Ber Wissenschaftsgesch - 2024 - Vollgraff - Before Mnemosyne Wilhelmine Cultural History Exhibitions and The Genesis of

Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 47 (2024): 1 – 34 www.bwg.wiley-vch.
de
doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202300014
Before Mnemosyne: Wilhelmine Cultural History

Exhibitions and the Genesis of Warburg’s Picture Atlas**
Matthew Vollgraff*
Summary: Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, left unfinished in 1929,

has attracted significant interest in recent decades. This essay offers a
new interpretation of Warburg’s “picture atlas,” not in relation to
modernist collage and photomontage, but as an heir to scientific
pedagogical exhibitions of the late Wilhelmine period. It deals in
particular with two “public enlightenment” shows curated by the Leipzig
medical historian Karl Sudhoff, whose work Warburg admired and
employed: the first on with the history of hygiene in Dresden in 1911,
the second in Leipzig, three years later, on the development of scientific
images. Like Warburg, Sudhoff appreciated artworks and artifacts as
sources for the history of science and medicine. His exhibitions consisted
of assemblages of photographic reproductions—some of which were
provided by Warburg himself—and uncannily anticipate Mnemosyne in
both form and content. By examining the exchange of materials and
display methods between the two scholars, the article explores how
their respective visual projects reflected deeper disagreements over the
public role of science, the epistemic power of images, and the persist-
ence of the irrational in the human psyche.
Keywords: Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Karl Sudhoff, exhibition

history, history of science, visual culture, Wilhelmine Empire
M. Vollgraff
NOMIS Fellow, eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel
E-mail: matthew.vollgraff@unibas.ch
** An earlier version of this article was presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, on the
occasion of the exhibition “Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original” on 26
September 2020. I would like to extend my thanks to Claudia Wedepohl, Eckart Marchand,
Steffen Haug, and the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments. Research for this
article was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research in the
context of the project “Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology.”
All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
© 2024 The Authors. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-
Commercial NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or
adaptations are made.
© 2024 The Authors. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte published by Wiley-VCH GmbH

1
These are not the final page numbers! ��

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Matthew Vollgraff
Es ist der Mensch ein wunderlich Gericht,

an dem nicht nur der Magen zu verderben.
Der Mensch ist giftig, wußtest du das nicht?
Bist du nicht giftfest, mußt du an ihm sterben.1
1.
On 4 September 2020—after significant delays incurred by the COVID-19

pandemic—the exhibition Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original
opened at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.2 Comprising hundreds of
photographs, print reproductions and newspaper clippings arrayed on 63 black
cloth panels, the art historian Aby Warburg’s (1866–1929) unfinished “picture
atlas” seemed to return to a ghostly life, tracing the circumference of the vast
exhibition space in a discontinuous, serpentine loop. What is, or was, the
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne? Practically since its inception, Warburg’s eclectic
assemblage of images, symbols and gestures has been interpreted variously as a
hermetic “laboratory” of cultural memory, a proto-cinematic work of “know-
ledge-montage,” a morphological archive of symbolic forms, and a harbinger of
the image-deluges of the digital age.3 It has also frequently been analyzed
within the framework of contemporary modernist collage and photomontage.4
Yet Mnemosyne can also be seen as the heir to a much different exhibition
history. In fact, the very Bilderatlas whose panels were painstakingly recon-
structed for the 2020 Berlin exhibition had itself grown out of a series of
ambitious photographic exhibitions produced by the Kulturwissenschaftliche
Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for the Science of Culture, henceforth
KBW) in Hamburg between 1926 and 1930.5 The majority of these so-called
“image series” (Bilderreihen) were designed to accompany Warburg’s famously
long improvised lectures, and were conceived with specialized scholarly
1
Quoted from Warburg’s personal edition of Morgenstern, with underlining in pencil by himself:
Christian Morgenstern, Epigramme und Sprüche, 4th edn. (Munich: Piper, 1920), Warburg
Institute Library, pressmark EEH 2052. English translation: “Man is a strange dish, / on which
not only the stomach spoils. / Man is poisonous, did you not know that? / If you are not
immune, you must die of him.” In the margin, Warburg adds: “ich muss es [I must],” dated 31
May 1923. I am grateful to Stephanie Heremans for bringing this note to my attention.
2
Ohrt and Heil 2020. The 2020 exhibition in Berlin was preceded by a 2016 exhibit at the
Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe: http://zkm.de/en/event/2016/09/aby-warburg-
mnemosyne-bilderatlas (accessed 25 March 2023); and before that by a 1994 exhibition in
Hamburg, see Koos et al. 1994.
3
Warburg 2000 (and later editions). Didi-Huberman 2016 describes the Bilderatlas as a
“knowledge-montage,” while Zumbusch 2004 examines its correspondences to Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades Project and his concept of the dialectical image. Johnson 2012 considers Mnemosyne
through the rhetorical lens of metaphor. For the Bilderatlas in relation to cinema, see Michaud
2004 as well as the critique in Schwartz 2020. On Warburg’s debts to the Goethean
morphological tradition, see Pinotti 2001.
4
For instance, Fleckner 2012; see also Schwartz 2020, on 106 and 119. Hofmann 1995, on 173
likens Warburg to an “exhibition-maker,” while te Heesen 2009 aptly defines Warburg’s
Mnemosyne as an “exposition imaginaire.”
5
See Wedepohl 2020; Mazzucco 2006; Sprung 2011.
2 Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 47 (2024): 1 – 34
�� These are not the final page numbers!

