Durante la primeras décadas del siglo, el historiador Aby Warburg y la librera estadounidense Sylvia Beach llevaron a cabo dos magníficos proyectos intelectuales que hoy día forman parte de la mitología cultural de la modernidad. La biblioteca Warburg, en Hamburgo--donde vio la luz el fascinante Atlas Mnemosyne--, y la librería Shakespeare & Company, en París, redefinieron la relación entre los lectores y los escritores, el arte, los libros, la literatura"--Page 4 of cover.

Este artículo discute los aportes de Quentin Skinner al análisis de las imágenes en la retórica política del Renacimiento y explora una elucidación teórica sobre su funcionamiento argumentativo aplicando la teoría de los actos de las imágenes de Horst Bredekamp. Después de revisar las dimensiones de la retórica de Skinner, el trabajo se enfoca en el examen del lugar que ocupan las imágenes en los argumentos retóricos. Para esto discute algunas imágenes icónicas del Renacimiento italiano e inglés como el Fresco (...) de Siena de Lorenzetti y el frontispicio del “Leviatán” de Hobbes. El trabajo establece que, a lo menos, tres figuras retóricas renacentistas que elaboraban imágenes con fines persuasivos servían de manera eficaz para construir abstracciones políticas, ficciones y para modificar significados de conceptos políticos. En términos visuales, el funcionamiento de estas tres figuras discursivas encuentra una explicación en la teoría de los de las imágenes que Bredekamp. El artículo concluye que, si bien la vinculación de los conceptos retóricos y visuales de ambos autores puede ser ejemplificada con el análisis de una sección del frontispicio del “Leviatán”, la viabilidad de utilizar este ensamblaje como modelo teórico para el examen de otras imágenes renacentistas depende, entre otras consideraciones, de la posibilidad de asociarlas a textos, contextos y a la comprensión de la recepción de los argumentos en una discusión específica. (shrink)

Aby Warburg a accordé une attention particulière au monstre comme motif iconographique mais aussi comme notion abstraite impliquant un certain type de rapport du sujet au réel. Pour comprendre ce qu’il entendait par la « causalité monstrueuse » et la « dialectique du monstre », l’article fait retour sur ses Fragments sur l’expression (1888-1903) et les met en parallèle avec les « Mnemosyne Allgemeine Ideen » et les « Mnemosyne Grundbegriffe I et II » (1927-1929) qui devaient (...) accompagner le célèbre Atlas Mnémosyne. Le monstre apparaît alors non comme un innommable qui résiste à la rationalité mais comme un des points d’appui du sujet rationnel dans son effort pour élaborer un espace de pensée. (shrink)

Este texto parte de uma tentativa de me encontrar e encontrar outros caminhos metodológicos de pesquisa através de uma escrita-pensante-ensaística-afetiva. Ao entrar em contato com a linguagem ensaística do filme-ensaio Elena (2012) dirigido por Petra Costa, me questionei e questionei o mundo que me cerca. Neste ensaio, apresento o modo como me juntei com as oito mulheres, minhas sujeitas afetivas e, pensamos juntas nas questões do feminino a partir das imagens do referido filme. Aproximei as imagens das minhas sujeitas afetivas (...) em quadros negros e realizei montagens visuais tendo como inspiração o Atlas Mnemosyne de Abby Warburg, dos quais apresento uma delas. Concluímos, que é possível construir outras metodologias para pesquisas com imagens, a partir da conexão do conteúdo visual, dos olhares de mulheres diversas e dos afetos que os envolvem. (shrink)

Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, left unfinished in 1929, has attracted significant interest in recent decades. This essay offers a new interpretation of Warburg's “picture atlas,” not in relation to modernist collage and photomontage, but as an heir to scientific pedagogical exhibitions of the late Wilhelmine period. It deals in particular with two “public enlightenment” shows curated by the Leipzig medical historian Karl Sudhoff, whose work Warburg admired and employed: the first on with the history of (...) hygiene in Dresden in 1911, the second in Leipzig, three years later, on the development of scientific images. Like Warburg, Sudhoff appreciated artworks and artifacts as sources for the history of science and medicine. His exhibitions consisted of assemblages of photographic reproductions—some of which were provided by Warburg himself—and uncannily anticipate Mnemosyne in both form and content. By examining the exchange of materials and display methods between the two scholars, the article explores how their respective visual projects reflected deeper disagreements over the public role of science, the epistemic power of images, and the persistence of the irrational in the human psyche. (shrink)

