Ten panels from the Mnemosyne Atlas
The last project of the German Jewish “cultural scientist” Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929), the Mnemosyne Atlas is an unfinished attempt to map the pathways that give art history and cosmography their pathos-laden meanings. Warburg thought this visual, metaphoric encyclopedia, with its constellations of symbolic images, would animate the viewer’s memory, imagination, and understanding of what he called “the afterlife of antiquity.” Read more »
View selected panels
Pathways
Panel B traces correspondences between the human being and the cosmos that underlie all other analogical associations in Warburg’s atlas. Spyros Papapetros offers this guided pathway.
Panel C addresses the epistemology and the practice of the creation of symbols. Claudia Wedepohl guides this pathway.
Panel 8 is given over to antique cults that centered on solar deities. Elizabeth Sears lights the way.
Panel 45 depicts excessive and alarming occurrences, the dangers of intense and unmediated passions. Hans Christian Hönes is our guide.
Panel 46 presents variations on the gesture of "bearing something/someone to something/someone else." Andrea Pinotti elucidates.
Panel 47 is concerned with Florentine art of the later fifteenth century, exploring themes of protection and slaughter through the figure of the nymph. Ben Anderson provides this guided pathway.
Panel 48 is concerned with the shifting uses of the pagan goddess Fortuna in medieval and Renaissance imagery. Florian Fuchs provides this guided pathway.
Panel 61-64 is concerned with the storms of ambivalence, transformation, and conflict that characterize the of transmission Antiquity, despite the putative stability of the heritage. Lisa Robertson navigates.
Panel 70 is devoted to “Baroque Pathos.” This guided pathway traces the status of the Baroque in Warburg’s Atlas, which tends to privilege the Renaissance and its reception of antiquity. Jane O. Newman is our guide, with Laura Hatch.
Panel 79 has as its principal theme the Eucharist. Christopher D. Johnson provides this guided pathway.
The Warburg Institute
The Warburg Institute of the University of London exists principally to further the study of the classical tradition, that is of those elements of European thought...
Learn more about The Warburg Institute
Readings
- Aby M. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas: Mnemosyne, Gesammelte Schriften II.1, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie, 2008).
- Aby M. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the Renaissance (PDF), ed. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty, 1999).
Featured
Aby Warburg Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Virtual Exhibition
The Warburg Institute offers this virtual tour to explore in detail the 63 Bilderatlas panels reconstructed for the first time as part of the landmark 2020 exhibition Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne - the Original.