An Unfinished Project

A Presentation of: Giulia Zanon, Una storia dell’Atlante Mnemosyne di Aby Warburg (Ronzani, Dueville 2025)

edited by Redazione di Engramma

Abstract

G. Zanon, Una storia dell’Atlante Mnemosyne di Aby Warburg (Ronzani, Dueville 2025).

Sommario

Il libro Atlante
Preludio. Zum Bild das Wort
Atlante, una forma di libro

L’architettura di Mnemosyne
Trovare un’ossatura
Il viaggio in Italia (settembre 1928-luglio 1929)
Il ritorno ad Amburgo (luglio-ottobre 1929)

Il Nachleben di Mnemosyne
Un progetto incompiuto (1929-1945)

Bibliografia

Indice dei nomi

Giulia Zanon’s Una storia dell’Atlante Mnemosyne di Aby Warburg (Ronzani, 2025) traces the genesis, development and posthumous history of the Atlas, considering it both as a publishing project and as a visual method of enquiry at the intersection of art history, philosophy, philology, anthropology and psychology. The excerpt presented here in English translation (pp. 287-331) examines the efforts to complete and publish the Atlas between 1929 and 1935, focusing on Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl and their negotiations with publishers.

An Unfinished Project (1929–1935)

Giulia Zanon

Aby Warburg died of a heart attack on 26 October 1929. His death came during the most intensely active period of his research and abruptly interrupted the Mnemosyne project: the Atlas intended to trace the processes through which the gestural and expressive language of antiquity re-emerged. Over the previous two years, the Atlas had become his greatest, most important and, above all, most urgent undertaking. Mnemosyne was the work to which he devoted his attention toto corde, with tireless passion, until just a few hours before his death, as one of his last written entries in the KBW diary attests:

Four in the morning, “Perseus”, or “Energetic aesthetics as a logical function in the activity of Orientation in Giordano Bruno”; this includes the “Perseus” panel of typological development (GS Tagebuch, 26 October 1929).

This brief note, written at four in the morning on 26 October, captures the Atlas as a work in progress that had yet to reach its final form. It refers to one of the panels of typological development devoted to Perseus as a paradigm of the stages of human Orientation: one of the panels still being worked on during the last days of the scholar’s life, which would never acquire a precise and definitive form in Mnemosyne. That this entry—the last of the many closely written fragments recording choices, doubts and ideas concerning the composition of the panels—deals specifically with a theme still under development, which had yet to receive a precise formal arrangement, speaks eloquently of a living workshop and of work lucidly directed towards an objective: the Atlas was not yet complete, but it could be completed.

Warburg died leaving those who had worked so closely with him over these years on the creation of the Memory Atlas—Gertrud Bing foremost among them—an unfinished work: defined, yet incomplete. How were they to respond? What were they to do? How could they approach the work on Mnemosyne now that they could no longer turn to its creator and director?

The first answer to these questions came six weeks after Warburg’s death, on 5 December 1929, in Fritz Saxl’s commemorative address, which he deliberately characterised not as a funeral oration but as a “prologue to the work” still to be done. Saxl declared:

We honour his wishes if we speak here of the work rather than of the life of its creator, for Warburg himself considered Zarathustra’s words applicable to his own life: “‘O Zarathustra’, they said, ‘are you looking into your happiness?’—‘What does happiness matter!’ he replied. ‘For a long time now I have sought not happiness, but my work’” (Saxl [1929] 2004, 161).

The quotation from Nietzsche introduced by Saxl immediately shifts attention from Warburg the man to Warburg the scholar and to his most important intellectual work, which must serve as a guide to tracing and understanding its author’s intellectual reach. Saxl continues:

Thus the Atlas, precisely because it is a systematic work, also becomes a historical work. […] Warburg’s formulation of the problem became so general that the confrontation between Athens and Alexandria, as he had once depicted it, was no longer specific to Renaissance culture but, on the contrary, to every European culture (Saxl [1929] 2004, 161).

A “systematic work”: further confirmation that Mnemosyne is the application of a method. This method is perfectly encapsulated in the “confrontation between Athens and Alexandria”: the polarisation inherent in humanity between myth and logic, but also between the Olympian and the demonic dimensions—the two instruments available to human beings for orienting themselves in the world and in their own thought, the two attitudes adopted by every civilisation (in Burckhardt’s sense of Kultur), with varying degrees of intensity and involvement, between continual oscillation and the risk of rigidification. Many years later, speaking about Warburg’s thought almost thirty years after his death, Gertrud Bing would develop this idea as follows:

Magic and logic, the double face of Antiquity that became the fatal destiny of European civilisation, are also the two poles between which the pendulum of the individual conscience swings. The fact that Man always falls back on magic does not exempt him from the duty to try always to emancipate himself from its guardianship by appealing to his own mind. In the words of Warburg, “We must free Athens again and again from the shackles of Alexandria” (Bing [1958] 2022, 75).

It is this polarity, inherent in the relationship with antiquity, of which Saxl speaks in 1929:

Warburg in his later years taught us that astrology and Rembrandt must be considered together, that both must be questioned as to their relationship with antiquity. The late Warburg saw, so to speak, the first pole of our nature in astrology and the second in Rembrandt’s Medea, who hesitates in the darkness. […] All we can rely on in this journey is the ever-fleeting interval between impulse and action (Saxl [1929] 2004, 163).

The most important lesson of Warburg’s method (“the late Warburg”, Saxl specifies, referring to the theoretical refinement achieved through Mnemosyne) lies precisely in the examination of society’s ever-changing “selective power […] dominated in all matters of art by emotional factors of attraction and repulsion which seem to alternate in rhythmic succession” (Warburg [1929] 2014, 466-467). It is within this “rhythmic succession”, this “ever-fleeting interval between impulse and action”, that we must find our bearings if we are to attempt to answer the question that had fuelled the daemon of Warburg’s research since his first study of Botticelli: which antiquity? Seeking answers—or, rather, seeking the means to find answers—to this question means understanding Warburg’s methodological legacy in its deepest sense:

It is up to us, with the help of Mnemosyne, the work that Warburg bequeathed to us as an instrument for reflecting upon ourselves, to succeed in prolonging that fleeting interval between impulse and action (Saxl [1929] 2004, 172).

The Atlas is therefore an instrument of individual reflection, a machine à penser, a machine for thought and study handed down to posterity. This definition undoubtedly reflects a collectively shared conception of Mnemosyne, held not only by Aby’s closest collaborators but also by those who, in different contexts, had come to know Warburg the scholar and his work. Of fundamental importance is the Ricordo di Aby Warburg, published in “Pegaso” the following year by the eminent classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali, who had known Warburg personally and intellectually in Florence, through the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Villani 2009). Remembering the man and the scholar behind the name of the prestigious Hamburg Institute “for the science of cultural history”, Pasquali concludes his encomium with this passage:

He died suddenly, but his life is in a certain sense complete. He leaves ready for publication a figurative Atlas, which takes its name from memory, Mnemosyne; it aims to show how different countries and different generations […] had successively conceived, and by conceiving transformed the “pathetic”, Dionysian legacy of Antiquity. […] Art historians and cultural scientists have a duty to make the work of Warburg fruitful, allowing it to operate on them, thereby transforming it (Pasquali [1930] 2022, 55).

Giorgio Pasquali not only learnt of Warburg’s Bilderatlas through his acquaintance with the scholar in Florence; he probably also saw the preparatory arrangement for Mnemosyne in person in the summer of 1928, when Warburg invited him to visit the KBW during an academic visit to Germany. In a letter to his wife Maria dated 1928, Pasquali recalls their meeting:

I also went to lunch at the millionaire Warburg’s, the Hamburg scholar of the Italian Middle Ages who has given his homeland a splendid library of material, chiefly religious and chiefly Italian (Giorgio Pasquali to his wife Maria, 2 June 1928, Archivio dell’Accademia della Crusca, Archivio Contemporaneo, Fondo Giorgio Pasquali, MPS1 F41).

For Pasquali, as for Saxl, attention must necessarily shift from the celebration of Aby Warburg to the afterlife of his thought through his work: “The point of departure from which we must continue along the road towards the goal that he discerned and indicated” (Saxl [1929] 2004, 162).

The Immediate Resolve to Publish the Atlas: The Mnemosyne Project in the Correspondence (1929–1930)

Gertrud Bing’s correspondence with scholars and friends in the period immediately following 26 October provides invaluable evidence for tracing this immediate shift of emphasis—from the sense of loss at Warburg’s death to responsibility for the survival of his methodological legacy—and the intellectual and practical consequences it entailed. Amid the expressions of grief at Warburg’s death, Bing displays no withdrawal into despondency, but a surge of positive resolve, born of her awareness of, and responsibility towards, a fertile legacy still taking shape, whose finest fruits were yet to come. Warburg’s death certainly brought work to a halt, but it did not extinguish the sense of urgency so clearly conveyed by Bing’s words: the Atlas could—and must—be published. The inexhaustible energy of the fire Warburg had kindled remained alive, and Gertrud Bing’s lucid, rational determination was firmly directed towards carrying forward the most important undertaking: Mnemosyne (Zanon 2024, 60).

The letter Gertrud Bing sent on 25 November 1929 to Ulrich Middeldorf—one of the scholars whom Warburg and Bing had come to know at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence—offers an effective synthesis of the tensions experienced by those who had been directly involved in this phase of the work:

From his time in Italy onwards, the Professor had been so well and so fully in possession of his capacity for work that I do not think one could say that his heroic life had ever known a period of such pure happiness as those last nine months. His stay in Italy was part of this, and you were able to see and feel its effects. That I was allowed to travel this last stretch of the road with him will remain an inestimable gift to me, but at the same time it makes the loss almost impossible to overcome (Bing to Middeldorf, 25 November 1929, WIA GC).

While the sense of loss is unmistakable—the unfillable space left by the master’s absence—Bing’s words also vividly evoke the euphoria generated by research, by such engaged and enthusiastic work on Mnemosyne: the warmth and light of “a period of such pure happiness”, still so intense as to survive even the death of its director (Zanon 2024). The letter continues, making clear that the resolve to complete the Atlas remained firm.

The only consolation is that this last year brought the Atlas forward to the point where we can contemplate publishing it. In the past few weeks a new and fairly definitive version of the panels has been assembled. Although there is no properly finished and coherent text, the wealth of notes and jottings is so infinitely great that we hope to compose the entire commentary as a mosaic of his own words. We also have a fairly precise knowledge of the structure of the whole work, for example as regards the addition of materials. Professor Saxl and I will edit Mnemosyne; I am proud and happy to have been entrusted with the new edition of the collection of published and rare writings, but it is a sad affair: death came too soon (Bing to Middeldorf, 25 November 1929, WIA GC).

