Tracing the Footsteps of Alfred Scharf: The Early History of the Census and the ‘Republic of Pictures’
Around 1975, two greenish-grey wooden boxes arrived at the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute. They contained a precursor of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, one which was only salvaged from oblivion three decades after the Census’s creation. In quest for a clearer picture of the main contributor to this early project, a lesser-known art historian named Alfred Scharf, I embarked on an odyssey across various archives with unexpected encounters. An outline of Scharf’s career was gradually pieced together, but my discoveries also revealed his presence amidst a ‘Republic of Letters’ of art historians and art dealers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who used photographs of artworks as their currency, cataloguing and indexing as their standard methodology.