Before Mnemosyne: Wilhelmine Cultural History Exhibitions and the Genesis of Warburg’s Picture Atlas
audiences in mind.6 However, the KBW did also produce two exhibitions
intended for a broader public. In September 1927, after receiving an invitation
to design a permanent display on the history of astrology for the Deutsches
Museum in Munich, Warburg and his team assembled the mock exhibition
Menschengleichnis am Himmel (Human Resemblance in the Cosmos) (Fig-
ure 1). The projected exhibit did not materialize, however, because the Munich
museum found it too highbrow for the general audience.7 Only after
Warburg’s death did his assistants Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) and Gertrud Bing
(1892–1964) finalize the Bildersammlung zur Geschichte der Astrologie und
Astronomie (Collection of Images on the History of Astrology and Astronomy)
at the Hamburg Planetarium. Ironically, the show proved so popular that it
remained on display from 1930 until 1941, well after its Jewish-German
curators had fled the country (Figure 2).8
In this essay I will argue that Mnemosyne, too, belongs to the same lineage
as these popular pedagogical exhibitions. For just like the printed atlases of
geography, anatomy or classical archaeology that proliferated throughout
nineteenth-century Europe, Warburg intended his atlas not only to illustrate,
but also to instruct.9 To take a term from Walter Benjamin, Mnemosyne could
be called an Übungsatlas, a kind of “training manual” for the visual cultivation
of knowledge.10 In this respect, its material and methodological foundations
had already been laid by the KBW’s didactic exhibitions of the late 1920s;
indeed, the final version of the Atlas absorbs entire panels from those prior
exhibitions, with only minimal alteration. Panel B, for example, almost
completely recycles a panel from the Menschengleichnis am Himmel exhibition
of 1927 (Figures 3 and 4).11 We will return to the significance of these and
other (re-)incorporations later on.
Considering the Bilderatlas as part of this exhibition history can throw both
its meaning and its aims into sharper relief. Warburg was no stranger to the
6
Warburg 2012. Warburg is reported to have stated that that “when I speak, I speak, of course,
not for the many, but for my fellows.” Quoted in Russell 2007, on 44. Much scholarship on
Warburg tends to remove his life and work from their social context, which was that of a
Hamburg patrician who dreaded social democracy and the political organization of the masses. As
Russell reminds us, “while committed to the ideals of Bildung and the Enlightenment, he was,
like many other German Jews, politically and socially conservative, a monarchist, and an ardent
nationalist.” Ibid., on 40.
7
See Vollgraff 2019.
8
See Fleckner 1993.
9
On the cultural and scientific history of the visual atlas, see Daston and Galison 2007; Didi-
Huberman 2011; and Flach et al. 2005. Numerous print inspirations have been proposed for the
Bilderatlas: Gombrich 1970, on 285–296 emphasizes the ethnologist Adolf Bastian’s 1887
Ethnologisches Bilderbuch. Wedepohl 2012, on 37–38 notes the importance of the classicist
Friedrich Hauser’s typological atlas Die neu-attischen Reliefs (1889). Several art-historical image
atlases from Warburg’s collection are discussed in Anderson et al. 2019, on 91–96. Most recently,
Bahrani 2021, on 263 has drawn attention to Warburg’s copy of Morris Jastrow’s 1912
Bildermappe zur Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens.
10
Benjamin 2005, on 520. On the Bilderatlas as Übungsatlas, see Vollgraff 2014 and Somaini
2015.
11
Compare Warburg 2000, on 10–11 with Warburg 2012, on 222–223.
Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 47 (2024): 1 – 34 3

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 1. Panel “Human Resemblance in the Cosmos,” from the 1927 exhibition of the same name
at the Warburg Library, Hamburg. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London.
Figure 2. Hallway view of the “Collection of Images on the History of Astrology and Astronomy
[Bildersammlung zur Geschichte der Astrologie und Astronomie]” exhibition at the Hamburg
Planetarium, 1930. Warburg 2012, on 399.
didactic use of pictures: as Eckart Marchand has shown, the art historian made
his first display panels as early as 1905, on the occasion of a pedagogical exhibit
on Albrecht Dürer at the Hamburg Volksheim, a cultural center for the
working classes; the exhibit however failed to resonate with its popular

Figure 3. Panel on “Realism of the German Middle Ages,” from the 1927 exhibition “Human
Resemblance in the Cosmos” at the Warburg Library. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London.
audience.12 Warburg’s later assistant Fritz Saxl practiced a more politically

engaged and progressive mode of visual education in postwar Vienna, which he
brought with him to the KBW in Hamburg. Saxl’s know-how would go on to
play a crucial role in the library’s photographic exhibition design and,
ultimately, in the elaboration of the Bilderatlas.13
Here, however, I wish to suggest that Mnemosyne built upon a different
precedent as well. This was namely a tradition of public exhibition that had
decidedly little to do with art appreciation, but instead employed photographic
12
Marchand 2022, on 370.
13
See Rappl 1996 and Haug 2019.

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 4. Panel B of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London.
images with the aim of popular enlightenment (Volksaufklärung). The exhibi-

tion culture of Wilhelmine Germany was rooted in Enlightenment notions of
aesthetic and moral self-cultivation (Bildung), deemed a precondition for
bourgeois citizen formation.14 In order to address a broad spectrum of
(majority middle-class) audiences, the scholars and entrepreneurs who develo-
ped such shows married popular science education with entertainment, and
social welfare with aesthetic appreciation. Most significantly, the popular
enlightenment exhibition put forward new formal models for the visual
14
On the concept of Bildung in relation to Warburg’s scholarship and public education efforts, see
Brosius 1997.

practice of cultural history—models that directly anticipate Warburg’s Bilder-

atlas in surprising ways.
I will focus here on Warburg’s relationship to two public pedagogical
exhibitions in particular: first, the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden
in 1911, and second, the International World Exhibition of the Book Trade
and Graphic Arts in Leipzig in 1914. Both contained scientific-historical
exhibits curated by the same man: the historian of medicine Karl Sudhoff
(1853–1938), a pioneering scholar whose work Warburg read, cited and
admired.15 That admiration may have been one reason why, as we shall see,
Warburg agreed to contribute five photographs to Sudhoff’s section of the
Hygiene Exhibition. In turn, the Hamburg art historian adopted many of the
very same images previously displayed in Sudhoff’s Leipzig exhibition for his
never-finished Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The two scholars’ relationship does not
end there, however. As the following will show, their exchange of materials and
display methods testifies to an ongoing intellectual conversation about the
relationship between science, superstition, and historical progress which far
exceeds the frame of their brief correspondence.
Karl Sudhoff’s reputation as the “Nestor” of medical history is well earned:
he occupied the first tenured German professorship in the history of medicine
and founded the preeminent journal of that field, as well as the Leipzig
research institute that still bears his name today.16 Sudhoff had originally
trained as a literary scholar, and his formation was steeped in the positivistic
methods of textual philology. However, as Claudia Stein has shown, he also
fervently advocated for the development of a “cultural history of medicine
[medizinische Kulturgeschichte]” that would study images, instruments and
artifacts as historical sources in their own right.17 His curatorial activities in
1911 and 1914 represented perhaps the most radical realization of his cultural-
historical approach to science and medicine, and of his epistemic appreciation
of visual and material culture. Sudhoff’s work in this domain evinces
astonishing parallels to Warburg’s. But while both men held numerous
assumptions in common about the relationship between science and “civiliza-
tion,” a closer comparison between their respective projects also reveals crucial
differences in their fundamental understandings of images and their role in the
human condition.
15
On Warburg’s relationship to Sudhoff, see further Wen (in press). There is no evidence that the
two men ever met in person, but they carried on a scholarly correspondence in 1916–1918,
while Warburg was preparing his lecture on Martin Luther and astrology in the Reformation.
16
See Rütten 2004. Founded in 1917, Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin is the oldest
continually published journal for the history of science. The Institut für die Geschichte der
Medizin he founded at the University of Leipzig was renamed the Karl-Sudhoff-Institut in 1938.
17
Stein 2013a, on 207–208. In his essay “Painting and the History of Medicine,” written in 1906
on the occasion of an exhibition on art and medicine he curated at the Kaiserin-Friedrich Haus
in Berlin, Sudhoff wrote how “the paintings of the great masters of all periods, more particularly
of the ‘simple’ periods, devoid of antiquarian element in artistic presentation, form pictorial
archives for the historian of culture and especially for the historian of the healing art.” Sudhoff
1926a, on 313.

Matthew Vollgraff
2.
Our story begins, not in Wilhelmine Germany, but in fifteenth-century Italy.