The most valuable information to emerge from the letter to Middeldorf can be summarised as follows:
1) “A new and fairly definitive version of the panels has been assembled”: the advanced state of the latest version of the picture atlas, on which Warburg and his collaborators worked intensively during the last weeks of his life, following his return from Italy;
2) “We also have a fairly precise knowledge of the structure of the whole work”: the existence of a methodologically well-defined framework which Warburg’s collaborators—above all Bing—knew and believed themselves to have mastered;
3) “We may reasonably hope to compose the entire commentary as a mosaic of his own words”: provision for a volume of text to serve as a commentary on the Atlas, and the capacity to construct this commentary using Warburg’s “own words”, thanks to his enormous legacy of fragmentary writings.
4) “Professor Saxl and I will edit Mnemosyne”: the presence of two principal figures in the immediate resolve to preserve Warburg’s memory through the publication of his writings, Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl.

The letter to Middeldorf is not the only one in which Bing clearly expresses her intention to publish the Atlas. On 8 November 1929, for example, she writes to the art historian Wilhelm Waetzoldt: “We want to publish the collected writings, of course complete the Atlas as well as possible, and then bring together Warburg’s countless fragmentary notes in a single volume” (Bing to Waetzoldt, 8 November 1929, WIA GC). Writing to Rudolf and Margot Wittkower on 12 December, Bing expresses her wish to “build a monument to the best of friends and the best of guides, one that will be aere perennius, or at least—to quote one of Warburg’s jokes—‘immortal for the next ten years’”: an intellectual monument involving the publication of the Atlas, which “at least as far as the picture panels are concerned, has been completed”, together with a commentary that “it should be possible to assemble in a reasonably complete form” (Bing to Wittkower, 12 December 1929, WIA GC). The task of completing the Atlas was felt not only as an intention but also as an imperative, as we read in a letter from Bing to the historian Robert Davidsohn:

The most important thing, before which everything else must take second place, is the publication of his works, published and unpublished, complete and fragmentary. You may know that, besides the great Atlas in which everything was to be brought together, there is a multitude of writings and lectures dealing mostly with new material (documents and images), about which Warburg often spoke both formally and informally. However, he always deferred the publication of this material until after the completion of his Atlas. Among the other things requiring systematic work is the two-volume collection of drawings in the Biblioteca Nazionale, with figures from festivals, some of which are published in the Costumi teatrali (Bing to Davidsohn, 8 November 1929, WIA GC).

In the letter to Davidsohn, who was well acquainted with the Mnemosyne project (Warburg to Davidsohn, 24 October 1928, WIA GC), Bing outlines the various projects to which she would devote herself, culminating in the Atlas “in which everything was to be brought together”. The “most important thing, before which everything else must take second place”, is the publication of Warburg’s writings, both published and unpublished: a relatively simpler undertaking than completing the Atlas and, in a sense, preparatory to it, bearing in mind the recurrent indication in Warburg’s notes that the Atlas was to consist of two volumes, the picture atlas and a volume of textual commentary.

Another interesting detail to emerge from the letter is the need for systematic work on Buontalenti’s drawings, a subject that had accompanied Warburg since his early Florentine studies. He had devoted to it I costumi teatrali per gli Intermezzi del 1589: i disegni di Bernardo Buontalenti e il ‘Libro di conti’ di Emilio de’ Cavalieri, published in Italian translation in 1895 (Warburg 1895). As with the publication of Warburg’s writings, this editorial undertaking may be regarded as preparatory to Mnemosyne, which, according to Warburg’s plan, was to include in its second, textual volume a section of sources useful for reconstructing the cultural milieu relating to the subjects of the panels and for an ‘interdisciplinary’ understanding of the images published.

The Final Journey to Italy: An Essential Phase for Mnemosyne

Warburg’s sudden death brought to an end that “period of such pure happiness”, unlike any he had experienced before. It was the renewed vitality of his return from the great Italian journey undertaken between September 1928 and July 1929, which had marked the high point of the scholar’s “heroic life”. Bing’s letters reveal the central importance of the journey to Italy as a powerful stimulus to thought. Bing continually emphasises the importance of the places and people encountered during the journey as indispensable elements in the development of the Atlas. Indeed, the Italian period had at last made it possible to reap what Warburg had sown throughout his scholarly career: the gathering of photographic and documentary material, but also a process of introspective elaboration—exemplified by the reading of Giordano Bruno and its impact on the theoretical development of Bing and Warburg’s work, documented in Aby Warburg and Gertrud Bing’s notebook Syderalis Abyssus, devoted to the reflections prompted by reading Bruno (Warburg [1929] 2019b, 405-433; Zanon 2025, 207-220). The journey had also provided an opportunity to test a conception of the ‘Warburg method’: one need only recall the major lecture delivered at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome in January 1929 (Zanon 2025, 99-123). Saxl, too, wrote in his address of 5 December 1929:

He achieved what he had never hoped for: a return to Italy in person. […] [The journey to Italy in 1928–1929] gave him the solution: what he had no longer dared to contemplate before Kreuzlingen, what during the final year of his illness had stood before his eyes as an unattainable goal—namely, to bring together in a unified presentation, through a major work, everything that his entire life had enabled him to learn—was the goal he reached (Saxl [1929] 2004, 169).

The years following his return from Kreuzlingen were happy ones. Having overcome the impasse brought about by the trauma of the First World War, Warburg redux returned to Hamburg to live his most fruitful years, both intellectually and personally. These years were devoted to achieving what had until then been an “unattainable” goal, now taking on the scope of a major undertaking: the construction of the Warburg Library, an “armoured turret in the service of reflection” and an “essential instrument for the reconstruction of European civilisation” (Warburg [1927] 2021b, 16) and a major work, the Atlas, which could become the summa of a lifetime’s research. It was a goal achieved—in Saxl’s words—through the “solution” found during the journey, through an understanding of his own epistemological mission that had at last become lucid and clear in the final year. A small but significant piece of evidence comes from Aby’s son, Max Adolph Warburg, who began compiling three preparatory notebooks (WIA, III 1.7.2.4.3.2.1-3) for a commemorative address marking the centenary of his father’s birth in 1966 (Warburg M.A. [1966] 2024; Stimilli 2024). While attempting to compose a biographical essay, he wrote “Annus mirabilis I” and “Annus mirabilis II” in the margins of his recollections of 1928 and 1929, the years of the journey to Italy (WIA, III 1.7.2.4.3.2.3, ff. 21, 23). 

Referring to the Italian period, Bing writes of a “culmination” in a letter to the historian Adolf von Harnack dated 2 December 1929:

This culmination […] became clearly apparent during the last year in Italy, and in the following three months it gathered such momentum that we now have no choice but to attempt to complete and publish the still unfinished Atlas. This was also why in Italy he found a large group of intensely engaged followers, such as has rarely been granted to a spirit perpetually at odds with itself (Bing to Adolf von Harnack, 2 December 1929, WIA GC).

The vitality of the Italian period and its continuing effects during the months after his return, the last months of Warburg’s life, provided the impetus towards completing the picture atlas. What must not be overlooked is the letter’s reference to his having found “a large group of intensely engaged followers”. Studies of Warburg published in recent decades, and more generally the renewed reception of the picture atlas, have often presented the Atlas as the work of a solitary genius, impossible to complete by its very nature; Warburg is often depicted as a prisoner of his own project, inhibited by the impossibility of expressing his thoughts. Bing’s words are particularly important in this respect because they confirm the still insufficiently explored significance of collaborative work in the development of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Dialogue with other scholars—the opportunity to explain his project and, in explaining it, to rationalise his arguments and organise the syntax of the images and concepts he brought into play—may have been the true key to the refinement of the Atlas project during its final year. This awareness is also emphasised in Gertrud Bing’s letter to Rudolf Wittkower of 12 December 1929:

With you, as with a great many of the people we met last year in Italy, I have felt a particularly strong sense of shared grief at this loss. […] It was such a high point in the Professor’s life, so wonderful a conclusion and so cathartic a synthesis of his entire heroic and perpetually combative life, that anyone who saw and knew him [in Italy] must necessarily, and as few others could, have gained a full impression of the “Warburg Idea” (Bing to Wittkower, 12 December 1929, WIA GC).

The “Warburg Idea” finds its full expression in the Atlas, at once a theoretical construct and a practical realisation of his method. Method and work constitute the summa of Warburg’s life and scholarship and become, after his death, a cultural mission to be brought to completion, while the sense of its paramount importance is reinforced: “The idea is growing in me that my method has been well received and will have consequences”, Warburg had noted in Rome (GS Tagebuch, 9 February 1929).

Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s heir

One of the immediate consequences of Warburg’s death for his close collaborators was the confrontation—undoubtedly difficult, at times violent—with an intellectual legacy as rich, both conceptually and materially, as it was complex. Fragmentary in nature and distinguished by its unique method, this legacy reflected the order established by its mentor and creator: Bing’s letters convey the despondency and disorientation of someone who, walking among the ruins of a destroyed city, measures the extent of her own tragedy with each step, caught between the promise of reconstruction and the anguished feeling of being unequal to the task. Gertrud Bing wrote to Ernst Robert Curtius on 2 December 1929:

I had to try to discern, among the rubble of the chaos into which Warburg’s death has plunged us—a chaos that Saxl also faces, burdened with the full responsibility of the successor and an overwhelming sense of his supposed inadequacy for the undertaking—the fragments from which a reconstruction might be made. Only now are we beginning to see this endeavour as something other than entirely hopeless. The legacy is extraordinarily rich and, although it consists largely of fragments or aphorisms, that last happy year in Italy advanced the Atlas to such a point that we really can publish it (Bing to Ernst Robert Curtius, 2 December 1929, WIA GC).

Yet Bing’s tenacity is always present, finding expression in the optimistic vitality of her promise to bring the Atlas to completion. The letter continues:

Of course, this will still take years and the combined work of us all; the new edition of the works already published and the preparation of the other materials he left us have essentially been entrusted to me alone, and you can imagine that the sorrowful good fortune of this task is the only thing that makes the loss bearable. Taking it on without Warburg’s help has only taught me the seriousness of his own unremitting demands (Bing to Ernst Robert Curtius, 2 December 1929, WIA GC).

The continuation of the letter adds an important detail that helps establish, from the outset, how responsibility for the Nachlass was distributed. Although Saxl was “burdened with the responsibility of the successor”, the letter to Curtius confirms that Bing was the true executor of Warburg’s intellectual legacy, the actual recipient of that “sorrowful good fortune”: the task of preparing and editing his writings. Who better than College Bing, “colleague Bing”, his close companion during that “last happy year in Italy”? Gertrud Bing had trained as a philosopher: she had studied in Hamburg, where she defended a thesis on the relationship between Leibniz and Lessing in 1921, and obtained a doctorate in the history of German literature under Robert Petsch, with a specialisation in psychology under Wilhelm Stern and Cassirer. Her thesis, Der Begriff des Notwendigen bei Lessing. Ein Beitrag zum geistesgeschichtlichen Problem Leibniz-Lessing (1921), was published in 2024 (Gelhard 2022; Gelhard, Roide 2024).

