Mnemosyne Atlas of Images
“The Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929), the last project of the German “cultural scientist” Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929), is an unfinished visual, metaphoric and theoretical encyclopaedia. The constellation of symbolic images on black canvas is an attempt to map the pathways that give art history and cosmography their pathos-laden meanings. It is thought to animate the viewer’s memory, imagination, and understanding of what he called “the afterlife of antiquity.” As the format wasn’t suitable to communicate its content, the project couldn’t be completed by Warburg’s successors and is now kept in the Warburg Institute in London. “ Christopher D. Johnson, http://warburg.library.cornell.edu/
Within the last five years of his life, Warburg obsessively tended and reorganized the massive and fragmentary constellation of images, the Mnemosyne Atlas, within the library. The world Atlas refers to the German meaning of it as Album or printed collection. The panels of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas owe something to the systematic imagination inherited from the eighteenth century and to the atlases of that time.
The Atlas proposes an art of the in-between, what Warburg called the ‘iconology of the interval’.