Edgar Wind

Wind is best remembered for his research in allegory and the use of pagan mythology during the 15th and 16th centuries, and for his book on the subject, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance.

In 1960, the BBC invited Wind to present the annual Reith Lectures. In this series of six radio talks, titled Art and Anarchy, he examined why, and how, great art is often produced in turbulent circumstances.

Wind was an enthusiastic and respected lecturer at many institutions. He was a key example of the encyclopedic phenomenon of the "Warburgian scholar" in the American academic scene, equally at home in art, literature, history, and philosophy, and giving "pyrotechnical lectures." Says one student of Wind's at Smith, "his Hamburg accent and his puckish smile ... remain the most delightful memories...his...charisma...is the quality that made the greatest impression... [His] utterly charming European manner, urbane, intellectual must have been stimulating and encouraging to [his colleagues.]" Wind was a crucial influence on the young R.B. Kitaj, who enrolled at the Ruskin School, Oxford in early 1957, introducing him to the work and legacy of Aby Warburg. He personally encouraged Kitaj, inviting him to tea with him and his wife, Margaret, at his flat in Belsyre Court. Someone who in 1967 attended his Oxford lectures on the Sistine ceiling recalls the packed house at the Sheldonian Theatre, the vast erudition behind the tracing of the "theology" of Michelangelo's figures, and simply the excitement of learning about the order of one Renaissance world picture.

In 1955, Wind returned to England and became Oxford University's first professor of art history, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1967. He died in London. A reading room in Oxford's new Sackler Library is dedicated to him, where his works are stored. Wind, although considered a classicist and Renaissance expert, staunchly defended modern art, unlike many of his colleagues: "If modern art is sometimes shrill," he said, "it is not the fault of the artist alone. We all tend to raise our voices when we speak to persons who are getting deaf."

Once in London, Wind taught and became involved with the Warburg Institute, helping found the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute in 1937. During the war he returned to the US and remained there, holding several teaching positions, at New York University, University of Chicago, and Smith College. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950.

Wind left to teach briefly in the United States for financial reasons (he had a two-year appointment at the University of North Carolina from 1925–27), but then returned to Hamburg as a research assistant. It was there that he got to know Aby Warburg, and was instrumental in moving the Warburg Library out of Germany to London during the Nazi period. Warburg's influence on Wind's own methods was significant.

Edgar Wind (/wɪnd/; 14 May 1900 – 12 September 1971) was a German-born British interdisciplinary art historian, specializing in iconology in the Renaissance era. He was a member of the school of art historians associated with Aby Warburg and the Warburg Institute as well as the first Professor of art history at Oxford University.