The Last Panels of Aby Warburg's Picture-Atlas Mnemosyne with annie bourneuf

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Annie Bourneuf (School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Clark Professor 2024–25) investigates one of the most enigmatic passages in the German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg’s picture-atlas Mnemosyne, his attempted summation of his work on the afterlife of antiquity, centered on Renaissance Europe, in arrays of images, nearing completion when he died in 1929. The atlas ends with two panels revolving around the Lateran Accords of that year, which established a new relationship of reciprocal support between the Catholic Church and Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Warburg himself stayed out late to witness the massive celebrations of the agreement, which he described as “the re-paganization of Rome,” and later combined press photographs of this and related events with reproductions of paintings by Botticelli and Raphael on the theme of the Eucharist, defamatory woodcuts depicting Jews desecrating the Host, a staged photograph of seppuku, and newspaper photographs of athletes, among other items, to make the two last panels. How might Warburg have understood the accords? What do these combinations of images do? More broadly, how can we understand the possibilities and perils of this foundational art historian’s attempt to bring his scholarly work to bear on the images and gestures formed by and in part forming the mass politics of his present?

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Mathis Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, detail of The Resurrection (outer wing panel), 1515, oil on panel. Musée Unterlinden, Colmar.