WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Tuesday, March 18, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents a talk by Annie Bourneuf (School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Clark Professor 2024–25).

 

She investigates one of the most enigmatic passages in the German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg's picture-atlas Mnemosyne, his attempted summation in arrays of images of his work on the afterlife of antiquity, centered on Renaissance Europe and nearing completion when he died in 1929, stated a press release. 

 

This free event takes place at 5:30 pm in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

 

According to a press release:

 

Mnemosyne ends with two panels revolving around the Lateran Accords of that year, which established a new relationship of reciprocal support between the Catholic Church and Mussolini's Fascist regime. Warburg himself stayed out late to witness the massive celebrations of the agreement, which he described as "the re-paganization of Rome," and later combined press photographs of this and related events with reproductions of paintings by Botticelli and Raphael on the theme of the Eucharist, defamatory woodcuts depicting Jews desecrating the Host, a staged photograph of seppuku, and newspaper photographs of athletes, among other items, to make the two last panels. How might Warburg have understood the accords? What do these combinations of images do? More broadly, how can we understand the possibilities and perils of this foundational art historian's attempt to bring his scholarly work to bear on the images and gestures formed by and in part forming the mass politics of his present?

 

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.