At popular religious festivals like the San Giovanni fair, it was not uncommon
to encounter the bizarre spectacle of men covered in live serpents, orating to
assembled crowds. These individuals were neither madmen nor prophets, but
salesmen hawking an antidote to snake poison, known since antiquity as
theriac or treacle. These street vendors’ putative ability to withstand the life-
threatening danger posed by the live snakes that crept and coiled about their
bodies served as visible evidence of what Warburg called the “immunity of the
strong in faith [Immunität der Glaubensstarken].”18 They claimed to be the
direct descendants of St. Paul, who according to legend survived snakebite
unharmed while shipwrecked on the island of Malta. In addition to theriac,
these self-anointed pauliani also sold pills made of “Maltese earth” to which
they likewise ascribed miraculous immunizing properties.19
Warburg had been interested in these quack doctors and their magical
medicines since the 1890s, when he first came across one depicted in a
cinquecento painting in Florence (Figure 5). Their curious commerce in
superstitions spoke to the young Hamburger’s growing interest in pagan ritual
and the psychology of magic. Hence when he received a request in 1910 to
contribute materials to the historical section of the International Hygiene
Exhibition in Dresden, Warburg’s mind returned immediately to the Italian
theriac vendors.20 In his response to the exhibition’s organizers, Warburg
proposed to send a “cultural-historical excursus on ‘snake men’ from the casa
di S. Paolo” along with photographs including an “until now unrecognized
representation of a theriac vendor.”21 His suggestion was enthusiastically
accepted.
Among the five photographs of early modern artworks Warburg sent to
Dresden was a Florentine wedding chest, or cassone, painted around 1425,
18
Warburg 1995, on 46. “In the eyes of the pagans, Paul was an impervious emissary when he
hurled the viper that had bitten him into the fire without dying of the bite,” writes Warburg in
the drafts to his 1923 lecture on the Hopi serpent ritual. “So durable was the impression of
Paul’s invulnerability to the vipers of Malta that as late as the sixteenth century, jugglers wound
snakes around themselves at festivals and fairgrounds, representing themselves as men of the
house of Saint Paul and selling soil from Malta as an antidote to snakebites.” Ibid., on 45.
19
Most of these supposedly Maltese vendors actually hailed from Calabria. Katharine Park reads
the theriac vendor “as a quasi-sacral figure, dispensing a product that purged the physical body of
its poisons, as the social body of the city was purged of its conflicts and dissensions by the annual
festival of St John.” Park 2011, on 119. Peter Burke by contrast interprets these marketplace
snake handlers as “commercialized shamans.” Burke 1987, on 220. On the history of modern
snake venom research see Schickore 2017.
20
Warburg Institute Archive, London (WIA), General Correspondence (GC), Otto Neustätter to
Aby Warburg, 2 May 1910. Warburg corresponded exclusively with Sudhoff’s main assistant on
the exhibition, the ophthalmologist, reformist and women’s rights advocate Otto Neustätter.
21
WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Otto Neustätter, 1 June 1910.

Figure 5. School of Vasari, Procession in the Piazza del Duomo, ca. 1561–1562. Florence, Museo di
Palazzo Vecchio. Just in front of the campanile, a theriac vendor on an elevated platform is orating
to a small crowd. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London.
upon which he had “discovered” the figure of the theriac vendor (Figure 6).22
He also included a photograph of a fresco depicting another pauliano painted
by Giulio Romano nearly two centuries later (Figure 7).23 In an expository
letter to the Dresden Hygiene Exhibition organizers, he presented his five
photographs as a self-contained corpus of “until now completely overlooked
image-documents on the developmental history of superstitious vaccine
medicine.”24 The main subject of his “little journey by way of illustrations” was
the persistence of “this type of the antitoxicologist over [the course of] four
centuries (from the 14–17c).”25 While the theriac vendor might outwardly
resemble a classical chemist-pharmacist, Warburg bitterly warned that “the
Middle Ages also transforms this art [i. e., medicine] into a superstitious kind
22
See Warburg’s sketch of the theriac vendor from Santa Maria Nuova (Uffizi), WIA, Zettelkasten
(ZK) 29a, 006/002141 (contained in the folder “Theriak-Krämer am St. Johannesfest,”
006/002120–002155).
23
On the background of this fresco, and the astrological image cycle to which it belongs, see
Gombrich 1950.
24
“[…] bisher völlig übersehene Bild-Dokumente zur Entwicklungsgeschichte abergläubischer
Gegengiftheilkunde.” WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Otto Neustätter, after 24 June 1911.
25
WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Otto Neustätter, undated [between 17–22 June 1910].

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 6. Giovanni di Francesco Toscani, cassone panel depicting the Festival of St. John, with
theriac vendor visible on the far left (detail), ca. 1425–1430. Florence, Museo Nazionale del
Bargello. Reproduced in Grafton and Theiss 2022, on 50.
of iatromysticism. The antitoxic idea of immunization sinks down into belief

in sorcery.”26
Warburg’s cautionary cultural history of the theriac vendor accorded well
with the “popular enlightenment” mission of the Dresden Hygiene Exhibition.
This massive event was the brainchild of one Karl August Lindner, an
ambitious Saxon entrepreneur who had made his fortune marketing the
mouthwash brand Odol.27 In 1903 he had put his acumen for visual
propaganda at the service of public health with an exhibition on Volkskrankhei-
ten und ihre Bekämpfung (Epidemic Diseases and their Treatment).28 In the
Hygiene Exhibition which followed eight years later, Lindner inflated his
successful synthesis of public science and health education to the proportions
of a world fair. Attended by over five million people, the Dresden Hygiene
Exhibition boasted national pavilions (including China, Russia, and Brazil)
and a midway replete with exotic attractions such as a Japanese garden and a
reconstructed “Abyssinian village” with live performers.29 Special interest
26
“Mir scheint diese kleine Illustrationsreise deshalb interessant[,] weil sie durch vier Jahrhunderte
(vom 14.–17.) jenen Typus des Antitoxinisten zeigt, den man ohne Kenntnis der ärztlichen
Praxis für einen Iatrochemiker im Sinne der Theriaka und Mithridaten des Salen halten würde:
das ist aber nicht der Fall: das Mittelalter verwandelt auch diese Kunst in superstitiöse
Iatromystik. Die antitoxische Immunisirungsidee taucht im Zauberglauben unter.” Ibid.
27
For background on the exhibition, see Eisolt 2019. On Lingner, see Obst 2005.
28
See Schrön 2003; Nikolow and Brecht 2000. On the history of public health in Germany, see
Weindling 1989.
29
Clemens Radauer has collected documentation of the Völkerschau performances at the 1911
exhibition at https://humanzoos.net/?page id=453 (accessed 1 March 2023).

Figure 7. Giulio Romano, fresco in the Camera dei Venti, Mantua, Palazzo del Te, ca. 1528. The
scene is intended to illustrate that those born under the sign of Capricorn will become snake
charmers, represented here by the figure of the theriac vendor. Photo: The Warburg Institute,
London.
pavilions also abounded, from children’s welfare and temperance societies to

showcases on tropical hygiene and eugenics.30
The core of the Hygiene Exhibition consisted of three main sections:
historical, scientific, and popular. Lindner had recruited none other than Karl
Sudhoff to curate the historical section, which was intended to serve as the
entry point to the other two. Here the question “what is hygiene” would be
30
See the description in Offizieller Katalog 1911, on 41–61. On the making of the exhibition’s
historical section, see Stein 2013b. See also Poser 1998, on 139–158; and Hartung 2010, on
102–107. For the section of the exhibition dedicated to “racial hygiene,” see Gruber and Rüdin
1911.

