Aby Warburg
Der Bilderatlas
Publisher Akademie Verlag
Technical info
25 x 31,1 cm. 140 p
Der Bilderatlas
The Bilderatlas or ‘atlas of images’ was a compilation of around 2,000 images of art and cultural-historical subjects, mounted on over sixty panels, intended by Warburg as both the synthesis and the culmination of his life’s achievement. Work on the Bilderatlas took up the last years of Warburg’s life, yet it remained a fragment at the time of his death. Although his collaborators at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek kept trying to edit the Bilderatlas both until and after its transportation to London, encouraged by contemporaries who had great hopes of what it might achieve, an appropriate publication of the material has never been realised. The present edition renders the Bilderatlas in the form in which Warburg left it and does not aim to complement the monumental fragment with comparative texts through speculative or associative imagination, as has been done elsewhere.