Wood, like many other scholars, is quick to admit that many of the meanings that Warburg ascribed to his aggregations of images remain enigmatic to this day. Modern photographs of golfers, two Greek coins, the cover of a fish cookbook, postage stamps from France andīarbados, an advertisement for a beauty cream, and a seal presenting Charles II of England as Neptune. Warburg summarized Panel 77, shown in Figure 1, for example, rather obliquely as “the catharsis of the ‘headhunter’ having taken the form of a golfer.” 4 Its contents comprise, as Christopher Wood describes it,Īn irregular constellation embracing Medea about to Kill Her Children and The Massacre at Chios by Delacroix, 3 Warburg intended each panel to demonstrate a particular theme or argument, many details of which are still being parsed. Warburg selected these images from his own library, and specifically from his photographic collection, which, Katia Mazzucco proposes, he specifically assembled to support this project. The photographs reproduced works of high art, maps, cosmographical images, manuscript pages, and were in some instances interspersed with contemporary newspaper clippings and advertisements ( Fig. Notoriously ambitious and elusive, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg’s death, the Mnemosyne Atlas comprised a numbered series of black cloth-covered screens on which Warburg would arrange and rearrange groupings of black and white gelatin silver photographs, comprising nearly one thousand images in all. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Panel 77, 1929, digital positive from glass plate negative, 9 1/2 x 7 in. As Warburg explained, his program was an attempt “to point to the function of collective memory as a formative force for the emergence of styles by using the civilization of pagan antiquity as a constant.” 2įig. 1 Although Warburg is often credited with founding the study of iconology, later promulgated in the United States by his disciple Erwin Panofsky, the movement and impact of images he hoped to demonstrate through the Mnemosyne Atlas had a much deeper psychological inflection. Warburg intended the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, as it has come to be called, to synthesize his previous scholarship and crystallize his theories about the migration and repetition of “images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power” from the art and culture of Western antiquity through the Renaissance, and up through his own day. In 1923, following his release from the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he had spent three years in treatment for depression and schizophrenia, the German art historian Aby Warburg began work on the great culminating project of his career.
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