A Note on the Criteria for the Selection of the Essays

Aby Warburg, the founder of a new Science of Culture, the scholar who gave back word to the image; a “militant” intellectual (so wrote Gertrud Bing), for whom no distinction exists between life and thought; pioneer of new research methods, inventing ‘machines’ of knowledge; architect of spaces designed as arenas of thought. The Library for the Science of Culture (transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933) and the Mnemosyne Atlas are the achievements to which the most substantial part of his heritage is linked. The illeven essays here collected for the first time, all stemming from the Italian cultural milieu, trace with clarity Warburg’s “living thought”. Giorgio Pasquali, Mario Praz, Gertrud Bing, Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Agamben, Guglielmo Bilancioni, Alessandro Dal Lago, Gianni Carchia, Salvatore Settis, Kurt W. Forster, Maurizio Ghelardi: the polyphonic dialogue, whether from close up or at a distance, between scholars of diverse backgrounds casts a new beacon of light that illuminates with clarity and precision Warburg’s personality and intellectual legacy.