a unique project: bilderatlas mnemosyne

The recovered Warburg returned to Hamburg in 1924. He assumed the directorship of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW – Warburg Library for Cultural Studies), which had become an important research institution, and began giving lectures and organizing conferences accompanied by Bilderreihen (image series). His last, great intellectual project, the Mnemosyne Atlas, emerged as an idea during this period. The roots of this unique work, a product of his spiritual and intellectual energy, lie even further in the past. Warburg viewed the Mnemosyne Atlas, with its visual and psychological appeal, as a pedagogical tool. He also described it as a relational plane where he sought answers to his questions. In particular, he was excited about putting his comprehensive ideas about the nature of historical change, repetition, and acceptance into a completed and publishable form. Within a short time, Warburg began to arrange metonymically a large number of interconnected images on large panels. He worked to make the pathos formulas (pathosformel) that characterized antiquity intrinsic and tangible.

During this intensive process, Warburg realized that his main interest was the visual cultural memory. He developed new organizational principles and thematic headings to understand the transfer of thought between historical periods and cultures and to make sense of images as vehicles and expressive documents of these journeys. Therefore, he placed great importance on the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne project as a thematic image map that enabled the continued existence of antiquity throughout and after the early modern period. In 1928, he completed the first version consisting of forty-three panels and immediately afterward the second version consisting of more than seventy panels. A year later, he began the third version of the Atlas, but he passed away on October 26, 1929. The Atlas, therefore, remained unfinished, an incomplete work.