Hamburg School of Art History

The so-called Hamburg School of Art History (Hamburger Schule der Kunstgeschichte) was a school of art historians primarily teaching at the University of Hamburg, who were closely connected with the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) at the Warburg Haus, Hamburg. Its main members were scholars such as Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl and Ernst Cassirer, who had been schooled to see images as cultural documents and inculcated in the investigation of pictorial types.^[1]

The Hamburg School of Art History is celebrated for the theoretical interpretations of subject matter known as iconography and iconology. It was soon established and attracted brilliant students such as Edgar Wind, Hugo Buchthal, Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Walter Horn, Charles de Tolnay, Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, Lotte Brand Philip, William S. Heckscher, Klaus Hinrichsen, Liselotte Müller and H. W. Janson.^[2][3] The School had also an influence on Ernst Kris's psychological interests.^[4]

Further reading

• Emily J. Levine, "Sokrates an der Elbe? Erwin Panofsky und die Hamburger Schule der Kunstgeschichte in den 1920er Jahren". In Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg. Nachrichten aus der Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg. Hamburg 2007, pp. 27-40.
• Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

References

1. ↑ Elizabeth Sears, "American Iconography: Assessing FSA Photographs, 1945", Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, Volume 30, Issue 3, 2014, pp. 239-254.
2. ↑ "A Symposium on Erwin Panofsky", The Burlington Magazine, Volume 134, No. 1073 (1992), pp. 547-48.
3. ↑ Dictionary of Art Historians: Janson, H(orst) W(oldemar).
4. ↑ Thomas Roeske, "Traces of Psychology: The Art Historical Writings of Ernst Kris", American Imago, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2001), pp. 463-477.