Rooms with a View. Aby Warburg, Florence and the Laboratory of Images

Jew by blood, Hamburger at heart, Florentine in spirit." This is how Aby Warburg famously described himself; his intense relationship with Florence is reflected in its eminent role in his last project, the Mnemosyne Atlas, an open laboratory of images, which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1929. This series of panels composed of reproductions, largely photographic, of art works and all kinds of images offers itself as a cartography of cultural memory. The 63 panels of the last version of the Atlas are documented by photographs from 1929 and were reconstructed with original materials from the Warburg Institute in 2020; a selection is being exhibited for the first time in Italy.

The history of Florence studied by the young Warburg focuses on the artistic civilization of the late fifteenth century, the world of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, the dissemination of secular themes, the multiplication of images in a plurality of artistic media, and the revival of ancient models. Over the years, this perspective on Florence opens up and becomes more complicated, on the one hand, taking on more of an anthropological approach, and on the other, adopting a critical reflection on the present based on analogies observed in visual politics and image practices.

The exhibition brings Warburg's revolutionary experiments back to the very place where he took much of his inspiration. Place, media, and image are the key notions that articulate the exhibition in five thematic rooms and other spaces of the Gallery: 1) the relationship between Warburg and Florence; 2) the role of the ephemeral; 3) the laboratory of images, first and foremost photographic images; 4) drawing as Pathosformel (pathos formula); and 5) in the room Dance, Ninfa, Fury, the "energetic inversion", another famous concept coined by Warburg.