Historical Analysis of Images, or Image Analysis of History: From "Mnemosyne" and

"Passagen-Werk" to Morphology of Image

TANAKA Jun

Today, I will consider the morphological metamorphosis of image memory in Warburg's

"Mnemosyne" and Benjamin's "Passagen-Werk" using a morphological approach myself.
And I would like to explore the contributions that the morphological method used for the
historical analysis of images (or historical image analysis) can make to the methodology of
"art history."

Aby Warburg's renowned "Mnemosyne" image atlas project is a "constellation" of images

which consists of the plates of books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements and other visual
documents on black panels. It is a compressed record of the survival of the classical antiquity
in Europe presented only by the images of Warburg's research activities thoughout his life,
beginning with his Botticelli research and extending to the expression of pathos and the image
of astrology in the fine arts of the Italian Renaissance.
The panel itself has been lost. What can be seen now are only the photographs taken in some
stages of the process of changing the arrangement of the images. The photograph thought to
be the last version tells only the state of the panels at the time work on them was interrupted
by Warburg's death, and is not complete.
Warburg's original interest was in the kind of anachronism with which "antiquity" was
revived during the Renaissance. His analysis, which pursued the survival of antiquity in
image memory, became anachronistic, disrupted linear time, and juxtaposed "what has been"
with "the now." Of course, he does not disregard either the process of tradition along a
time-axis or influence relations, but they are not the purpose of his investigations. All that
matters is the modification of images in the process of the tradition, propagation, and reuse of
those images that go back to antiquity, and the differences for each epoch and area brought
about as its result.
In such a context, Warburg's maxim "God dwells in details" means "God dwells in
differences." The social conditions and the mental tendencies peculiar to each epoch and area
that went into action with the modification of images are interpreted through those differences.
Warburg found the function of "selective will of the age (der selektive Zeitwille)" in the
image modification process. For his "comparative psychology," Warburg pointed to the
function of European collective memory as a formative force for the emergence of styles by
using the civilization of pagan antiquity as "a constant."
The space of the social memory in which the images are accumulated, transformed and
connected to each other does not know time, similar to the Freudian unconscious. Here,
Warburg's researches into the rule of historical modification of images is analogous to the
psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams.
The vivid meaning of the antique images discovered in the Renaissance or the Reformation
was not a pure revival of the original antique meaning, but was produced retroactively
through the process of reusing those images.
In order to establish such a retroactive meaning, every historical phenomenon must once be
isolated from the contemporaneous context based on linear time through which its meaning is
usually given, and all must be considered as synchronic signifiants. This is how Warburg
investigated "deferred action (Nachträglichkeit)" in the memory of European cultural history
through his "Mnemosyne."
The black screen of "Mnemosyne" is a table for such synchrony. Because of this character,
"Mnemosyne" was often compared with the technique of the photomontage of Dadaism and
that of Russian constructivism. Each image was overdeterminated by the contiguous relations
on the panel, and Warburg tried to investigate the process of the retroactive semantic
formation of images from various angles by continuously changing the arrangement of images.
This image atlas was a technique with heuristic value.
Warburg called this space of memory "the interval (Zwischenraum)" where images are
connected by a network. Mnemosyne is not a mere two-dimensional table. The relations of
images cannot be closed only within each panel. Rather, they cross the panels and make a
structure of mutual reference.
This figure that I created based on the index of Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE of Warburg's
Gesammelte Schriften shows the links of the panels that share a name of a person or a place, a
theme, and a motif. The figure shows that the whole Mnemosyne has a tightly knit network.
Thus, the space of image memories of "Mnemosyne" potentially spreads three-dimensionally.
In fact, Warburg exhibited panels similar to Mnemosyne at a lecture meeting and exhibition
in the Warburg cultural science library (Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg) in
its elliptical hall. He created a space surrounded by numerous images.

In "Mnemosyne," Warburg tried to illustrate the process of metamorphosis over thousands of

years experienced by ancient symbolic images. He was influenced by Goethe's study of nature.
Warburg's iconology, which crystallized to form “Mnemosyne”, is, so to speak, a
morphological analysis of symbols originating in antiquity. It searched for "the primary
phenomenon (Urphänomenon)" of the gods of ancient paganism, and the missing link
between heterogeneous expressions of them.
The symbolic image of antiquity in this morphology of is a primary image corresponding
precisely to Goethe's "original plant (Urpflanze)" and "prototype (Typus)," and we can follow
its metamorphosis in various phenomena in European culture. For example, Warburg found
out the "prototype" of Perseus in a figure of the fresco of the Schifanoia palace, and he also
found out the "prototype" of the Nymph in a female figure in an modern advertisement. "The
pathos formula (Pathosformel)", Warburg's original concept, means the same "prototype."
Such a "prototype" is not necessarily a historical "origin." It is rather an image formed of the
act which, so to speak, memorizes a "family resemblance" (Wittgenstein) to various other
images through repetitive contact with them.

