When it was published in England in 1964, the book Saturn and Melancholy had lost the historical and cultural references that have framed its original version, in the Hamburg of the 1920's. The turmoil of the 20th Century led to obsolescence one of its main scopes: the focus on the German contribution, with Albrecht Dürer's work, to the Renaissance ideal of the temperamental, superior man, as a forerunner of the romantic concept of "genius". The authors, assimilacionist Jews, had begun their work while the Weimar Republic was starting to collapse, just as their intellectual patron, the art historian Aby Warburg, retired to a psychiatric hospital. The rise of Nazism scattered them and they increasingly moved away from Warburg's character and ideas.