Edgar Marcel Wind was born in Berlin 14 May, 1900, as one of two children of the Argentinian merchant Maurice Delmar Wind and his Romanian wife Laura Szilard. Wind attended Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and in 1918 went on to read classics, philosophy and art history at the University of Berlin. In 1918 he moved first to Freiburg, attending lectures by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, then to Vienna, being taught by Max Dvořák, Julius von Schlosser and Josef Strzygowski. In 1920 he turned to the newly founded Hamburg University, where, supervised by Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, he completed his dissertation Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand: ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte in 1922.



In 1927 Wind returned to Hamburg, becoming Aby Warburg's personal research assistant at the Bibliothek Warburg. Following the completion of his Habilitationschrift Das Experiment und die Metaphysik in 1930, Wind became Privatdozent at Hamburg University, where he produced his first major art historical work, Humanitätsidee and heroisiertes Portrait in der englischen Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts (1932, reprinted in translation in the posthumous collection Hume and the Historic Portrait, 1986).

Due to his Jewish extraction, Wind was dismissed from his post at Hamburg University shortly after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. At the same time, Nazi antisemitism endangered the Bibliothek Warburg, and Wind came to play a decisive role in the Bibliothek's transfer to London in 1934. From 1934 he was deputy director of the Warburg Institute, and with Rudolf Wittkower in 1937 became founding editor of the Journal of the Warburg Institute. Wind published his first iconographical studies of Renaissance art, and lectured extensively on the works of Michelangelo and Raphael. Some of his studies were posthumously published as The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo (2001).

At the outbreak of the war in 1939 Wind was on sabbatical leave in the United States, where he unexpectedly remained, widely lecturing at museums and academic institutions, and in 1940 becoming lecturer at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. From 1942, he was professor of art at the University of Chicago, then was appointed Neilson research professor at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts in 1944. At the end of the war, Wind chose to remain at Smith College as professor of philosophy and art. He developed his studies into Renaissance art, publishing on the Sistine Ceiling (1947) and Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods (1948), and also engaged in debates about contemporary art and philosophy. In 1953 he organised, and contributed to, a symposium on art and morals.

In 1954 Wind was invited to give the Chichele Lectures at All Souls College in Oxford, choosing 'Art and scholarship under Julius II' as his subject. When the Oxford chair in the history of art was created in 1955, Wind, who had been in touch with Oxford scholars such as Richard Livingston, Ernest Jacob, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin since the 1930s, was appointed to it, also becoming a professorial fellow at Trinity College. In the following years, Wind was the driving force in establishing art history as a discipline in Oxford, arguing for the creation of a new department with its own research library. He applied his cultural historical approach to the study of art, giving hugely popular lectures on a wide range of subjects, including Leonardo and Michelangelo, but, with a more interdisciplinary approach and in collaboration with other scholars (Stuart Hampshire, Austin Gill, Humphrey Sutherland and John Sparrow), also extending his studies to Kant and Hegel, Manet and Mallarmé, and Renaissance poetry. During his years in Oxford, Wind published the two works for which he is best known: Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (first published 1959, revised edition 1967) and Art and Anarchy (1963 - originally given as the Reith Lectures in 1960). In 1967, Wind retired from his chair at Oxford, dedicating his time to working on a book about Michelangelo's theological sources, and publishing a shorter work on Giorgione's Tempesta (1969). Edgar Wind died from leukaemia, from which he had been suffering since 1965, on 12 September 1971.

Based on the entry for Edgar Wind in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Ben Thomas, 2004. Also see Dictionary of Art Historians: Wind, Edgar [Marcel].

Margaret Wind was born in Rochester, New York, 25 August 1915 as the daughter of the German physicist G. A. Hermann Kellner and his wife Margarethe, née Goetze, who had emigrated to the United States. After obtaining a B.A. at the University of Rochester 1937, she went on to Mills College, California, where she met her future husband, Edgar Wind, there on a lecture tour. From 1940, she served as Edgar Wind's research assistant, working with him at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and other institutions with which he became affiliated. In May 1942 they married.

After Edgar Wind's death in 1971, Margaret Wind became his literary executrix and the driving force behind the posthumous publication of many of Wind’s papers. She dedicated more than 30 years to advocating for Edgar Wind's legacy in Oxford and for making the significance of art historical and philosophical work more widely known. Her donations, together with funding secured from the Louise Crane Foundation, went into the Wind Benefaction, which under Margaret Wind's auspices helped to fund work on Edgar Wind's private and scholarly papers, research on his life and work, and new editions and translations of his publications. Margaret Wind also took a leading role in the establishment of the Wind Room, which opened at the Sackler Library in 2001 and houses the collection of books that Edgar Wind had acquired for the History of Art Library during his tenure as Professor at Oxford.

Margaret Wind died in Oxford in 2006.