Guided Pathway

Microcosmic afterlife—Feet on the moon

As Warburg makes clear in his great essay on “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920), however intangible or distant they may appear from the surface of the earth, cosmological speculations are intimately connected with momentous social and political events that occur in the real world. And that is valid both for the Renaissance and early modern period examined in Warburg’s scholarly studies as well as early twentieth century modernity when the same studies were written. If part of the explorations of astrological prognostication and the figures of planetary men (or “children”) occurred around the era of World War I, similar cosmological topics would become the subjects of another resurgence in both historiography and global politics in the aftermath of World War II. One could indeed fill several new panels with images of microcosmic, planetary, or (Neo-)Vitruvian men that surfaced post 1945 and could extend Mnemosyne to the postwar era. One of the symptoms (and triggers) of that revival were the theories of micro-macro-cosmic harmony transferred from bodies to buildings in the studies of Rudolf Wittkower at the Warburg Institute in London. Published in 1949 (and based on a series of articles published earlier in the Journal of the Warburg Institute), Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism featured a number of images of micro-macro-cosmic representations of humans in circles and squares excerpted from Renaissance editions of Vitruvius. These studies of Renaissance harmony coincided with a revival of interest in proportion especially in architectural circles across Europe and around the world in the early 1950s during a period of financial reorganization when modes of production, distribution, and organization appeared to be in need of a uniform system that could be implemented on a global scale.  Echoing the function of Zodiac or planetary men in Renaissance calendars, the influence of these modern micro-macrocosmic systems was allegedly therapeutic not for an individual but for a larger social body which was now ailing.