Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

Preface

Preface Before us lies a black and white photograph of twenty-four photographic reproductions (see fig. 5). Varying in size, the images are arranged in five uneven rows, provisionally mounted on mats, and fastened more provisionally still to a black background. Although they lack captions, and their styles vary considerably, the images can be easily distinguished as belonging to the European Renaissance. Many will also discern in this second-order tableau of paintings, drawings, sculptures, artifacts, manuscript and book pages, a more or less common theme: the death of Laocoön. Less easily deciphered, however, is the rhyme or reason for this photograph of photographic reproductions. Opaque is why some images are privileged by their relative largeness or central position, and why others appear devalued by their smallness or marginal position. Confusion is further heightened when we turn to the second photograph (fig. 21), whose seventeen images include one of a woman’s head on an ancient coin, another of an advertisement for toilet paper, and another of a female golfer. Indeed, if the first photograph suggests temporal and thematic cohesion, this one, eschewing ordered rows and replete with several empty black spaces, presents, it seems, merely history’s flotsam and jetsam. The conundrum posed by these photographs grows greater still when we learn that they are just two of a sequence of sixty-three photographs, the surviving artifacts of a never-completed, encyclopedic effort to represent the West’s cultural legacy, and especially how antiquity’s art-historical and cosmological currents flowed through the Renaissance. Undertaken between 1926 and 1929, the atlas of images titled Mnemosyne is Aby M. Warburg’s nearly wordless account of how and why symbolic images of great pathos persist in Western cultural memory from antiquity to the early twentieth century. Metonymically arranging and rearranging some thousand symbolic, symptomatic images on sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth, which were then placed in loose historical and thematic sequences, Warburg (1866–1929) and his collaborators sought both to express and to comprehend this persistence, its causes and its effects. At once a deeply personal testament, the culmination of decades of research and methodological innovation, as well as a theoretically complex effort to compass the importance of Renaissance art and cosmography for twentieth-century eyes, Mnemosyne maps the dynamics of historical memory even as it idealizes what Warburg calls “metaphoric distance.” And if his juxtaposition of images and panels self-consciously flirts with anachronism , then this is because Warburg believed that humanity in fact was forever oscillating between extremes of emotion and reason. The task of his Kulturwissenschaft (science of culture) was to graph these oscillations. The aim of this book, in turn, is not only to adduce texts and contexts to help explicate Mnemosyne, but also to show how, by remembering das Nachleben der Antike (the afterlife of antiquity), it lends metaphor new historical and epistemological powers. Warburg wanted to make visible a genealogy of expression and gesture together with the Prozeß (process) of metaphoric transformation that makes such a genealogy possible. As Warburg figures it, Mnemosyne (or as he informally calls it the Bilderatlas [atlas of images] or the Atlas) is a “savings bank” of classical and Renaissance imagery, a “treasure chest of woe” needing all the hermeneut’s tools to be unlocked. Aiming to placing ad oculos the ever-recurring “pathos formulas” shaping humanity’s attempts to reconcile polar forces, Mnemosyne treats these in ways that anticipate the “historical metaphorics” of E. R. Curtius, who dedicates his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages to Warburg. It likewise spurs us to reflect on the modes and limits of historical consciousness and aesthetic judgment. It invites us to revisit, too, the tensions Erwin Panofsky finds between documents and monuments, to chart anew the tensions between word and image, and to contemplate a road not taken in intellectual history. If Warburg invents what Giorgio Agamben dubs “the nameless science,” the Mnemosyne-Atlas finds a concrete analogue in Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Passagen-Werk—for it, too, collects history’s artifacts to furnish a now material, now metaphoric archaeology of modernity. Instead of allegorical ruins, though, this book finds in Mnemosyne a novel metaphorology , one that parallels but crucially diverges from Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, a philosophy to which Warburg has often been strongly yoked. Warburg’s metaphoric thinking differs significantly from Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, which would transcend metaphor for more transparent, logical forms of mediation. For Warburg, metaphor...