I have just received news of the announcement of David Freedberg as the new Director of the Warburg Institute, my alma mater. I’m really pleased that he has taken the post: partly because it sees the return to this country of a major scholar, who trained here, but has spent most of his career in New York; partly because it provides an opportunity for the Warburg to solve the problems it has been having over its funding with the University of London; but, most of all, because he is so obviously committed to Warburgian studies, the history of science as well as the history of art, their relationship to the history of ideas, and the development of an understanding of the relationship between the mind and eye.