Ernst Hans Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909. After the First World War, he studied art history at the University under Julius von Schlosser. Among his fellow students were Ernst Kris, nine years his senior, and Otto Kurz, older by one year. As the Nazi menace grew, he welcomed the help of Dr. Kris, who secured him a position at the Warburg Institute in 1935. It had managed to move from Hamburg to London in December 1933. It was there that Gombrich, after interruptions caused by the war, established his reputation, mainly with Art and Illusion (1960). He rose to become the Director of the Institute from 195 3, a position he held until his retirement in 1976. He was knighted in 1972.

Tributescollects Gombrich’s addresses and lectures: generous tributes to his friends and colleagues at the Warburg Institute and to the Institute’s founder, Aby Warburg, whom Gombrich could not have known, since Warburg died in 1929. Gombrich has already devoted a large, fully documented monograph to Warburg with the subtitle, “An Intellectual Biography.” The essay in this volume is a summary of Warburg’s life story and of his immense work on the Italian Renaissance, which branched out into the history of mythology, astrology, and magic—subjects that are, after all, also part of the classical tradition to which Warburg devoted his magnificent library of some sixty thousand volumes. Gombrich emphasizes that, in spite of Warburg’s interest in the “nightside” of culture, he remained a “champion of