Aby Warburg

El Atlas de imágenes Mnemosine

Великое переселение образов

A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.

Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance

The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity

Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929) is recognized not only as one of the century's preeminent art and renaissance historians but also as a founder of twentieth-century methods in iconology and cultural studies in general. Warburg's 1923 lecture, first published in German in 1988 and now available in the first complete English translation, offers at once a window on his career, a formative statement of his cultural history of modernity, and a document in the ethnography of the American Southwest. This edition includes thirty-nine photographs, many of them originally presented as slides with the speech, and a rich interpretive essay by the translator. The presentation grew out of Warburg's 1895 encounter with the Hopi Indians, an experience he claimed generated his theory of the Renaissance. In this powerfully written piece, Warburg investigates the relationships among ethnography, iconography, and cultural studies to develop a multicultural history of modernity. As an independent scholar in Hamburg, Warburg led the intellectual circle that included Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, pioneers in the investigation of cultural history through the analysis of visual art and the interpretation of symbols. When Warburg wrote this exposition, however, he was a mental patient in a Kreuzlingen sanatorium. Warburg's vulnerable state of mind lends urgency and passion to his discussion of human rationality and cultural demons.

Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America

Mnemosyne es el gran proyecto al que Aby Warburg dedicó los últimos años de su vida y que debía resumir y coronar toda su obra. Para ello, recopiló unas 2.000 imágenes articuladas en 60 tablas en un magno atlas que quedó sin terminar a su muerte. Sin embargo, este material no vio la luz hasta la edición de la Akademie Verlag llevada a cabo por Martin Warnke, uno de los más prestigiosos historiadores del arte de las últimas décadas.

Atlas Mnemosyne

Roberto Ohrt

Claudia Wedepohl

From 1925 until his death in 1929 the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric. This folio volume and the exhibition in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin succeed in restoring Warburg's vanished legacy-something that researchers have long considered impossible.

The Original

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

Philippe-Alain Michaud

Warburg asume los riesgos de una "iconología crítica" basándose en la fertilidad de los anacronismos. Frente a la gran narrativa teleológica inaugurada por Vasari, el método de Warburg opera a través de anacronismos y discontinuidades históricas. Mediante procedimientos de montaje, enlaza artefactos paganos con obras maestras del Renacimiento, la astrología del antiguo Oriente Próximo con la Reforma de Lutero, las celebraciones manieristas con las danzas sagradas de los nativos americanos. Michaud afirma que Warburg entiende la historia del arte no sólo como reconocimiento de la radical heterogeneidad de los objetos, sino como descubrimiento de los valores intrínsecos de la obra de arte, tales como las líneas de fractura, las contradicciones, las tensiones y la energía de la magia, del totemismo y del animismo. Desafiando las explicaciones normativas del clasicismo europeo occidental, localiza las fuentes del Renacimiento en el espíritu dionisíaco, en la expresión de movimiento y danza, en la experiencia del trance personificada en la ninfa frenética o la ménade extática.

Aby Warburg

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