Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime.
The Courtauld Institute of Art, commonly referred to as The Courtauld, is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art and conservation. It is among the most prestigious specialist colleges for the study of the history of art in the world and is known for the disproportionate number of directors of major museums drawn from its small body of alumni.
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.
James Loeb was an American banker, Hellenist and philanthropist.
Aby Moritz Warburg was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, a private library, which was later moved to the Warburg Institute, London. At the heart of his research was the legacy of the classical world, and the transmission of classical representation, in the most varied areas of Western culture through to the Renaissance.
Edgar Wind was a British interdisciplinary art historian, specializing in iconology in the Renaissance era. He was a member of the school of art historians associated with Aby Warburg and the Warburg Institute as well as the first Professor of art history at Oxford University.
David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. He was also Director of the Warburg Institute at the University of London from July 2015 to April 2017.
John B Onians, FSA is Professor Emeritus of World Art at the University of East Anglia, Norwich and specialised in architecture, especially the architectural theory of the Italian Renaissance; painting, sculpture and architecture in Ancient Greece and Rome; Byzantine art, material culture, metaphor and thought; perception and cognition, and the biological basis of art. His recent work has been instrumental in the establishment of Neuroarthistory as a distinct set of methodologies.
Joseph Burney Trapp CBE FBA FSA was the director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at London University from 1976 to 1990.
Gertrud Bing was a German art historian and director of the Warburg Institute.
Friedrich "Fritz" Saxl was the art historian who was the guiding light of the Warburg Institute, especially during the long mental breakdown of its founder, Aby Warburg, whom he succeeded as director.
Horst Bredekamp is a German art historian and visual historian.
The Warburg Haus, Hamburg is a German interdisciplinary forum for art history and cultural sciences and primarily for political iconography. It is dedicated to the life and work of Aby Warburg and run by the University of Hamburg as a semi-independent seminar. "It issues a series of art historical publications directly modeled on the original institution's studies and lectures, and is a sponsor of the reprinted 'Study Edition' released through the Akademie Verlag in Berlin."
The so-called Hamburg School of Art History 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.
Pathosformel or "pathos formula" is a term coined by the German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg (1866–1929) in his research on the afterlife of antiquity. It is described as "the primitive words of passionate gesture language" and the "emotionally charged visual trope[s] that recur throughout images in Western Europe. While the term is associated with formalism, Warburg restricts the concept to cultural-psychological themes, as he held "an honest disgust of aestheticizing art history". Despite its name, pathosformel does not provide a calculable formula to identify visual links among images. Instead, it calls on collective and individual imagination to find such links apart from those based on age, type, size, or origin. In historian Kurt Forster's words, "it exerts its control over existing figurations in a way that endows them with new, 'sign-giving' qualities." The art historian Ernst Gombrich, described pathosformel as "the primeval reaction of man to the universal hardships of his existence [that] underlies all his attempts at mental orientation".
Christopher S. Wood is an American art historian. He is a professor in the Department of German at New York University.
Enriqueta Harris Frankfort was a British art historian and writer who specialised in Spanish art. Born into a family with an English father and a Spanish mother, she attended the University College London to read modern languages and later studied a Doctor of Philosophy art degree under Tancred Borenius. Harris travelled to Spain to research Caravaggio's influence on 17th-century Spanish paintings and her first book was published in 1938. She billeted Basque child refugees during the Spanish Civil War and worked with the Ministry of Information to keep Spain neutral during World War II. After the war ended she worked in the Warburg Institute and was offered the post in their photographic collection in 1947. Harris worked there until her retirement albeit for two years when she was married to the institution's director Henri Frankfort. Her work on Spanish paintings earned her widespread recognition in the country and received multiple awards and honours.
Otto Fein (1906–1966) was a bookbinder and photographer who worked at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Germany and later in the United Kingdom after the original library migrated to London in 1933. Fein sometimes used the name Hugo Otto Fein, for example in publications in which his images featured, such as the Warburg Institute Publications. He died in 1966; his death was registered in Havering, London.
Julian Richard Gardner is a British art historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Warwick. A scholar of late medieval and renaissance Italian art, particularly patronage, and a Giotto di Bondone specialist whose expertise has led to a number of scholarships and appointments as visiting professor at various institutions both in Europe and America.
