die neue sachlichkeit rembrandts . aby warburg´s claudius ......journal of art historiography...

Journal of Art Historiography Number 19 December 2018

‘Die Neue Sachlichkeit Rembrandts’. Aby

Warburg´s Claudius Civilis

Yannis Hadjinicolaou

Figure 1 Karl Schuberth, Copy of The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, 1926, oil on canvas, Warburg

Institute, London (Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou)

I. A Claudius Civilis Picture

Positioned on a landing between two floors, a large painting unfolds its power – a

picture almost every art historian knows: Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis,

now at the National Museum in Stockholm (fig. 1). Meant to embellish the interior

of the Amsterdam town hall, built in 1648, the painting was completed in 1661-2.

Nevertheless, it was eventually rejected by the regents, removed from Jacob van

Campen’s famous edifice, and stowed away out of public view.1

The questions to be addressed here are: where was the photograph taken,

and what is the painting that it shows. If it were in a museum, the wall label would

carry information concerning the painting, yet it only contains the lapidary

1 For the town hall in Amsterdam see the publications: Eymert-Jan Goossens, The Palace of

Amsterdam. Treasure wrought by chisel and brush, Zwolle: Waanders, 2010; Exh. Cat.

Opstand als Opdracht/The Batavian Commission. Flinck Ovens Lievens Jordaens De Groot

Bol Rembrandt, ed. by Marianna van der Zwaag, Amsterdam: Stichting Koninklijk Paleis

Amsterdam, 2011.

I would like to thank Mark-Oliver Casper, Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Robin Greeley and Herman

Roodenburg for their valuable and critical reading.

Yannis Hadjinicolaou ‘Die Neue Sachlichkeit Rembrandts’. Aby Warburg´s

Claudius Civilis

2

statement ‘Stairs up.’ A small arrow also indicates the upward direction. The

Rembrandt picture is clearly not hanging in Stockholm. As the wall label is written

only in English, the painting must be in an English-speaking country but not in a

museum, because the hanging of the image neither seems to be dictated by security

nor by the wish to offer the best point of view for the beholder. The photograph was

taken between the third and the fourth floors of the Warburg Institute in London.

The name of Aby Warburg already delivers a second hint in identifying the

painting. In fact, in 1926, the famous art historian – or rather image-historian

(Bildhistoriker), as he called himself – commissioned the Swedish artist Carl

Schuberth (1860-1929, a painter mostly of landscapes and history pieces) to make a

copy of Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis.2

The copy was meant to decorate the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg

(KBW) in Hamburg.3 Soon after 1926, it was moved next door to Heilwigstrasse 115,

Warburg’s private residence. There it hung in the staircase, as Carl Georg Heise

recalls in his memoirs on Aby Warburg and as it is documented on a note by Fritz

Saxl from the diary of the KBW.4

With the library’s later move to London in 1933 and its foundation as The

Warburg Institute, the work arrived in the British capital via Amsterdam. It hung in

various parts of the Institute until it reached its current placement, following

Warburg’s thematic ordering, between the third floor (‘Orientation’) and the fourth

(‘Action’). Action, as I discuss below, comprised a substantial part of Warburg’s

lecture Italienische Antike im Zeitalter Rembrandt´s (Italian Antiquity in Rembrandt´s

Age), which he gave in May 1926 at the KBW lecture hall.5

2 This occurred after the director of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Alex Gauffin,

recommended Schuberth to his friend Warburg. Warburg and Graf Kalckreuth (who

actually wanted to make himself a copy of Claudius Civilis) in Hamburg were pleased by

Schuberth’s work even if it was delivered a bit later than expected. Cf. Aby Warburg,

Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg mit Einträgen von Gertrud Bing und

Fritz Saxl, Karen Michels and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001,

128 (17 August 1927): ‘Vormittags erschien Graf Kalckreuth, (...) zu seinem Erstaunen fand,

daß die Copie des Claudius Civilis gut war (Er selbst hatte ja die Absicht gehabt das Bild zu

copieren), und sodann bemerkte, daß ich durch meine Explicationen Rembrandt nicht in

einer Abhängigkeit festnagele, sondern vielmehr als eigenstes Organ der schauenden Welt

herauszupraeparieren versuche (...)’. 3 Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Conspiracy in the common room’, The Warburg Institute Newsletter, 15,

2004, 2: ‘Accompanied by a photograph of one of Rembrandts preliminary drawings of the

original composition, the magnificent work was mounted on the front wall of the eliptical

reading room, above the lectern’. 4 Carl Georg Heise, Persönliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg, ed. by Björn Biester and Hans-

Michael Schäfer, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005, 71: ‘So ließ er eine Kopie in den

Riesenmaßen des Originals für sich malen und hängte sie unter das Oberlicht im

Treppenhaus’; Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, 26: ‘Civilis

beginnt im Treppenhaus sichtbar zu werden’ (Fritz Saxl, 27.12.1926). 5 Aby Warburg, Italienische Antike im Zeitalter Rembrandts (1926), Aby Warburg, Nachhall

der Antike. Zwei Untersuchungen, ed. by Pablo Schneider, Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2012,

69-102.


