Mnemosyne 46: The Florentine Nymph's Step

Mnemosyne is the most original legacy of Aby Warburg’s studies and represents the culmination of his research. It is an Atlas of images designed to explore the mechanisms of transmission of the tradition of images, figures and forms from antiquity to the present, with particular attention to the formal revival of models of movement, gestures, postures and iconographic schemes. Warburg saw the figure of the arena in the large black panels on which he fixed the images in an ephemeral and always precarious syntax: a field in which linear progressions or definitive conclusions are not reconstructed, but in which the transformations, frictions and conflicts expressed by each era are made visible. Among the Panels of Mnemosyne, Panel 46, because of its crucial theme (the Nymph) and its particular structural and formal completeness, offers a clear thread to guide us through the Atlas, a thread to confront the labyrinth of Mnemosyne. “While it tempts you to follow her like a winged idea through all the spheres in a Platonic rapture of love, I feel compelled to turn my philological gaze toward the soil from which she arose and, marvelling, ask: is this strangely delicate plant really rooted in the arid Florentine earth?”