He continued his studies in Munich and with Hubert Janitschek in Strasbourg, completing under him his dissertation on Botticelli's paintings The Birth of Venus and Primavera.

Before heading West, he had met veteran anthropologists James Mooney and Frank Hamilton Cushing at the Smithsonian Institution, both of whom contributed to early ethnographies of Indigenous Americans.

He continued on to visit a number of Pueblo villages in New Mexico before stopping in San Ildefonso, where he had the opportunity to photograph a traditional Antelope dance.

In Cochiti, Warburg convinced a priest and his son to illustrate their people's cosmology; their drawing highlighted the importance of meteorological phenomena and serpents to their cultural worldview.

[4] Warburg's American travels served as the inspiration for his first forays into photography and ethnography, but aside from two photographic exhibits, his personal accounts of his experiences among the Pueblo and Hopi peoples remained largely unexamined for nearly three decades.

Among their Florentine circle could be counted the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, the writer Isolde Kurz, the English architect and antiquary Herbert Horne, the Dutch Germanist André Jolles and his wife Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, and the Belgian art historian Jacques Mesnil.

Warburg, for his part, renounced all sentimental aestheticism, and in his writings criticised a vulgarised idealisation of an individualism that had been imputed to the Renaissance in the work of Jacob Burckhardt.

Feminine clothing takes on a symbolic meaning in Warburg's famous essay, inspired by discussions with Jolles, on the nymphs and the figure of the Virgin in Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco in Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

[citation needed] In 1902 the family returned to Hamburg, and Warburg presented the findings of his Florentine research in a series of lectures, but at first did not take on a professorship or any other academic position.

[citation needed] He had manic depression and symptoms of schizophrenia,[8] and was hospitalized in Ludwig Binswanger's neurological clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in 1921.

It consisted of 40 wooden panels covered with black cloth, on which were pinned nearly 1,000 pictures from books, magazines, newspapers and other daily life sources.

Despite being respected among academics during his lifetime, he remained widely unknown and was almost forgotten during Nazi rule and the years following World War II.

For the most part, his academic estate consists of notes, card indices, about 35,000 letters, incomplete manuscripts, as well as a library diary written from 1926 to 1929.

In 1933 it was decided to relocate the entire library and staff to London, a move in which Warburg's mentee Edgar Wind was instrumental; the young discipline of art history was thereby introduced into the Anglo-Saxon world and led to the establishing of chairs at several elite universities.

[citation needed] New interest in Warburg was sparked by the publication of Gombrich's biography, which was published in England in 1970 and only printed in a German translation eleven years later.

"The devil is in the details") refers to the extensive study of various documents in order to achieve a profound understanding of an artwork in relation to its historical and social context.

The aftermath of antiquity and ancient gods in the taking effect of pagan-antiquarian compositions and magic image practices — especially in the Renaissance —, which can be traced all throughout European history and into modern Western astrology, was a topic that he shifted the attention of Cultural studies onto.