memory reaching back over ‘one and a half millennia’? Is the Nympha the Maenad, or a trace of that figure erupting in the art of the Quattrocento as Salome into that of the fin de siecle? Warburg is undoubtedly thinking of her in a manner for which, much later, he was to find concrete terms in Semon; she is the reinterpretation of an engram, harnessing the energy of the old image, civilizing it. She represents the way in which antique forms may be modern. By understanding Botticelli’s communion with the past we are afforded an understanding of our own.

So, in his very different way, Warburg too was fascinated by the dancing Salome; for him as for Yeats, such a figure represented the survival into modernity of images perpetuated in a process of memory that transcended the individual. What marks the difference between the self-educated poet and the scholar of many seminars and libraries is partly a matter of tone, but more of the type of intellectual system that each, according to his formation, chose. Warburg’s explanations tend to have a scientific character, as his training required; Yeats preferred magic.

Over the years Warburg built a large, interdisciplinary, and idiosyncratic library, at first housed in the Institute at Hamburg. He called it an ‘observation post for cultural history’. Anything that had some bearing on the Nachleben ought to be there.⁵³ For the study of detail and recurrence he used large screens, on which one could arrange images and study their mnemic interrelations; these screens he would carry across Europe in trains, a rich man’s instruments for the study of cultural memory traces, a service to Mnemosyne, whose name was to give him the title of his last projected book. On such screens one might see the relation between Judith and an ancient female headhunter and also the sublimated image of a girl carrying a basket of fruit; she might be the Nympha as the Hora of Autumn, or Rachel at the well, in Botticelli’s Vatican fresco. More playfully, perhaps, one connects a maenad with a female golfer. Gombrich illustrates the Nympha screen: a tondo by Filippo Lippi, examples of the classical origin of blown veils, an early Christian ivory, a photograph of an Italian peasant with a head basket, debased nymphs on travel posters. Warburg called the screen Das Märchen vom Fraulein Schnellbring – another jest, but he also associated her with manic states, in himself and in cultural history.⁵⁴

It is easy to see that his work was both facilitated and constrained by his own psychology, and he pursued it passionately without ever fully justifying his method. Gombrich remarks that it is impossible to tell where ‘the metaphor of survival ends and where a belief in the independent life of these entities [the archaic symbols] begins’.⁵⁵ But perhaps it is never simple to distinguish between the systematic expression of beliefs, and needs or drives more obscure, for which such systems may serve as metaphors.

The study of the Nachleben has taken new forms, though they are recognizably in the Warburg tradition, and testify to the continuance of his passion for detail, his cult of Mnemosyne. He was himself unusually aware that forgetting and mistaking were important parts of the action of memory. He pointed to the errors of the Florentine camerata, which sought to revive ancient music, misunderstood it, and so helped to make possible modern opera.⁵⁶ He knew that the pagan deities, which had survived in almost unrecognizable forms until restored to their old splendour and granted their original attributes in the Renaissance, were nevertheless not what they had been; their potency was altered, their place and play in the minds of later men was different; even an antique statue could not be looked on with ancient eyes. What is made of such things, he said, ‘depends upon the subjective make-up of the late-born rather than on the objective character of the classical heritage … . Every age has the renaissance it deserves’.⁵⁷ He was none the less anxious to correct the misunderstandings of earlier scholars as to the true historical character of the Italian Renaissance, hoping no doubt that his own age deserved the truth.

His Institute, smuggled out of Nazi Germany, received in London, and now firmly established in Bloomsbury, had a history he could not possibly have foreseen, and work is done there that he could not have predicted. The language spoken in the corridors is no longer for the most part German, and the present director is the first to have English as his native language. But the library remains recognizably Warburg’s, designed, as they say, to lead you not to the book you’re looking for but to the one you need. The photographic collection still services Warburgian screens though I don’t suppose the images thereon are thought of as engrams, and the familiar Warburg lecturing style still requires two projectors for the comparison of images. Over the door is written, in Greek characters, MNEMOSYNE.

‘Of the general ideas to which I attach so much importance’, wrote Warburg, ‘it will perhaps be said or thought one day that there was at least one thing to be said for these erroneous schematisms, that they excited him to churn up individual facts which had been unknown before.’⁵⁸ About his having done much useful churning up of facts there is absolutely no argument; but much more than fact survives. It is perfectly possible to see in, for example, Panofsky’s work on renaissance and renascence, and on the interplay of history and interpretation – on the Nachleben, as it were, of theories concerning the Nachleben – or in Gombrich’s very different interest in memory and symbolism and his eye for the significant detail, transformations of recognizably Warburgian themes and precepts. When Sir Ernst recently told the American Academy of Arts and Science that the humanities were the memory of culture, he was, perhaps with deliberation, saying what his predecessor might have said on such an occasion. As we have seen, the interpretation of the Botticelli Venuses continues with many variations; but however they differ, they are all conscious of the tradition in which they have their place, and of Warburg’s importance in its constitution. It is indeed inconceivable that such interpretation should ever come to a stop, or that it should not contain error, or that the mood of a later generation’s understanding should exactly imitate that of its predecessors. If we have systems they will not be the systems of those predecessors. As Michael Podro says at the end of his study of the German art-historical tradition, ‘no system, no systematic viewpoint could be regarded as identical with our thought and viewpoint. To make such an identification would be incompatible with the mind retaining its freedom’.⁵⁹ And yet there is continuity, there is a tradition.