Bing began working in the library at Warburg’s home in 1923, while Aby was in Kreuzlingen. Following his return from the Bellevue sanatorium and the construction of the KBW at Heilwigstraße 116, she took on a role of increasing responsibility:

Her activities ranged from recording acquisitions and indexing them in book registers and antiquarian catalogues to maintaining the provisional catalogue and checking incoming books, organising and assigning shelfmarks, and alphabetic cataloguing; they also included managing loans, ordering and labelling slides and photographs, and collaborating in research (Schäfer 2003, 189 ff., quoted in Gelhard 2024a, 254).

Collaboration in research gradually became Bing’s principal activity—although she never relinquished the seemingly ancillary tasks of organising and administering the Library—culminating in the Italian journey, which established her as Warburg’s closest and most actively engaged companion in the creation of the Atlas. The acceleration of this process, bringing her ever closer to the core of Warburg’s thought, can be traced clearly in the Tagebuch, the KBW’s research diary (kept by Aby Warburg, Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl from 1926, and by Warburg and Bing alone from 1928: GS Tagebuch). As Mnemosyne began to emerge as a potential work among fragmentary records of ideas, formulations, research, disappointments and discoveries, and phrases such as “Mnemosyne will follow” and “This is the most profound assistance towards achieving our goal: Mnemosyne” became increasingly frequent, Gertrud Bing’s ever more evident presence established her as a protagonist alongside Warburg. After visiting the Mithraeum at Capua with Bing, Warburg wrote:

Gertrud Bing and I function—in retrospect—like a doubly forked divining rod, bending obediently in the pneuma—occasionally quite regardless of how we happen to feel—whenever, in the sphere of pictorial imprinting, a compulsion to descend ad inferos, into the depths, or a raptus in coelum announces itself (reveals itself) (GS Tagebuch, 19 May 1929).

In what is perhaps one of the most compelling formulations of his research, Aby Warburg described his work as an act of dowsing, reading in images the impulse that oscillates between the two dynamic poles of ascent and fall. “Gertrud Bing and I”: it is impossible to overlook the fact that this practice was undertaken by a dual “we”.

“Fräulein Dr. Bing”, “Bingia”, “Bingius”, “College Bing”: these were among the names Warburg used with increasing frequency and informality in letters and diaries, testifying to a working relationship that increasingly resembled a close partnership. As Dorothee Gelhard observes, these nicknames had little to do with a “masculinisation” of Bing (Gelhard 2024a, 255). Rather, they revealed his enthusiasm for working as equals and his sincere curiosity about engaging with a young scholar who proved to be a “bridge across which, not without trepidation, I came to know the state of mind of the generation after my own” (Warburg to Max Warburg, quoted in Meyer, Treml 2005, 20).

Expressions of enthusiasm and esteem for Bing recur constantly: “I am very pleased to note that colleague Bing now proves to be a capable assistant in all the tasks that fall within the remit of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg” (GS Tagebuch, 25 March 1929). Her sustained involvement was also recorded: “Conversation with colleague Bing about periodisation: Greek-Roman is too narrow a conceptual pair because it is topological” (GS Tagebuch, 18 March 1929); “Colleague Bing remarked that Pauli’s bucolic interpretation of the earthbound demigods corresponds to his optimistic assessment of the young American. Quite right” (GS Tagebuch, 22 February 1929). The diaries of the Italian journey are studded with passages of this kind; nevertheless, they are accompanied by a demanding attitude, expressed in the remark “colleague Bing is too slow at writing” (GS Tagebuch, 24 March 1929), and at times by rigidity towards the young scholar:

Colleague Bing, with her talent for the visual, ought to recognise the immense wealth of ordered engrams that she has acquired on her own in a very short time (from Carracci to the Nazarenes!). […] The risk is that, for this reason, the daily drilling undertaken for the Atlas and Bruno might acquire the character of a ponderous and half-obscure dilettantism. That would be dangerous (GS Tagebuch, 28 January 1929).

In a letter to her friend Marianne Joseph, Gertrud Bing recalled Warburg’s severity amid the concentration demanded by so feverish a phase of the project:

I can only be grateful that fate allowed us, despite all the difficulties, to complete what we wanted to do for the Professor during his lifetime; I owe this, not least, to the energy with which Warburg himself, seemingly selfishly, continually reminded me of my task (Bing to Marianne Joseph, 12 December 1929, WIA GC).

“Apparent selfishness”. Once again, these words—written by the person who had followed every stage in the conception of Mnemosyne and had been closest to Warburg during his final, radiant months—dispel every doubt and efface any false image of a blindly despotic Warburg, wholly subject to the caprice of an eccentric exercise of the imagination. Bing continued:

That it was more than selfishness, that it was rather a justified assurance that foresaw the requirements of his own destiny, is now demonstrated by the fact that precisely those final months, for which the Italian journey and the preceding six months seem to have been merely a preparation, brought the great work to completion; its final production and publication are our next task (Bing to Marianne Joseph, 12 December 1929, WIA GC).

What could only superficially be perceived as selfishness or intransigence was simply the most intimate expression of his complete embodiment of his mission, a “justified assurance” about the demands of his research. His concentration on the Mnemosyne Atlas, intense and relentless yet also lucid and incisive, was energetically projected onto Gertrud Bing. The reasons can all be found in a note Warburg left in the KBW diaries, close to the time when the Atlas was conceived:

Nota bene: ever since my return, my sole endeavour has been to move myself into the background as a figure of authority […]. I must be able to pass my overall cosmic picture into trustworthy hands; otherwise I shall not leave a legacy capable of growing independently. This must be the principal point (GS Tagebuch, 22 July 1927).

Warburg’s words in this note mirror what Giorgio Pasquali would later write in retrospect (“Cultural scientists have a duty to make Warburg’s work fruitful by allowing it to act upon them, that is, by transforming it”; Pasquali [1930] 2022, 55): they convey the urgency of his search for heirs. This was a search not for mere intellectual descendants, but for independent intellectual personalities who could find ways to preserve, extend and transform the scholar’s legacy, which was, above all, a method of research and thought. “I also wish to confess that even before the war I regarded my undertaking as having been created essentially for my successor”, Warburg wrote, returning to the same reflection (GS Tagebuch, 22 July 1927). The role of successor had undoubtedly first been intended for Aby’s son, Max Adolph. Max Adolph trained as a classical philologist and studied at the Universities of Heidelberg and Berlin with Franz Boll and Ernst Cassirer. His thesis, prepared under the supervision of Werner Jaeger, examined Plato’s Cratylus: defended in 1927, it was published in 1929, with a dedication to Aby, as Zwei Fragen zum Kratylos (Warburg M.A. 1929). It drew on fundamental premises of Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft: the simultaneity of mythical and rational thought, and the role of astrology as a means of analysing this oscillation (Gelhard 2024b). Although this path might be read as an implicit movement towards the Warburg Library along the lines of his father’s intellectual trajectory, very early on—already in the early 1920s—Max Adolph’s restless, saturnine nature led the young philologist away from Hamburg and eventually confirmed his voluntary withdrawal from any position of responsibility within the KBW’s cultural enterprise. It is therefore clear why Warburg turned towards Gertrud Bing and recognised in her—initially a librarian and personal assistant, then an increasingly close collaborator, until she became an indispensable ally in the creation of the Atlas—the “trustworthy hands” (alongside those of Edgar Wind) to which he could entrust the “overall cosmic picture” of the Warburg constellation (Centanni 2022b; Anderson 2022; Boffi 2021; Ghelardi 2020; Takaes 2020; Takaes 2018; Targia 2018a; Targia 2018b; Targia 2019; Ghelardi 2017; Pinotti 2016; Engel 2014; Buschendorf 1985).

Bing wrote: 

The wonderful thing is that, whereas until now the Atlas had been a magnificent chaos from which a piece of cosmos emerged here and there, but whose underlying structure could be discerned only by those who knew it, in the last few weeks a version of the panels has been produced which Saxl, on seeing it for the first time after his return from England, immediately described as the greatest thing Warburg had ever done, and which, with very few changes, is practically ready for publication. A great deal of work on the text remains, however: his innumerable notes, some of which contain wonderful formulations, must be selected and reworked into a coherent whole. For the next few years this will be the Library’s principal task, and mine in particular, because—and you can imagine how this fills me with a sorrowful pride—the administration of the entire legacy has chiefly been entrusted to me. First we want to publish a collection of his previously published works; this will be followed by the unpublished lectures and shorter works, and finally, after Mnemosyne, the aphorisms, miscellaneous writings, extracts from the diaries and letters (Bing to Margarete Gütschow, 18 December 1929, WIA GC).

Gertrud Bing’s awareness that she was the person entrusted with the task of administering Warburg’s legacy—a task that filled her with “a sorrowful pride”, as she wrote to Margarete Gütschow in this letter of 18 December 1929—and the corresponding sense of responsibility towards so great an honour and burden, which in the years that followed would alternately inspire unshakeable enthusiasm and a debilitating sense of burden, provide an essential thread to follow in understanding the posthumous history of the Mnemosyne Atlas.

Publishing agreements (1929–1935)

On 5 December 1929—alongside the memorial ceremony at which Fritz Saxl reminded those present, in the words of Zarathustra, that honouring Warburg’s memory meant keeping his work alive—a meeting of the Warburg Library’s advisory board (Kuratorium) was held. On this occasion, members of the Warburg family approved a five-year financial plan confirming their support for the KBW’s activities (Wedepohl 2015). The plan to publish the founder’s work received dedicated funding and, as a natural consequence, Gertrud Bing was placed in charge of the editorial work (Wedepohl 2015, 135).

A further essential clue for reconstructing the atmosphere of concentration and determination that animated the weeks following Warburg’s death takes us back to the ceremony of 5 December. Alfred Doren—“Alfresco”, as Aby affectionately called him, having become close to him during his years in Florence—was present at the ceremony. Their correspondence chiefly concerns Doren’s studies of Kairos (Barale 2011; Barale, Squillaro 2011). Doren would recall the ceremony two years later in a short article for the “Archiv für Kulturgeschichte”:

The time has not yet come for an overall assessment of his life as a scholar. The main lines and supporting structures of the entire edifice have been clearly laid out, but it will fall to the next generation to complete, develop and refine this work before a portrait of this unique scholarly personality can be drawn from an appropriate distance. […] Nevertheless, even today it is fitting and necessary to offer a brief account of his work, at least provisionally and perhaps subject to future corrections, if only because this work, often far removed from the beaten paths of contemporary research, embarked—with relentless, unwavering and at times almost fiercely rigid determination—upon solitary, rugged and vertiginous paths, and for that reason was not always understood, even in the most specialised scholarly circles (Doren 1931).

