Abstract

1. In 1929, a few months before his death, Aby Warburg wrote an introduction to his last intellectual project: the ‘Picture Atlas’ (Bilderatlas) which he dedicated to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, whose name was inscribed on the front door of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek he had founded. The opening sentences of Warburg's introduction, first published 70 years after his death in Italian translation, read: ‘The conscious creation of distance between the self and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’

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