• 1 Aby Warburg: Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE. Ed. Martin Warnke with the assistance of. Claudia Brink. Be (...)

1Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne makes use of a very specific form of the genre and medium of atlas. Instead of projecting geographical knowledge onto a two-dimensional plane as the conventional cartographic map does, his atlas consists of a number of plates each of which is a configuration of reproduced images, which are collected under a common heading or leitmotif. Gertrude Bing later supplemented these headings with a short explanation, - for example: “Pathos of Suffering in energetic inversion (Pentheus, maenads at the cross). Bourgeois keen, heroized. Ecclesiastic keen. Death of the redeemer. Entombment. Meditation of death.” (Fig.1).1

• 2 See Michael Diers: Atlas und Mnemosyne. Von der Praxis der Bildtheorie bei Aby Warburg. In: Klaus S (...)

3However, the Mnemosyne-Atlas we are actually talking about has never been finished – and would presumably never have been turned into the form of a printed book, - even if his author had survived his heart attack on October 26^th, 1929. But it makes no small difference whether one is talking about an atlas as a printed volume or about the more than 60 image tables that have been handed down to us by means of photography. It is the latter, namely an atlas as a work in progress2, that is the form of Warburg’s project named Mnemosyne, and the only one we may refer to when talking about Warburg’s Bilderatlas.

• 3 Aby Warburg: Mnemosyne I. In: Werke in einem Band. Ed. and commented by Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel (...)

6In such a momentum the atlas actually turned into a common site for contemplating images and for reflecting the historical and iconological relationships between them. In this situation, that is to say when the Mnemosyne atlas was in situ and in actu, the series of plates effectively constructed a sort of Denkraum, a common space for thought. Both the spacing of the plates as well as the intervals between the images opened up a new space for thinking, reading, interpreting, - and for seeing, discovering and re-reading the history of images, of iconology and of culture. In this kind of material culture of an atlas technique Warburg found the ideal form for presenting his idea of an Ikonologie des Zwischenraums, an iconology of interval, or better, interspace, as he called his project in his notes to Mnemosyne: “Iconology of interspace [Zwischenraum]. Art historical material for a developmental physiology of the pendulous movement [Pendelgang] between stating a cause [Ursachensetzung] by means of images and doing this by means of signs.”3

• 4 The English translation puts it as „laboratory of the iconological science of civilization“, but Wa (...)
• 5 „Mögen sich Kunstgeschichte und Religionswissenschaft, zwischen denen noch phraseologisch überwuche (...)
• 6 Georges Didi-Huberman: Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back? Museo Nacional Centro de Arte R (...)

7The possibility to assemble and reassemble the boards for any subject or lecture and to arrange and rearrange different pictures on any of the plates is a characteristic that qualifies the atlas – beside his library and his note-boxes, Zettelkästen - as the most important medium of what Warburg himself called a laboratory of “kulturwissenschaftlicher Bildgeschichte”, a very dense formulation which may be read as history of images and also as history as recognised through images, examined by a cultural scientific approach.4 Therefore the plates of the atlas in situ and in actu correspond to the table in the sense of the scholar’s work place mentioned in that passage of Warburg’s text on Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920) where he invents this laboratory as a site where scholars from art history and the studies of religion come together at one and the same workbench.5 Thus, the medium of the atlas became the perfect cultural technique for Warburg’s methodological-theoretical perspective in investigating the history of images as a function of a technique of the mind, namely as an archive of pathos formulas. In considering the images of gestures as memory images of physiologically and energetically expressed movements of the human body – or as a dynamographical archive6 - and understanding them as a sort of human civilising action, Warburg was interested in interpreting their meaning as a function of the mind’s technique, as a “geistestechnische Funktion”:

• 8 See Claudia Wedepohl: Ideengeographie. Ein Versuch zu Aby Warburgs ‘Wanderstraßen der Kultur’. In: (...)

10Thus the reading of the table gets turned into a literal corporealisation of Warburg’s figure of Wanderung or Wanderstraße, which he invented in order to describe the ‘migration’ of symbols, images, and astrological figures from culture to culture in both time and space.8 For example in his deciphering of the mural cycles at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara (1912), where he discovered the enigmatic personifications of the twelve months as being late heirs of the ancient figures of Indian deans (Dekane):

• 9 Warburg: Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia. In: The Renewal of Paga (...)

11“The complicated and fantastic symbolism of these figures has hitherto resisted all attempts at interpretation; by extending the purview of the investigation to the East, I shall show them to be components of surviving astral notions of the Greek pantheon. They are, in fact, nothing else than symbols for the fixed stars – although over the centuries, in their wandering from Greece through Asia Minor, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Spain, they have lost the clarity of their Grecian outline.”9

• 10 Paul Dean Adshead Harvey: The History of Topographical Maps. Symbols, Pictures and Survey. London 1 (...)

12With this aspect of ‘wandering’ both as an epistemic figure and a practise of reading images, Warburg’s atlas constitutes a very peculiar kind of its genre; it may be considered as a modern follower of late antique and medieval cartography. Within the development of topographical and isometric maps, which consists of transforming the heterogeneity of the world into a homogeneous schematic image in order to project this onto a two-dimensional page, the emergence of the cartographic technique, a “highly artificial construction” as Harvey puts it in his History of Topographical Maps (1980)10, had been preceded by pictorial maps that depicted not a virtual bird’s-eye view but an itinerary. Viewing or reading such a pictorial map means to perambulate stations or images in one’s imagination. (Fig.6)

• 11 Walter Benjamin: Doctrine of the Similar. In: Selected Writings. Ed. by Michael W. Jennings. Vol. 2 (...)

