Epistemology of Wandering, Tree and Taxonomy. The system figuré in Warburg’s Mnemosyne project within the history of cartographic and encyclopaedic knowledge

Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne makes use of a very specific form of the genre and medium of atlas. Instead of projecting geographical knowledge onto a two-dimensional plane as the conventional cartographic map does, his atlas consists of a number of plates each of which is a configuration of reproduced images, which are collected under a common heading or leitmotif. Gertrude Bing later supplemented these headings with a short explanation, - for example: “Pathos of Suffering in energetic inversion (Pentheus, maenads at the cross). Bourgeois keen, heroized. Ecclesiastic keen. Death of the redeemer. Entombment. Meditation of death.”

The article discusses the cultural technique of the Bilderatlas in respect of its fundamental epistemological problem to combine a genealogical perspective (‘Nachleben’ of ancient pathos formula or symbols in Renaissance painting) with classification (collocation of similar gestures under certain headings) in one and the same system of representation, – a problem which has been intensely discusses by d’Alembert and Diderot when conceptualizing their project of Encyclopédie. The same epistemic problem underlies not only the Bilderatlas but appeared already in several of his earlier notes where he experimentalizes with different figures of representation, e.g. taxonomic tables and genealogical trees (‘Symbolismus als Umfangbestimmung’, the notes for the ‘Ninfa Fiorentina’). It can be regarded as a primal reason that these projects could not be completed.

Here is the link to the download-article in the online-journal Images - re-Vues. histoire, anthropologie et théorie de l’art, 4/2013: