LONDON.- The Warburg Institute today launched a new virtual tour that makes available to a wide international audience two major exhibitions devoted to Aby Warburg’s magnum opus, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

The virtual tour, which sits on the Warburg Institute website and Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s exhibition website, has been launched to provide a digital afterlife to the exhibitions, which have enjoyed critical and public acclaim since they opened this autumn. With the early closure of the Berlin exhibitions on 2 November due to a new lockdown in Germany, the publication of the virtual tour provides an enduring and accessible resource.

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne - the Original, curated by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil was a collaboration with the Warburg Institute, at HKW. An accompanying exhibition, Between Cosmos and Pathos: Berlin Works from Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, was held at the Gemäldegalerie.

The Warburg Institute was founded in Hamburg by the historian of art and culture Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the scholarly scion of one of Europe’s great banking families. It was exiled to England in 1933—becoming the only institution forced to flee from Nazi Germany that survives intact in Britain. Today, as part of the University of London, it is one of the world’s premiere institutes for the study of images, ideas and society.




Warburg spent the last years of his life on an ‘atlas of images’ that he named Mnemosyne, after the Greek goddess of memory. By the time of his death, Warburg had arranged 971 images on 63 large black panels. This unfinished magnum opus is at once a map of ancient images and one of modernity’s foundational projects. Known only from the black-and-white photos taken before Warburg’s death, the Bilderatlas has become a legend for scholars, artists and curators. The exhibition at HKW reconstituted the 63 panels of the Atlas for the first time from Warburg’s original, multi-coloured images, contained within the archives of the Warburg Institute.

Parallel to the exhibition at HKW, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin presented in the Gemäldegalerie, Kulturforum, an unprecedented collection of 50 objects pictured in Warburg’s Atlas, gathered from 10 of Berlin’s state museums. The Bilderatlas is a masterpiece which draws on Warburg’s intellectual preoccupation with the afterlife (‘Nachleben’) of images and motifs, and how their continuity or metamorphosis as emotionally charged visual tropes resonates from antiquity to contemporary society. In creating a new virtual facsimile of these exhibitions, the Warburg Institute creates a new afterlife for this cultural milestone.

The virtual tours have been created with financial support from the Warburg Charitable Trust and technical direction from Marco Vedana at documentart.de. They will allow visitors to explore the content of both exhibitions online and will also enable them to move freely between the panels of images at HKW and the original artworks in the Gemäldegalerie. The site will feature interviews with those who created the exhibitions and selected objects will be accompanied by expert commentary. The tour consists of over 100 viewpoints created from over 1000 high-res photographs, alongside audio and video commentaries with directors, curators and experts. Although largely in German, English translations are available throughout.

This commission forms part of the Warburg Institute’s ongoing commitment to the digitisation of its assets as part of Warburg Renaissance, a capital transformation project to create in London the interdisciplinary laboratory that Warburg dreamed of in early 20th-century Hamburg. The Warburg Institute is working with Stirling Prize-winning architects Haworth Tompkins on a complete transformation of its much-loved but long-neglected building. This will not only improve the Institute’s spaces for collections, students and visiting fellows but will also introduce a new public hub on the ground floor, with a greatly expanded lecture room and its first gallery for physical and digital exhibitions.

Professor Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute, comments: ‘The exhibitions in Berlin will bring Warburg’s legendary project to new audiences—and the Virtual Tour will allow those who cannot visit in person to see the Bilderatlas online. As a digital thinker before the creation of digital technology, Warburg would no doubt have embraced VR and its ability to transmit images and ideas across space and time.’