Aby Warburg delivered his Lectures on Leonardo in 1899 to introduce himself as a young art historian and private scholar to the wider public in his hometown Hamburg. One hundred and twenty years later, the Warburg Institute in London publishes these texts for the first time to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death. Fully illustrated and translated into English, the lectures give an insight into Warburg as a public speaker, concerned to convey a complex visual argument to a non-specialist audience. Using state-of-the-art projection technologies and drawing on recent publications, Warburg discussed Leonardo’s artistic development in three steps: his training and early years in Florence, work at the Sforza court in Milan, and final years in Florence and France. Within this overview Warburg persistently turns to research questions that are recognisably his own, especially the afterlife of antiquity in the representation of animated life in religious and courtly festivals.

The cover image shows Aby Warburg as a young man of about 32, at his desk in Florence in 1898.