ABY WARBURG -- Mnemosyne, 1927-1929
The original ‘atlas’ consists of 63 panels measuring 170x140cm (more than 88 metres in length when placed end to end), covered with black canvas and bringing together, in the form of constellations, nearly 1,000 images—mainly reproductions of works of art, some with enlarged details, but also newspaper clippings, pages from books, maps and photographs from various sources. The atlas thus aims to understand the circulation and transformation of pathetic forms from antiquity to the Florentine Renaissance.
The care taken in the montage reveals the relationships between the images, but also the distance that separates them. Warburg speaks of an “iconology of intervals”.
Within a panel, the images may be linked by a theme, a form or a technique. The transition from one to another can be achieved through a panoramic shot, by switching from a wide shot to a close-up, through a series of reframings and enlargements of details in the image, or by alternating between shot and reverse shot.
Through their status as reproduced images, paintings, sculptures, or artefacts of any kind are placed on an equal footing: the decontextualised works thus become commensurable with one another. Comparison becomes possible.
When existing documentation is insufficient, Warburg turns to the Alinari photographic agency to obtain photographs of works of art. It would be interesting to know how Warburg went about varying the scales between, for example, a highly enlarged detail and a reduced painting in the 1920s, when he wanted to re-hierarchise the images among themselves, independently of their original format – i.e. the format of publication of the works from which they were extracted.
The relationship does not exist solely between the images. It is also woven with an off-screen element—namely, for Warburg, his experience with the Hopi Indians during a trip to Arizona and New Mexico some 25 years earlier. The persistence of ancient motifs and their transformation in the Renaissance is achieved through a lateral shift: to borrow Philippe-Alain Michaud's expression, ‘the distant illuminates the past’. This Hopi presence is underpinned by the black canvas, the mesa negra (common to the ‘black backgrounds’ of the 1930s by Henri Michaux, who had returned from Ecuador), and emerges in certain montages transforming characters from Florentine paintings into kachina dolls. The black background, like the white cube a few decades later, establishes an experimental, i.e., controlled context. It allows current conventions (in this case, Italian perspective) to be suspended, leaving room for ‘apparitions’.
Unlike the Eames' Glimpses of the USA, Warburg does not seek to bring out invariants through accumulation, but rather to show otherness within identity and transformations over time. Thus, plate 2 brings together representations of the earth from a 9th-century manuscript based on Ptolemy, reproductions of the Farnese Hercules, full-length and in detail, and vignettes from the Aratus, a 9th-century Latin manuscript. As Michaud has shown, the transition from one image to another follows a cinematographic process: close-up, panoramic shot, medium shot, long shot, extreme close-up, return to the initial shot.
While the musei cartacei — the “paper museums” (such as those of Cassiano del Pozzo in the early 17th century) — which sought to classify human knowledge according to iconographic principles, are one of the models for the atlas, the latter nevertheless aims at perpetual incompleteness: the combinations are infinite (far from being random, they must all be rigorously justified), it is an exploratory tool (allowing, for example, through a series of exercises, the production of an open repertoire of gestures), and not a sum of knowledge.
Instructions
- Gather all available documents.
- Have access to a photocopier so that the same document can be used several times.
- Link groups of images using cinematographic techniques: original image, followed by cropping or enlarging one of its parts, shot/reverse shot of a scene, series of several images from the same sequence (photograms or tracking shots) or the same motif from different sequences.
- Assemble these sets of documents into panels.
