Botticelli's painting incorporates, Warburg argues, Poliziano's interpretations. This reading of the ancients mediated through Renaissance poetry is not Warburg's only stint as literary historian. As one finds in reading more of his essays, Warburg writes painstaking analysis not only of literature but of any number of written sources. He scrutinizes private letters, marriage certificates, and tax returns with a philologist's care, worrying out the most astounding familial or business relations to explain the subject of a portrait or propose the identity of a draftsman. Here Gertrude Bing's grouping of the essays, by subject matter rather than chronological order of publication, helps to underline the way in which Warburg would plumb a document for all its myriad facts.
Several characters become familiar.
To answer in the affirmative would to read an anachronistic ideological or political agenda into Warburg's historicist project. His urgency to uncover new source material is driven not by a conviction that culture should be defined more popularly but by his desire to answer certain canonical art historical questions which he finds inadequately addressed by his colleagues. Simply put, he wants to describe Renaissance artistic style as a multifaceted evolution and finds the predominant formal apparatus incapable of doing so. Yet, again this breadth is only a tool. His first blueprint for iconological analysis, for example, relies on an erudite discussion of manuscript migration.