New post for Verso by Chris­to­pher Lu

13. Oktober 2023

Chris­to­pher G. Lu, a Rhodes Scholar at the Univer­sity of Oxford, has published a new blog post for Verso. Lu is curr­ently reading for an MSt in Modern Languages at Oxford and specia­lises in Renais­sance art and intellec­tual history. Lu’s post for Verso follows up on a topic he began to explore in 2021 when, as an MA student at the Warburg Insti­tute, he contri­buted to the online exhi­bi­tion for the 75th anni­ver­sary of the Census.

The start of his inves­ti­ga­tion is a box of index cards housed at the Photo­gra­phic Coll­ec­tion of the Warburg Insti­tute that bears the label ‘Burchard Census’. Lu’s rese­arch into this box led him from the Rubens scholar Ludwig Burchard to the art histo­rian Alfred Scharf who compiled the cards on Burchard’s behalf in the 1930s. In this essay, Lu describes his fasci­na­ting journey into the history of the Buchard box, which brought him into contact with Scharf’s descen­dants and with the traces of Scharf’s career at the Warburg Insti­tute, the Cour­t­auld, I Tatti, and elsewhere.

Lu’s rese­arch offers inva­luable insights into the history of the Census project, since the cards in the Burchard box are the direct prede­cessor to the Census as it was devised by Fritz Saxl and Richard Kraut­heimer in 1946. His essay opens up new perspec­tives, moreover, on the chal­lenges faced by scho­lars exiled from Germany as they re-estab­lished their careers and rese­arch projects in the UK.

The summary is given below and the full essay is available here. It is also available in English here.

Auf den Spuren Alfred Scharfs: Die frühe Geschichte des Census und die „Repu­blik der Bilder“

Um 1975 erreichten zwei grün-graue Boxen die Foto­gra­fi­sche Samm­lung des Warburg Insti­tuts. Sie enthielten einen Vorläufer des Census of Antique Works of Art and Archi­tec­ture Known in the Renais­sance, der erst drei Jahr­zehnte nach der Entste­hung des Census vor der voll­kom­menen Verges­sen­heit bewahrt worden war. Die Suche nach einem klareren Bild des Haupt­ver­ant­wort­li­chen jenes Vorläu­fer­pro­jektes, eines eher unbe­kannten Kunst­his­to­ri­kers namens Alfred Scharf, führte mich auf eine Odyssee durch verschie­dene Archive, begleitet von zahl­rei­chen uner­war­teten Begeg­nungen. Dies ermög­lichte mir, die Umrisse von Scharfs Karriere zu rekon­stru­ieren. Meine Entde­ckungen offen­barten zudem Scharfs Rolle inmitten einer „Repu­blik der Briefe“, die sich aus Kunst­his­to­ri­kern und Kunst­händ­lern des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahr­hun­derts konsti­tu­ierte. Foto­gra­fien von Kunst­werken dienten ihnen als eine Art Währung, während Indices und Kata­loge das Funda­ment ihrer Stan­dard-Methodik bildeten.