IN HIS LAST book, Words and Pictures (2003), the late Michael Baxandall paid tribute to his one-time supervisor Ernst Gombrich, ‘the art historian by whom I have been the most influenced, of choice’, and to J.B. Trapp, Gombrich’s successor as Director of the Warburg Institute, adding that ‘the work in this book would not have been done but for them and the Institute’. Many others, whether directly or indirectly associated with the place, have been equally eloquent about their debt to the Warburg and its extraordinary library and photographic collection. The Institute’s contribution to the development of art history as well as to cultural history in all its branches has been enormous, quite out of proportion to its size. It would be tragic if that rich legacy were lost to future generations of scholars – and shameful, if the Institute and its library, which narrowly escaped destruction in Nazi Germany, were now put at risk through the policies of the University of London, the very body charged with its preservation.
Warburg, the eldest of six brothers of a family of Hamburg bankers, chose at an early age to devote himself to scholarship, and gave his brothers control of the bank in exchange for financing his library. This proved an expensive commitment, since at his death in 1929 it already amounted to some 60,000 volumes. Warburg saw art as a particularly sensitive indicator of wider cultural developments, and in his library he set out to illuminate its more general context. His central interest, the continued influence of the ancient world on later periods, led him to collect across the whole range of cultural and intellectual history of Europe and the Mediterranean area from antiquity to the Enlightenment and beyond.
Warburg soon envisaged that the library would serve a broad scholarly community, not just his own research. Unlike the owners of many private libraries, he was not interested in bibliographical rarities as such; he wanted a collection with comprehensive coverage. Until 1919 there was no university in Hamburg, but from much earlier Warburg had hoped that his library would be an essential adjunct to a new university there. The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg created was something unique, combining the strengths of a multi-subject university library and a specialised departmental library.
In the early 1920s, while Warburg was at a clinic in Kreuz­lingen, his library was developed by Fritz Saxl into a centre of scholarly activity and intellectual exchange, with its own programme of lectures, seminars and publications, and with close links to the new University. Among the professors who frequented the library were Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer. The Institute continued its activity under Saxl’s leadership after Warburg’s death in 1929, but in 1933 the new political regime forced it to close its doors. The surviving Warburg brothers immediately tried to move it out of Germany, first considering Rome and Leiden as possible homes. At this juncture a group of British scholars and benefactors, including Lord Lee of Fareham, the founder of the Courtauld Institute, offered it refuge in London, recognising that it would be highly beneficial to academic life in Britain, and particularly to the development of art history.
With the support of Samuel Courtauld and the Warburg family, the Institute continued to function even during the War, although its library was split between different locations and some of its staff, including Gombrich and Otto Kurz, suffered restrictions as enemy aliens. In 1944 the family handed it over to the University of London which, as trustee under a deed, undertook to maintain and preserve it as an independent unit in perpetuity. It moved into its present premises in Woburn Square in 1958.
Since 1944 the library has grown from about 80,000 to almost 350,000 items, of which about 40 per cent are not to be found in the British Library, and the photographic collection now contains well over 300,000 images. Always managed and developed by scholars, it attracts readers from all over the world, because there is no other institution, in Britain or elsewhere, that offers a comparable range of material that is so readily accessible. Through the efforts of its small staff, the Institute has continued to be innovative and highly productive, while remaining faithful to Warburg’s commitment to interdisciplinary research based on primary sources, to his interest in posing broad questions about the development of European culture and its relationship to other cultures, and to the belief that scholarship is best advanced by sharing knowledge.
Because of its special character and history the Institute does not fit easily into the pattern of British universities and is vulnerable to the imposition of administrative and managerial initiatives. One such initiative is the University’s plan to centralise control of the management and budget of the Warburg Library with other University research libraries within a new organisation, University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS).1 The idea of combining in some way the University’s research libraries has long been under discussion, but it is difficult to see how such a policy would benefit the Warburg or how it would, in the words of the Institute’s Trust Deed, ‘maintain and preserve’ it as an ‘independent unit’. The integration of the Warburg into the School of Advanced Study, which brings together research institutes of very different size and character, is already problematic for the same reasons. Both policies pose a very real threat to the Warburg’s unique and autonomous status, one that has been carefully maintained for over sixty years under the trusteeship of the University.
The newly appointed Board of Trustees of the University of London must surely recognise the Institute as an irreplaceable asset to the national and international scholarly community, and to the University itself, for that matter, and it should be urged to respect the original intentions and foresight of the Warburg family.

The newly appointed Board of Trustees of the University of London must surely recognise the Institute as an irreplaceable asset to the national and international scholarly community, and to the University itself, for that matter, and it should be urged to respect the original intentions and foresight of the Warburg family.