Archives are being digitised on an enormous scale worldwide, and the connections between Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and the contemporary digital accumulation of data have not been lost on contemporary scholars. By problematising what I suggest is a simplified relation between repetition and replication in the transmission of Warburg’s body of work into a digital era, I believe that an engagement with contemporary digital discourse provides the possibility of seeing his work in a new light while (...) allowing for insights into how Warburg might be instrumental in rendering visible possible discrepancies between individual entities and larger collective patterns, whether within his Mnemosyne Atlas or among datasets more broadly speaking. (shrink)

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion. In this illustrated exploration of Warburg and his great work, Georges (...) Didi-Huberman leaps from Mnemosyne Atlas into a set of musings on the relation between suffering and knowledge in Western thought, and on the creative results of associative thinking. Deploying writing that delights in dramatic jump cuts reminiscent of Warburg’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, and drawing on a set of sources that ranges from ancient Babylon to Walter Benjamin, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science is rich in Didi-Huberman’s trademark combination of elan and insight. (shrink)

In June 1927, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg celebrated "forty years of bibliophily". On the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of his brother Max, Aby Warburg organized a guided tour of his library and a photographic exhibition presented with original documents: one example of the practical side of the "Bild und Wort" method. These two terms were used by Aby Warburg to describe a theme of his research, namely the complex relation between iconographic and textual tradition and the (...) theory of the function of the human visual memory. At the same time, "image and word" were research tools, experimented by Warburg in structuring his lectures as reading plus slideshow plus guided visit of the panels and in creating a photographic collection in his Library. It was from this lecturing and exhibiting practice, and from the desire to collect and disseminate his research in a suitable manner, that Warburg’s project for an atlas-book, entitled Mnemosyne, took its origin and form. "The" Mnemosyne was intended to be a work dedicated to the investigation of the dynamics of the Western tradition and its cultural memory, focusing on the examples provided by the "posthumous life" of antiquity during the Renaissance. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to bring together two methodological approaches to the study of images. The first was developed by Aby Warburg, around his work for the Mnemosyne Atlas. The second was created by researchers establishing the framework for a software entitled Lignes de Temps. I will try to demonstrate that a new methodology in the understanding of images works toward a ‘pedagogy of imagination’. I will also try to show how, from my point of (...) view, this innovative methodology, which redefines the roles of the audience and its relationships to pictures, was already active within the research of Warburg. The spectator-researcher does not need a pre-established hypothesis. He or she can trust his own practice with the images to spark a new string of thoughts. From that potential of imagination and creation, a whole new field of singular and personal images may spring. (shrink)

Analogies, contaminations and assonances between certain aspects of the thought of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin are still at the center of the contemporary theoretical debate. In the absence of tangible and documented exchanges, the similarities between the two scholars can be found in the structure of their most original and significant works, the Atlas of Memory and the Passagen-Werk, and in the adoption of the fragment as a conceptual language. Of particular interest is the reflection on baroque (...) which, for both scholars, involves the relation with the ancient tragedy and the modern drama. (shrink)

As regards Aby Warburg’s oeuvre, it is fascinating that three unfinished or unpublished projects have come to represent the very theorems now appearing of most interest for cultural historians and theorists: The Mnemosyne Atlas representing pictorial memory; the Serpent Ritual as theorem for a cultural-anthropological reading of pagan cultures; and the Nymph Fragment as a foundational figure of modern iconology. This essay undertakes an analysis of the fragmentary character of Warburg’s way of working, arguing that his (...) search for an analytic model to account for the interplay between Christian and pagan/polytheistic traditions displays striking asynchronies and displacements. Rather than explicating these irregularities biographically, the conceptual problems tied to his methods and cognitive interests are investigated. The article thus examines a set of conceptual questions whose relevance extends well past Warburg’s methodology, considering the dimensions of religious and cultural-historical theory within a broader history of European arts and media. Concentrating on probably the most cited figure from Warburg’s repertoire of images, the “nymph” figure on Ghirlandaio’s fresco The Birth of St John the Baptist, the essay focuses on Warburg’s borrowings from Heinrich Heine and reveals Heine to be a blind spot in research on Warburg up until now. (shrink)

The fruitful intellectual exchange between Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer revolves around the concept of “symbolic function”. In particular, the concept of function that emerges from Cassirer’s early volume, Substance and Function, can be applied to the analysis of the compositional principle that gives shape to the architecture of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.

