Martin Warnke (12 October 1937 – 11 December 2019) was a German art historian.
Life and work
Warnke grew up in a German pastor's family in Brazil. He studied
art history, history and German literature at the universities of Munich, Madrid and Berlin. In 1963, he wrote a Ph.D. thesis on
Peter Paul Rubens at the
Free University of Berlin under
Hans Kauffmann. In 1964 and 1965, he worked at the Berlin museums. In 1970, he completed his Habilitationsschrift on court art at the
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. From 1971 to 1978 he was a professor of art history at the
University of Marburg. In 1979, he moved to the
University of Hamburg, where he taught art history until his retirement in 2003.
Warnke represented a research direction that is particularly focused on the social history of art. He directed the Center for Political Iconography at the
Warburg Haus, Hamburg. Here he devoted himself to the work of the important cultural theorist,
Aby Warburg.
(with Uwe Fleckner and Hendrik Ziegler), Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie. Vol. 1: Abdankung bis Huldigung. Vol. 2: Imperator bis Zwerg. 2nd edition. Munich 2011.
Zeitgenossenschaft: Zum Auschwitz-Prozess 1964. Zurich 2014.