In its forthright concision, Doren’s text effectively conveys the absolute novelty of a unique research method, described as an arduous path, the most difficult of all, yet one that must be taken even at the cost of being misunderstood. These words are illuminated by a footnote to his article, in which Doren states that, during the ceremony, he was able to view the panels of Mnemosyne, displayed for the occasion, and to have the images explained to him by Saxl and Bing (Doren 1931). This is particularly valuable evidence: it helps reconstruct the meaning of Saxl’s address and confirms once again the need to enter the Atlas and follow its logical pathways carefully in order to understand its distinctive character. That it was Saxl and Bing who explained the panels further confirms their role as heirs, able to navigate the intricacies of the picture atlas with confidence and hopeful that its completion was both possible and imminent.

Optimism and determination regarding the Atlas project, evident in Bing’s correspondence in the winter of 1929, translated into concrete attempts to publish Mnemosyne. Her sense of responsibility and her awareness of being, together with Fritz Saxl, an “heir” in the noble yet burdensome sense of an administrator of a legacy had to be honoured. In the months following Warburg’s death, they prompted the submission to various publishers of a plan for the corpus of Warburg’s writings, of which the Atlas was an integral part.

Perhaps because of the contract concluded with Teubner between 1928 and 1929, or out of a more general desire to continue its longstanding partnership with the KBW, this was the first publishing house considered when, after Warburg’s death, Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl were entrusted with publishing his work. Valuable evidence to this initiative is an undated letter, probably written around 1930, addressed to Teubner and signed by Fritz Saxl. The long text opens with a presentation of the themes addressed and the method introduced by the Bilderatlas:

The Atlas, to which Warburg gave the title Mnemosyne—a series of images for the study of the function of prefigured ancient expressive values in the representation of life in motion in the art of the European Renaissance, constitutes a fundamental attempt to connect philosophical and historical understandings of the image. In it Warburg devoted himself primarily to the history of Italian Renaissance art, and did so on a much broader basis than in his previous publications. Through the Atlas, Warburg succeeded in presenting to scholars, fully and as a coherent whole, the cumulative results of all his scholarly work (Letter from Fritz Saxl to Teubner, WIA GC).

Saxl highlights a fundamental methodological issue underlying the Atlas: the attempt to create a paradigm that would provide a basis for future work in the study of culture, but also the desire to set historical and philosophical approaches alongside one another or, more precisely, make them converge (understanding philosophy broadly as the study of humanity, its relationships and manifestations, at every level of existence).

Here too, the scope is much broader and exceeds any rigid disciplinary definition, extending from ontology to the history of thought, and from psychology to anthropology: “Sometimes it occurs to me that, as a psychohistorian, I am trying to deduce the schizophrenia of the Western world from the figurative in an autobiographical reflection” (Warburg [1929] 2019a, 59). “Psychohistorian” was the term Warburg coined for himself, and in this sense the Atlas marked the emergence of that “nameless science”, in Giorgio Agamben’s formulation, presented to the scholarly community “fully and as a coherent whole” (Agamben [1975] 2022).

The letter continues with a precise analysis of the themes and arguments constructed through images as a further development of Warburg’s research. That Mnemosyne was ordered by a precise internal architecture emerges clearly from Saxl’s words as he writes of “groups of panels”; among his examples are the following: “The first group brings together, arranged according to criteria I shall shortly explain, the ancient models demonstrably used during the Renaissance”; “The second group collects the Renaissance works of visual art that rework ancient motifs, and constitutes the main section of the Atlas” (Saxl to Teubner, 1930, WIA GC). The second part is significant: after the theoretical introduction to Mnemosyne, Saxl turns to the question of publication. The following is an extract:

In some respects, Warburg is more difficult to understand than other authors, if only because he worked on materials that research had hitherto neglected and whose value it had therefore been unable to recognise. It goes without saying that only his own words, with their depth and beauty of expression unmatched by any living art historian, will be able to give the panels the meaning and impact they deserve. We have in our hands an extraordinarily rich body of unpublished material which, pieced together like a mosaic, will undoubtedly yield that text (Saxl to Teubner, 1930, WIA GC).

Warburg’s legacy of unpublished texts was a “mosaic”. The metaphor had already appeared in Gertrud Bing’s words (“The wealth of notes and jottings is so infinitely great that we may well hope to compose the entire commentary as a mosaic of his own words”, as she wrote in her letter to Middeldorf in November 1929). Perhaps this points to a shared purpose between Saxl and Bing; more probably, it signals the substantial presence of Bing’s thinking in the drafting of this important letter, which may have been signed solely by Fritz Saxl because of his direct, authoritative and prominent collaboration with the publisher as editor of the KBW’s Vorträge and Studien (Bing to Middeldorf, 25 November 1929, WIA GC).

Bing’s presence in the letter can also be traced in the importance attached to studying objects that had until then been ignored by scholarship and relegated to the margins as eccentric curiosities, but that Warburg had known how to use, recognising their authority as historical documents. Bing would repeatedly emphasise the distinctive character of the “Warburg method” in the years that followed, for example in her introduction to La rinascita del paganesimo antico, the collection of Warburg’s writings that she edited and that was published in Italian in 1966 through the enlightened initiative of La Nuova Italia and the good offices of Delio and Emma Cantimori (Cantimori 1965; Centanni, De Laude 2020).

The historian must not regard any sphere of existence as too lowly, too obscure or too ephemeral to provide evidence. The lifeless remains that constitute the historian’s only working material should be interpreted as residues of human responses, that is, the responses of living men and women to that changing and evanescent reality. This direct and intimate approach is part of the fascination that emanates from Warburg’s way of presenting people and things; it is also the point at which his path diverges from that of those who practise the history of ideas and Geistesgeschichte (Bing 1966, XVIII).

Bing had also returned to this theme in her important 1958 address in Warburg’s honour at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Warburg had created for art history what archaeology calls Realienkunde. Bing acknowledged that this method was the fruitful outcome of a long tradition reaching back to German positivism, but that this genealogy in no way diminished its originality:

In Warburg’s time, no art historian would have been interested in the business contracts of the Medici, the will of one of their partners in which there was no mention of art or even letters from their representatives across the Alps who complained about business being bad; such things were left to the historians of political economy. In accordance with contemporary opinion, domestic furniture belonged to the realms of craftsmen and artisans, and their decoration seemed too distant in style and content from the products of the so-called liberal arts to be taken into consideration or to pose the question that Warburg asked himself: whether in both cases the choice of figurative content was not determined by the use for which the objects were intended (Bing [1958] 2022, 69).

This research had in turn produced a wealth of materials that now had to be patiently worked through and integrated, like a mosaic, into the text for the Atlas, in order to recover, as far as possible, the force of Warburg’s thought. This was unprecedented thinking whose force, expressed in a new and profound way, was perfectly complementary to the image: “Only his own words […] could have given the panels the meaning and impact they deserve”. This sentence highlights a fundamental theoretical issue concerning the questions that must be asked in interpreting the Mnemosyne Atlas: the relationship between image (or, more precisely, panel, as a montage of images possessing their own syntax) and word. Regarding the balance between these two elements, in continuity with the formulations Warburg left behind, Saxl’s letter to the publisher also offers further crucial information about the structure of the plan for the work:

The collection of writings, which will be published first, amounts to approximately 400–450 pages, and the unpublished lectures to approximately 100–150 pages. The substantial volume containing aphorisms, diaries and letters will be about 400 pages long. In this case it is very difficult to say anything definite in advance. I envisage an Atlas comprising 300–350 plates in a 30 × 40 cm format and approximately (as an upper estimate) 400 pages of text in a smaller format. Finally, there will be around 300 illustrations to accompany the collection of writings (Saxl to Teubner, 1930, WIA GC).

This summary is fundamental to any attempt to reconstruct the publishing plan for Warburg’s corpus, and especially for the Atlas, as it was envisaged around 1930. As Saxl writes, the plan provided for the publication not only of essays and lectures, both published and unpublished, but also of the important body of writings belonging to a more personal sphere. These included correspondence, fragments and diaries, between whose lines Warburg, who had always aspired to a unified synthesis of life and research, left formulations essential to understanding his method and thought.

Alongside these writings stood the largest and most significant work: the Atlas, “comprising 300–350 panels”. There is no evidence to help explain how Saxl’s estimate reached so high a number of panels. Warburg’s final notes on the structure of the Atlas mention a plan for 200 panels (GS Tagebuch, 6 October 1929); yet we know that the surviving photographs record 63 panels: the introductory panels A, B and C, followed by sixty numbered panels in a sequence running from 1 to 79, with gaps and combined numbers.

The writings were to be accompanied by around 300 illustrations. The fact that this is specifically stated is important, because it establishes a clear distinction between an image belonging to an illustrative apparatus and an image within the panels of the Atlas. Whereas the illustrations accompanying the texts serve as supporting commentary, the images within a panel’s montage constitute a “textual”, rather than illustrative, element with a formal autonomy of its own. In the case of Mnemosyne, one might instead hypothesise that the “400 pages in a smaller format” mentioned by Saxl were to constitute a supporting body of texts commenting on the panels. 

A crucial element for this reconstruction is Saxl’s specification of the format of the panels: 30 × 40 cm. This information must be analysed in the light of two preliminary considerations:

1) The format of typological atlases circulating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Teubner’s catalogue included a series of Bilderatlanten, illustrated atlases of archaeology and geography. One might hypothesise that the dimensions suggested by Saxl were based on other atlases issued by the publisher or on exemplary scholarly publications of the period, such as Carl Robert’s Die antiken Sarkophag-Reliefs, a cornerstone of archaeological publishing: “The atlas of ancient sarcophagi from which Warburg drew not only valuable information but also drawings of the sarcophagi themselves, to be physically mounted (using the actual pages of the archaeological atlas) on Panel 4 of the picture atlas” (Perfetti, Zanon 2023, 52). Robert’s atlas, published in 1890 by G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, consists of a volume of text and a volume of plates, with the longer side measuring approximately 35 cm (Robert 1890).
2) The relationship with the panels photographed in their final surviving arrangement. The only visual evidence available to scholars investigating the structure and dimensions of Mnemosyne consists of the photographs commissioned by Gertrud Bing before the Institute’s move to London, which record the 63 panels. A comparison of the images from the final photographic campaign of Mnemosyne with the admittedly sparse photographic documentation of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg’s exhibitions and lectures of 1926–1928—at which Bilderreihen, series of images mounted on panels, were often displayed—suggests that Warburg and his collaborators used the same frames for the Atlas as they had in previous years. As the photographic evidence shows, whereas the Bilderreihen extend horizontally across a frame composed of two modules, the panels of Mnemosyne are constructed on a single module.