The article deals with an object which has hitherto been overlooked, but which was essential to Aby Warburg’s work: the desk. While in a first step sources are collected from and about Warburg, which emphasize the significance of the desk for Warburg’s work, a second step is taken to reconstruct a specific type of desk that was of great importance to Warburg. From the identification of this work table the thesis is derived that this table played (...) a decisive role in the formation of the tableaus of the Mnemosyne Atlas. (shrink)

Judith Clark looks at fashion exhibition-making alongside Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas for her 2011 gallery exhibition entitled The Judgement of Paris. By looking at the three goddesses’ attributes, the reproduced exhibition leaflet wonders about the styling of mannequins and props that are intrinsic to exhibition-making but extrinsic to the exhibited object, which is omitted from the exhibition entirely. The visual essay links Aby Warburg to Anna Piaggi’s monthly collages for Vogue Italia and their idiosyncratic act of (...) recovery. (shrink)

The comparison of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology requires a clarification of their definitions of morphology, transformation and translatability. We will expose the morphological field where Cassirer’s aesthetics emerges in relation to Goethe, who represents an important source for Levi-Strauss as well. Defining the concept of transformation is supposed to follow his modifications of the key ideas of the German poet and biologist, by taking account of the new point of view provided by the theory (...) of groups of transformation which the mathematician Felix Klein developed in the »circle of Erlangen «. Then we will show how Edgar Wind, a brilliant student of Cassirer, invents a kind of morphological aesthetics to provide art history with a methodology, and we will give some examples for the application of the concept of building series of pictures in the field of art history. We will examine the global function of the tables of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, Erwin Panofsky’s wellknown iconological interpretation of Durer’s Melencolia I and then, by contrast, the creation of a virtual series of masks through an imaginative variation which Levi-Strauss creates to give sense to a particular Ameridian mask found during his investigations. Finally, we will investigate the problems appearing by the definition of transformation as translatability in both Cassirer’s and Levi-Strauss’ semiologies. We will ask for their uses of the model of translation in linguistics to compare different forms of structural homologies. (shrink)

Borrowing some of Aby Warburg’s methods from his Mnemosyne Atlas, this paper experiments with an anti-linear, non-teleological method of writing fashion history. It investigates fashion movement, gesture and pose, and their afterlife in images and objects. It thus looks at the intersection of time and the gesture, particularly in relation to the idea of the ‘now’, a central organising principle of fashion. To this end, it juxtaposes images of the body in motion from a wide range of (...) sources, including scientific photography, etiquette manuals and fashion magazines. Spanning three centuries, though not chronologically, the images show a range of activities: not only fashion posing, but also tennis-playing, duelling, dancing, military marching, social gestures, and going to the races. The paper proposes that each image is charged with some quality or attribute that is also immanent in one or more of the others, even though they have no causal or temporal relationship. (shrink)

In 1969 the American avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs gained wide recognition with a two-hour long interpretation of a 1905 silent short film. Ever since, the artist has kept on revisiting the same material, each time with a different technological approach. Originally hailed as a prime example of structural filmmaking, Jacobs’ more recent variations on the theme of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son beg for a broader understanding of his methods and the meanings implied. To gain a deeper insight in this (...) on-going mise-en-abyme, this essay expands comments by the artist himself with concepts taken from animation, media-archaeology and Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas. Rereading a filmic text with minute attention, remediating it from an analogue to an electronic format, and reanimating the original action by adding a variety of intervals: all Jacobs’ strategies are aimed at demonstrating the afterlife of Tom Tom in a contemporary cultural context. (shrink)