Claudius Civilis

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The audience was informed in the announcement of KBW´s forthcoming

publications that Warburg would publish his lecture two years later in 1928. Yet

already in 1926 he had decided not to do so. The copy’s importance for Warburg

becomes clear in a letter written in 1955 by the Institute’s second director, Gertrud

Bing, to Warburg’s son Max. Hoping to secure the painted copy of the Rembrandt

for London, she described the Claudius Civilis ‘as a feature which figured

prominently in the old Institute in Hamburg’.6

II. Claudius Civilis as an emblem for Warburg

In both the theory and historiography of art history, artistic practice is often ignored

as if only written language played a role in theory, and the work of art only implied

craftsmanship. Aby Warburg’s copy of Claudius Civilis is a perfect example of the

contrary. As an emblem of the KBW in Hamburg, the copy of Rembrandt’s famous

painting counterbalanced the term ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ, which still adorns the building.

As such the Rembrandt copy is a symptomatic work of art, revealing the roles of

memory and history. The various ways it was received in each of its respective sites

are a true crystallisation of Warburgian ‘afterlife’.

The significance of Warburg’s lecture, Italienische Antike im Zeitalter

Rembrandts was recently pointed out by Pablo Schneider, who in 2012 published the

text for the first time. It was also briefly discussed by Claudia Wedepohl in 2004.

Without developing her argument, Wedepohl contends that the painting was

Warburg’s ‘personal icon’.7 Ernst Gombrich, fiercely attacked by Edgar Wind, was

the first to mention the copy in his critical biography of Warburg.8 Recently,

Charlotte Schoell Glass, Claudia Cieri Via, and Andrea Pinotti have written

brilliantly on the iconographic and iconological importance of Rembrandt’s Claudius

Civilis for Warburg.9 But my question in this paper is not about these issues, so

6 WIA (Warburg Institute Archive), GC, 23/11/1955. Cf. Wedepohl, ‘Conspiracy in the

common room’, 3. 7 Wedepohl, ‘Conspiracy in the common room’, 2-3. In a similar vein Karen Michels and

Charlotte Schoell-Glass note: ‘Der Claudius Civilis hatte für Warburg und seine Mitstreiter

eine wichtige symbolische Funktion, die allerdings nur dem internen Kreis zugänglich

gewesen sein dürfte’. Cf. Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek

Warburg, xxv. 8 Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. Eine intellektuelle Biografie, Hamburg: Philo & Philo Fine

Arts, 2006, 307-322 [English, 1970]. Anonymous (Edgar Wind), ‘Unfinished Business. Aby

Warburg and His Work’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 1971, 735-736. Gombrich simply

mentions the copy (308). Gombrich’s critical observation that Warburg integrated

Rembrandt’s art into his own structure of thought (307) should be considered an objective,

neither negative nor positive, observation that was enforced through the experience of the

copy by Schuberth and the other reproductive media concerning Claudius Civilis. Cf.

Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus. Kulturwissenschaft als

Geistespolitik, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998, 203. 9 Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus, 200-205; Andrea Pinotti, ‘La

sfida del batavo monocolo. Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, Carl Neumann sul Claudius Civilis di

Rembrandt’, Revista di Storia della Filosofia, 3, 2005, 493-599; Claudia Cieri Via, ‘Warburg,

Rembrandt e il percorso dei salti del pensiero’, Schifanoia, 42/43, 2013, 35-55.


Claudius Civilis

4

much as it is about how the copy (as well as other reproductions of the work)

engaged Warburg’s thinking and writing. Additionally, this entanglement of image,

thinking, and writing also evidences a certain paradox (between iconophobia and

iconophilia; see below) deeply rooted in Warburg’s manner of thought.

Figure 2 Frontispiece: John Kruse, Die Farben Rembrandts, Stockholm 1913 (Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou)

Thanks to a letter written by Aby Warburg in January 1927 to his friend, the

Rembrandt specialist Carl Neumann (who had published a fundamental study on

the Dutch painter in 1902), we know the circumstances under which Warburg

became intrigued by Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis.10 He saw a reproduction of the

painting in John Kruse’s book, Die Farben Rembrandts of 1913 (fig. 2).11 Warburg

indicated that it was the Rembrandt specialist Fritz Saxl who had drawn his

attention to Kruse’s book.12 In 1915 Saxl had defended his PhD thesis on the artist in

Vienna with Max Dvorak as his supervisor.

In Kruse’s study, the Claudius Civilis figures prominently as a frontispiece

printed in colour and protected by rice paper, like paintings once used to be covered

10 Andrea Pinotti, ‘La sfida del batavo monocolo’, 529: ’Als ich nach jahrelanger Abwesenheit

1924 zuerst wieder neue „Kunst” Bilder in mich aufnehmen konnte, fand ich, durch Saxl´s

Forschungen indirekt darauf geführt, in dem Buch von Kruse die farbige Reproduktion des

Claudius Civilis, von dessen Existenz ich vorher einfach keine Ahnung hatte. Ich fragte

darauf Saxl wo denn Näheres über dieses Werk zu finden wäre, und wurde natürlich zu

Ihrer vorbildlich Aufschluss gebenden Studie geführt; der erste Eindruck äußerte sich in den

Worten: Italien Shakespeare, was Saxl in gebotener Skepsis anhörte, mir aber sofort half (...)‘.

Aby Warburg to Carl Neumann, January 22 1927. Cf.: Karin Hellwig, Aby Warburg und Fritz

Saxl enträtseln Velázquez. Ein spanisches Intermezzo zum Nachleben der Antike, Berlin and

Boston: De Gruyter, 2016, 33. 11 John Kruse, Die Farben Rembrandts, Stockholm: Norstedt & Söners Förlag, 1913. 12 Andrea Pinotti, ‘La sfida del batavo monocolo’, 529.