 

Here then are two scholars, one of them bringing to the Quattrocento and especially to Botticelli all that he had learned from a largely German tradition of scholarship, the other discovering his admiration for the painter and his interest in Florentine history as he worked and played among the artists, poets, and dancers of fin-de-siècle London. Florence was the source and focus of their wholly independent enquiries; had there been no ignorant vogue of Botticelli it is hard to imagine that the two could ever have met or, indeed, wanted to meet. But meet they did, and in Florence. Academic and amateur, each respected the other’s scholarship, and Horne speaks of Warburg in tones very different from those in which he referred to that other German Quattrocento specialist, Schmarsow. They became friends, and when Warburg was not in Florence they corresponded. Then war divided them; but when Horne was dying in Florence in 1916 Warburg went to see him, citizen though he was of an enemy nation, and Warburg a patriotic German.

So these two scholarly lives improbably came together; but Horne’s Nachleben has diverged very widely from Warburg’s. Like its founder, the Museo Horne is little known, while Warburg’s Institute, founded in Hamburg, flourishes transformed in Horne’s native city, indeed in Bloomsbury, the scene of so much of Horne’s activity; not a city or a quarter in which Warburg would ever have imagined it. Horne was not rich, and in any case would not have wanted to establish an academy; like his friend Berenson, he deeply distrusted German scholarship. All the two – Warburg and Horne – had in common were a belief that truth lived in detail, and a passion for the Quattrocento and especially for Botticelli – a painter of whom, had they been born a century earlier, they might never have heard or, if born half a century earlier, might not have considered worth more than a glance or a passing thought.

That they were both affected by a movement of taste over which they had no control, I hope I have shown. Horne, for all his strictures, polite or otherwise, on Pater, Ruskin, and the art of his youth, could not escape altogether from what he called ‘literature’; his Botticelli may have the aria virile attributed to the painter by his tough Florentine contemporaries, but he is also the visionary, melancholy and sometimes bizarre, whom Pater saw, or thought he saw. Warburg, though so much more remote from avant-garde myth and fashion, could not altogether avoid infection by the Romantic Agony, nor by the association of the dancer with the secret perfections of art that so dominated the aesthetic thought of his younger years. He too sought to be objective; but there is an important difference in the manner of his objectivity and Horne’s. Warburg considered the significance of detail (of the Nymph’s drapery or her flowers) against a background of cultural history that had no discernible limits; he needed, in principle, all knowledge to understand the cultural memory. Its archaic recurrences in an evolving civilization must be studied in science, magic, and religion, as well as in art. Behind him stood those powerful, schematizing professors. Horne’s confidence in his own eye and his own mind must have seemed extraordinary to Warburg. He was not at all aware, so far as one can tell, of any difficulty to be faced in seeing his subject with a time-transcending eye. He has no interest in method; the archives are enough. And if we set aside, as of course we should not, the peculiar chill distinction of his prose, and his admirable conduct of a complicated narrative, we might think of his book as a work to be subsumed by other books, as the archives yield more information (though in fact they have yielded little; it does not take Pope-Hennessy long, in his preface to the new edition, to list the points on which Horne has been superseded or shown to have been wrong). There is behind Horne’s work no such theory of art and culture as Warburg wanted, no symbolism, no doctrine of memory, whether literally or metaphorically intended. There is no myth to discount, except perhaps that of the independence of empirical observation from theory.

Botticelli became canonical not through scholarly effort but by chance, or rather by opinion. He was thereafter available to these two scholars, who accepted while wishing to inform that opinion, who were touched by the taste of their own time, but who brought to the task of converting opinion into knowledge methods and temperaments very diverse. In Horne’s masterpiece there is little to discard, which may represent a failure of intellectual ambition. From Warburg there is a heritage not only of findings but of methods and attitudes; and these, as he knew, would need to be modified or even discarded, either because of discoverable faults or because it is in the nature of such things to be rejected, because new work may need new thinking about the whole huge subject, even if what must be seen anew is minute. What is left is a deposit of know-how, hints as to possible procedures, ways of deciding the true nature of problems. The relegation of ‘theory’ into partial oblivion may sometimes be slowed, in as much as powerful institutions can, up to a point, slow temporal change. But usually it is quick, and its use is primarily the consolidation of some work of art, perhaps only in explanation of why it is canonical, why it should call for repeated attempts at interpretation. There are what Donne grandly called ‘unconcerning things, matters of fact’, and Horne discovered a great many of them, as perhaps he did about the uncanonical members of the scuola. But they will not maintain the life of a work of art from one generation to another. Only interpretation can do that, and it may be as prone to error as the ignorant opinion that first brought Botticelli into question among the learned.