Mnemosyne is a figurative atlas (Bilderatlas) consisting of a series of plates made up of montages of photographs that bring together various works of art: vestiges mainly of the Renaissance (works of art, pages of manuscripts, playing cards, etc.), but also archaeological finds from the ancient east, Greece and Rome; and further evidence from 20^th century culture (newspaper cuttings, advertising labels, stamps).

In the Bilderatlas, which contains about one thousand photographs assembled and arranged in a scholarly fashion, the images are the subject of privileged study because they provide an immediate way of “speaking the world”. The image is the locus in which the impression and the memory of an event comes to a head and condenses. Endowed with primordial energy and powers of evocation on the strength of their expressive vitality, images are the principal vehicles and supports of the cultural tradition and social memory, which in certain situations can be “reactivated and downloaded”.

In the Atlas, the juxtaposition of images, impaginated so as to weave several themes around a core element and details of greater significance, creates energy fields and induces the beholder to an open interpretative process: “the word to the image” (zum Bild das Wort).

Mnemosyne is therefore a machine, a kind of enormous capacitor, in which are gathered all the energy currents that have animated and animate still European Memory. The aims of the Atlas are to illustrate the mechanisms of tradition, and themes and figures from antiquity – eastern and Graeco-Roman – through to today, with particular regard to the revival of movements, gestures and postures that express the entire range of emotional stirrings (aggression, defence, sacrifice, mourning, melancholia, ecstasy, triumph, etc.). These are Pathosformeln – expressive formulas of emotion – either taken directly in artistic form from ancient models, or reappearing without direct connections to models in the form of an engram, the spontaneous expressive reflex of human gestural instinct.

The Atlas is Aby Warburg’s final undertaking. Starting with a collection of images prepared for conferences and exhibitions, Warburg organised his work in the shape of an Atlas that was to have been accompanied by explanatory texts and then printed by the publishers Teubner, probably as part of a series that already included figurative and archaeological atlases, and atlases of other kinds. At the time of his death, in 1929, Warburg left an unfinished mock-up (the 63 plates of the last version), the draft of an Introduction and a series of notes later gathered together by his collaborator, Gertrud Bing. By 1930, the work was described by Fritz Saxl, and in Italy by Giorgio Pasquale, as “about to be published”. However, the uncompleted state of the Atlas at the time of his death, historical events – the rise to power of the National-Socialist party in 1933 and the subsequent transfer of the Library and the Warburg Institute to London – and more importantly, the complexity of the work, persuaded Warburg’s collaborators to abandon the publishing project.

Only in 1944, the first edition of the unfinished version of the Atlas, the “Daedalus version”, which consists of 63 plates, the first three being identified by letters (A, B, C), and the others numbered (from 1 to 79), with gaps, has been recomposed. In recent decades, following the first edited by Daedalus team in collaboration with Associazione “Warburg Italia”, other editions in German, Italian, French, Spanish, have been published. Therefore, it is only recently that the Atlas, that for over half a century had almost sunk to oblivion, has been rediscovered, and also thanks to many exhibitions, is being met with critical and publishing success.

Since 2000, “La Rivista di Engramma” has dedicated specific in-depth analyses and studies to the figure and work of Aby Warburg, by publishing on-line the results of studies and organising an exhibition of the Mnemosyne Atlas in Venice in 2004. All the materials and lectures on Aby Warburg and Mnemosyne are now gathered together and can be consulted on a special section of the Journal website.