Mnemosyne

a cura del Seminario Mnemosyne, coordinato da Monica Centanni, Maria Bergamo, Giulia Bordignon, Daniela Sacco, con Mirco Bimbi, Annalisa Cescon, Lucia Coco, Silvia De Laude, Anna Fressola, Sofia Magnaguagno, Yasmin Mhdawi, Valentina Olivetti, Francesca Petazzini, Tania Piacquadio, Alessia Prati, G. Olmo Stuppia, Silvia Urbini, Maria Aime Villano

A "reasoned gallery of images from the Bilderatlas" in the first part of the essay that traces a route throughout Aby Warburg’s whole Atlas. This track follows a postural formula that qualifies various figures that are displayed in the Atlas panels, as a specific expressive brand: a head, a face leaning on the hand. This is the posture that characterizes the enigmatic central figure of one of the better known engravings of the Renaissance: the Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer.
The gallery proposed here, and that crisscrosses through all the Atlas panels, shows a gestural and postural link that connects different figures, male and female, according to precise tangent lines and marked by a well-defined position: the hand to the face, committed to support the weight of the head, as if the point where the face finds support is the precise place where the gravity of the body posture in an act of contrition or neglect is channeled most insistently, almost free-falling, be it leaning against a support, or slumped, semi-lying or all-lying. In assembling the gallery, the figures are not set in chronological order according to the date of composition, but rather in a thematic-formal articulation that starts off from the posture of pondering and reflecting (SERIES I. From the pondering Muse to the posture of the humanist-intellectual), or of anguish or mourning (SERIES II. Melancholy on the stage of commiseration), accidie (SERIES III. Figures of idleness (and old-age), and abandonment (SERIES IV. Ariadne or the figures of abandonment). Each of these presents a prototypical image in ancient repertoire: the thinking Muse (I); the mourning accompanying the deceased (II), Accidie (III), Arianna (IV).

In this issue of Engramma: Giulia Zanon’s Zooming Mnemosyne deals with the use of details in Warburg’s Bilderatlas, Monica Centanni’s Collateral effects of the “visibile parlare” (Dante, Pg. X, v. 95) reconstructs the hypothesis of a visual model for the legend of Trajan’s Justice, according to Warburg intuition about it; this contribution is connected of the paper by Filippo Perfetti’s Dante, Botticelli, and Trajan. An Open Note where the author investigates how Botticelli could have come to know that the bas-relief of the Arch of Constantine liberatori urbis was related to an episode in Trajan's life”. The focus of this issue is then extended to Warburg's cultural environment. Matilde Sergio’s Aby Warburg, Walter Benjaming, and the Memory of Images investigates the influence of Warburg's essay about Luther, on Benjamin's thought, while Dorothee Gelhard’s Gertrud Bing’s Scientific Beginnings reconstructs the intellectual history of Bing's doctoral thesis and its influences on Warburgian work. The theme of Warburg’s Denkraum is the focal point of Salvatore Settis’ Anselm Kiefer's Logic of Inversion: a fundamental overview of Kiefer's Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce (Andrea Emo) on display at Sala dello Scrutinio in Palazzo Ducale, Venezia from March to October 2022.  The third section of the issue is dedicated to new publications and exhibitions. Echoing Settis’ reflection on Denkraum, we present Clio Nicastro’s La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg, published this year for Palermo University Press; an introduction to Cultural Memories: a series published by Peter Lang and edited by Katia Pizzi. Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino with Mary Hertz Warburg: Free and Unconventional reviews the exhibition of the artist Mary Hertz Warburg. The issue closes with the important Choral Reading of Il metodo di Aby Warburg by Kurt W. Forster. L’antico dei gesti. Il futuro della memoria, where Barbara Baert, Victoria Cirlot, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Diers, Andrea Pinotti and Ianick Takaes offer us their personal reading of Warburg’s life and thought as they are presented by Forster’s newly translated book, edited by Ronzani editore.