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Louis Rose observes in this delightful study that each of the trio of thinkers he discusses-the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the art historian Aby Warburg, and the archeologist Emmanuel Loewy-was in his own way concerned with the “survival of images” in the classical tradition, or, in Warburg's words, “das Nachleben der Antike.” Freud himself in his youth underlined the following passage in his copy of Jakob Burckhardt's Cicerone: “What the eye perceives in this and other Greek edifices are not mere stones, but living beings.”1 This sense of the vitality of the past-an essential theme of the book by the great historian of the Renaissance-depended on the relation of images to memory as understood by such important contemporaries as Bergson.2
The shared quest for this cultural “afterlife” provides the guiding thread for Rose's interdisciplinary account of three figures not previously united even in the vast literature on Freud, though Ernst Gombrich touched on all three: he wrote an essay (1966) on Freud, a book (1970) on Warburg, and passages (1960, 22-23) on his teacher Loewy, but he did not interrelate them.3 The present review will attempt to supplement Rose's book with comments on the personal ramifications of the striving of Freud and Warburg (Loewy's biography is less instructive) for the survival of the classical tradition, and with a brief account of the aftermath of their project.
The devotion of these Jews to gentile culture might seem surprising, particularly considering the traditional Jewish resistance to idolatrous imagery and emphasis on the “survival of