Verlag Heinrich Keller

That the exchanges between the Warburgkreis and the publisher Teubner were not merely the automatic continuation of an agreement signed before Warburg’s death, but rather the second stage of a specific publishing plan devised by Bing and Saxl, is confirmed by the fact that Teubner was not the only publisher to whom the project for Warburg’s corpus was submitted. Significant evidence comes from a letter sent by Victor Fleischer to Fritz Saxl on 9 December 1929, a few weeks after Warburg’s death and before the important letter, datable to 1930, that Saxl would send to Teubner concerning the Atlas.

In 1920 Victor Fleischer, director of the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, took over the publishing house established in the first half of the nineteenth century by the German publisher Heinrich Keller. From its foundation until its final closure during the National Socialist era, the firm specialised in books on art, architecture, history and literature, travel books and maps, and the printing of photographic albums, portraits, and architectural and landscape photographs, using the new collotype printing process. Fritz Saxl had been in contact with the publisher since early 1929: Heinrich Keller was planning a mythological encyclopaedia as part of its publishing programme, and Saxl was initially involved. The encyclopaedia would not be completed, but Saxl would publish a study of Mithras with Heinrich Keller (Fleischer to Saxl, 13 February 1929; Saxl to Warburg, 18 February 1929, WIA GC; Saxl 1931).

The letter followed a meeting between Saxl and the publisher at which a possible publishing plan for Aby Warburg’s writings had been presented (Fleischer to Saxl, 28 November and 1 December 1929, WIA GC). Fleischer summarised it as follows:

According to my notes, you estimate the extent of Warburg’s writings as follows:
Selected writings, approximately 400 pages
Unpublished lectures, approximately 150 pages
Diary, letters, aphorisms, approximately 400 pages
Illustrations, 300 images in total
Atlas, approximately 400 pages and 300 collotype plates (Fleischer to Saxl, 9 December 1929, WIA GC).

Faced with the structure of the proposed publication, which corresponded to the plan subsequently put to Teubner, Fleischer immediately expressed reservations about the real prospects of securing a financial return from a work of such scope and complexity of production. Nevertheless, the publisher left open a possibility in relation to Mnemosyne:

For the Atlas, the prospects seem more favourable to me: here too, for the time being, I can calculate the costs only approximately and, with due caution, I would suggest the figure of 18,000 marks. This Atlas, with its 300 panels and the uniqueness of its content, has a better chance of selling in the numbers required. Here too, however, further subsidies would be desirable, allowing the retail price to be reduced, certainly in the interests of the cause (Fleischer to Saxl, 9 December 1929, WIA GC).

The Atlas, “with its 300 panels and the uniqueness of its content”, might represent an investment of considerable interest. Fleischer offered an estimate of 18,000 marks for the publication and distribution of Warburg’s work, but reiterated his reservations about the financial viability of a project that would require an excessively large investment without any assurance of a return on the capital committed. A publishing house as small as his could not shoulder such a burden, and Fleischer also suspected that even a financially stronger firm would not readily take such a risk (Fleischer to Saxl, 9 December 1929, WIA GC). Saxl’s categorical reply came two days later: “Under the circumstances, I am not yet in a position to judge whether it will be possible for us to reach an agreement” (Saxl to Fleischer, 11 December 1929, WIA GC). The Warburg Library would not publish the Atlas with Heinrich Keller.

The Gesammelte Schriften and Relations with Teubner

On 24 February 1931 Elsbeth Jaffé, a longstanding collaborator of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, who had written the essential and exceptionally detailed notes to Warburg’s essay on Schifanoia (Jaffé 1932, 631-639), wrote from Florence to Gertrud Bing (“Cara Benigna”, she began in Italian). The personal letter continued with references to a Florence awaiting spring, Bing’s time in Italy, Jaffé’s tireless work and her dreams. This seemingly mundane exchange nevertheless provides valuable evidence. Jaffé closed her letter to her friend by enclosing a cutting from the “Vossische Zeitung” of a few days earlier:

The “Studien aus der Bibliothek Warburg” of the unique KBW in Hamburg, which continues to exist as a family foundation after the art historian’s death, will collect Warburg’s scholarly work over the coming years and publish in book form a number of lectures that have hitherto remained unpublished. Only then will the inspirational force of Warburg’s work become fully apparent. His personality should live on in a collection of his aphorisms, to be published together with selected letters. Above all, however, as Professor Alfred Doren reports in the “Archiv für Kulturgeschichte”, the work should emerge in which Warburg sought to bring all the scattered rays of his research into a single focal point, but which nevertheless remained fragmentary. The visual material for the great atlas, entitled Mnemosyne, which was intended to illustrate in three volumes the afterlife of ancient symbols down to the most recent times, was collected, arranged and repeatedly revised by Warburg over many years; only about a quarter of the text volume could be completed; for the remainder, there is only a scarcely manageable quantity of scattered notes. We shall owe a debt of gratitude to Warburg’s faithful assistants of many years, Professor Fritz Saxl and Dr Bing, if they succeed in bringing the work to completion (“Vossische Zeitung”, 1931, clipping enclosed with Jaffé to Bing, 24 February 1931, WIA GC).

The short article confirms that, by 1931, the forthcoming publication of the Warburg corpus was already taken for granted. Gratitude would be due to Bing and Saxl if the publication of Warburg’s writings and Mnemosyne, “The work […] in which Warburg sought to bring all the scattered rays of his research into a single focal point”, were successfully completed. As we have seen, Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl remained determined to administer (in the noblest sense of ‘administer’: to make a legacy fruitful) and publish the Nachlass, Warburg’s legacy of notes and unpublished works. The project did not concern Mnemosyne alone, but initially focused on a task that was easier both conceptually and editorially: collecting Warburg’s published essays in book form.

The Hamburg scholar wrote extensively during his lifetime, leaving a substantial body of letters and diaries in which private life and scholarly research are often inextricably intertwined (for Warburg, as for every great intellectual, the two always happily coincided), as well as fragmentary reflections on his own work and innumerable notes commenting on his wide and varied reading. Despite the extensive written record of his research, the number of essays Aby Warburg published in his lifetime was very small in relation to the cultural scope of his research and his commitment to communicating scholarship: one need only think of the fundamental seminars at the University of Hamburg on astrology (Warburg [1913] 2019a; Warburg [1913] 2019b), or those on Burckhardt, essential to an understanding of the ‘Warburgian method’, which remained unpublished during his lifetime. Among the latter, the two seminars devoted to Jacob Burckhardt in the summer of 1927 and the winter of 1927–1928 are particularly important (Warburg [1927] 2021a, 88-93). The number of Warburg’s essays published by the time of his death was therefore rather limited: no monograph, a few shorter essays in book form and a few dozen scholarly articles. The total amounted to some thirty writings, of varying length and importance: the first step was to republish them as a collection. Once the hesitation arising from the publisher’s reluctance to assume financial responsibility for the project had been overcome, the Gesammelte Schriften would appear with Teubner bearing the date 1932, although they were actually printed in 1933.

The editing of the work was entrusted to Gertrud Bing, evidently regarded as the most knowledgeable and attentive interpreter of Warburg’s work, and to Fritz Rougemont, a young specialist in Italian studies associated with the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg since 1926. Rougemont, whom the tragic course of history consigned to merciless oblivion, “belonged to the close circle of KBW collaborators and took an active part in its research seminars, the project to organise the Library, and the Atlas as a work in progress” (an initial reconstruction of his intellectual career and his role at the KBW is owed to Monica Centanni, from whose study this account is drawn: Centanni 2024, 135).

The republication of the published essays undoubtedly constituted an initial and fundamental step towards securing recognition for Warburg’s work, but it was only the beginning of a project intended to bring the scholar’s entire legacy to light. This intention is clear to anyone who opens the Gesammelte Schriften. On its first page appears the complete plan of the edition, signed by Fritz Saxl:

Complete plan of the edition
The collected writings of A. Warburg will comprise the following six parts:
I. The texts contained in the present two volumes are the works Warburg published during his lifetime, supplemented by annotations drawn from the author’s notes.
II. The Atlas, largely completed at Warburg’s death, in which he intended to bring together his previous research: “Mnemosyne—a series of images for the study of the function of prefigured expressive values from antiquity in the representation of life in motion in the art of the European Renaissance”.
III. The unpublished lectures and shorter scholarly writings.
IV. The fragments on a “Science of Expression on an Anthropological Basis”.
V. Letters, aphorisms and autobiographical notes.
VI. To complement and conclude these works, the catalogue of the Library will be published. For Warburg’s work in its entirety comprises both the Library and his writings.

The content of the complete six-volume plan reflects the proposals Saxl had put to the publishers Teubner and Heinrich Keller. After the first part, comprising the two volumes of published writings, the Gesammelte Schriften, the second publication was to be the Atlas. Once again, the plan emphasised that Mnemosyne was (almost) complete and, above all, that it represented a culminating point at which the scholar’s research converged. The title “Mnemosyne—a series of images for the study of the function of prefigured expressive values from antiquity in the representation of life in motion in the art of the European Renaissance” is one of the many formulations Warburg noted down for the Atlas, and closely resembles one of the fragments dating from October 1929:

Mnemosyne. A series of images for the cultural-scientific study of classicising expression in the representation of the cosmic and human dynamics of individual movement (in motion). Figures of movement in Renaissance Europe (Warburg, Flüchtige Notizen, WIA, III 102.6, f. 26).

The decision to announce the publication of the Atlas under a specific title is significant, since it confirms that the volume was considered to be nearing completion. At the centre of the Atlas are the re-emergences and revivals of antiquity, explored through research arising from the study of the expressive formulae of emotion (the Pathosformeln, or pathos formulae). This is a study of the representation of movement, across every degree of passion, using the methodological tools of Kulturwissenschaft developed by the scholar, and within a specific field of enquiry centred on the European Renaissance, understood in the distinctively Warburgian sense that embraces Rembrandt’s North and welcomes Baghdad within ‘European’ boundaries.

Following the publication of the two volumes of writings, the Atlas thus seemed the natural next step in the publishing programme. The plan of the edition reflects a sequence intended to fit perfectly within the cultural project of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg after its founder’s death. This cultural project could be considered complete only with the sixth volume of the edition, the Library catalogue, since “Warburg’s work in its entirety comprises both the Library and his writings”.

Yet it is at precisely this point in the narrative that the fabric of history would tragically overturn every plan. Fate decreed that the Gesammelte Schriften, dated 1932, should actually be printed in 1933, as National Socialism rose to power and amid a growing climate of political and cultural uncertainty that, like a stormy sea, tossed the Warburgkreis’s small boat among ever higher, ever more threatening waves. The great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was aware of this when, in 1933, he published a crucial review of Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften in the journal “De Gids” (Huizinga [1933] 2018). The review ends with a sentence expressing both great confidence in Aby Warburg’s new method and an acute, prophetic sense of tragedy in the face of the impending cultural storm that would soon break over Germany. Huizinga wrote:

We must fervently hope that this beautiful plant will not perish in the storms of our difficult times, but will continue to flourish and bear fruit in the interests of the great culture of antiquity, whose development is being explored here along new lines (Huizinga [1933] 2018, 207).