Claudius Civilis

5

by curtains, thus engaging the beholder’s curiosity.13 The moment Warburg lifted

the paper, it must have felt like an electric shock to him: the painting revealed itself

as a culmination both of an action and the reception of antiquity north of the Alps,

notions that he had been eagerly looking for (fig. 3). Already in 1905, in his Dürer

and Italian Antiquity, Warburg introduced similar notions related to this other

‘Northern‘ artist. In this text, he developed one of his most famous concepts, the

Pathosformel.14

Figure 3 Frontispiece: John Kruse, Die Farben Rembrandts, Stockholm 1913 (Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou)

All the other photographs in Kruse’s book are in black and white. The fact is

stressed by the author in his introduction – the paradox of discussing paintings

using black and white reproductions, an issue to which I will return.15

If one compares the London copy with the painting’s mechanical

reproduction in the book, the similarities and differences are evident, especially by

observing how the light emerges amidst the figures. (Even today, this latter remains

a real challenge to everyone exhibiting the painting in question or printing a

reproduction of it, something the very images of the present paper clearly show).

13 For the curtain motive cf. Exh. Cat. Hinter dem Vorhang. Verhüllung und Enthüllung seit der

Renaissance, ed. by Claudia Blümle and Beat Wismer, Düsseldorf Museum Kunstpalast,

Μunich: Hirmer, 2016. 14 Aby Warburg, ‘Dürer und die italienische Antike (1905)’, Aby Warburg, Werke in einem

Band, ed. by Martin Treml/Sigrid Weigel/Perdita Ladwig, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, 176-183.

Cf. Marcus Andrew Hurttig, ed, Die entfesselte Antike. Aby Warburg und die Geburt der

Pathosformel, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012. 15 Kruse, Die Farben Rembrandts, III.


Claudius Civilis

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The stimulus which the Claudius Civilis gave to Warburg’s thinking derived from

both a painted reproduction (the original in Stockholm as well as the copy in

Hamburg) and a photographic reproduction (from Kruse’s book).

Right after his first confrontation with Claudius Civilis, Warburg asked Saxl

where he could find more information on the painting. In 1923, Saxl, Warburg’s ‘

right-hand man’, had already published an article, based on his PhD, on

‘Rembrandt and Antiquity‘ in Oud Holland.16 By comparing his arguments with

those defended by Warburg in his lecture, especially his references to the Rape of

Proserpina or Medea, Saxl – not for the first time – seems to have laid some of the

foundations upon which Warburg could develop his arguments.

III. Critical iconology

Figure 4 Rembrandt, The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, ca. 1661, Pen and brown ink with brown

wash and white body colour, 19,6x18 cm, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (Photograph: Prometheus

Image Archive, Humboldt Universität Berlin)

A large reproduction of Rembrandt’s only known drawing for the painting (which

is not simply a modello), now in Munich, hangs above the entrance door of the

lecture hall (fig. 4). This is shown in a photograph, in which one also recognises,

16 Fritz Saxl, ‘Rembrandt und Italien’, Oud Holland, 1923, 145-160. Fritz Saxl, ‘Rembrandt and

Classical Antiquity (1941)’, Fritz Saxl, Lectures I, The Warburg Institute, University of

London, London, 1957, 298-310.


Claudius Civilis

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Figure 5 Photograph of interior KBW Hamburg, 1926. (Photograph: Prometheus Image Archive, Humboldt

Universität Berlin)

among other reproductions in the KBW, the ‘first dean of Aries’ from the Palazzo

Schifanoia in Ferrara. This was another highly important and emblematic work in

Warburg’s talk of 1912 in Rome – a talk which is generally seen as the inauguration

of the iconological method (‘Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo

Schifanoia in Ferrara’) (fig. 5).17 The photograph perfectly summarizes Warburg’s

research interests: Italy, Rembrandt, and the term Mnemosyne (that can be

recognized – on the image – at the end of the room, on the other side above the

door).18 If the doors were open, part of the drawing or the copy would be seen in the

background, creating a bridge between image and word (fig. 6). This very

17 Aby Warburg, ‘Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu

Ferrara (1912/22)’, Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 373-400. 18 The idea of hanging a Rembrandt for the library also derives from another context. A

letter, dated 29 December 1924, by Ludwig Binswanger from Kreuzlingen to Warburg makes

clear that the latter gave the Hundred Guilder Rembrandt print to his doctor as a present. He

had the wish that it should hang at the library in Kreuzlingen, where Warburg gave his

‘Serpent Ritual’ talk (21 April 1923) as a proof that he was healthy again. See Ulrich Raulff,

‘Akten zur Korrespondenz Ludwig Binswanger–Aby Warburg im Universitätsarchiv

Tübingen’, Aby Warburg, Akten des internationalen Symposions. Hamburg 1990, Horst

Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds, Weinheim: VCH, 1991, 57: ‘Sie

haben meiner Frau und mir mit dem wunderbaren Rembrandt eine sehr große Freude

gemacht und wir werden Ihren Wunsch, den Stich in der Bibliothek aufzuhängen, gern

erfüllen. Wir haben gestern schon den Platz dafür ausgesucht. Ich finde die Reproduktion

ganz ausgezeichnet und freue mich, dass Sie gerade diesen Rembrandt gewählt haben, um

uns eine Freude zu machen’. Warburg´s healing process through Binswanger functions in an


Claudius Civilis

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Figure 6 KBW (today Warburg Haus) with Μνημοσύνη Inscription, Hamburg (Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou)

connection between image, word, and action was, in general, one of Warburg’s

crucial desiderata,19 but also one which he concretely defined at the beginning of his

Rembrandt lecture:

As long as the occasional correspondences between word and image do not

fall into place in a systematic array of lighting installations; as long, also, as

the relation between form and content, between art and the stage – as ritual,

mime, theatre, or opera – are not recognized in their mutual illumination, let

alone systematically seen as one, historicism must still be permitted to

counter this accusation with the attempt to present and illustrate the spirit of

the age in the voices and the forms of that spirit itself, and thereby to

eliminate the self as the main source of error from the investigation of this

connection between word, action, and image.20

analogous way to the work Rembrandt’s with Christ healing the sick. See also Ludwig

Binswanger and Aby Warburg, Die unendliche Heilung. Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte,

ed. by Chantel Marazia and Davide Stimilli, Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007, 133. Ulrich

Raulff, ‘Nachwort’, Aby Warburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht, Berlin: Wagenbach, 2011,

117. For the notion of memory see Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor and Aby

Warburg's Atlas of Images, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. 19 Quoted after Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus, 107. WIA, III. 51.1., 4: ‘die

natürliche Zusammengehörigkeit von Bild und Wort wiederherzustellen’. 20 English translation from Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London:

The Warburg Institute, 1970, 313. See Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike im Zeitalter

Rembrandts’, 69: ‘Solange nur ganz gelegentlich Übereinstimmungen zwischen Wort und

Bild sich nicht zu einer systematisch geordneten Reihe von Beleuchtungskörpern

zusammenschließen, und solange z.B. die Beziehungen stofflicher und formaler Natur

zwischen bildender Kunst und Drama – es sei dies nun kultische Handlung, stummes

Schauspiel oder sprechendes und singendes Theater – in ihrer gegenseitigen Bedeutung

überhaupt nicht erkannt, geschweige systematisch zusammengeschaut werden, muss man

dem angeklagten Historismus das Recht zu dem Versuch lassen, den „Geist der Zeiten” aus


Claudius Civilis

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Some notion of Critical Iconology, directly related to the Claudius Civilis,

seems already to emerge in a note of Saxl´s dated 12th July 1927 in the KBW register:

wonderfully clear the position of Civilis a) in connection with Rubens,

Caravaggio and Tempesta (the official nationalistic world in the mirror of

Antiquity); b) in the separation (regarding its content) from the

revolutionary bourgeoisie; and c) in the rejection of Civilis by the official

society of Amsterdam, which is no longer revolutionary and bourgeois but

only nationalistic.21

Reading the note, one understands why in the 1970s Warburg and his circle were a

central reference to the Ulmer Verein which, with Martin Warnke rediscovered

Warburg from a socio-critical perspective.22

Warburg begun his 1926 lecture on Rembrandt by quoting Goethe, which

may be related to Saxl’s note above:

Every serious scholar who [confronts] a problem of cultural history reads

over the entrance to his workshop Goethe’s lines “What you call the spirit of

the age is really no more than the spirit of the worthy historian in which the

age is reflected” (...) so far not all the methodological resources have been

used to make the spirit of the age speak with the voice of the age itself.23

Stimme und Gestaltung des Zeitgeistes selbst zum Bilde beizubringen, um damit sich selbst

aus der Region des Zusammenhanges von Wort, Handlung und Bild als größte Fehlerquelle

auszuschalten’. See also another part of the lecture, where Warburg mentioned the

relationship between image and word: ‘Civilis symbolisiert einen Augenblick, wo einerseits

die gedächtnismässig in Wort und Bild festgehaltenen, antike historische Erzählung aus

eigener Vorzeit…’. Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike im Zeitalter Rembrandts’, 99 (see note 28). 21 My translation. Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, 117:

‘Wunderbar deutlich die Stellung des Civilis a) Verbindung mit Rubens – Caravaggio –

Tempesta (die offizielle nationalistische Welt im Spiegel der Antike) b) die Trennung (schon

rein inhaltlich) das revolutionäre Bürgertum c) die Ablehnung durch die offizielle

Amsterdamer Welt, die eben nicht mehr revolutionär und bürgerlich, sondern nur mehr

nationalistisch ist’. 22 Werner Hoffmann, Georg Syamken and Martin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des Auges.

Über Aby Warburg, Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980. Cf. Yannis

Hadjinicolaou, ‘Die Aktualität der Kritischen Kunstgeschichte‘ in Stephan von Huenes ‘Blaue

Bücher’, Kritische Berichte, 4, 2014, 62–73. Of course this is only one aspect of Warburgian

reception thinking for instance of Jörg Traeger. See Jost Philipp Klenner, ‘Kugelmensch.

Percy Ernst Schramms politische Ikonologie’, Hubert Locher and Adriana Markantonatos,

eds, Reinhart Koselleck und die politische Ikonologie, 84-95. 23 English translation from Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 313. See Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike

im Zeitalter Rembrandts’, 69: ‘Jeder Wissenschaftler, der sich an ein kulturgeschichtliches

Problem, heranwagen muss, liest über dem Eingang seiner Werkstatt Goethes Worte: „Was

Ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt, das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, in dem die Zeiten

sich bespiegeln” … bisher (wurde) methodologisch nicht alles versucht, um den Geist der

Zeiten aus den eigenen Stimmen der Zeit selbst herzustellen.’


Claudius Civilis

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The passage is central to the lecture as a whole.

