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Aby Warburg's name is today most widely known in connection with the scholarly institution he founded on the basis of his private Hamburg library, the Warburg Institute on Woburn Square in London. After World War I the library became a cultural history research institute affiliated with the new Hamburg University Warburg had helped to found. It was moved from Germany to London in 1933 and made a part of the University of London at the end of World War II. Directors or noted scholars associated with it have included Fritz Saxl, E. H. Gombrich (also author of the standard intellectual biography of Warburg), Ernst Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, and Arnaldo Momigliano. In many ways Warburg's life reflected the fortunes and misfortunes of the successful and culturally integrated German-Jewish elite during the brief German Empire and its successors after World War I. Echoing the evolution of another Hanseatic family, albeit a fictional one, the Buddenbrooks, Aby broke away from the family banking tradition to become a "private scholar," although one well endowed by the family's resources, eschewing an academic career that was in any case made difficult by the official and unofficial anti-Semitism of his times as well as his own reluctance to give up his independence. Even some allusions to illness in Thomas Mann's novels were reflected in Warburg's personal afflictions, including symptoms of bipolar disorder, a nervous breakdown, and a multiyear residence in Ludwig Binswanger's Swiss sanitarium. His fascination with Renaissance Florence and the Medici undoubtedly reflected his hope that Hamburg, under the leadership of upwardly mobile commercial elites such as his own family, would become capable of producing a comparable cultural flowering in modern Germany that would, however, also carry over and revive the best traditions of...