Regarded by many as one of the 20th century’s intellectual giants, the scion of a German-Jewish banking dynasty used his family’s vast wealth to establish one of the world’s foremost libraries, which was moved from Hamburg to London in 1933 to escape Nazi Germany. Promoting an interdisciplinary approach is also consistent with the vision of Aby Warburg, the institute’s eccentric founder, who collected works on wide-ranging subjects from astrology and folklore to magic and the history of science. “I didn’t come over from New York to run a place just to satisfy the fantasies of a few people,” he says of the Warburg’s “abstruse, but high-standard” output in recent years. But the new outward-looking approach is needed to stop the Warburg’s “slide into obscurity”, he believes. ”Ĭhanging the institute’s mindset had elicited some resistance as it is “a major step change for the institution”, he admits. “But they are getting the money because there is a sense of excitement. “People are very afraid that I am selling out to the sciences because they’re getting the money,” he says.
Forging closer links with scholars in the sciences and social sciences will help to restore the standing of the Warburg, which Freedberg fears has fallen sharply in the UK in recent times as the institute increasingly concentrated on Renaissance studies.
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