Matthew Vollgraff
answered in terms of its historical becoming: “As with every other scientific or
practical activity of the human mind,” wrote Sudhoff in the exhibition
guidebook, “a complete understanding of every individual ‘hygienic’ phenome-
non requires knowledge of its emergence, its formation and further develop-
ment.”31 The historical section would therefore unfold “the hygienic and
unhygienic moments in the entire cultural development of humanity” using a
combination of photographs, murals, sculpture, and architectural models.32
The vast exhibition was structured as a journey through the history of
civilization, albeit conceived in broadly Eurocentric terms: moving through the
exhibit, viewers proceeded from the Babylonian treatment of epidemics to
Egyptian mummification and Jewish ritual hygiene practices, onward to
Roman baths and thence to plague containment in medieval Europe
(Figures 8–10). The exhibition’s conclusion, which foregrounded the Islamic
world, fulfilled a dual function as the transition to the ethnographic section.33
The exhibition and its accompanying texts reflected the assertively philhel-
lenic outlook of its curator. “Viewed in the light of hygiene alone, classical
antiquity, Greece and Rome, represents a cultural pinnacle of almost incompa-
rable height,” Sudhoff swoons: “The Greek spirit was the first to clearly grasp
the aims and inwardness of hygiene.”34 In its fixation on the ancient
Mediterranean world (some eighteen rooms were dedicated to Greece and
Rome alone), the historical section of the Hygiene Exhibition aligned with
Warburg’s central research problem: the survival and cultural memory of
classical antiquity. For instance, the text of the official guidebook laments that
“with the decline of the culture of antiquity, hygienic ideas were lost along
with much other mental and cultural heritage [Geistesgut],” and expresses
astonishment “that such a sum of knowledge […] could disappear so
completely from the memory of mankind.”35 Warburg’s conception of the
theriac vendor—as the embodiment of the medieval degradation of classical
healing arts into superstitious sorcery—therefore fit perfectly into the exhibiti-
on’s narrative. The rhetoric of the official texts notwithstanding, however, it is
noteworthy that the Hygiene Exhibition devoted ever more space to the
Middle Ages overall than to classical antiquity (4,800 compared to 2,750
objects).36 In contrast to Warburg’s steadfast belief in the Renaissance as the
31
Internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung 1911, on 1.
32
Offizieller Katalog 1911, on 41.
33
On the Islamic section, see ibid., on 60–61; a description of the “ethnological subdivision” is
given on pages 61–68.
34
Sudhoff 1926b, on 126 and 113.
35
Offizieller Führer 1911, on 8–9, quoted in Schrön 2003, on 313. On the other hand, the
guidebook also expressed the hope that, “in view of the high level of intellectual education of the
modern civilized peoples and the great development of science and technology, […] we will
surpass antiquity in this field as well in the not too distant future.” Ibid.
36
Hartung 2010, on 105.

Figure 8. “Egyptian Room,” Dresden Hygiene Exhibition 1911. Photo: The Wellcome Collection.
Figure 9. “The Atrium in Antiquity,” Dresden Hygiene Exhibition 1911. Photo: The Wellcome
Collection.

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 10. “Disease Control in the Modern Era,” Dresden Hygiene Exhibition 1911. Photo: The
Wellcome Collection.
sole pivot of Western bourgeois modernity, Sudhoff does not neglect to credit
the Middle Ages for its positive gains in the field of hygiene.37
For Sudhoff, the word “hygiene” encompassed “everything in the collective
life of humanity, which has from the beginning affected the health of the
individual or the race for good or evil.”38 His exhibition lay at the crossroads of
preventative medicine and cultural history, embracing architecture, nutrition,
clothing, housing, bathing, exercise, waste management, burial, but also all
forms of belief and folk practice.39 Warburg’s images of theriac vendors, which
he himself had labelled an “episode from the history of magical hygiene,” were
suitably placed in a room on “phantastical hygiene and superstition [Phantas-
tische Hygiene und Aberglauben].”40 Here the viewer was confronted with a
bewildering array of magical objects and pictures: “ribbons and appendages,
little stones and silver hands, bracelets and tin plates, crescents and fingers,
dried plants and animal skulls, saints’ images and handwritten notes with
inexplicable lines.”41 The room’s purpose was to demonstrate the pernicious
37
“The idea of infection,” for instance, “completely unknown to ancient medicine and while
mentioned later, always a dead letter, came triumphantly out of the East and acquired a vitality
all its own in mediaeval medicine, alongside of the traditional trumpery of humoral pathology.”
Sudhoff 1926b, on 119.
38
Ibid., on 114.
39
On the exhibition’s hazy definition of hygiene, see Stein 2013b, on 375.
40
WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Otto Neustätter, undated [between 17–22 June 1910].
41
Internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung 1911, on 373.

“power of ideas” over hygienic practice, and the obstructive force of

superstition and prejudice against the advance of scientific knowledge. As the
exhibition guide cautioned to the visitor of this section:
Only one step, and man is no longer content to hang a fica on a little silver chain so as to
banish the evil eye: he passes over to defense, to attack, to persecution. He grabs the evil
demon wherever he suspects him. Thus out of this circle of ideas the most horrible of
horrors arises, man in his delusion! The persecution of witches, burning of Jews and
heretics, of ‘plague spreaders,’ doctors, and gravediggers follow after; or else the delusion is
directed against his own sinfulness, which tends to be inseparable from fanatical hatred
and destructiveness: howling and covered with blood, the flocks of flagellants—the
dancing maniacs with their distorted faces—traverse the lands, and the epidemics which
these penitents have set forth into the world to expel spread and multiply into a spiritual
pestilence.42
The cautionary examples of superstitious medicine on display, including the

theriac vendors, thus offered historical testimony to the omnipresent and
recrudescent dangers of human unreason.
While there is no surviving photographic documentation of the room on
“phantastical hygiene and superstition,” we can get a sense of how it might
have looked from an exhibition shot of the adjacent room, dedicated to early
modern disease treatment (Figure 10). Having borrowed over twenty-two
thousand images and objects, the organizers clearly struggled with their limited
display space: particularly in the rooms dedicated to more recent history,
images and artifacts were densely packed together and scarcely labelled. After
visiting the show in the summer of 1911, Warburg complained that only one
of his five photographs had been put on display—and even then, the label
mistakenly gave “Peter” for “Paul.”43 He nevertheless agreed to donate the five
images to the collection of what would become, two years later, the Dresden
Hygiene Museum.44
It is a testament to Warburg’s enduring fascination with the theriac vendor
that the same images he sent to Dresden later provided the focal point of the
last public lecture he gave before his death.45 The talk, held at the
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence on 8 June 1929, addressed the figure of
the theriac vendor both as a fixture of everyday Florentine life and as a visual
vehicle for the transmission of classical antiquity. The photographs also make
an appearance in Mnemosyne Panel 28/29, which may well have been produced
to illustrate that same lecture (Figure 11). While the fifteenth-century cassone
(Fig. 6) showed how “life in motion” could be represented in the late medieval
42
Offizieller Führer 1911, on 373–374; compare Offizieller Katalog 1911, on 58. Both texts on this
section were written by Neustätter. Additional parallels to Warburg could be drawn here:
Schoell-Glass 2008, on 49—63, argues that contemporary manifestations of antisemitic violence
colored his conception of the irrational and “Dionysian” inheritance of classical antiquity.
43
WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Otto Neustätter, 12 August 1911.
44
WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Otto Neustätter, 9 September 1911; WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to
Internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung 1911, 16 February 1912. Warburg’s contributions are listed
in the exhibition catalogue Internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung 1911, on 399.
45
Warburg 1999c, on 403, 547–550.

