Unlike other Mnemosyne panels, panel B exhibits a remarkable sense of regularity and symmetry with essentially nine images arranged in three rows of three figures each, at the very center of which lies Leonardo’s well-known Vitruvian figure. Here, the arms and legs of the Renaissance master’s ideal human extend not only towards the abstract expansion of the universe but also the concrete contours of other microcosmic figures. They too constitute a cosmic “circle,” of an iconographic kind, in which this foundational image reconnects with its epistemological origins. As we know, the Greek Kosmos meant not only the world, but also adornment (cosmetics), and by combining these two meanings, the hierarchic arrangement of the world into an orderly design. Panel B does not simply offer several images of the cosmos but its very arrangement of individual images is a cosmos. Warburg and Saxl recreate the cosmic order of the world (and its periodic lapses into chaos) in the regular intervals and framed pictures of the panel, which now become stars in an iconographic constellation. While a static rectangular frame, panel B appears to rotate around one or multiple gravitational centers.

By translating cosmological ideas to a stylized figurative type, this panel comes closer to the iconographic threads that unite the rest of the atlas’s panels. At the same time however, it foregrounds an increasing abstraction imposed by the laws of mathematics and geometry that threaten to erase the human figure and convert it to an intangible system of proportional relationships (a form of abstraction that constitutes another iconological problem that permeates Warburg’s own era and particularly the period when the panel was created). But the same iconographic arrangement also has an ideographic function: for ultimately the micro-macrocosmic figure also inscribes an epistemological perimeter, in Warburgian terms, an Umfangsbestimmung: literally, the “parametric definition” or conceptual radius of an idea that here aims to encompass the entire world. Therefore, while represented by a closed geometric circle, such perimeters can never be properly defined.