The latent crisis preceding the rise of the Third Reich can already be discerned in relations with Teubner in the early 1930s. Three years before the printing of the Gesammelte Schriften, in a letter of 6 February 1930, the publisher informed Saxl that it would be impossible to publish Ernst Cassirer’s volume on English Platonism and the Cambridge School. The reasons were expressed as follows:

In the current economic climate, even surveys can achieve only very inadequate sales and, as I know from experience in many similar cases, specialist studies such as Cassirer’s are purchased only by the few specialists concerned, and not even by the largest libraries. […] Schools and private individuals have cancelled journal subscriptions on a large scale. All this now falls upon me. It is not easy for me to have to send you this cancellation and perhaps disappoint you as a result. Yet I see no other possibility, since I must reckon with the current economic emergency, which has hit the academic book trade particularly hard (Teubner to Saxl, 6 February 1930, WIA GC).

The book would nevertheless be published by Teubner in 1932 (Cassirer 1932), but exchanges such as this, involving continual negotiation in the face of an increasingly pervasive market crisis, are important elements whose reconstruction is necessary to understand the widening rift between the KBW and Teubner, a widening rift that would eventually prove irreparable. Following the publication of the two volumes of Warburg’s writings, Fritz Saxl wrote to Teubner on 20 February 1933 to protest against the publisher’s intention to adjust the print run of the Gesammelte Schriften because of rising printing costs, in order to avoid taking a greater risk. Saxl requested an estimate based on precise calculations so that he could assess the future printing costs of the complete works and decide whether to continue publishing with Teubner, thereby maintaining a relationship of trust extending over a decade that both parties wished to honour, or to acknowledge that this was impossible because of economic circumstances which, as Saxl wrote, “force us to be extremely economical” (Saxl to Alfred Giesecke, 20 February 1933, WIA GC).

From October 1929 the Warburg Library entered an exceptionally difficult period of uncertainty, economic even before it was political. For reconstructions of the financial crisis of 1929 in relation to the Warburg bank, see the studies by Lucas Burkart, Isabella Woldt and Dieter Wuttke (Burkart [2000] 2020; Woldt 2015; Wuttke 1984). As Monica Centanni observes: “Significant, yet not sufficiently highlighted in the critical literature, is the coincidence between the outbreak of the Wall Street crisis (29th October 1929), the date of Aby’s death from a heart attack (26th October 1929)” (Centanni 2022a, 343). The Great Depression caused severe financial problems for the Warburg bank. Its fortunes would recover through a well-managed financial recovery programme, but with the rise of National Socialism its economic position would collapse once more, reducing its capital within two years to a quarter of the level consolidated in 1932 (Woldt 2015, 17-19). As early as 1931, the funding allocated to the KBW by the Warburg bank was halved; Bing wrote: “I should like to remind you that the last budget before the Professor’s death was 340,000 marks, so with a budget of 160,000 marks we have already reduced it to less than 50%” (Bing to Eric Warburg, 14 August 1931, in Burkart [2000] 2020, 163), and “The budget for book purchases has been reduced by almost two thirds” (Burkart [2000] 2020, 164). Bing and Saxl sought to keep the financial support for research as secure as possible, while Max Warburg, under pressure from the American branch of the family, played the mediator’s role, not without a touch of irony:

If you have any material demonstrating that the world crisis can be overcome only if the Warburg Library continues to develop substantially, I ask you to have it delivered to me before Wednesday (Max Warburg to Bing, 31 October 1931, WIA GC).

In 1932 Fritz Saxl, by then convinced that the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg would close before the end of the year, began considering the possibility of moving the Library. The first destination considered was Rome, in keeping with what Warburg himself had confided to his friend Gustav Pauli during his time in Italy:

If I were ten years younger and not so ill, although my body has survived the rigours of the Italian winter relatively well, I for my part would not refuse to consider moving my Institute to Rome. The Archaeological Institute, the Hertziana and my Library together would be an exceptional beacon (Warburg to Pauli, 25 May 1929, in Burkart [2000] 2020, 152).

From 1932 onwards, the search for a new home for the Institute intensified, and many possible destinations were considered: Florence, Zurich, Basel, Leiden, London, New York and Jerusalem. The last of these would recur frequently in the correspondence of those years, under pressure from the American branch of the family (Woldt 2015, 21): it should be recalled that the Hamburg Warburgs were not particularly orthodox and that Aby, who had married the Protestant Mary Hertz, had little affinity with Zionism in any of its forms. Gertrud Bing opposed this prospect in defence of the Institute’s intellectual freedom:

We have learnt that the American Warburgs are considering a donation to the University of Jerusalem. Since this would certainly put an end to the Library’s existence as an independent institute, the idea is naturally not very welcome to us (Bing to Kaegi, 2 September 1933, in Burkart [2000] 2020, 173).

Finally, in April 1933 the National Socialists introduced the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, with the aim of removing Jews, people of Jewish descent and political opponents from public service, and the immediate need to move the Library became clear (Woldt 2015, 21). Lucas Burkart writes:

The clarity with which those responsible for the Library understood this, and on the basis of which they were able to move the Library to London in only eight months, was due in large part to the fact that discussion of a transfer had never been entirely abandoned since the 1920s. The ultimately unsuccessful efforts made from the late 1920s onwards to plan and prepare a transfer represented important groundwork for the actual move in December 1933 (Burkart [2000] 2020, 180).

Within a few months the Institute would leave Germany for Great Britain. An attentive observer of events was Eric Moritz Warburg, Max’s son and Aby’s nephew, who was gradually establishing himself as a protective figure for the Warburg Institute. At the same time, Eric was working on two fronts: negotiating with two leading British universities, London and Oxford, to secure an affiliation and the resulting financial stability that might enable the Institute’s Library to find a suitable home; and securing protection for the KBW in Hamburg from the American consulate during the transfer (American Consulate in Berlin to Eric Warburg, 10 May 1933, WIA GC).

In publishing matters too, Saxl kept Eric constantly informed of the negotiations with Teubner concerning the publication of Warburg’s works: examples include the letters of 17 and 21 February 1933, to which the letter to the publishing house was attached (Saxl to Eric Warburg, 17 and 21 February 1933, WIA GC). It is easy to see how the profound uncertainty and the move across the Channel could lead to a general deterioration in relations with the Library’s ‘commercial partners’, especially its publishers, and consequently undermine the optimism that had animated the years immediately after Warburg’s death.

In this respect, it was Gertrud Bing’s tenacity that sustained the tireless effort to ensure that, despite adverse conditions, the publishing project would be recognised as important and brought to a successful conclusion. In a letter of 27 May 1933 to Aby’s brother Max (Bing to Max Warburg, 27 May 1933, WIA GC), Bing reported on Fritz Saxl’s meeting with Teubner, held in Leipzig a few days earlier. The financial pressures on the publisher were such that Teubner wished to discontinue two books originating in the circle of the Warburg Library which were already in production: Richard Salomon’s monograph on Opicino de Canistris and the volume on Dürer’s Melencolia I by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Salomon’s book would eventually appear in London in 1936, in the “Studies of the Warburg Institute” series edited by Saxl (Salomon 1936). The book on Melencolia I would not appear until 1964, in a revised form and under the names of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl (Saxl, Panofsky, Klibansky 1964; on its long and complex publishing history, see Despoix 2018; Wedepohl 2018).

As Bing reported, the publisher “might be willing to print under considerable pressure, but would do nothing to distribute the books”. The publishing rights to the two texts were therefore withdrawn, and other publishers began to be considered, including Zanichelli, whose prices were very low and which was willing to print texts in German, and Oxford University Press, “a very renowned, very respectable and rigorously academic publishing house”, particularly suitable because of its “good distribution in America” (Bing to Max Warburg, 27 May 1933, WIA GC). At the heart of the gradual and inexorable break with the German publisher lay, above all, the question of distribution and the resulting reach and impact of the scholarly dissemination of the writings, foremost among them Warburg’s own. This had already emerged from the earlier disagreement over the print run of Warburg’s collected writings.

In the same letter, Max was informed of Teubner’s reluctance to send scholars and institutions the prospectus for the corpus of Warburg’s works. Yet it was essential, Bing wrote, to publicise the Gesammelte Schriften: to send the two volumes to scholarly journals in Germany and abroad, particularly in Italy and England, and, even more importantly, to secure reviews in daily newspapers. Warburg and his method needed to gain authoritative and universal recognition, so that an ever wider audience could appreciate the revolutionary importance of a discipline as new as the Warburg Library’s Kulturwissenschaft. The horizon had to be as broad as possible, and attention was directed towards America. As Bing put it: “It would also be very important to obtain a review in the ‘New York Times’. Do you or your son have any contacts there?” (Bing to Max Warburg, 27 May 1933, WIA GC).

The promotional project did not concern only the recently published collection of Warburg’s writings, which bore the date 1932. It also aimed, above all, to circulate a prospectus setting out the complete plan for Warburg’s works which, as we have seen, would include many unpublished texts, foremost among them the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In the months following the May meeting, Bing negotiated with Teubner for the printing of a prospectus and its circulation to the principal German and foreign libraries (“including American ones”) and to the leading specialist journals. A letter Gertrud Bing sent to Saxl in November 1933 gives an account of the negotiations then under way. “Printing a run of 2,300 copies costs 127 marks, or 147 marks if a plate on coated paper is added”; to these printing costs would have to be added the charges levied by the various journals for inserting the prospectus. Bing named several: the “Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte”, “L’Arte” and the “Burlington Magazine”. She reported that Teubner was unwilling to contribute to any of these costs, adding that the publisher hesitated and prevaricated over the possibility of sending out the prospectus immediately (Bing to Saxl, 1 November 1933, WIA GC). Teubner’s hesitation “makes no sense” to Bing (Bing to Saxl, 1 November 1933, WIA GC), while its refusal to bear part of the cost of the booklet was, in Saxl’s view, “extraordinarily indecent” (Saxl to Bing, 11 November 1933, WIA GC).

This growing number of causes for conflict and disagreement, increasingly evident in the correspondence, no longer seems to have resulted solely from financial difficulties. Rather, a deeper motivation appears to emerge ever more clearly, one historically identifiable with the period in which this publishing history unfolded. The tragic diaspora of German intellectuals and the severing of ties with a Germany that was no longer hospitable must not be underestimated in this context. It was against this background that Warburg’s work failed to achieve international recognition, and it is here that we can best understand Bing and Saxl’s sense of urgency about publicising his works as a whole.

