Page - 266 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

cHARLES hOPE266 was unlike any that had  appeared up to that time. It contained very few dates, and very little about the development of style or the wider cul- tural circumstances in which art was produced. Instead, it concentrated on the problems of rep- resentation that the artists faced at different pe- riods, and the means that they adopted for solv- ing them. That Gombrich chose to construct his history around this approach was no accident, because he had been interested in representation in painting already in the 1930s, when he had be- gan to work on caricature with Ernst Kris, and had been forced to consider the central paradox of caricature, “the discovery that similarity is not essential to likeness”.1 The interest in representa- tion was to result in what is generally recognised as his most significant book, Art and Illusion, published in 1960. The Story of Art was the first book that Gombrich published in English, but it was not the first that he wrote in English. It was pre- ceded by the intellectual biography of Aby Warburg, which was completed in some form by about 1948, but not published until 1970. Gombrich had been invited to prepare an edition of Warburg’s unpublished works in 1936 by Fritz Saxl, the Director of the Warburg Institute, hav- ing been recommended by Ernst Kris, who had also recommended his great friend Otto Kurz three years earlier, when the Institute was still in Hamburg. At that time, of course, his chances of obtaining a job in a university or museum in Austria were non-existent. The idea that he should write a book on Warburg emerged after it had become apparent that most of Warburg’s unpublished work was not in fact publishable, and this was true particularly of the unfinished picture-atlas, Mnemosyne, the focus of most of Warburg’s intellectual efforts in his final years. Gombrich did not share the unqualified admi- ration for Warburg of those who had been his colleagues in Hamburg, even though in pub- lished statements he was invariably respectful about his ideas. Indeed, there were aspects of Warburg’s work that Gombrich admired, above all his research in the Florentine archives, which enabled him to recognise that someone like Francesco Sassetti was far from being the kind of semi-pagan Renaissance man who figures in the pages of Jacob Burkhardt. Gombrich him- self, when carrying out research for his disser- tation on Palazzo del Te, had had a similar ex- perience in the archive at Mantua, which had convinced him that neither Federico Gonzaga nor his court artist Giulio Romano, although favouring what was later called Mannerism, was experiencing the kind of psychological crisis and neurosis which that style was then supposed to reflect. Gombrich’s sceptical attitude to the then prevalent ideas about Mannerism was one that he shared with Schlosser, another being a lack of sympathy with the notion that medieval art might be understood in terms of Expressionism. But if Gombrich appreciated Warburg’s reco gnition that Sassetti was deeply preoccu- pied about his fate after death, he could not share Warburg’s belief, which was almost uni- versal among art historians of his generation in the German-speaking world, that art reflected in some very concrete way the spirit of an age. That idea, originating with Hegel, was behind the view of Mannerism that Gombrich found so uncon- vincing. He disliked it because he considered that it was no more than a tautology, explaining noth- ing about the actual motivations of the artists and their patrons, who might have made other artistic choices than those that they did. There were other aspects of Warburg’s work that made Gombrich very uneasy, such as the obscurity of his style and his method of argument, and perhaps above all the weight he gave to visual evidence in attempt- ing to understand the attitudes of people other than artists in past centuries. But Gombrich was certainly impressed by Warburg’s interest in the 1 E. H. Gombrich/E. Kris, Caricature, Harmondsworth, 1940, p. 12.