Arabic Studies in the Warburg Institute

Author(s): J.B. Trapp

Source: Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 8, No. 2 (1981), pp. 126-129
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/194543
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 ARABIC STÜDIES IN THE WARaURG INSTITUTE
J.B.Trapp

The Warburg Institute of the University of London houses a

scholarly working collection of some 200,000 books and offprints,
about 1,000 runs of periodicals (dead and alive in the ratio
1:9) and 250,000 photographs. Its staff comprises a director,
five teachers, four librarians and three photographic curators,
plus auxiliary members.
The present Institute began as the private library of
Professor Aby M.Warburg (1866-1929) in Hamburg. At Warburg's
death it was already a semi-public institution, with a library
of about 50,000 volumes and photographs in proportion. It acted
as an adjunct to the newly-founded University of Hamburg, with
its own programme of public lectures and publications. In ·1933,
at the beginning of the Nazi era, Fritz Saxl, Warburg's
assistant and Director of Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek
Warburg after its founder's death, brought the collections, with
a small staff, to London. The Institute was incorporated in the
University in 1944.
One of the Bibliothek Warburg's early publications was an
edition of the Arabic text of the werk by Pseudo-Magriti known
as Picatrix,or The Aim of the Sage. This curious comp~ndium of
astrological, medical and magical belief was put tagether in
Spain in the second half of the eleventh century. For Warburg
it was valuable and symptomatic as documenting the role of the
legacy of Hellenistic science and philosophy to the West, and
so a help in his obsessive question 'Was bedeut das Nachleben
der Antike?' Picatrix, he found, was not only mentioned by
Rabelais, but had still served Marsilio Ficino in fifteenth-
century Florence as a source for his Hermetic-Platonic
philosophy. Helmut Ritter's remarkable lecture on the book was
published in the first vclume of the Bibliothek Warburg's
Vortr!ge (1921-2) and his edition of the Arabic text as volume
12 of its Studien in 1933: a Germantranslation from the Arabic
by Martin Plessner was published as volume 33 cf the Studies of
the Warburg Institute in 1962; and the Latin text in which the
work achieved Eurcpean diffusion is now being prepared for
publication by David Pingree as a later volume in the same
series. Professor Pingree has also published notable
discoveries about the vernacular versions and about later use
of Picatrix in the Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes.
In his investigations of the routes by which the civilization
of Greece travelled, often via Rome, to shape the culture of
medieval and Renaissance Europe, "Vlarburg was led to study the
fifteenth-century fresco cycle known as the Schifanoia Months in
Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara. He was able to demonstrate how
the imagery of these frescoes depended upon the ~adition of
Greek astronomy mediated by the Arabs, and by Abu Ma,shar
(Albumasar) in particular. Some of his details were wrang, but

