Common Knowledge

This article traces the roundabout journey of an architectural historian from Cambridge to the Warburg Institute Library, via Cracow, Princeton, and Manchester. The author's early research, into German and Central European architecture, had little to do with Warburgian interests, but in his studies in Cracow he became aware of the importance of architectural symbolism, via the friendship of his Cracow tutor, Lech Kalinowski, with Erwin Panofsky. As a corrective to Panofsky's idealist notion of the architectural symbol, the author was introduced to Richard Krautheimer's theory of the "copy," first published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes for 1942. It was this Warburgian model that launched the author's publications on the architectural symbolism of the Middle Ages. He writes that ending his journey as one of the editors of the Warburg and Courtauld Journal left him feeling that he had (in some sense) come home.