As Warburg argued, in its rejection by the Amsterdam regents, Rembrandt’s

Claudius Civilis revealed a new dominant taste in Dutch society from the middle of

the seventeenth century onwards. Warburg responded in a similar way to the new

trends within the Weimar Republic, seeking to understand Rembrandt’s Neue

Sachlichkeit, as he called it: ‘Rembrandt’s new objectivity overcame the hollow

classical pathos formula which, deriving from fifteenth-century Italy, dominated the

superlatives of Europe’s gesture-language.’24 Here Warburg is referring to the Rape

of Proserpina (today in Berlin). Somewhat later in his lecture he used the same notion

regarding the Claudius Civilis.

It is the notion of movement and action, or we might even say emotion and

its materialisation by Rembrandt that is so different from the extroverted Italian

examples (such as in Florence, which Warburg knew well) with its non-classical

pathos formula.25 Or, to make a more contemporary art historical comparison in the

sense of Michael Fried, between absorption (Rembrandt) and theatricality (Italy).26

Figure 7 Detail: Rembrandt, The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, ca. 1661-2, Oil on canvas,

196x309 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou)

Figure 8 Detail of figure 1 (Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou)

24 English translation from Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 232. Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike im

Zeitalter Rembrandts’, 79: ‘Die neue Sachlichkeit Rembrandts führte zur Überwindung der

antikischen Pathosformel, wie sie, von Italien aus dem 15. Jahrhundert herkommend, die

europäischen Superlative der Gebärdensprache beherrschte’. 25 Gombrich also underlines this fact with other consequences than the present argument.

Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 316-317. The intrinsic tension in Claudius Civilis (and in

Rembrandt’s late works in general) is carried out through the power of colour as the

emotional interval between impulse and action. See Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Denkende Körper –

Formende Hände. Handeling in Kunst und Kunsttheorie der Rembrandtisten, Berlin/Boston 2016,

255-312. 26 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot,

Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1988. The problem of the easily changeable character of

Fried’s concept will not be further problematized in this paper.


Claudius Civilis

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But Schuberth’s copy also induced Warburg to explore Rembrandt’s Neue

Sachlichkeit. The performativity of the impasto in the original (fig. 7), the active role

of the paint applied thickly, is lacking in the copy (fig. 8). Τhe fact that, for

Figure 9 Carl Schuberth, Woman writing. Portrait of Miss I. Holck, Oil on Paper mounted on a paper-panel, 39 x

32,5 cm, 1887, Private Collection (Photograph © Bukowskis).

Schuberth, the materiality of colour does indeed play a role as evidenced in his

sketch of a Woman writing (fig. 9), shows clearly that the Swedish artist not only

could but also would have tried to paint in Rembrandt’s heavy impasto style in his

own version of Claudius Civilis —something that, in the end, he avoided. Could this

be due to a wish on the part of the commissioner, and hence of Warburg, to

concentrate upon Rembrandt’s New Objecthood in both motif and manner? Since one

of the characteristics of Rembrandt’s late style is the thick application of paint, it can

only be suggested (rather than proved) that it was the art historian who did not

want or was not particularly interested in developing the issue further. I suggest

that happened because he was focused upon the subject matter, and hence the

problem of action in Rembrandt’s picture, and that the handling of colour was, at

least in Warburg’s eyes, not dependent on this. The image’s dematerialisation is,

paradoxically, materialised in the very thinking of Warburg himself and thus shapes

it through visual stimulus.

The term Neue Sachlichkeit, created as a Stilbegriff (concept of style) in 1923 by

the art historian Gustav Hartlaub, took root after the 1925 exhibition with the same


Claudius Civilis

12

name. The term had a strong impact on Warburg’s circle of scholars.27 It inspired

critical research and a critical response to contemporary political positions. This fact

goes together with a respective lack of expressionistic or impressionistic

materialities that would distract from the very subject itself as if one were

participating in the debates between Protestants and Catholics concerning the

nature of an image and its didactic and ethical role.

IV. Triangle of memory: Tacitus-Amsterdam-Hamburg

Thus, a triangle of memory emerged around Claudius Civilis, uniting the ancient

historian Tacitus with 17th-century Amsterdam and early 20th-century Hamburg.

Already in 1910, Warburg had written an article on the frescoes decorating the town

hall of the Hanseatic city.28 In his view, they served to support the nationalism of

certain segments of society. In this way, an analogy arose with the regents of

Amsterdam who asked for similar works of art 250 years earlier. Govert Flinck’s

depiction of The Oath of Claudius Civilis (finished by the German painter Jürgen

Ovens after Flinck’s death), which took the place of Rembrandt’s painting, can be

compared with the five large frescoes painted between 1901 and 1909 by Hugo

Vogel for the banquet hall of Hamburg’s town hall (an exemplary of which is The

Christianisation of Hamburg’s Pagans by Bishop Asgar) (fig. 10 and fig. 11). Warburg

dismissed the frescoes as ‘pleasingly pasteurized impressionism’.29 What he asked

for instead was a programmatic actualization of the past, something he believed

Rembrandt’s painting had achieved. Civilis he wrote:

symbolizes the refusal of a genius to be tempted into Romanizing rhetoric or

theatrical posturing, either by the memories of other illustrations of classical

tales about the country’s past or by the tangible immediacy of mime shows

and plays. The fact that the harsh and manly society of this picture of

revenge did not find favour with the gentlemen of the Town Hall only goes

to prove that then, just as at any other time or in any other country of

Europe, those who want their art to serve the festive mood of certain

27 Schoell-Glass, Warburg und der Antisemitismus, 209. 28 Martin Warnke, ‘Lebendige Kunstgeschichte. Mit Warburg im großen Festsaal des

Hamburger Rathauses’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, VII: 2, Summer 2013, 110-118. Mark A.

