Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels of Aby Warburg's encyclopedic Mnemosyne (Atlas of Images), begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929.

Christopher D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought.

Johnson's intellectual reach is far, his commentary theoretically complex and intuitive. It provides the reader, Warburg scholar and novice alike, with many different points of entry into the material, concisely summarizes and contextualizes Warburg's project with a wealth of references and background information, and weaves these elements into a presentation of great erudition and scope that is at once deeply informed, methodologically reflective, and winningly whimsical. Johnson's approach and relationship to his material are quintessentially Warburgian: he develops his method (and lines of investigation) out of his subject matter, traces its 'implication threads' into remote areas of knowledge, follows with fascination the transtemporal and transregional migration of ideas, and moves expertly and with remarkable insight and intellectual daring between numerous discourses. Contemplative, tenacious, and thoroughly comparative, Johnson's work shares its subject's disdain for disciplinary, conceptual, or chronological boundaries.

Ritchie Robertson:

Johnson's dense, rich, often digressive book defies summary. It is centrally concerned with Mnemosyne as a work of cultural memory based not on metonymy, like modernist montages, but on metaphor.... He does much both to illuminate the Mnemosyne project and to place Warburg in the larger context of philosophical and critical thinking about metaphor.

Michael Ann Holly, Starr Director of Research and Academic Program, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute:

Who could ever tire of Aby Warburg and his ceaselessly meandering mind? Can we ever read enough about this idiosyncratic and brilliant thinker? Probably not. Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images is a most erudite and thoughtful analysis of Warburg's role in twentieth-century intellectual history. Christopher D. Johnson focuses on the way Warburg's triumph is rooted in metaphor and metonymy.

Michael P. Steinberg, Director of the Cogut Humanities Center and Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History and Professor of Music, Brown University:

This is a rich and learned book, and also an extremely humane and attractive one. The final chapter, on Warburg and Bruno, has the status of revelation. It is absolutely fascinating, not only as a dialogue in intellectual history but also as a political allegory. Christopher D. Johnson pays close attention to Warburg's ethical and epistemological aspirations when he focuses on Warburg's final and uncompleted project: the Atlas of Images. Assembled during the years prior to his death in 1929, these collages strove to mount a history of cultural memory via a dense series of images from antiquity to the present.