This special collection takes its inspiration from the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a monumental project of the art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg (1866–1929). The Bilderatlas was Warburg’s attempt to map the afterlives of images, specifically exploring how tropes from the Ancient Western canon reappeared and were revivified in the art and thought of later times and places. By the time of Warburg’s death, the Bilderatlas comprised 63 wooden panels, on which were pinned, arranged, and re-arranged groups of black and white photographs depicting various art historical and cosmographic subjects: early modern maps, classical sculpture, medieval manuscript pages, paintings, coins, and clippings from contemporary newspapers and magazines. By juxtaposing and sequencing these images, Warburg was able to illuminate a new, broad historical view of recurrent visual culture, images he dubbed as having bewegtes leben: “life in motion”, a constantly re-animated existence.
Contributors to this special collection were invited to consider, with the same breadth as Warburg’s Bilderatlas, the use and reuse of images in art and art history, from antiquity to the present day. For despite his use of cartographic terminology, Warburg also wanted to transform the notion of the ‘atlas’ from a scientific or navigational document into a more dynamic Denkraum, or “thought space”, where metonymic and intuitive logic could play out, supported by rigorous scholarship and knowledge.
Image: La galerie de l’hôtel de la rue Pierre-Charron, anonymous photograph in Samuel Rocheblave, Un grand collectionneur Alsacien, Jean Dollfus, 1823 à 1911 (public domain)
Edited by: Katie Faulkner (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Jack Hartnell (University of East Anglia)
Interview
Cultural Constellations: Burckhardtsource.org
Emilie Oléron Evans, Susanne Müller and Costanza Giannaccini
2017-03-20 Volume 3 • Issue 1 • 2017 • 7
Also a part of:
Mnemosyne
Metaphors of Collecting in Late Nineteenth Century Paris
Valerie Mendelson
2016-05-31 Volume 2 • Issue 1 • 2016 • e15
Also a part of:
Making Sense of the Works of Amar Kanwar: A Phenomenological Perspective
Christine Vial Kayser
2016-09-14 Volume 2 • Issue 2 • 2016 • e2
Also a part of:
Antonio Canova and the Whatever Body
Cora Hatshepsut Gilroy-Ware
2017-02-21 Volume 3 • Issue 1 • 2017 • 2
Also a part of:
Special Collections
-
Humour as a Human Right
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: Opening Museum Collections, Project Data and Digital Images for Research, Query and Discovery
Literature as Imaginary Archive: Ephemera and Modern Literary Production
Caliban's Mirror: Reflections of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde
Cultural Representations of Machine Vision
The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past
Medieval Minds and Matter
Representing the Medieval in Popular Culture: Remembering the Angevins
The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish Campaign to End Period Poverty
Production Archives 03: Archival Practices
Production Archives 02: Production Contexts
Production Archives 01: Puppets for Action
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine
Binary Modernisms: Re/Appropriations of Modernist Art in the Digital Age
Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture
Reading in Ruins: Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies
The Language of Perspective
Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain
The Working-Class Avant-Garde
Colonialities in Dispute: Discourses on Colonialism and Race in the Spanish State
Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918–2018
Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
Muslims in the Media
Encounters between Asian and Western Art in the 20th and 21st centuries: a liberating influence for Asia?
Waste: Disposability, Decay, and Depletion
Pride Revisited: Cinema, Activism and Re-Activation
New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records
Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives
Representing Climate: Local to Global
Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics
Freedom After Neoliberalism
The Medieval Brain
Remaking Collections
New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies
Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Imaginaries of the Future 02: Politics, Poetics, Place
Imaginaries of the Future 03: Utopia at the Border
Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing
#Agreement20
What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the 21st Century
New Voices in Jewish-American Literature
Authors, Narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives
From TV To Film
American Literature & the Transnational Marketplace
Mnemosyne
Healing Gods, Heroes and Rituals in the Graeco-Roman World
The Abolition of the University