An irregularity testifies to the fact that, at the time of printing in 1933, Teubner was negatively disposed towards certain aspects of Warburg’s civic and intellectual commitment: close examination of the second volume of the Gesammelte Schriften reveals a gap in the pagination, which jumps from page 614 to page 621. This gap was first noticed by Dieter Wuttke in ASW, as reported by Giovanna Targia (Wuttke 1992, 547, cited in Targia 2019, 199, n. 4). Apparently a trivial typographical error, the gap is in fact evidence of a serious act of censorship: the jump from 614 to 621 is the trace of the last-minute removal, during printing, of a short text by Warburg entitled Ernst Cassirer. Warum Hamburg den Philosophen Cassirer nicht verlieren darf (“Ernst Cassirer. Why Hamburg Cannot Afford to Lose the Philosopher Cassirer”). The text had first appeared in the newspaper “Hamburger Fremdenblatt” in 1928 (Warburg [1928] 2007, 755-760).

Warburg was linked to the German philosopher by an intellectual relationship that began in 1924: Cassirer came to know Warburg ‘at a distance’, while the latter was still in Kreuzlingen, through his Library. Cassirer’s now legendary encounter with the Warburg Library, with that “unbroken chain of books, as though surrounded by a magician’s breath” (Cassirer [1929] 2003), as he described it on the occasion of Warburg’s death, marked the beginning of an intense exchange in which the two intellectuals influenced each other’s research (numerous studies examine the relationship between Ernst Cassirer and Aby Warburg: see Settis [1985] [1996] 2022, 176-192; Ghelardi 2003; Woldt 2012; Sacco 2018; Sacco 2020).

It is therefore unsurprising that Warburg fought so vigorously to secure Cassirer’s position at the University. The text was a response to the “risk that Ernst Cassirer would be removed from his chair in Hamburg by a call to Frankfurt” (Bing [1958] 2022, 65). It was precisely the reprinting of this important piece, which once again underlines Warburg’s extraordinary “activism, energy and effectiveness of his initiative” (Centanni 2022a, 338), that revealed Teubner’s caution towards the scholar’s combative words. In their unvarnished truth, those combative words became increasingly dangerous in the historical context of Germany in the early 1930s:

But we are no longer at war. All the more, therefore, do we have a duty to cultivate with particular care the material and spiritual ground of a Germany that remained unscathed because it was encircled by a rampart formed by its countless fallen. The establishment of the University of Hamburg after the war was, and remains, a sign of the will to renewal through intellectual work whose source of energy no Treaty of Versailles has managed to bury. The change in Germany’s domestic politics can at least claim the achievement that the University of Hamburg has entrusted Ernst Cassirer with the leadership role of great responsibility to which he had long been entitled (Warburg [1928] 2007, 757; see also Levine 2013).

The vigorous defence of a philosopher of Jewish origin, advanced in support of the duty to cultivate the spiritual ground of a Germany that had “remained unscathed” by the war, and as a “sign of the will to renewal […] whose source of energy no Treaty of Versailles has managed to bury”, was already inflammatory material in 1928 and was certainly not innocuous in the political climate marked by the rise of Nazism and the first anti-Jewish measures of 1933. It was in that climate that Teubner carried out this act of censorship without the Warburg Institute receiving any notification, or at least any written notification. This serious intervention in the Gesammelte Schriften was undoubtedly the first step towards a growing estrangement between the Warburg Library and what had until then been its principal publisher.

The dissolution of that partnership, as we have seen, also had causes connected with the economic crisis of those years: a contracting market, distribution problems, lower sales of the volumes… Apparently insoluble publishing difficulties accumulated until they erupted into accusations from Teubner that intertwined the new cultural and political climate with economic circumstances. The definitive break was marked by a letter the publisher sent to Eric Warburg on 3 April 1935:

We may set aside the reason that prompted the transfer of the Warburg Library to London, just as we may set aside whether or not the move is temporary. The fact is that the transfer was the step that gave rise to criticism of the Warburg Library’s publications and to talk of émigré scholarship. The reasons that led to this emigration do not alter the fact that the distribution of Warburg publications by a German publishing house is inadmissible (Teubner to Eric Warburg, 3 April 1935, WIA GC).

Bibliography

Abbreviations and Editions Used

• AWM I
  A. Warburg, Astrologica. Saggi e appunti 1908-1929, a cura di M. Ghelardi, Torino 2019.
• AWM II
  A. Warburg, Fra antropologia e storia dell’arte. Saggi, conferenze e frammenti, a cura di M. Ghelardi, Torino 2021.
• AWO I.2
  A. Warburg, La rinascita del paganesimo antico e altri scritti (1917-1929), a cura di M. Ghelardi, Torino 2007.
• GS
  A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften. Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance, hrsg. von G. Bing unter Mitarbeit von F. Rougemont, Leipzig/Berlin 1932.
• GS Tagebuch
  A. Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, hrsg. von K. Michels und C. Schoell-Glass, Berlin 2001.
• RPA
  A. Warburg, La rinascita del paganesimo antico, a cura di G. Bing, tr. it. E. Cantimori, Firenze 1966.
• WIA
  Warburg Institute Archive, London.
• WIA GC
  Warburg Institute Archive, London, General Correspondence.

Writings by Aby Warburg

• Warburg 1895
  A. Warburg, I costumi teatrali per gli Intermezzi del 1589: i disegni di Bernardo Buontalenti e il “Libro di conti” di Emilio de’ Cavalieri, “Atti dell’Accademia del R. Istituto Musicale di Firenze: Commemorazione della Riforma Melodrammatica” XXXIII (1895), tr. it. A. Giorgetti, 133-146.
• Warburg [1913] 2019a
  A. Warburg, L’antico cosmo e le immagini delle stelle [Die Fixsternhimmelsbilder der Sphaera Barbarica auf der Wanderung von Ost nach West, 1913, WIA III 61], in AWM I, 67-146.
• Warburg [1913] 2019b
  A. Warburg, Le migrazioni dell’antico mondo degli dèi prima del loro ingresso nell’alto Rinascimento italiano [Die Planetenbilder auf der Wanderung von Süd nach Nord und ihre Rückkehr nach Italien, 1913, WIA III 87.I.2], in AWM I, 147-186.
• Warburg [1927] 2021a
  A. Warburg, Burckhardt e Nietzsche [Burckhardt-Übungen, Notizen für ein Sommerseminar, August 1927, WIA III 113.2.3], in AWM II, 88-93.
• Warburg [1927] 2021b
  A. Warburg, Da arsenale a laboratorio [Vom Arsenal zum Laboratorium, Vortrag zur Kuratoriumssitzung KBW, Dezember 1927, WIA III 2.3.1.1.1], in AWM II, 3-20.
• Warburg [1927-1928] 2021a
  A. Warburg, Il metodo della scienza della cultura [Kulturwissenschaftliche Methode. Schlussübung, Notizen für ein Winterseminar, 1927-1928, WIA III 113.6, III 113.4.1], in AWM II, 713-719.
• Warburg [1928] 2007
  A. Warburg, Perché Amburgo non si può permettere di perdere il filosofo Cassirer [Ernst Cassirer. Warum Hamburg den Philosophen Cassirer nicht verlieren darf, “Hamburger Fremdenblatt”, 23 Juni 1928], in AWO I.2, 755-760.
• Warburg [1929] 2019a
  A. Warburg, Frammenti tra Manet e Mnemosyne [Notizen zu Manet und Mnemosyne, 1929, WIA III 102.1.2], a cura di M. Ghelardi, nota di commento di M. Centanni, “La Rivista di Engramma” 165 (maggio 2019), 49-87.
• Warburg [1929] 2019b
  A. Warburg, Syderalis Abyssus: Giordano Bruno [Giordano Bruno, Notizen, 1929, WIA III 121.1.1], in AWM I, 405-433.
• Warburg [1929] 2014
  A. Warburg, Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Pagan conceptions of elemental divinities and their formative function in the development of the modern attitude towards nature [Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”. Die vorprägende Funktion heidnischer Elementargottheiten für die Entwicklung modernen Naturgefühls, WIA III 116], Eng. trans. H. Frankfort, edited by C. Wedepohl, “Bruniana & Campanelliana” 20, 2 (2014), 455-476.