13The figurative walking alongside images is an epistemic centrepiece of Warburg’s atlas. In theoretical terms it may best be described as a commemorative practise very much like the traces and images in the Freudian conception of memory. This correspondence between a pre-modern material culture of knowledge, the pictorial itinerary map, and the post-neurological description of memory in psychoanalysis, which is conceptualised as a scripture of images, provides a wonderful example for Walter Benjamin’s anthropological theory in his Doctrine of the Similar (Lehre vom Ähnlichen, 1933). There he argues that certain human capacities – he talks mainly of the mimetic faculty -, which in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic prehistory were directed to the outer world (i.e. mimetic behaviour and magic practises of interpreting bowels and astral constellations) have during the course of civilisation turned into an intellectual capacity. In the case of the mimetic faculty, the capacity of recognising the similar has “found its way into language and writing, […] thus creating for itself in language and writing the most perfect archive of nonsensuous similarity.”11 According to this perspective, the cultural technique of a wandering epistemology has been transformed into a technique of the mind, namely recognition through memory traces and images. Against this backdrop it is recognizable that the form of Warburg’s atlas exactly mirrors the subject matter of his project, namely a reading of a cultural history through images and the development of the human culture from what he calls a Greifmensch, a man grasping with hands, to the state of Begreifen, comprehension.

• 12 Michel Foucault: The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. Tavistock/ Routledge 19 (...)

15“The system of signatures reverses the relation of the visible to the invisible. Resemblance was the invisible form of that which, from the depth of the world, made things visible; but in order that this form may be brought out into the light in its turn there must be a visible figure that will draw it out from its profound invisibility. This is why the face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words – with ‘hieroglyphes’, as Turner called them. And the space inhabited by immediate resemblances becomes like a vast open book; it bristles with written signs; every page is seen to be filled with strange figures that intertwine and in some places repeat themselves. All that remains is to decipher them.”12

• 13 P. 104 (German edition).
• 14 Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project. Transl. by H. Eiland/ K. Mc Laughlin. Cambridge, Mass. and Lo (...)

16Although Foucault’s historiography of the human sciences shows how the similitude has been excluded from epistemology during the subsequent development, i.e. the advent of the age of representation, classification and taxonomy, his Order of Things is to be read as a ‘rescuing critique’ in the Benjaminian sense, that is to say as illuminating a phenomenon in the moment of its disappearance. For Foucault simultaneously emphasises that resemblance is indispensable for any recognition. In this context he emphasises that the relationship between things is nothing which is just there, inherent in the nature of things, instead it is a result of the human perception – or rather the human eye and mind. “There is no resemblance between the things without imagination.”13 In his historiography of the human sciences the imagination, together with “language as literature”, i.e. the poetic language full of images, takes over the task to provide a sphere for the survival of similitude in the rise of the encyclopaedic will to fully capture the world by means of a taxonomical and chronological order of things and beings. Warburg’s atlas is part of a return of elements of similitude after the classical era of representation. In making use of these capacities, the concept of history is transformed into an image-structure. “The relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but like an image [bildlich]”14, as Walter Benjamin states in his notes of the Arcades-project.

• 15 Didi-Huberman, Atlas (footnote 5), p. 14.

17Warburg’s Mnemosyne is part of a very specific version of the atlas which has been developed during the 19^th century as a visual-poetic form of knowledge and, as Didi-Huberman puts it in the catalogue of the current exhibition, as a combination of an aesthetic and an epistemic paradigm.15 This hybrid genre developed by writers, artists, as well as some scholars, shares the appearance and form of a scientific atlas but it neglects the pretention to assemble the complete knowledge of the epoch in one systematic representation, - a project which found its ideal, model and its climax in the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers. Published between 1751 and 1780 in 35 volumes, the project includes 60.000 articles. Whereas such an endeavour is only possible with the support of innumerous contributors, the post-encyclopaedic atlas is often engendered by the obsession of a single author and based on his own collection gathered together over decades. The latter can be described as a poetic-visual supplement, and sometimes even counterpart, to the scientific order of knowledge, in that it emerged at the margins of the formation and proliferation of the big encyclopaedic projects of the 18^th/19^th century. In methodological terms it is a kind of echo to the fundamental and ultimately unsolvable problems of an encyclopaedic taxonomy based on the principles of comprehensive knowledge, systematic structure, classification, alphabetic order etc.

• 16 Jean Le Rond d’Alembert: Einleitung zur ‚Enzyklopädie‘. Ed. by Günther Mensching. Frankfurt/M. 1989 (...)

19“If it is already often difficult enough to prescribe a limited number of rules or general concepts for the individual sciences and arts, it is no less difficult to accommodate the infinitely intricate branches of human knowledge in a single unified system. […] Our first step in this study is thus the analysis of – if we may use the term – the family tree and of the connections and continuities between the areas of our knowledge, the probable causes of their development and the characteristics of the distinctions made; in a word, we must return to the origin and emergence of our conceptions.’16