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 11. Panel 28/29 of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Giovanni’s cassone and Giulio’s fresco can
both be found to the left side of the panel. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London.
festival, Giulio Romano’s seventeenth-century fresco (Fig. 7) instead attested to

the stylistic afterlife, or Nachleben, of pagan antiquity in early modern Italy. If
the theriac vendor truly represented a survival of the pagan past in the
Christian cinquecento, Warburg had hazarded in 1910, it was only with
Giulio’s depiction that this “antique content regained its antique form.”46 In
his 1929 lecture he went further, praising “the Laocoön-like appearance of one
of those survivors of the ancient cult of Asclepius,” who, “twined about with
46
“Bei Giulio Romano gewinnt übrigens der antike Stoff auch seine antike Form wieder.” WIA,
GC, Aby Warburg to Otto Neustätter, after 24 June 1911.

serpents, […] hawked his dubious wares around the country.”47 No longer
interpreted merely as an incarnation of medieval superstition, the theriac
vendor has instead become the medium of an antique ‘pathos formula,’ as
Warburg called the gestural patterns of emotional intensity that were revived
from their medieval slumber by the art of the Italian Renaissance.
3.
While they had each had their formations in the history of art and medicine
respectively, Warburg and Sudhoff met on the common ground of cultural
history. This was hardly something that could be taken for granted at the time,
for to practice Kulturgeschichte in Wilhelmine Germany signified nothing less
than a methodological revolt against the dominant historiographical school.48
The tradition of political history then associated with Leopold von Ranke
treated the state as the true subject of knowledge and great men as the
privileged agents of historical change.49 Cultural history, by contrast, oriented
itself around the masses rather than individuals, prioritizing customs and
mentalities over political events. Perhaps most importantly, Kulturgeschichte
gave license to the use of images and other nonverbal sources as genuine
historical documents, which testified to a wider range of social practices and
beliefs than the textual archives of landed elites could bear out. Not only did
images enlarge the scope of historical inquiry; like seismographs, they at times
seemed capable of registering the collective psychological undercurrents that
connect past, present and future.
At the University of Leipzig, Sudhoff was colleagues with the most
controversial cultural historian of his generation, Karl Lamprecht—who had
incidentally been one of Warburg’s most influential teachers.50 It was the same
Lamprecht who was closely involved in the organization of the Internationale
Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik (International World Exhibition of
the Book Trade and Graphic Arts), or Bugra for short, which opened in
Leipzig in March 1914. Attracting 2.3 million visitors before the abrupt
outbreak of the First World War, the Bugra was billed as a veritable Welt-
Kultur-Ausstellung (Exhibition of World Cultures). Much like its predecessor in
Dresden, it staged a spectacular microcosm of an asymmetrically globalizing
world, with numerous national pavilions, ethnographic dioramas, and even a
recreation of “Old Istanbul,” where visitors could watch “dervishes” and
“harem dancers” as they sipped their complementary mochas. At the center of
this grand exposition was the so-called Halle der Kultur (Hall of Culture),
which included under its auspices Lamprecht’s comparative exhibition of world
47
Warburg 1999c, on 403.
48
See Chickering 1994; Huizinga 1984; Gombrich 1969.
49
Sudhoff nonetheless considered himself a pupil of Ranke’s. See Stein 2013a.
50
See Stein 2013a, on 208–209 and Brush 2001. According to Gombrich 1970, on 37, “if there is
one man who may be called Warburg’s real teacher, it is Lamprecht.” On Lamprecht’s life and
work, see Chickering 1993. On the Hall of Culture exhibition, see Vollgraff (forthcoming).

Matthew Vollgraff
art, an ethnographic division and—last but not least—a scientific section

curated by Sudhoff.51
Entitled Drei Jahrtausende Graphik im Dienste der Wissenschaft (Three
Thousand Years of Graphic Art in the Service of Science), Sudhoff’s 1914
exhibition illustrated the evolution of visual representation in the natural
sciences across Europe, the Near East, and Asia, from prehistory to the end of
the seventeenth century.52 Due to constraints of both time and space, the
rooms were arranged not chronologically but according to scientific disciplines,
including astronomy, chemistry and physics, medicine and anatomy, zoology
and botany (Figure 12). Looking at these cluttered collages of black and white
photographs, one might well be reminded of Mnemosyne. In fact, there is more
to this resemblance than meets the eye: Sudhoff’s show and Warburg’s
Bilderatlas shared not only many of the same images, but also a common
intellectual preoccupation with the cultural history of scientific knowledge—as
well as its troubling inversion into superstition and magic.
These preoccupations are manifest in the room that Sudhoff devoted to the
history of medicine, which (among other things) gathered together various
images of Babylonian and Etruscan bronze liver models used for augury
(Figure 13; see top). Several of the very same photographic images reappear in
Panel 1 of Warburg’s Bilderatlas, which thematizes the cosmological correspon-
dences that gave this type of fortune-telling its meaning (Figure 14). This
divinatory practice rested upon a perceived magical connection between the
organic body and the cosmos, with certain of these bronzes even assigning
specific regions of the sacrificial liver to different astral deities. Speaking about
a third-century BCE Etruscan bronze liver model (Figure 14, top row, upper
right), for instance, Warburg perceived what he called a “transitional type
between divination by entrails and mathematical cosmic speculation.”53 As
Zainab Bahrani has argued, Warburg treated these Mesopotamian sources and
their derivatives “not as a reference to the primitive, chaotic past, or even
simply to the transfer of forms from East to West, but rather as a paradigm of
knowledge, a scientific method that twentieth-century scholarship would
nevertheless categorize as irrational thinking.”54 In contrast to the splintering
lines of development outlined by Warburg’s Atlas, Sudhoff’s display simply
presents a sober inventory of bronze livers: equally chaotic in appearance
perhaps, but neatly encapsulated in their own time. Like the Pythagorean
prognostic diagrams just to their left, these implements of ancient magic are
offered not as a paradigm, or even as an impetus for the development of
science, but merely as relics of the pre-rational past, a stage long since
superseded in the slow ascent of scientific progress.55
51
See Halle der Kultur 1914.
52
Sudhoff 1914b. On the exhibition, see Kästner 2013.
53
“Uebergangstype von Eingeweideschau und mathematisch-kosmischer Spekulation.” Warburg
2008, on 112.
54
Bahrani 2021, on 264.
55
See Sudhoff 1914b, on 45.