Bibliographical References

• Agamben [1975] 2022
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• Anderson 2022
  J. Anderson, ‘Posthumous Reputations’: Edgar Wind’s Rejected Review of Ernst Gombrich’s Biography of Aby Warburg, “The Edgar Wind Journal” 3 (2022), 14-35.
• Barale 2011
  A. Barale, Prometeo in bolina, “La Rivista di Engramma” 92 (agosto 2011), 57-59.
• Barale, Squillaro 2011
  A. Barale, L. Squillaro (a cura di), Testi inediti e rari sul tema della fortuna. Regesto di testi dal Warburg Institute Archive, “La Rivista di Engramma” 92 (agosto 2011), 60-75.
• Bing 1966
  G. Bing, Introduzione, in RPA, IX-XXXI.
• Bing [1958] 2022
  G. Bing, Aby M. Warburg [Vortrag anlässlich der feierlichen Aufstellung von Aby M. Warburg Büste in der Hamburger Kunsthalle am 31. Oktober 1958, Hamburg 1958], in Centanni 2022a, 61-78.
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  G. Boffi, On Form: Wind and Warburg Examined, “The Edgar Wind Journal” 1 (2021), 39-54.
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  L. Burkart, “Die Träumereien einiger kunstliebender Klosterbrüder...”. Zur Situation der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg zwischen 1929 und 1933, “Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte” 63/1 (2000), 89-119; tr. it. “Le fantasticherie di alcuni confratelli amanti dell’arte...”. Sulla situazione della Biblioteca Warburg per la Scienza della Cultura tra il 1929 e il 1933, a cura di C. Giannaccini, “La Rivista di Engramma” 176 (ottobre 2020), 145-198.
• Buschendorf 1985
  B. Buschendorf, “War ein sehr tüchtiges gegenseitiges Fördern”: Edgar Wind und Aby Warburg, “Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle” 4 (1985), 165-209.
• Cantimori 1965
  D. Cantimori, In memoriam G.B., in In memoriam Gertrud Bing, edited by E.H. Gombrich, London 1965, 6-10.
• Cassirer [1929] 2003
  E. Cassirer, Worte zur Beisetzung von Professor Dr. Aby M. Warburg, Hamburg 1929; in Mnemosyne. Beiträge zum 50. Todestag von Aby M. Warburg, hrsg. von S. Füssel, Göttingen 1979, 15-33; tr. it. in A. Warburg, E. Cassirer, Il mondo di ieri. Lettere (1923-1929), a cura di M. Ghelardi, Torino 2003, 111-126.
• Cassirer 1932
  E. Cassirer, Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge, Leipzig/Berlin 1932.
• Centanni 2022a
  M. Centanni (ed.), Aby Warburg and Living Thought, Eng. trans. E. Thomson, Dueville 2022.
• Centanni 2022b
  M. Centanni, The Rift between Edgar Wind and the Warburg Institute, Seen through the Correspondence between Edgar Wind and Gertrud Bing. A Decisive Chapter in the (mis)Fortune of Warburgian Studies, “The Edgar Wind Journal” 2 (2022), 75-106.
• Centanni 2024
  M. Centanni, Preliminary Note to the 1930 Essay and its Author, in M. Centanni, G. Calandra di Roccolino, A forgotten essay by Fritz Rougemont on Warburg and the use of “bibliophily” as a scientific tool (1930), “La Rivista di Engramma” 211 (aprile 2024), 133-142.
• Centanni, De Laude 2020
  M. Centanni, S. De Laude, Delio Cantimori e il Warburgkreis, “La Rivista di Engramma” 171 (gennaio-febbraio 2020), 113-126.
• Despoix 2018
  P. Despoix, La Mélancolie et Saturne: un projet collectif au long cours de la bibliothèque Warburg, “Revue germanique internationale” 28 (2018), 159-181.
• Doren 1931
  A. Doren, Aby Warburg und sein Werk, “Archiv für Kulturgeschichte” XXI (1931).
• Engel 2014
  F. Engel, Though this be madness: Edgar Wind and the Warburg Tradition, in S. Marienberg, J. Trabant (Hrsg.), Bildakt at the Warburg Institute, “Actus et Imago” 12 (2014), 87-116.
• Gelhard 2022
  D. Gelhard, Gertrud Bing’s Scientific Beginnings. The 1921 doctoral thesis: The Concept of the Necessary in Lessing, “La Rivista di Engramma” 191 (aprile-maggio 2022), 85-105.
• Gelhard 2024a
  D. Gelhard (a cura di), A Presentation of: Gertrud Bing im Warburg-Cassirer-Kreis, Wallstein, Göttingen 2024, “La Rivista di Engramma” 211 (aprile 2024), 243-277.
• Gelhard 2024b
  D. Gelhard, Max Adolph Warburg’s Doctoral Thesis and the Warburg Circle, “La Rivista di Engramma” 211 (aprile 2024), 183-204.
• Gelhard, Roide 2024
  D. Gelhard, T. Roide (Hrsg.), Gertrud Bing im Warburg-Cassirer-Kreis, Göttingen 2024.
• Ghelardi 2003
  M. Ghelardi, “Die Welt von gestern”: il Mondo di Ieri, in A. Warburg, E. Cassirer, Il mondo di ieri. Lettere (1923-1929), a cura di M. Ghelardi, Torino 2003, 5-37.
• Ghelardi 2017
  M. Ghelardi, Edgar Wind su Aby Warburg: un esercizio ermeneutico, “La Rivista di Engramma” 150 (ottobre 2017), 625-635.
• Ghelardi 2020
  M. Ghelardi, Edgar Wind, Percy Schramm e il Warburg-Kreis. Sui concetti di Nachleben, Renovatio, Correctio, “La Rivista di Engramma” 176 (ottobre 2020), 13-42.
• Huizinga [1933] 2018
  J. Huizinga, Un laboratorio di scienza della cultura [Een cultuurwetenschappelijk laboratorium. A. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, I, II. Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Leipzig, Teubner, 1932, “De Gids” 97 (1933) 363-367]; tr. it. M. Centanni, S. Polano, “La Rivista di Engramma” 153 (febbraio 2018), 197-207.
• Jaffé 1932
  E. Jaffé, Texte zur Analyse der Dekanfiguren, in GS, 631-639.
• Levine 2013
  E.J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School, Chicago 2013.
• Meyer, Treml 2005
  T. Meyer, M. Treml, Gertrud Bing. Ein intellektuelles Porträt, “Trajekte. Zeitschrift des Zentrums für Literaturforschung Berlin” 10/5 (2005), 18-22.
• Pasquali [1930] 2022
  G. Pasquali, A Tribute to Aby Warburg [Ricordo di Aby Warburg, “Pegaso” II, 4 (1930)], in Centanni 2022a, 37-55.
• Perfetti, Zanon 2023
  F. Perfetti, G. Zanon, Le alternative del Moderno, Raffaello e Manet. Lettura di Mnemosyne Atlas, Tavola 55, “La Rivista di Engramma” 206 (ottobre-novembre 2023), 41-79.
• Pinotti 2016
  A. Pinotti, Wind, Warburg et la Kunstwissenschaft comme Kulturwissenschaft, “Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft” 61/2 (2016), 267-279.
• Robert 1890
  C. Robert (Hrsg.), Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs, Berlin 1890.
• Sacco 2018
  D. Sacco, Per una critica dell’irragionevolezza. Sul concetto di funzione simbolica in Ernst Cassirer e Aby Warburg, “Aisthesis” 11/1 (2018), 181-192.
• Sacco 2020
  D. Sacco, Simbolica del cerchio-ellisse: l’“amicizia stellare” Warburg-Cassirer, “Rivista di storia della filosofia” 2 (2020), 223-240.
• Salomon 1936
  R. Salomon, Opicinus de Canistris: Weltbild und Bekenntnisse eines avignonesischen Klerikers des 14. Jahrhunderts, mit Beiträgen von A. Heimann und R. Krautheimer, London 1936.
• Saxl 1931
  F. Saxl, Mithras, typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen, Berlin 1931.
• Saxl [1929] 2004
  F. Saxl, Discorso di commemorazione di Aby Warburg [Rede gehalten bei der Gedächtnis-Feier für Professor Warburg am 5. Dezember 1929, WIA I 10.8.1], tr. it. M. Vinco, “aut aut” 321-322 (maggio-agosto 2004), 161-172.
• Saxl, Panofsky, Klibansky 1964
  F. Saxl, E. Panofsky, R. Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art, London 1964.
• Schäfer 2003
  H.M. Schäfer, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. Geschichte und Persönlichkeiten der Bibliothek Warburg mit Berücksichtigung der Bibliothekslandschaft und der Stadtsituation der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, “Berliner Arbeiten zur Bibliothekswissenschaft”, Berlin 2003.
• Settis [1985] [1996] 2022
  S. Settis, Warburg continuatus. The Description of a Library [Warburg continuatus. Descrizione di una biblioteca, “Quaderni storici” 58, XX/1 (aprile 1985), 5-38; Nota finale, in Le pouvoir des bibliothèques. La mémoire des livres en Occident, éd. par M. Baratin, C. Jacob, Paris 1996, 150-163]; in Centanni 2022a, 171-230.
• Stimilli 2024
  D. Stimilli, Introduction, in M.A. Warburg, “Aby Warburg was a volcano”. Max Adolph Warburg, for the Centenary of Aby Warburg’s Birth (1966), a cura di D. Stimilli, “La Rivista di Engramma” 211 (aprile 2024), 95-96.
• Takaes 2018
  I. Takaes, “L’esprit de Warburg lui-même sera en paix”. A Survey of Edgar Wind’s Quarrel with the Warburg Institute, “La Rivista di Engramma” 153 (febbraio 2018), 109-182.
• Takaes 2020
  I. Takaes, “Il y a un sort de revenant”. A Letter-Draft from Edgar Wind to Jean Seznec [1954], “La Rivista di Engramma” 171 (gennaio-febbraio 2020), 97-112.
• Targia 2018a
  G. Targia, “Energie der Umformung” als “Reaktionsenergie”. Aby Warburgs Vorträge über die Kultur der Italienischen Frührenaissance (1909), in Kraft, Intensität, Energie. Zur Dynamik der Kunst, hrsg. von F. Fehrenbach, R. Felfe, K. Leonhard, Bd. 2, Berlin/Boston 2018, 317-328.
• Targia 2018b
  G. Targia, Détails et hypothèses : Edgar Wind, Aby Warburg et L’École d’Athènes de Raphaël, “Revue germanique internationale” 28 (2018), 69-86.
• Targia 2019
  G. Targia, Edgar Wind’s Self-Translations, in Migrating Histories of Art: Self-Translations of a Discipline, edited by M.T. Costa, H.-Ch. Hönes, Berlin/Boston 2019, 77-90, 199-203.
• Villani 2009
  T. Villani, Mezzi e mediatori della diffusione in Italia delle ricerche warburghiane. Un caso esemplare: Giorgio Pasquali, in C. Cieri Via, M. Forti (a cura di), Aby Warburg e la cultura italiana, Milano 2009, 103-121.
• Warburg M.A. 1929
  M.A. Warburg, Zwei Fragen zum Kratylos, Berlin 1929.
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  M.A. Warburg, “Aby Warburg was a volcano”. Max Adolph Warburg, for the Centenary of Aby Warburg’s Birth (1966), a cura di D. Stimilli, “La Rivista di Engramma” 211 (aprile 2024), 95-107.
• Wedepohl 2015
  C. Wedepohl, Critical Detachment: Ernst Gombrich as Interpreter of Aby Warburg, in U. Fleckner, P. Mack (eds.), The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. The Emigration and the Early Years of the Warburg Institute in London, “Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus” 12 (2015), 131-164.
• Wedepohl 2018
  C. Wedepohl, The Genesis, Writing, and Re-Writing of Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl’s Dürers ‘Melencolia I’, in P. Despoix, J. Tomm, Raymond Klibansky and the Warburg Library Network. Intellectual peregrinations from Hamburg to London and Montréal, Montréal 2018, 210-235.
• Woldt 2012
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Abstract

This contribution presents an excerpt from Giulia Zanon’s Una storia dell’Atlante Mnemosyne di Aby Warburg (Ronzani, 2025, pp. 287–331) in English translation. Drawing on archival documents and unpublished sources, the book reconstructs the genesis, development and posthumous history of the Atlas. It examines Mnemosyne both as a work intended for publication and as a visual method of enquiry at the intersection of art history, philosophy, philology, anthropology and psychology. The first part follows the formation of the publishing project and the successive attempts to bring it to completion; the second explores its conceptual structure through Warburg’s research, travels and intellectual exchanges. The excerpt focuses on the years between Warburg’s death in 1929 and the termination of negotiations with Teubner in 1935. Through correspondence, commemorative addresses and publishing plans, it examines the roles of Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl and the Warburg family in preparing the Atlas and Warburg’s collected writings for publication. Particular attention is given to the relationship between images and commentary, the organisation of the surviving materials, and the effects of the economic crisis, the rise of National Socialism and the Library’s move from Hamburg to London.

keywords | Gertrud Bing; Fritz Saxl; Teubner; Verlag Heinrich Keller; Alfred Doren; Ernst Cassirer; Max Adolph Warburg.

Per citare questo articolo / To cite this article: Redazione di Engramma (edited by), An Unfinished Project. A Presentation of: Giulia Zanon, Una storia dell’Atlante Mnemosye di Aby Warburg (Ronzani 2025), “La Rivista di Engramma” n. 239, settembre 2026.