Journal of the History of Ideas

Abstract:

Why compare Aby Warburg, talented cultural and art historian, creator of the eponymous library, and Leo Frobenius, pioneer of primitive art studies and the father of modern Africanism? Not merely for biographical reasons. The work of Warburg and Frobenius offers two clear examples of a cultural and scientific trend between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, which aspired to the organization of universal knowledge, in order to establish a method for the study of the most unstable field of human culture.