In this poster I compare two types of visualization that can be distinguished by the role of the viewer. In the first, which I call “closed visualization,” interpretation is seen as a decoding of meanings already set by the author. The other—“open visualization”—sees the viewer as an active co-creator of meanings. In its processual character, open visualization elicits the critical potential of the imagination and is open to new contexts and interpretations. As such, open visualization democratizes the production of knowledge (...) by enabling the critical analysis of the spectator. Instead of the hegemonic production of discourse typical of closed visualization, it introduces a “diagonal perspectivism” that allows problems to be seen from differentiated perspectives. As examples of the mentioned models of visualization I will analyze two projects: Neil Halloran’s The Shadow Peace: The Nuclear Threat and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. (shrink)

La identificación de Granada con el icono del fruto del granado en los atlas náuticos de al-Šarafī alimenta una imagen evocadora del reino nazarí, a la vez que solidaria con los exiliados moriscos en el contexto de la defensa turco-otomana del Islam en el Mediterráneo. Tanto la imagen de Granada como de la Sierra de Segura en la cartografía náutica mediterránea plantea interesantes cuestiones de tipo conceptual y estilístico pero, sobre todo, documenta la interacción entre las tradiciones magrebí-andalusí y (...) mallorquina. La carta de al-Mursī se presenta aquí como testimonio de ello. (shrink)

This book is an anthology about transformation processes. It brings together contributions that were made during the 16th International Congress of the German Society for Semiotics 2021. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was finally not held in attendance at the TU Chemnitz, in Germany, but took place online. 11 sections with different focuses from archaeology, architecture, design, digital humanities, on the body, from the field of literature & youth and subcultures, media, fashion, environment, and carto/atlas semiotics and sign (...) philosophy had each published their own call for papers. -/- The focus of the IMAGE & Cultural study sections' call, published with the volume, was to understand images as agents - according to art and cultural studies scholar Aby M. Warburg - and to recognize and understand not only their potential for cognition, but also their potential for action. As an active part of culture, they not only convey it, but at the same time stimulate action. In this respect, images can be understood not only as documents and testimonies of collective history, but also as active carriers and repositories of affectively effective elements of communication. As agents of cultural transformation processes, images take on a status of their own within the human capacity for expression and action. The essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this. (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta los resultados preliminares obtenidos en la conformación del Atlas Iberoamericano en Bioética que ha desarrollado el Centro Anáhuac de Desarrollo Estratégico en Bioética (CADEBI) respecto a la identificación y análisis de las instituciones de Bioética existentes en la Región. Se realizó una revisión documental a través de motores de búsqueda, bases de datos, redes sociales y otras fuentes. La información obtenida se agrupó en seis diferentes categorías de acuerdo con la estructura, objetivos y actividades que desarrollan. (...) De esta manera, se realizó un diagnóstico inicial con base en las fuentes documentales disponibles en la Web. Como parte de los resultados, se identificaron 157 instituciones en 25 países; así como la variación en la densidad institucional, concentrándose principalmente en España (29 instituciones), México (26 instituciones), Argentina (17 instituciones), Brasil (13 instituciones), Chile (11 instituciones) y Colombia (8 instituciones). Además, se resalta la importancia de las comisiones nacionales de bioética en el desarrollo institucional, señalando la relación entre el avance científico y tecnológico de los países y el desarrollo de la bioética. El texto concluye con la propuesta de crear un Observatorio de la Red Iberoamericana de Bioética para documentar y promover el intercambio institucional y científico en la Región, así como algunas recomendaciones derivadas del desarrollo de este trabajo. (shrink)

Les atlas linguistiques sont-ils des corpus? Nous voudrions ici montrer pourquoi certains atlas ne sont pas des corpus et comment leur informatisation pourrait, néanmoins, permettre de les exploiter comme tels. Le questionnement auquel font écho ces lignes est celui de la possibilité d’une informatisation de l’Atlas linguistique de la Wallonie (ALW), envisagée dans un premier temps comme l’intégration d’échantillons des publications dans des bases de données, exploitables via une interface de consultation en ligne. Ce travail consisterait à (...) réduire la matière de l’enquête qui avait été enrichie lors de l’édition des matériaux. Cependant, nous voudrions montrer la part d’analyse qu’il est souhaitable de conserver lors de cette réduction. (shrink)

