The Warburg Institute Romance Collections
The library of the Warburg Institute is a unique collection centred on the European Renaissance and the reception of the classical tradition. It contains editions of primary texts and critical works across the Romance languages, particularly in French and Italian, as well as reference works, many of which are unavailable elsewhere in the UK. The library is uniquely organised around the four themes of Image, Word, Orientation and Action. Further information on the library’s resources and a guide to its classification system can be found here.
The Photographic Collection, which contains tens of thousands of physical photographs of sculptures, paintings, drawings and other forms of imagery, mainly of European origin. The collection is currently being digitised: see the Iconographic Database.
In 2017, work began to convert materials from the library into digital format. The Warburg Digital Library currently contains a selection of books on the subjects of Magic and Science from the personal library of the art historian and scholar Aby Warburg, as well as a collection of Italian baroque opera libretti. Further material will be added in the future.
The Warburg Institute Library also provides access to 65 online resources and databases, a number of which include significant quantities of Romance language material. These include:
- L’Année philologique
- Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale
- International Bibliography of Humanism and the Renaissance
- Persée
- Revues.org
- The Drawings of the Florentine Painters