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WHEN ABY Warburg was 13 years old, he made a bargain with his brother Max. He offered his younger sibling the family bank if Max agreed to provide Aby with all the books he wanted. From Max’s 12-year-old perspective, it appeared to be the deal of a lifetime: In the late 19th century, M.M. Warburg & Co. was one of the richest private banking firms in Hamburg. But Max vastly underestimated Aby’s bibliomania. By the time Aby died in 1929, he had built one of the city’s foremost private libraries, comprising 60,000 rare volumes on subjects ranging from ancient astrology to Renaissance painting. Transported to England when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and bequeathed to the University of London, the library of the Warburg Institute remains a major center of scholarship even today.

However Aby Warburg also left another was still incomplete when he unexpectedly died at the age of 63: a jumble of crooked pictures, irregularly numbered, and lacking captions and commentaries. Disassembled in the ’40s and preserved only in hazy snapshots, the