Meditations on Tafel #61-64 in the Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne: Bilderatlas: Neptune as ancillary, “serving God.” Whom I now. “Virgil”.
This post is the second half of meditations begun last week (Meditations on Tafel #61-64: Part I) on Tafel 61-64 of the Mnemosyne Atlas and offers thoughts about some of the specific sequences of images presented by Aby Warburg.
Meditations on Tafel #61-64 in the Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne: Bilderatlas: Neptune as ancillary, “serving God.” Whom I now. “Virgil”.
This post offers a background to some of the tensions which can be unpicked in Tafel #61-64, which will then be examined through the lens of individual sequences in the post ‘Meditations on Tafel #61-64: Part II’.
In his much-debated, “intellectual biography” of Aby Warburg, E. H. Gombrich discerns the “twin processes” structuring the Mnemosyne-Atlas: “The restoration of the Olympian gods and that of the restoration of expressive movement.” His analysis, though, is also occasion for this critique:
Breaking news: Three new “pathways” for the website, Mnemosyne: Meandering through Aby Warburg’s Atlas, jointly sponsored by Cornell University Press and The Warburg Institute, have now gone live. One of these, on Panel 45, was written by our own Hans-Christian Hönes!
Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the Mnemosyne Atlas is Aby Warburg’s attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity,” or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany.
Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala is a unique example of how words and images may wander across and beyond traditional geographical, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. His indigenous origins and ties to and knowledge of mitmaq and Inca cultures, together with his education and experience in Spanish colonial Peru enabled Guaman Poma to produce this unique document/monument. The ways in which his visual and verbal rhetorics are informed by Inca mythology and history, Christian homiletics, and a fusion of European and native styles make this text exemplary for the Bilderfahrzeuge project. Whether depicting himself journeying to deliver his manuscript to the King, reimagining the Garden of Eden, or representing an Inca mappamundi, Guaman Poma traces the kind of Wanderstraßen that can and should motivate the future of iconology.
