Profilo di un atlante: il cerchio e l'ellissi. Note sul "Bilderatlas" di Aby Warburg

According to the essay, with his ‘Mnemosyne Project’ (Bilderatlas, 1929) Aby Warburg renewed not only our way of understanding images, but also of reckoning with the weight of art-images (specially taken from the art of the Renaissance) in understanding experience and life, i.e. in ‘orienting’ ourselves in the world. First, what emerges is Warburg’s ‘central question’ of image as “symbol” and of imagination as the faculty ruling at the same time poetical intuition and mathematical formulation as opposite, anti-thetical descriptions of the world – Phantasy and Reason taken as the two poles of an ellipse. Among the many images Warburg arranges on Bilderatlas tables, the essay chooses the photograph of Atlas Farnese, the marmour group representing the Titan of Greek mythology carrying the sky globe on his shoulders and it describes it as exemplary to illustrate the double-role Warburg refers to images as “pathos-formulae”. Atlas indeed shows power and pathos at the same time (his knee is bent for strenuous effort), while the globe carried by him shows a combined mythical and mathematical assemblage of astrological figures of constellations and astronomical lines and signs gathered together. The Bilderatlas itself, moreover, creates for each ‘spectator’ of the exibition the space for a ‘surveying gaze’ following actually the double-focused experience of images swinging between Apollo’s “artistic act” and Dionysus’ “expressive values”, where Sophrosyne and Mnemosyne still supply, through historical and cultural images, signs and power to direct one’s mind and choises.