Today the fragmentary literary corpus of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) is the object of sustained critical attention: the German Jewish art and cultural historian presciently promoted a mode of cultural study giving equal weight to the “read” image and the interpreted text. This talk focuses on Warburg as a critic of disciplinary structures and the creator of an enduring model of collaborative work across the humanities. It follows the early life of the movement that he set in motion and introduces the labyrinthine library he created to serve collaborators as a humanistic “laboratory”; this library, which was saved from the Nazis in 1933, when members of Warburg’s circle negotiated its transfer to London, continues to function today as the Warburg Institute.