Figure 12. Display on medieval astronomy and astrology, from the “Three Thousand Years of
Graphic Art in the Service of Science [Drei Jahrtausende Graphik im Dienste der Wissenschaft]”
exhibition, Bugra, Leipzig 1914. Halle der Kultur 1914, on 66.
Similarly, several of the images from Sudhoff’s display on astronomy in

ancient Greece and Babylonia (Figure 15) were later reproduced in Panel 2 of
the Mnemosyne picture atlas, dedicated to the Hellenic cosmological imagina-
tion (Figure 16). Both share the same three photographs of depictions of
Andromeda, Cetus, and Cassiopeia, taken from a ninth-century copy of an
ancient zodiacal manuscript. According to Warburg, it was only “thanks to
their power of poetic and anthropomorphic visualization” that the ancient
Greeks “created order among the flicker of infinitely distant heavenly bodies,
by grouping the stars into constellations and projecting into their imaginary
outlines beings or objects after which the constellations were named.”56 But as
Warburg knew quite well, the Greek conception of the cosmos was not created
ex nihilo, and he insisted upon tracing Greek astral figures back to their Near
Eastern precedents. In this connection, we can observe the transfer of materials
from Sudhoff’s exhibition not only to the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, but also to
the 1930 public exhibition at the Hamburg Planetarium. For example, an
etching from a twelfth-century BCE boundary stone (kudurru) of Nebuchad-
nezzar I depicts the figure of the centaur hunting with a bow that eventually
became the sign of Sagittarius (Figure 17); while the astrological embellish-
ments at the top of an eighth-century black marble kudurru (lent by the Berlin
Vorderasiatisches Museum) include the familiar zodiacal symbol of the
scorpion (Figure 18). In the Hamburg Planetarium exhibition, Warburg’s
successors Saxl and Bing adopted an approach much closer to Sudhoff’s,
56
Aby Warburg, “Über astrologische Druckwerke aus alter und neuer Zeit (1911),” quoted and
translated in Gombrich 1970, on 199–200.

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 13. Display on “Liver Divination and Disease Prognostics in the Spheres of Pythagoras and
Apuleius,” “Three Thousand Years of Graphic Art in the Service of Science [Drei Jahrtausende
Graphik im Dienste der Wissenschaft]” exhibition, Bugra, Leipzig 1914. Halle der Kultur 1914, on
83.

Figure 14. Panel 1 of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London.
producing a relatively linear history of ancient astral symbols’ journey from

Near Eastern “unreason” to the Greek “genius.”
The formal commonalities between Sudhoff’s and Warburg’s exhibition
projects also betrayed far-reaching conceptual differences. Let us return briefly
to Panel B of the Atlas, which centers on the projection of the cosmic system
onto the human body (Figure 4). According to Warburg, the astrological figure
of the “zodiac man”—found, among other places, in the thirteenth-century
manuscripts of Hildegard of Bingen (upper left)—expressed a fundamentally
classical understanding of the harmonic correspondences between man and
universe. Yet he also staged his photographic montage to illustrate how, as he

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 15. Display on astronomy in ancient Greece and Babylonia, from the “Three Thousand
Years of Graphic Art in the Service of Science [Drei Jahrtausende Graphik im Dienste der
Wissenschaft]” exhibition, Bugra, Leipzig 1914. Halle der Kultur 1914, on 65.
put it in 1913, “man and the astral symbol shrivel up in the post-classical
Middle Ages into a dreary instrument of sympathetic magic.”57 As medieval
barber-surgeons applied the harmonic correspondences of ancient cosmography
directly to the patient’s body, the Tierkreismann (zodiac man) merged into the
Aderlassmann (bloodletting man): thus patients were bled at the knee if the
month was in Capricorn, for instance, or at the ankle if it was in Pisces.58
These astrological-medical practices effectively perpetuated the same “iatromys-
ticism” Warburg had decried in his letter to the Hygiene Exhibition curators in
1910.
Karl Sudhoff, too, had a long-standing interest in iatromathematics and its
visual representations.59 In 1914, he published a visual compendium of
57
Aby Warburg, “Wanderungen der antiken Götterwelt vor ihrem Eintritt in die italienische
Frührenaissance (1913),” quoted and translated in Gombrich 1970, on 202.
58
Ibid.
59
Sudhoff’s 1902 study of “Iatromathematicians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”
(Iatromathematiker vornehmlich im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Eine Studie) concludes dramatically
with the following indictment of astrological superstition: “If alchemy may be styled the mother
of chemistry, then is astrology the fantastic, degenerate sister of astronomy, who from birth bore
in her body the germs of early dissolution. Iatro-chemistry was an important half-way station in
the progress of medicine, and its influences are still vital and sensible in the scientific medicine of
today; but iatromathematics was a confused dream of the possibility of exactitude in prognosis
and therapeutics, which has faded completely from the memory of recent medicine and only
survives, by scanty shreds of recollection, in the nursery tales of the children’s playroom,
cherished by the tender desires of overanxious mothers.” Quoted and translated in Garrison
1926, on 19.

Figure 16. Panel 2 of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Photo: The Warburg Institute, London.
manuscripts on medieval surgery, many of which were reproduced there for the
first time (Figure 19).60 Many of the photographs were put on display that
same year in his Leipzig exhibition on scientific images, in a section dedicated
to “zodiacal signs and planetary men and women” (Figure 20).61 It is difficult
to deny an uncanny resemblance between this exhibition display and Panel B
of Warburg’s Bilderatlas (Figure 4)—and for that matter, also the 1927
exhibition panel reiterated by the Atlas (Figure 3). Among the photographic
reproductions that teem in Sudhoff’s display, at least three would later
60
Sudhoff 1914a.
61
See Sudhoff 1914b, on 45.

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 17. Etching from a boundary stone (kudurru) of Nebuchadnezzar I, late twelfth century
BCE, held at the British Museum. “Collection of Images on the History of Astrology and
Astronomy [Bildersammlung zur Geschichte der Astrologie und Astronomie]” exhibition at the
Hamburg Planetarium, 1930. Warburg 2012, on 409.
resurface in Warburg’s Panel B: a zodiac man from the Très riches heures du
Duc de Berry (Figure 20, second row down, third from right); a fifteenth-
century manuscript from Paris depicting Heracles as kosmokrator (top, far left);
and a thirteenth-century “shepherd’s calendar” from a Munich manuscript
(top, fourth from right).
It is uncertain whether Warburg viewed the exhibition, either in person or
in print: his correspondence gives no indication that he travelled to Leipzig in
1914, and the illustrated guide to the Bugra—the Amtlicher Führer—does not
figure among his library’s possessions. Nonetheless, the often staggering overlap
between his and Sudhoff’s display programs testifies as much to their ongoing
exchange of materials and ideas as it does to their shared investments in putting
the cultural history of science and medicine on public view. To greater or lesser
degrees, both scholars advanced a cautionary enlightenment narrative that
upheld classical antiquity as a moral and aesthetic standard; and both tended to
treat the historical arc of Western civilization as a gradual triumph over
medieval and Eastern magic, facilitated by an emulative return to ancient
Greece. Yet the differences are equally discernible already in their distinctive
arrangements of the images themselves. Whereas the medical historian’s display
practice could best be described as didactic, Warburg’s mature perspective was

