Figure 93. "G

oing to the Snake Dance at W

alpi," August 1891. From Th

omas D

onaldson, M

oqui Pueblo Indians of Arizona and Pueblo

Indians of New

Mexico (W

ashington, DC

, 1893).

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intervals," which h

e used in his journal of 1929. 2 This iconology is

based not o

n th

e meaning of the figures

-the foundation of inter-

pretation for Warburg's disciples, beginning w

ith Panofsky -

but o

n the interrelationships betw

een the figures in their co

mplex,

autonom

ous arra

ngement, w

hich can

not be reduced to discourse.

Although E

rnst Gom

brich claimed that Fritz Saxl played a

n

important role in the genesis of the project, o

ne n

otes that Mnem

o-syne re

capitulates, in im

ages, Warburg's re

search into the su

rvival of A

ntiquity throughout his care

er

-from

the depiction of the gods of A

ntiquity in Renaissance a

rt to the representation of the nym

ph in motion; from

the history of the heavens and the c

orre

-

spondences between the m

icrocosm a

nd the macro

co

sm to c

ou

rt festivals. 3 O

ne episode, however, is strangely absent from

this them

atic catalog: Warburg's trip to N

ew M

exico and A

rizona dur-ing the w

inter of 1895-1896, despite the important photographic

documentation he had av

ailable and that he had in part a

ssem

bled firsthand

. 4 The trip re

mains n

on

etheless a likely, though deleted, o

rigin of the atlas Warburg u

ndertook right after leaving the Kreu-

zlingen clinic -

after having delivered his lecture on

the serpent

ritual, which broke his long silence a

nd marked his return to the

Indian question, in which he had se

em

ingly lost interest for mo

re

than twenty-five years. s

In the margin of his draft of the 1923 lecture, W

arburg noted,

"missing Freud Totem

a

nd Taboo."6 In the first lines of that essay, Freud declared that he so

ught to establish a parallel betw

een "the

psychology of primitive peoples, as it is taught by so

cial anthro-

pology, and the psychology of n

eu

rotics, as it has been revealed by

psycho-analysis:'7 In light of Freud's rem

arks, the K

reuzlingen lecture takes an

openly introspective turn. B

ut the trip to the Am

erican West also has a heuristic v

alue. In 1930, Saxl n

oted that it was in N

ew M

exico that Warburg dis-

co

vered the principle for a re

new

al of his interpretation of the

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Florentine Re

nais

san

ce. 8 In the im

ages of the rituals W

arburg photograph

ed or a

ssem

bled after the fact, o

ne do

es notice that h

e

sought to interpret th

e past in the light of the faraw

ay, producing a c

ollision betwee

n tw

o levels of reality u

nknown to each other:

Native (and to so

me e

xten

t acculturated) A

merica o

n the o

ne

hand, and th

e Florentine Renaissance, o

n th

e other (figures 94a and b). Thes

e violent asso

ciations, which o

ver tim

e wo

uld lose their intuitiven

ess and becom

e structural, arise no

t from sim

ple co

mparisons but from

rifts, detonations, and deflagrations. They

seek n

ot to find c

on

stants in the order of h

eterogeneous things but to introduc

e differences within the identical. In M

nemosyne, in

keeping with the m

odel Warburg form

ulated during his trip, the distance betw

een the images, w

hich tends to invert the parame-

ters of time a

nd space, produces tensions between the objects

depicted and, inductively, betw

een the levels of reality from

which

these objects proceed. To grasp w

hat Warburg m

eant by the

"iconology of the inter-v

als," on

e m

ust try to u

nderstand, in terms of introsp

ection a

nd m

ontage, w

hat binds, or, inversely, separates, the m

otifs on

the irregular black fields that isolate the im

ages on

the surface of the

panels and bear w

itne

ss to an e

nigmatic prediscursive purpose.

Each panel of Mnem

osyne is the cartographic relief of an

area of art

history imagined Sim

ultaneously as an objective sequence a

nd as a chain of thought in w

hich the netw

ork of the intervals indicates

the fault lines that distribute or o

rganize the representations into archipelagoes o

r, in other wo

rds, as Werner H

ofmann has put it,

into "c

on

stellations."9 In a

rranging the im

ages o

n the black cloth of th

e panels of his atlas, W

arburg was attem

pting to activate dynam

ic properties that w

ould be latent if c

on

sidered individually. His inspiration for this

technique of activating visual data w

as a c

on

cept form

ulated 1

0 1904 by R

ichard Semon, a G

erman psy

chologist who w

as a

253

Figures 94a and b.

Masked dancers,

Hopi co

untry, Arizona, 1895. Photographed

by Henry R. Voth. Aby W

arburg Collection.

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student of Ewald H

ering's. In his Die M

neme ais erhaitendes Prinzip

im W

echsei des organischen Geschehens (M

emory as a basic principle of o

rganic becoming), Sem

on defined mem

ory as the function

charged with preserving a

nd transmitting e

nergy tem

porally, allow

ing som

eo

ne to re

act to so

mething in the past from

a dis-tance. Every e

vent affecting a living being leaves a trace in the

mem

ory, a

nd Semon c

alled this trace an

engram

, which he de-

scribed as the reproduction of an

original e

vent. 10

Warburg's atlas e

xternalizes and redeploys in c

ulture the phe-n

om

en

on

described by Semon w

ithin the psyche. The images in

Mnem

osyne are "e

ngrams" capable of re

-cre

ating an e

xperience of the past in a spatial c

onfiguration. As c

on

ceived by W

arburg, his album

of images represents the place in w

hich original e

xpressive en

ergy c

an

be rekindled in archaic figures deposited in modern

culture a

nd in which this re

surgence c

an

take shape. Like Semon's

engram

s, the atlas's images are

"reproductions," but they a

re pho-

tographic reproductions, literally, photograms. 11

One e

xam

ple is on

panel 2 of the atlas (figure 95), in the ele-m

ents a

rranged o

n the top a

nd to the right. In this module, o

ne

finds, arra

nged in a circle:

tw

o representations of the heavens from a ninth-century m

an

u-

script, after Ptolem

y;

a globe held by the Farnese Hercules from

the Museo N

azio-n

ale in Naples, in close-up;

a detail of the Farnese Hercules;

a close-up of a detail of the globe held by Hercules, depicting

an episode from

the legend of Perseus;

and below

, vignettes taken from the Aratus, a Latin m

an

usc

ript in Leiden, c

arv

ed on

two sym

metrical c

olumns, depicting the

actors in the n

arrative: A

ndromeda, the sea m

on

ster Cetus,

Perseus, Pegasus, Cassiopeia. 255

Figure 95. Aby W

arburg, M

nemosyne, pi: 2

(detail): Ptolemy

's heavens.

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Through the simple juxtaposition of im

ages taken from differ-

ent so

urc

es, W

arburg generates som

ething that anyone of these

images taken alone w

ould n

ot produce. Taken sim

ultaneously, the tw

o drawings of the c

elestial vault represent the totality of the

sky. The close-up of the globe, to the right, appears as the materi-

alization of this double planetary relief, in such a w

ay that on

e

mo

ves u

nco

nsciously from

a drawing of the heavens to its projec-

tion in three dimensions, from

a line drawing to a photograph.

Next, o

ne m

ov

es from the close-up to the general plan, a

nd from

the close-up to the extrem

e close-up that isolates an episode of

Perseus's adventures in a syntax entirely cinem

atic in inspiration. N

ext, on

e c

om

es back to a general draw

ing of the sky through a circular m

ov

em

ent, a form

al path similar