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What is the
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, this strange assembly of passionate postures, mute and motley on their numbered black panels? A pictorial history of European art; a map showing the pathways of its recurring figures; an instrument for research; an argument about the development of human culture; a catalogue of types; a collage or montage of emotion. Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the German-Jewish art historian whose last years were devoted to the project, described it more soberly, as ‘an attempt at an art-historical cultural science’, and provided an almost parodically formal description: ‘An Image Series for the Investigation of the Function of Pre-formed Ancient Expressive Values in the Representation of Animated Life in European Renaissance Art’. But these academic claims coexisted with richer, stranger articulations. He named his atlas of images for Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses and the patron of memory, suggesting that ....

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