Russell: Between Tradition and Modernity. Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in

Hamburg, 1896-1918, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2007, 131-150. 29‘(…) gefällig pasteurisierter Impressionismus’: Martin Warnke, ‘Lebendige

Kunstgeschichte’, 112. See also Michael Diers, ‘Der Gelehrte, der unter die Kaufleute fiel. Ein

Streiflicht auf Warburg und Hamburg’, Aby Warburg, Akten des internationalen Symposions, 49.

The work by Flinck/Ovens may have more or less the same subject matter, nevertheless,

stylistically speaking, it does something totally different than Rembrandt that also affects the

content and so for instance the question of action. The Flinck and Ovens picture is more

classical and hence would have been as a kind of a hollow pathosformula according to

Warburg, pleasing the ‘manly society’ of the town hall in Amsterdam. In this sense it is not

different from the works of Vogel in Hamburg.


Claudius Civilis

13

occasions are reluctant to face the demanding challenge of a stirring

experience.30

Figure 10 Govert Flinck and Jürgen Ovens, The Oath of Claudius Civilis, 1659-1662, oil on canvas, 5,5 x 5,5 m, Royal

Palace, Amsterdam (Photograph: Prometheus Image Archive, Humboldt Universität Berlin).

Figure 11 Hugo Vogel, The Christianization of Hamburg’s Pagans by Bishop Asgar, 1901-1909, fresco, Townhall,

Hamburg. (Martin Warnke, ’Lebendige Kunstgeschichte. Mit Warburg im großen Festsaal des Hamburger

Rathauses’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, VII/2, Summer 2013, 114)

30 English translation from Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 234-235. Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike

im Zeitalter Rembrandts’, 99: ‘Civilis symbolisiert einen Augenblick, wo einerseits die

gedächtnismässig in Wort und Bild festgehaltenen, antike historische Erzählung aus eigener

Vorzeit, und andererseits die unmittelbare lebendige körperhafte dramatische Darstellung

weder zu romanisierender Eloquenz noch zu theatralischer Pose verleiten können. Daß die

bittere Ernsthaftigkeit, die in diesem Rachebild liegt, den Herren des Rathauses nicht

zusagte, beweist nur, wie damals und zu jeder Zeit und in jedem Lande Europas

Gelegenheitskunst für festliche Stimmungen von auffordernden Erlebnissen nur

widerstrebend Kenntnis nehmen mag’.


Claudius Civilis

14

In these lines, everything comes together. They connect Goethe’s dictum

with Saxl’s note on Civilis and, last but not least, they summarise Warburg’s

politically inspired views on Rembrandt’s Neue Sachlichkeit. It is not accidental that

Warburg characterised Civilis as a ‘sittlich forderndes Kultbild’ (ethically demanding

cult image).31 In this sentence, Kultbild (cult image) is connected to Warburg’s own

critical research and his model Neue Sachlichkeit, which involves distance-making

and is hence demanding in an ethical sense (sittlich forderndes).

V. Historiography and Mnemosyne

Besides Warburg’s role in local politics, his response to two opposing views in

German art history is important as well. One of these was ‘The German Rembrandt’,

the child of Julius Langbehn´s pan-Germanic historiography, partly supported by

Wilhelm von Bode, the ‘tsar’ of the Prussian Collections. And there was also the

Rembrandt of Carl Neumann and the Dutch art historian Frederik Schmidt

Degener.32 That Warburg owed much to the latter is clearly seen in his lecture,

especially regarding a supposed cultural rift in Dutch society, with the classicist

poet Joost van den Vondel on the one side and Rembrandt on the other. 33 In

Warburg’s view, Claudius Civilis was a typical ‘northern’ work of art without

Langbehn’s pan-Germanic colouring.

As already mentioned, the issue of moment and action in Rembrandt’s work

was all-important to Warburg: ‘All we can take with us on this journey is the ever

fugitive interval between impulse and action; it is left to us to determine how long

we can extend this breathing-space with the help of Mnemosyne’.34 The painting’s

interval between impulse and movement, before action occurs, the union of the

Batavians against the Romans (symbolically rendered in the ‘northern’ ritual of the

touching swords, occurring then and there) relates to the notion of Mnemosyne,

which permits the viewer to extend this particular moment, the processuality of the

union, and eventually effect the revolt against the Romans.

31 Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike im Zeitalter Rembrandts’, 99. English translation from

Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 236. 32 Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher. Von einem Deutschen, Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1890;

Carl Neumann, Rembrandt, two volumes, Berlin and Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1905; Julius

Langbehn, Der Rembrandtdeutsche, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder & Co., 1926; Frederik

Schmidt-Degener, Rembrandt und der holländische Barock, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1928, (Dutch

1919). Cf. Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus, 205-208. Cf. Catherine B.

Scallen, Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship, Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press, 2004. 33 Schmidt-Degener, Rembrandt und der holländische Barock., 44. 34 English translation from Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 238. Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike im

Zeitalter Rembrandts’, 101: ‘Auf dieser Fahrt dürfen wir als einziges Reisegut nur

mitnehmen: die ewig flüchtige Pause zwischen Antrieb und Handlung, es steht bei uns, wie

lange wir mit Hilfe der Mnemosyne die Atempause dehnen können’.


Claudius Civilis

15

The Mnemosyne’s montage cannot be grasped without the role of

photography and cinema, the new media used by Warburg.35 Such a combining of

the media with black-and-white and colour reproductions played a major role in

forming Warburg’s ideas on art history.

Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis as a photographic reproduction also had a key

role in his last and unfinished project of the Mnemosyne Atlas: ‘(...) I managed to

gather material for an atlas with images (...) which will constitute the basis for the

development of a new theory of human memory’. 36 The project also engaged

Warburg because of the moment of revelation he experienced when looking closely

at the Claudius Civilis copy as well as its reproduction in Kruse’s book.

Figure 12 Rembrandt Exhibition 1926, KBW Hamburg, The Warburg Institute, London (Photograph: Prometheus

Image Archive, Humboldt Universität Berlin)

This fact is also clearly seen in a picture of the library, in which the

photographic material for the 1926 exhibition, following to a certain degree the

35 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, New York: Zone Books,

2004 (French 1998); Thomas Hensel, Aby Warburgs Graphien. Wie aus der Kunstgeschichte eine

Bildwissenschaft wurde, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011; Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation

of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture and the Extension of Life, Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2012. 36 My translation. Georges Didi-Huberman, Das Nachleben der Bilder. Kunstgeschichte und

Phantomzeit nach Aby Warburg, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010 (French 2002), 508: ‘Mit Hilfe (...) von

Frl. Dr. Bing ist es mir gelungen, das Material für einen Bilder-Atlas zusammenzubringen, in

dem man an seinen Bilderreihen die Funktion der vorgeprägten antikisierenden

Ausdruckswerte bei der Darstellung inneren und äußeren bewegten Lebens ausgebreitet

sieht und der zugleich die Grundlage sein soll für die Entwicklung einer neuen Theorie des

menschlichen Bildgedächtnisses’. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas oder die unruhige

fröhliche Wissenschaft. Das Auge der Geschichte, III, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016

(French 2011), 302.


Claudius Civilis

16

systematic approach in Mnemosyne, is displayed (fig. 12). Not satisfied with the

Rembrandt photographs for the Atlas, Warburg asked for better reproductions.37

VI. Manual and photographic reproductions in black-and-white and colour

Figure 13 Mary Hertz Warburg, Drawing after Fig. 10, The Warburg Institute, London.

Besides benefitting from ’reproductions’ (painted or photographic ones), Warburg

also profited from the drawings made by his wife, the artist, Mary Hertz Warburg,

which she made for his own investigations such as the Rembrandt lecture.38 Hertz

made drawings on her travels with Warburg, for instance in Amsterdam’s town

hall. This schematic drawing, with its pronounced outline of the Ovens/Flinck

painting, shows clearly how much she stressed the power of the picture’s motif by

insisting on black and white. Thus, more painterly effects are eliminated, for

instance, the fact that it is a night scene (fig. 13). This is an exemplary collaboration

between an artist and an art historian, uniting form (schema of Hertz’s drawing, the

contour line) and content (Warburg’s argument), theory and practice.

Finally, the issues of colour and the reproduction of a work of art must be

addressed. For Warburg, the importance of Claudius Civilis resided not so much in

the palpability of its colours (though it was the late Rembrandt’s primary element of

37 Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, 25.4.1928, 247: ’Der

Claudius Civilis ist knapp mittelmäßig. Bei welchen Reproduktionen müssen noch die

Namen der Photographen angegeben werden. Sicher bei Claudius Civilis, die Schweden sind

sehr penibel. Eventuell Anfrage bei Gauffin’. 38 Ute Haug, ‘Mary Warburg geb. Hertz – Künstlerin der Avantgarde?’, Exh. Cat.

Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Hamburg zwischen 1890 und 1933, Vol. 1, ed. by

Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg: Hachmannedition, 2006, 29-49.


Claudius Civilis

17

action as principal mover of the viewer’s emotions), as in its New Objectivity.39 For

Warburg, the activity of colour was a ‘you live and do not harm me’ (du lebst und

tust mir nichts), protected through his ‘Thought-Space’ (Denkraum).40

Concerning an exhibition that was to take place in Hamburg, Warburg

stated in 1907 that reproductions should be in colour when larger audiences were

involved but not when used in scholarly analysis, another form of Neue Sachlichkeit

or an estrangement technique, as Bertolt Brecht would say.41 Monika Wagner argued

recently that the Mnemosyne Atlas could only function in black and white and not

in colour, as its comparisons are based on patterns carrying the motif’s afterlife.42

Figure 14 Tobias Sergel, The Oath of Claudius Civilis, free drawing after Rembrandt, 1779, Nationalmuseum,

Stockholm (Photograph Prometheus Image Archive, Humboldt Universität Berlin)

39 Concerning an Iconology that is not interested in questions of materiality and hence colour

see: Monika Wagner, ’Kunstgeschichte in Schwarz-Weiß. Visuelle Argumente bei Panofsky

und Warburg’, Schwarz-Weiß als Evidenz. ‘With black and white you can keep more of a

distance’, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 2015, 126-144. Wagner

mentions that it was known among the pupils of Panofsky, that he visited museums with

sunglasses so that the colours would not dazzle him (page 139) showing among other things

even in this anecdotical form Panofsky’s general distance towards colour. 40 Horst Bredekamp, ’„Du lebst und thust mir nichts”. Anmerkungen zur Aktualität Aby

Warburgs’, Aby Warburg, Akten des internationalen Symposions, 1-7; Frank Fehrenbach,’„Du

lebst und thust mir nichts”. Aby Warburg und die Lebendigkeit der Kunst, Hartmut Böhme

and Johannes Endres, eds., Der Code der Leidenschaften, Paderborn, 2010, 124-145. 41 Hensel, Aby Warburgs Graphien, 43-44. As Schoell-Glass mentions ’Warburgs Wunschraum

ist … durch Farblosigkeit als abstrahierend und dadurch distanzierend bezeichnet’ meaning

that he did not think in colour enforcing the argument of the role of Claudius Civilis and its

matter of content in the already mentioned sense of an Iconology in black and white or even,

as Schoell-Glass does in this case, in grisaille. Charlotte Schoell-Glass, ’Warburg über

Grisaille. Ein Splitter über einen Splitter’, Aby Warburg, Akten des internationalen Symposions,

209. 42 Wagner, ’Kunstgeschichte in Schwarz-Weiß’, 140-143. See also Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt,

Mnemosyne Bilderatlas. Rekonstruktion-Kommentar-Aktualisierung, Karlsruhe, 2016, 28-32.


