Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE – The Original

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From 1925 until his death in 1929, Aby Warburg, a Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar, worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a groundbreaking volume of plates that has become iconic in modern art and visual studies. Warburg developed a visual reference system that was revolutionary for its time. In collaboration with the Warburg Institute, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have undertaken the task of locating and displaying the individual images from the atlas, featuring artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance, arranged as Warburg originally intended on panels draped in black fabric. This commentary volume and the exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin aim to restore Warburg’s lost legacy, a feat previously deemed impossible by researchers. Warburg, born into a Hamburg banking family in 1866, earned his doctorate in 1892 on Sandro Botticelli, leading him to explore the connections between myths, images, and rites across cultures, with a focus on the Renaissance's relationship to antiquity. Recognized as a pioneer of modern pictorial science, Warburg sought to dismantle the rigid boundaries of art history. Ohrt and Heil's extensive search through the Warburg Institute's 400,000-image Photographic Collection pays homage to Warburg’s visual universe.