Aby Warburg
Born into a prominent Jewish banking family in Hamburg, Aby Warburg (1866–1929) studied art history, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy and the history of religions at the University of Bonn. His first trip to Florence in 1888–1889 marked the beginning of a privileged relationship with Italian art and culture. He summed up his biography in a single sentence: ‘Jew by birth, Hamburger at heart, Florentine in spirit’. >>
The Mnemosyne Atlas
The Atlas dedicated to memory, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, was Aby Warburg’s final project: a series of panels with pictorial collages visualising the mechanisms of transmission and tradition of themes and figures from antiquity—both Eastern and Greco-Roman—to modern times. Particular attention was paid to the formal revival of patterns of movement, gestures, postures and iconographic schemes. >>