126
his demonstration as a whole was brilliant, especially in his
identification of the figures of the decans. Wilhelm Gundel's
Dekane und Dekanstornbilder, published in the Studien der
Bibliothek Warburg (1936) , was a more detailed investigation
of this tradition. More recently, David Pingree's The Thousands
of AbÜ Ma,shar, also published by the Warburg Institute (1968),
and his article on 'The Indian Iconography of the Decans and
Horas' in the Institute's Journal (1963) carried on this
interest. Warburg also made other important studies of the role
of Arab astronomy, astro1ogy and star-images in Europe.
Warburg bimself could not read Arabic, but Fritz Saxl, his
intellectual heir, could. Saxl carried on Warburg's studies of
Arabic star-imagery and its part in medieva1 c!vilization. He
pub1ished a paper on the Zodiac at Qu~ayr 'Amra, and his
surveys of astrological and mythological illuminated manuscripts
made use of much Arabic material. Another study arising out of
this interest was R.Hartmann's account of M~ammad's heavenly
journey and its meaning for Islam in the Vortrßge der Bibliothek
Warburg, 1928-9.
An important initiative, undertaken under the general
editorship of Raymond Klibansky and published by the Warburg
Institute,is the Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi-- the Latin and
Arabic translations of the Dialogues of Plato by which those
dialogues reached a later age. The following volumes of the
Arabic series have been published:
Vol. I. Galenus -- Compendium Timaei Platonis, edited by
Paul Kraus and Richard Walzer (1951)
Vol. II. Alfarabius -- De Platonis Philosophia, edited by
Franz Rosenthai and Richard Walzer (1943)
Vol.III: Alfarabius -- Compendium Legum Platonis, edited by
Francesco Gabrieli (1952).
The first Arabist to become a member of the Institute's
permanent staff (1965-72) was, however, A.I.Sabra, now of
Harvard. Sabra had previously held the Institute's Senior
Research Fellowship, to work on Arabic optics and geometry.
He has published in the Institute' s Journal: ''A twelfth-
century defence of the fourth figure of the syllogism' (1965);
'Simplicius's proof of Euclid's parallels postulate' (19€8);
'Thäbit Ibn Qurra on Euclid's parellels postulate' (1969).
Furthermore, for some years, in collaboration with Richard
Walzer of Oxford, Sabra conducted a seminar on Islamic
philosophy and religion at the Institute. Be also directed a
nurober of doctoral theses:
Kamal Hamid Shaddad: 'Ibn Taymiyya's critique of
~xistotelian logic'
Nabil Y.Shehaby: 'The propositional logic of Avicenna' (Saxl
Fund Research Fellow at the Institute, 1965-68)
127
 Abdalla Bassan Zaroug: 'The concept of possibility in some
Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's De interpretatione'.
Professor Sabra's English translation, with commentary, of
the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham will be published by the Institute.
From 1971 to 1974 Dr Friedrich W.Zimmermann, now Lecturer in
Islamic Philosophy at Oxford, was Senior Research Fellow of the
Institute. His recent Muhammad ibn Muhammaa al-Firibi
[Commentarium in Aristoteiem] (1981) is the fruit of work done
during the tenure of the Fellowship. Later, Patricia Crone,
now Lecturer in Islamic History at Oxford, held the same
appointment. Her recent book Hagarism: The Making of the
Islamic World (with Michael Cook, 1980) was partly the result
of this.
The present Senior Research Fellow, Dr c.s.F.Burnett, works
chiefly on the eleventh- and twelfth-century translators from
and into Latin, Hebrew and Arabic active in Northern Spain. He
has in the press an edition,with translation,of Hermann of
Carinthia's De essentiis; he has published notes on AbÜ Matshar
and Picatrix in the Journal, and he is now working, with
Professor Pingree, on Arabic and Latin astrological texts.
Together they are editing the excerpts, in Arabic, of a lost
Persian astrological work attributed to Andarzaghar, and the
Latin Liber Aristotelis de 255 Indorum voluminibus summam
continens, a translation by Hugo of Santalla of an Arabic work
incorporating much of 'Andarzaghar'. He is also preparing for
publication by the Institute a survey of the medieval Latin
translations of al-Kindi (on the lines of M.-Th. d'Alverny's
Avicenna Latinus).
Most recently, Robert Jones has completed an M.Phil
dissertation on 'The Arabic and Persian studies of Giovan Battista
Raimondi (c. 1536-1614).
A colloquium held at the Institute in 1980 on the pseudo-
Aristotelian Secret of Secrets drew contributions on the Arabic
Kitäb as-Sirr from ~~oud Manzalaoui and Mario Grignaschi as
well as on the Latin, English, French, Russian and Hebrew
versions. This, too, will be published by the Institute.
The foregoing studies have been supported, as they still are,
by the holdings of a Library and Photographie Collection which
is strengest on the oriental side in the history of Islamic
philosophy and science, particularly medicine and astrology-
astronomy, as well as in Islamic art. Special emphasis is placed
on interchange between civilizations -- ancient, modern, Eastern
and Western. Two books to have been written largely on the
Institute'sresources in art-history are Hugo Buchthal's and the
late Otto Kurz's Hand List of Illurninated Oriental Christian
Manuscripts (1942) and Professor Kurz's European Clocks and
Watches in the Near East (1975) . There is also good documentation
of the European image of and contact with the Turks, especially
during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, many of the books coming

128
from the library of the late Paul Wittek. The Library also
possesses a large number of books relating to Arabic studies,
especially those published in Germany, which arenot easily
available elsewhere in this country.

October, 1981.

129