Figure 18. Plaster cast of a black marble kudurru of the Babylonian king Marduk-appla-iddina II,
721–711 BCE, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin. The astrological embellishments on the upper
margin include the zodiac symbols for the scorpion, sun, moon, and Venus. “Collection of Images
on the History of Astrology and Astronomy [Bildersammlung zur Geschichte der Astrologie und
Astronomie]” exhibition at the Hamburg Planetarium, 1930. Warburg 2012, on 409.
more dialectical in nature. His Bilderatlas and public exhibitions strove not to
enlighten the masses out of superstition, but to illustrate precisely the inevitable
“interpenetration of rational and magic thought.”62 Panel B (Figure 4) is a case
62
Gombrich 1970, on 200. Fritz Saxl referred directly on this distinction in an enthusiastic letter
he sent to Warburg from Sudhoff’s Leipzig institute in 1927: “Diese Sammlungen sind eigentlich
das Interessanteste und Anregendste, was ich seit langem gesehen habe. Sie haben eine
erstaunliche Ähnlichkeit mit unseren, nur mit dem Unterschied, dass hinter unseren Sammlun-

Matthew Vollgraff
Figure 19. Zodiacal bloodletting diagrams from medieval manuscripts. Sudhoff 1914, Plate 54
(detail).
in point, for its visual argument does not simply stop with the superstitious
surgeon’s manuals; the bottom half goes on to track how, in the sixteenth
century, the encircled zodiac man metamorphoses yet again into Leonardo da
Vinci’s rationalistic studies of human proportion (center)—and simultaneously
into the occultist magic of Agrippa of Nettesheim (bottom right).63
Despite the palpable imprint of evolutionary theory on his thinking,
Warburg rejected rationalist narratives of progress. Superstition was and would
always remain the ineradicable complement to enlightenment: “That age when
logic and magic blossomed […] in Jean Paul’s words, ‘grafted to a single stem,’
is inherently timeless.”64 While his public exhibitions tended more towards a
straightforwardly didactic mode, the more private and heuristic arena of the
Bilderatlas almost always problematized progressive visions of history—hence
its fundamentally fragmentary, agonistic, and unresolved vision of European
gen Sie mit Ihren philosophischen Fragestellungen stecken, hinter den Leipziger der ganz
positivistisch gerichtete Sudhoff.” WIA, GC, Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 14 January 1927.
Underlining by Warburg in original. English translation: “These collections are actually the most
interesting and stimulating thing I have seen in a long time. They bear an astonishing similarity
to ours, the only difference being that behind our collections is you with your philosophical
questions, while behind the Leipzig collections there is the entirely positivistic Sudhoff.”
63
Saxl also discussed these “microcosmic” images in a 1926 lecture. See Papapetros 2012, on 86–
89.
64
Warburg 1999b, on 599.

Figure 20. “Zodiac Signs and Planetary Men and Women,” “Three Thousand Years of Graphic Art
in the Service of Science [Drei Jahrtausende Graphik im Dienste der Wissenschaft]” exhibition, Bugra,
Leipzig 1914. Halle der Kultur 1914, on 84.
culture’s past and future. By contrast with Sudhoff’s dispassionate, cataloguing

approach, Warburg used the collage format to pursue historical survivals into
the present day, incorporating also contemporary sources (newspaper clippings,

Matthew Vollgraff
advertisements, stamps) into the longue durée of what he called the “self-
education of humanity [Selbsterziehung des Menschengeschlechts].”65
4.
By inquiring into the hidden and maligned sources of cultural history, Sudhoff
claimed, the “historian of hygiene [finds himself] in the same position as the
modern historian of art.”66 But while they shared a certain cultural-historical
outlook, he and Warburg also held irreconcilable views about the use value of
images. In his 1914 exhibition especially, the medical historian addressed
images primarily as auxiliary instruments of scientific knowledge, preoccupied
especially with the development of verisimilitude. This also impacted his
opinion of the primary medium of both his exhibitions: photography. Only
such a “self-triggering photo-chemical process” could liberate images from the
taint of subjectivity, he opined.67 Still, by specifically deploying photographic
reproductions of artistic images, Sudhoff nonetheless demonstrated that, as
Sander Gilman puts it, even “‘subjective’ images could form the stuff of
‘objective’ history.”68
For his part, Warburg’s shifting attitudes towards photography closely
match with the changing aims of his scholarship. Writing in 1907 about the
pedagogical exhibitions of Dürer and Rembrandt at the Hamburg Volksheim,
he summarily dismissed the use of photography as a “surrogate,” as “adultera-
ted food,” and a “systematic obstruction of the emergence of an independent
and informed interest in art.”69 Over time, however, his emphasis on “art
appreciation” turned into something more akin to the public enlightenment
motives of Sudhoff’s exhibitions. If in 1905 Warburg had unironically
described the lower-class spectators at the Volksheim as “seekers of enlighten-
ment,” by the time of the Atlas both the means and the ends of that
enlightenment had changed irrevocably.70 In crucial ways, the later Warburg
abandoned traditional art-historical questions in pursuit of a broader cultural
history of knowledge. Sudhoff’s visual exhibitions may well have served as a
65
Aby Warburg, “100 Handzeichnungen. Dürer als Spiegel seiner selbst und seiner Zeit.” Notes
for inaugural address at the Hamburger Volksheim, 1905, WIA III.60.1, fol. 26, quoted and
translated in Russell 2007, on 46.
66
See Sudhoff 1926b, on 115: “Dwellings, settlements, food, clothing, the care of the body,
exercise, sexual relations, as also many things so closely related to hygiene as the disposal of the
dead, must all pass in review before our eyes, if we are to gain the true historic viewpoint. Over
the whole world, the historian of hygiene must diligently and faithfully follow up the researches
of the historian of culture and the work of archaeologists, with that sense of values which the
modern hygienist cannot be without.”
67
Stein 2013a, on 208, note 35. Sudhoff’s enthusiasm for photography in the process of collecting
facts stemmed from this belief. He deemed photography a “self-triggering photo-chemical
process,” which did not require any personal input from the historian. Sudhoff 1911, col. 279.
68
Gilman 1995, on 24.
69
Warburg 1999a, on 718.
70
Ibid., on 717.

