Lecturing at Hamburg University in the winter of 1927, the art historian Aby Warburg concluded his reflections on the Nachleben der Antike, the ‘afterlife of Antiquity’, with an image from the modern age of telegraphy and radio. He characterised Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, the rationalist historian and the wayward philosopher, as ‘receivers of mnemonic waves’. Both, Warburg said, had been ‘sensitive seismographs’, receptive to images from ‘the region of the past’.
At the time, Warburg was working on his Bilderatlas, or Picture Atlas. He wanted to map the bewegtes Leben, the ‘life in motion’ of images, from Antiquity to Christianity, and thence to the threshold of the technological present, the Italian Renaissance and 17th-century science. By the time of his death in 1929, Warburg had assembled 63 complete sets of images, 17 incomplete sets that were still in progress, and some 1300 images; he may have planned as many as 200 wooden panels on which the images would be pinned.
The polymathic scholars who followed him, notably Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl and Ernst Gombrich, traced how the clarity of ancient images varied with the quality of the transmission. The signal’s strength could be weakened by cultural decay, as in the decline of oratory when Rome turned from republic to dictatorship. It could be strengthened by a fortunate conjunction of stability and patronage, as at the court of Charlemagne. It could be lost entirely for generations, silenced by barbarian invasion. It could even, as Warburg’s hapless nephew Eddie discovered during a five-hour one-to-one lecture on ‘Why England Sits in the Position of Neptune on the Pound Note’, take surprising modern forms.
Egyptology: obelisks and ambitions