Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
by Aby Warburg, edited by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil
Buy on AmazonFrom 1925 until his death in 1929 the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. In cooperation with the Warburg Institute, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric.…
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"In spite of it all, 2020 has been a good year for Modern and Contemporary Art, and art books relating to the last century. Auction houses and art fairs appear to be taking the pandemic in their stride, honing their online exhibition prowess, even as they take a hit. One publishing milestone was the reconstruction and publication of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne , a legendary modernist epic of visual thinking from the founder of iconology, tracing the migration of symbols through art, history and cosmology. This visual dictionary of symbols encompasses everything from medieval manuscripts to coins, playing cards, postage stamps and modern photographs, always looking for deeper meanings carried by images—a reference volume akin to an encyclopaedia among art books ."
The Best Art Books of 2020 · fivebooks.com