Opéra en trois parties, Atlas, de Meredith Monk, a été donné au début des années 1990 à Paris, au théâtre de l'Odéon. C'est l'un des plus grands souvenirs de musique de ma vie. A cette époque, je ne connaissais pas grande chose à la musique dite contemporaine, j'y suis allé un peu par hasard, sans aucune idée préconçue ni a priori et j'en suis sorti complètement émerveillé. Atlas fait partie depuis vingt ans de mes CD favoris, que je (...) me passe et repasse avec un bonheur jamais démenti. Inspiré par la vie – hors (...) - Musique et Musicologie – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Les observations des activités de jeux et de construction de jouets se concentrent sur l’âge préscolaire et primaire. Le début des activités ludiques des filles et garçons à l’extérieur de la maison, dans le domaine public, se situe vers l’âge de trois ans dans l’Anti-Atlas et en général au Maroc. Toutefois, l’on trouve des enfants plus petits dehors, lorsqu’ils sont pris en charge par des filles à l’âge de l’école primaire ou par des adolescentes, moins souvent par des garçons (...) ou adolescents : les observations concernent donc des filles de l’Anti-Atlas âgées de 2 à 8 ans, à quelques exceptions près, les jeux de faire semblant, les poupées et autres objets bricolés, et examinent l’impact des jouets industriels sur la fabrication de jouets par les enfants. (shrink)

El presente ensayo aborda el trabajo realizado por Miguel Rojas Mix en América Imaginaria en torno a la construcción de la imagen fantástica de América y sus habitantes en Europa en tiempos de la conquista y colonización del Nuevo Mundo. En primer lugar, se revisan las tesis del autor sobre el imaginario, donde se comprende la función de la imagen en relación con la construcción de la identidad del otro tras el supuesto arribo de Colón a las Indias occidentales. Para (...) continuar, en segundo lugar, se lleva a cabo el análisis de las imágenes del monstruo en la teratología del siglo XVI para comprender su rol clave en la deshumanización del otro. En tercer lugar, se describen los avances de la cartografía en paralelo con la proyección de la imagen fantástica del territorio de América, entendida como la continuación de la teratología por otros medios, como un modo de afianzar la conquista y explotación de las tierras que reclama para sí la Corona de Castilla, así como otras potencias europeas. La relevancia de esta revisión se cifra en evaluar, a partir del atlas que propone Rojas-Mix, la pervivencia del imaginario precientífico en la construcción de la imagen del otro colonizado en América hasta nuestros días. (shrink)

Manuel des Études grecques et latines. ParL. Laurand. Fascicule VII.: Métrique, Sciences complémentaires (Critique des textes, Paléographie, Épigraphie, Numismatique, Histoire de la Philologie, Bibliographic, Le Travail philologique): 4e édition, revue et corrigée. Appendices II.-IV.: L'Art oratoire des anciens, L'Enseignement du grec et du latin, Lectures de litterature grecque et latine. Appendice V.: Petit atlas pratique d'histoire grecque et romaine. Paris: Auguste Picard, 1929. - Volume 45 Issue 2.

Un atlas zoopolítico es lo que pretende tener aquí lugar. Un atlas en el sentido en que cada pequeño tratado de los cincuenta y dos que configuran el libro se presenta en la forma de un retrato donde el pensamiento, entre sus pensadores, se aplica en el esfuerzo de hacerse cargo de la presencia animal sin renunciar a la diferencia humana, y en que, entre todos ellos, se delinea en todas sus valoraciones posibles esta nueva presencia del animal (...) entre nosotros. Retrato con animal. Prefacio. Pablo Perera Velamazán es escritor, además de filósofo e historiador del arte. Esta triple condición –y alguna otra (profesor, traductor)- le han permitido entrar en el círculo de los que escriben siempre de los que no saben y le ha impedido, también formar parte de ninguna empresa concreta, salvo la del precipicio del pensamiento en la singularidad que se resiste a los nombres. Allí suelen estar acompañado de niños y animales, de ángeles como muñecos, pero allí también se pueden encontrar a cualquiera. Buen compañero de viaje de invierno. (shrink)