Claudius Civilis

18

The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis is the Janus-faced emblem of Warburg’s

critical thought trying to find a balance, without eliminating any tensions, between

Ethos (Apollonian) and Pathos (Dionysian), between scientific/objective (black and

white, Mnemosyne) and private/subjective approach (colour in the copy).43 A

drawing, a free interpretation of Claudius Civilis made in 1779 by the Swedish

bacchic classicist Tobias Sergel, whose work Warburg does not seem to have known,

appears as an interval (Ikonologie des Zwischenraums)44 with its eloquent chiaroscuro

holding in productive balance the dialectic tension of the art historian’s thought (fig.

14).45

Warburg characteristically concluded his talk on Rembrandt, which again

underlines this paper’s argument:

We must not demand of antiquity that it should answer the question at

gunpoint whether it is classically serene or demonically frenzied, as if there

were only these alternatives. It really depends on the subjective make-up of

the late-born rather than on the objective character of the classical heritage

whether we feel that it arouses us to passionate action or induces the calm of

serene wisdom. Every age has the renaissance of antiquity it deserves.46

Claudius Civilis reveals in a paradigmatic way that theory does not consist

independently of any tangible reality, but of images and thought interacting with

43 Salvatore Settis, ’Ethos und Pathos’, Vorträge aus dem Warburg Haus, 1, 1997, 31-73; Schoell-

Glass, Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus, 202; Didi-Huberman, Das Nachleben der Bilder,

157-171. 44 It is worth to be reminded that the term Ikonologie des Zwischenraums (Iconology of the

Interval) is mentioned notably in the introduction of Mnemosyne as well as the notes on the

Mnemosyne Project addressing the issue between impulse and action that was already

observed and described by Warburg in Claudius Civilis. Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Einleitung

(1929), Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 630: ’Hingabe an das geschaffene Idolon, schaffen jene

Verlegenheiten des geistigen Menschen, die das eigentliche Objekt einer Kulturwissenschaft

bilden müssten, die sich illustrierte psychologische Geschichte des Zwischenraums zwischen

Antrieb und Handlung zum Gegenstand erwählt hätte’; Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne I.

Aufzeichnungen (1927-29), Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 643: ’Ikonologie des

Zwischenraums. Kunsthistorisches Material zu einer Entwicklungspsychologie des

Pendelganges zwischen bildhafter und zeichenmässiger Ursachensetzung’. 45 I wish to thank Werner Busch, who brought to my attention the Sergel drawing. Exh. Cat.

Sergel, Nils-Göran Hökby and Ulf Sederlöf, eds., National Museum of Stockholm,

Stockholm, 1990. 46 English translation from Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 238. Warburg, ‘Italienische Antike im

Zeitalter Rembrandts’, 101: ‘Man darf der Antike die Frage „klassisch ruhig“ oder

„dämonisch erregt“ nicht mit der Räuberpistole des Entweder-Oder auf die Brust setzen. Es

hängt eben vom subjektiven Charakter der Nachlebenden, nicht vom objektiven Bestand der

antiken Erbmasse ab, ob wir zu leidenschaftlicher Tat angeregt, oder zu abgeklärter Weisheit

beruhigt werden. Jede Zeit hat die Renaissance der Antike, die sie verdient’.


Claudius Civilis

19

each other and playing a fundamental role in the building of any theoretical

approach.

Gertrud Bing illuminated the concept of Pathosformel in her article on Aby

Warburg in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (published shortly after

her death in 1965) as one of the central features of warburgian thought. She

characterized materials such as pigments or marble as having a Pathosformel quality,

something that Warburg himself never defended, since, as it was argued in the

present text, he thought more through the motive than the material agency: ‘The

Gestures of classical art … are still able to call forth a corresponding emotional

response, even in the attenuated form of pigments and marble in which they have

come down to us.’47 A material iconology of the blot as pathosformel will be a

warburgian challenge for the future.

Yannis Hadjinicolaou is a research associate at the project Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby

Warburg´s Legacy and the Future of Iconology, Warburg Haus (University of

Hamburg). PhD 2014 Freie Universität Berlin on Thinking-Bodies-Shaping Hands.

Handling in Art and Art Theory of the Rembrandtists, published 2016 by Walter de

Gruyter in German. He is associate member at the Cluster of Excellence Image

Knowledge Gestaltung (Humboldt University). During the summer semesters of

2015 and 2016, he taught (lectureship) at the Institute of Art History of Hamburg

University as well as at the Institute of Art History of Basel University (2017). He

was a research fellow in the Humanities at New York University in Abu Dhabi

(2017-2018).

[email protected]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International License

47

Gertrud Bing: ‘A.M. Warburg’, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28, 1965, 310.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/



die neue sachlichkeit rembrandts . aby warburg´s claudius ......journal of art historiography...

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