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 Censu
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 available in German here.
Tracing the Footsteps of Alfred Scharf: The Early History of the Census and the ‘Republic of Pictures’
Around 1975, two greenish-grey wooden boxes arrived at the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute. They contained a precursor of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, one which was only salvaged from oblivion three decades after the Census’s creation. In quest for a clearer picture of the main contributor to this early project, a lesser-known art historian named Alfred Scharf, I embarked on an odyssey across various archives with unexpected encounters. An outline of Scharf’s career was gradually pieced together, but my discoveries also revealed his presence amidst a ‘Republic of Letters’ of art historians and art dealers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who used photographs of artworks as their currency, cataloguing and indexing as their standard methodology.