model for this endeavor. But rather than considering images, as the medical
historian did, merely as novel sources of history, Warburg also viewed images as
active agents of that history.71 Images can collapse the mental distance between
cause and effect, as in Babylonian liver models or astrological surgical diagrams;
but they can also generate new spaces of reflection in turn. In this way, the
peregrinations of symbols charted by the Atlas reflect how images have served
as instruments not only of scientific, but also spiritual orientation.72
By way of conclusion, let us return to the example of the theriac vendors
with which this article began. At multiple junctures, Warburg speaks of the
reception of classical antiquity itself as a process of “aesthetic detoxification
[ästhetische Entgiftung]”: the sublimation and rationalization of the destructive
forces of human unreason.73 Giulio Romano had aesthetically detoxified the
theriac vendor, on this view, by rendering him as a placative, latter-day
Laocoön. It is in the same sense that Warburg imagined certain hallucinatory
affinities between the theriac vendors of Renaissance Italy and the Hopi serpent
ritual dancers in the modern American Southwest—both of whom manipulate
poisonous snakes in ritual manifestations of supernaturally-ordained immu-
nity.74
It was no accident that the serpent, in Warburg’s anthropology of images,
was one of the most potent symbols of the “inner and outer demoniac forces
that humanity must overcome.”75 Yet like theriac itself—a venom antidote
produced from snakes’ flesh—images and symbols can also immunize us to the
dangers they carry within themselves: as so often, the poison is also the cure. In
a similar sense, Warburg once professed that he could only approach the goal
of “understanding, enlightenment, law in the workings of cultural history […]
71
Indeed, he was not above selecting those images that suited his preferred historical narrative.
Newman 2008 uncovers how, in composing his essay on astrology in the German Reformation,
Warburg deliberately chose an image of Albrecht Dürer’s 1496 woodcut of a syphilitic man from
a 1912 collection by Sudhoff that the latter referred to as a “barbarically” manipulated version of
uncertain authorship. By ignoring the cleaner original that Sudhoff reproduced in the same
volume, Warburg “‘primitivizes’ this ‘early’ Dürer print in decisive ways, making it easier to align
with the illustrations adorning the ‘popular’ prognostication treatises that were his subject in the
first part of the talk.” Ibid., on 102.
72
See Warburg 2008, on 125.
73
Warburg 1932, on 563. In a note from 29 January 1927, Warburg reflects further on the
“detoxification of the tragic [Entgiftung des Tragischen].” WIA III.97.2.1.1, fol. 26.
74
Warburg had described the Hopi serpent ritual as a “cultic exchange with the most dangerous
beast, the live serpent.” Warburg 1995, on 35–36. “The Indians have found in these dance
ceremonies a way of handling the most dangerous of all animals, the rattlesnake, so that it can be
tamed without violence, so that the creature will participate willingly—or at least without
making use of its aggressive abilities, unless provoked—in ceremonies lasting for days. This
would surely lead to catastrophe in the hands of Europeans.” Ibid., on 35.
75
“Symbol dessen […], was der Mensch äußerlich und innerlich an dämonischen Naturkräften zu
überwinden hat.” Warburg, 2010, on 560–561.

Matthew Vollgraff
by including irrational instinct within the ambit of historical investigation.”76

As Georges Didi-Huberman has written, Warburg’s interest in fear and
“primitive” unreason “was still a way of seeking Enlightenment, but in a tragic
mode—in the melancholy affirmation that the ‘monsters’ resist or, rather,
survive all the stages of the ‘progress of reason.’”77
It is due to Warburg’s dialectical embrace of his own “monsters” that,
despite its debts to Sudhoff’s exhibitions, the complex and contradictory vision
of cultural history realized in the Mnemosyne Atlas decisively parts ways the
earlier tradition of popular scientific enlightenment.78 Warburg’s Bilderatlas
was at once the apotheosis and the exorcism of the bourgeois liberal humanist
vision of culture. Before 1914, the man who ironically referred to himself as
the “good European” could still maintain a certain faith in the laborious and
hard-won achievements of universal reason.79 By 1929, however, in the wake
of the devastation of the First World War, the rise of fascism and antisemitism
in Europe, and his personal struggle with mental illness, Warburg had come to
grips like few others with the perpetual perils of political madness and mass
violence: Mnemosyne, one might say, was his attempt at an antidote.80 While it
absorbed the techniques of Volksaufklärung, Warburg’s visual exposition of
cultural history, science, and superstition ultimately pointed towards an
altogether more disturbing kind of “enlightenment”: namely, “the devastating
truth that unchained, elemental man is the unconquerable ruler of this
world.”81
76
“Erkenntnis, Aufklärung, Gesetz im kulturgeschichtlichen Verlauf durch Einbeziehung der
unvernünftigen Triebhaftigkeit in die Untersuchung des geschichtlichen Verlaufs.” WIA, Family
Correspondence (FC), Aby Warburg to Mary Warburg, 26 December 1923. In an intriguing
parallel to Warburg, the Polish-Jewish microbiologist and epistemologist Ludwik Fleck used
Sudhoff’s anatomical images to illustrate his 1935 monograph Genesis and Development of a
Scientific Fact, but also criticized the German medical historian’s idealistic narration of the rise of
modern anatomy. See Fleck 1979, on 140 and 143; and Fleck 1986, on 73.
77
Didi-Huberman 2016, on 290.
78
They also parted ways politically, albeit after Warburg’s death: on Sudhoff’s 1933 enlistment in
the Nazi party, see Stein, on 200. Panel 79 of Mnemosyne takes up as one of its themes the
Concordat (or Lateran Treaty) which Mussolini signed with Pope Pius XI on 11 February 1929.
79
Warburg borrows the phrase “good European” (and its accompanying irony) from Friedrich
Nietzsche, who had coined it “out of disgust with Bismarck’s German Reich.” Hannah Arendt
argues that this notion enabled Nietzsche to positively affirm the Jewish contribution to
European history without “falling into the pitfalls of cheap philosemitism or patronizing
‘progressive’ attitudes.” Arendt 1951, on 23.
80
On Warburg’s illness, see Binswanger and Warburg 2007. In the preparatory drafts for his 1923
serpent ritual lecture, Warburg recounts how as a young man he “devoured” Indian novels as a
means of emotional escape from his mother’s protracted illness. He describes these novels
retrospectively as a form of inoculation, whereby “painful sensations were abreacted in the
fantasy of romanticized cruelty.” Thus the “technically tranquilized artistic configurations” of the
artist Max Slevogt, illustrator of the German editions of James Fenimore Cooper, provided the
young Warburg with a “fertile soil and a vaccine [Schutzimpfung] against the agent that destroys
romanticized terror, and which the average educated person needs.” Warburg 2004, on 308.
81
“Der Krieg von 1914–1918 hatte mir in vernichtender Weise die Wahrheit entschleiert, dass der
entfesselte elementare Mensch der unüberwindliche Herrscher dieser Welt ist.” WIA, FC, Aby
Warburg to Mary Warburg, 26 December 1923.

Acknowledgements
Open access funding provided by Universitat Basel.
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Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 47 (2024): 1 – 34 www.bwg.wiley-vch.

Before Mnemosyne: Wilhelmine Cultural History

Summary: Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, left unfinished in 1929,

Keywords: Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Karl Sudhoff, exhibition

© 2024 The Authors. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte published by Wiley-VCH GmbH

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Es ist der Mensch ein wunderlich Gericht,

On 4 September 2020—after significant delays incurred by the COVID-19

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audience.12 Warburg’s later assistant Fritz Saxl practiced a more politically

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images with the aim of popular enlightenment (Volksaufklärung). The exhibi-

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practice of cultural history—models that directly anticipate Warburg’s Bilder-

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Our story begins, not in Wilhelmine Germany, but in fifteenth-century Italy.

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of iatromysticism. The antitoxic idea of immunization sinks down into belief

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pavilions also abounded, from children’s welfare and temperance societies to

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“power of ideas” over hygienic practice, and the obstructive force of

The cautionary examples of superstitious medicine on display, including the

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festival, Giulio Romano’s seventeenth-century fresco (Fig. 7) instead attested to

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art, an ethnographic division and—last but not least—a scientific section

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Similarly, several of the images from Sudhoff’s display on astronomy in

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producing a relatively linear history of ancient astral symbols’ journey from

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