Atlas mnemosyne aby warburg biography

Ascent and Descent of the Gods IX. The Age of Neptune XI. Art officiel and Baroque pathos XII. Aby Warburg Born into a prominent Jewish banking family in Hamburg, Aby Warburg — studied art history, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy and the history of religions at the University of Bonn. Thomson progetto grafico: Daniele Savasta.

Thomson graphic design: Daniele Savasta. What was utterly extraordinary, however, was the project to which he dedicated the final years of his life: the Mnemosyne Atlas, which has long remained a legend, even after its publication in From toWarburg concentrated his entire body of knowledge in this collection of images, which ultimately spanned 63 panels and encompassed almost a thousand individual pieces.

He predominantly used photographs, but also included illustrations from books or picture files, original graphics, and newspaper clippings. He even used postage stamps and promotional brochures. He chose Mnemosynethe Greek goddess of memory and mother of the muses, as the patron saint of his project. Warburg was concerned with the question of how the pictorial world of antiquity had come back into the European cultural sphere and led the medieval world into a new era — a classic problem with a very familiar solution: the Renaissance, the rebirth.

Warburg never simply mapped out the dialogues and clashes of interest between artists, clients, philosophers, poets, and churches. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. German art historian — HamburgNorth German Confederation. Hamburg, Weimar Republic.

Atlas mnemosyne aby warburg biography: This “technique” formed the

Mary Hertz. Early life and education [ edit ]. Travels in the United States [ edit ]. Florence [ edit ]. Return to Hamburg [ edit ]. Last project: Mnemosyne Atlas [ edit ]. Status in the history of science [ edit ]. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

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Atlas mnemosyne aby warburg biography: In February , Aby Warburg

Publications [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. New York: Random House. ISBN Images from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Translated with an interpretive essay by Michael P. Cornell University Press. Retrieved 22 September The renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the European Renaissance by Aby Warburg.

Psychoanalysis and History. Retrieved Warburg als Lehrer, He never systemised these thoughts in the form of a publication but a more or less fixed range of methodological elements are available, scattered throughout his work, both published and unpublished. The most important adagium used by Warburg to construct a historical opponent is the famous adagium "Zum Bild das Wort" "to the image the word".

Adherence to this adagium made Warburg into such a prolific buyer of books. But it also meant that he would dig his way through Florentine archives, studying wills, diaries as well as money ledgers, thus being able to track the travelling roads of people, goods, images and ideas. Warburg, always a keen producer of drawings, graphs, schemes and what one could call "storyboards", realised that cultural contexts with their socio-psychological topics were constructions by the historian in order to differentiate the way persons or groups of persons dealt with the contents of images in the past.

For Warburg the period we now refer to as the Renaissance was a multidimensional semantic space in which persons and groups of persons, patrons and artists, had to deal with three opposing forces, that could literally mark the words and images they made or commissioned: the practical oriental force with the opposites of astrology and more scientific oriented astronomythe Italian humanistic force that had to find its way between the Dionysian and Apollonian extremesand the North European courtly force realism vs idealism.

Atlas mnemosyne aby warburg biography: Aby M. Warburg ()

Since images were carriers of the marks they were stamped with in this multidimensional space, Warburg tried to construct a inventory of these images with the Mnemosyne Atlas, both the images and texts one had deal with that were stamped within their context as well as the images and texts that were produced. Or, as Warburg formulated a title for the effort of the Atlas at half past four in the morning : "Mnemosyne.

Images for a cultural historical view of classicising expression stamping coining ". In Warburgs view words and images could be as much actors "Engramme", "Mneme" in a historical context as were the persons upon whom they acted upon. Describing these processes as part of their cultural contexts was the task of the art historian as cultural historian.

Given the contours of the methodology sketched above, there are no shortcuts to be taken in art history. It is all bottom up work: Getting the texts and images one needed, analysing and describing the routes they travelled, working with paintings and sculptures but also with prints and book illustrations to track the appearance, disappearance and re-appearance of particular forms and motifs, often concealed as details within larger containers.

Analysing and describing their place in the semantic space constructed with the help of the models of opposite poles ["Hilfskonstruktionen"]. But always doing this in such a way that persons or groups of persons are involved. Warburg gave lectures and organised exhibitions which he often prepared with the help of the "exhibition screens":.

In the Warburg Institute in London there exist three series of photographs of the state of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Frozen moments of a project that was always changing. The first series of photographs dates from May It is often referred to as the ' series' there were 43 screens photographed and it contained objects. The second state of the Atlas that was captured is often referred to as the 'penultimate series'.

It consisted of 71 screens with objects displayed. It was the largest series photographed because the last series, the so-called ' series' [ warnke] consists of 63 screens with objects displayed. The buildup of the screens of '' series closely reflects the research themes of Warburgs research:. Bing used a similar structure for the 'Gesammelte Schriften', Warburg's collected writings, published in And when Bing wrote a memo about the Warburg Institute in it's new London setting in she used similar topics to prioritise the new works to acquire for the library:.

Astrology was a semantic space always present in the atlas Boll lectureOrientalistentag exhibition Accompanied by the context of the 'Pathosformel' Ovid exhibition and the works from the 17th century Rembrandt lecture Taken from Warburg's earlier publications were the contexts of the relation between Italy and Northern Europe and that of festivities.

But with this flexible working medium at his disposal Warburg experienced difficulties to bring the different themes of his research together. These kind of factual journal entries are interleaved with more methodological entries that touch upon topics as "Mneme" "Eintritt des antikis. Mneme", "aus dem mnemischen Erbgut" and "Symbol" "Wesen des Symbols".

And with entries that show that Warburg was putting in some hard work on the introduction for the Atlas. In November Warburg and Bing were in Rome, with the screens, to prepare his so-called Hertziana lecture. And things were going well according to Bing:. On the 20th of Octoberjust a couple of days before his death on the 26th of that same month, Warburg noted the following on the state of the Atlas:.

So up to his last working days Warburg kept finding it difficult to arrange the contents of the Atlas. Partly this is due to the medium he used. Although the large screens allow for the easy arrangment of images, and were easy to take with you whilst travelling and lecturing, they were two dimensional perhaps three dimensional when the succession of screens would indicate a kind of a timeline.

But what Warburg tried to do, to enlarge the semantic atlas mnemosyne aby warburg biography to incorporate the various smaller spaces, is not easily expressed in this, in essence, two dimensional medium. And, to complicate things further, how should the texts that belong to the Atlas be re- arranged? In essence the problem is that of possible n to n relations between, often, small parts of images and other images and texts.

The more topic oriented version of the Atlas, the series, built around the research topics semantic spaces of Warburg showed stable groups of images but required the onlooker to make relevant jumps to other screens containing similar content appearing in another space or in a group belonging to another period. On the other hand the "chronological historical infusion" of the Atlas, added in the later part of would make it much more difficult for the onlooker to distill repeated patterns groups of similar items from the material.

Warburg, realising this, then started to work on the epistemological, methodological, and practical introductory screens that were not numbered, but are marked with capital letters: A, B, etc. This way he tried to frame the onlookers of the new ordering of the Atlas to be able to regroup the material that was now laid out in a more chronological way.

What we will never know for sure, is whether Warburg would stay satisfied with this new arrangement.