The similarity between Warburg's "Mnemosyne" and Benjamin's "Passagen-Werk" is often

pointed out. First of all, both Warburg's "Mnemosyne" and Benjamin's "Passagen-Werk" use
a montage of quotations as their constituting principle. However, it is important that not only
Warburg who analyzed visual images, but also Benjamin grasped the "prototype" of the
history, which corresponds to Goethe's "primary phenomenon" as visual "image (Bild)."
In his "Passagen-Werk," Benjamin argues that the concept of "the origin (Ursprung)" which
he used in his thesis "The Origin of the German Tragic Drama" is the Goethean concept of
Ur-phenomenon "extracted from the pagan context of nature and brought into the Jewish
contexts of history" (N 2a, 4). His "Passagen-Werk" is also the pursuit of the "origin" in such
a meaning. Benjamin said:
"I pursue the origin of the forms and mutations of the Paris arcades from their beginning to
their decline, and I locate this origin in the economic facts. Seen from the standpoint of
causality and however (and that means considered as causes), these facts would not be primal
phenomena; they become such only insofar as in their own individual development--
"unfolding " might be a better term-- they give rise to the whole series of the arcade's concrete
historical forms and just as the leaf unfolds from itself all the riches of the empirical world of
plants."
His task is not to clarify causal relationships, but to research economical facts as
morphological "primary phenomena (Ur-phenomenon)." Benjamin called the form of the
origin as historical object a "dialectical image." Recognizing the origin means to catch this
image with its ambiguity. Because of this ambiguity, it is "dialectics at a standstill."
Benjamin wrote that historical facts become "polarized" to "fore- and after-history" by their
encounter with actuality. Every dialectically presented historical circumstance polarizes itself
and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history
is played out. As he argued:
"And thus the historical evidence polarizes into fore-and after-history always anew and never
in the same way." (N 7a, 1)
To grasp history in this way is to be attentive to anachronistic "deferred action
(Nachträglichkeit)" that smashes the continuity of the historical time of propagation and
tradition.
For Benjamin, the fore-history of Baudelaire's poetry was the 18th century allegory, and its
after-history was Jugendstil at the end of the 19th century. For Warburg, the fore-history of
Ghirlandajo's Nymph was ancient "Victoria," and its after-history was an advertisement of a
travel company. The image in which the fore-history and the after-history are represented is
the site of "confrontation" in which many historical powers encounter each other.
And so, we can say that Warburg tried morphologically to catch the Benjaminean "origin" in
ancient symbolic images as a "prototype" which dwells in the visual culture of Europe. In
Benjamin's dialectical image, what has been and what is now come together in a flash to form
a constellation. (N 2a, 3) The dialectical images are produced from their arrangement of the
plural powers at tension.
Benjamin pursued the perceptibility or graphicness (Anschaulichkeit) of historical description
in "Passagen-Werk". What would he have found in "Mnemosyne", which made the
constellation of countless images emerge on the sky of black panels? On this image atlas, not
each image alone but the network of intricately related images, which make each other its
“fore- and after-history”, forms the dialectical image as a constellation in the sky.

However, this method risks lapsing into non-historical speculation. So Benjamin strove to
distinguish the dialectical image as the "origin" clearly from Jungian archetypes. When the
problem of the survival of antiquity was related to the social or collective memory of Europe,
Warburg too might have lapsed into this trap.
Warburg does not take the simplified positivistic view that the spread of influence of antiquity
can be based only on the process of propagation with historical evidences. However, on the
other hand, the existence of symbols shared a priori as collective memory and remain same
universally and eternally is difficult to prove.
Carlo Ginzburg is a very conscious historian on this problem of the methodology of history.
His work Storia notturna investigates the possibility of the morphological method in
historical study. As Ginzburg points out, in the comparative study for an extensive diachrony,
"isomorphism establishes identity, not vice versa". The "prototype" of antiquity as the
"origin" is found out retroactively through morphological "isomorphism." It is not a
fundamental symbol (archetype) in the unconscious, which is inherited hereditarily.
The unconscious creates the isomorphic phenomenon of images not through universal and
eternal symbols, but through the modification of metaphorical replacements of the forms of
symbols themselves.
Warburg's "selection" by "the will of the age" is exactly such an unconscious process of
transfer and modification. For Warburg, morphology was the way to discover resemblances
between many phenomena in different epochs, and to observe the metamorphosis of the
"prototype" in the modifications.
In Warburg's "Mnemosyne" and Benjamin's "Passagen-Werk," the most important thing is
neither the real work of art nor the urban space of actual Paris. It is rather the metamorphosis
of their images. In other words, "Mnemosyne" and "Passagen-Werk" are more than a "history
of works of art" or "history of a city," they are "morphologies of images."

The background of this move from art history based on the work of art to such a "morphology
of images" in the 1920s and the 30s was changes in the media environment surrounding the
works of art. As we all know, Benjamin discussed this change in his essay "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
In his essay, Benjamin analyzes the modification of the images of the work of art by modern
media such as photography and cinema. Warburg too was taking notice of the role of such
media as movable tapestries in the Italian Renaissance and the social function of reproducible
prints in the Reformation. Furthermore, "Mnemosyne" was premised on photographic
technology, which enables the reduction of images and the expansion of details, and Warburg
himself also edited images by framing and layout. "Mnemosyne" itself was a laboratory for
the metamorphosis of images by duplication technology.
In this context, Japanese art historian Yukio Yashiro's book "Sandro Botticelli” is also
important. This research published in English in 1925 attracted attention because it used
partial photographs of Botticelli's works in large quantities, and had a large influence on
research methods and on the appearance of art history books. With their enlargement of parts
of pictures, figures influenced similarities between Botticelli's details, for example, his
decorative flowers, and the work of Japanese Rimpa and KITAGAWA Utamaro. For example,
we can discover a resemblance between these pictures of the Renaissance and the lacquer
work of OGATA Korin through the enlargement of the iris drawn on the right corner of
Botticelli's “Spring (Primavera)”.
The works, which do not originally have a direct influence relation, are connected by their
resemblance in the forms of details. If Yashiro's book had contained not only the figures of
Botticelli's works but also those of Korin and Utamaro, and if, for example, he had arranged
Red Fudo of Koyasan beside Botticelli's “Death of Saint Ignatius” (San Barnaba altarpiece,
predella) -- Yashiro wrote about a similar tendency between them --, it might have become
the forerunner of Warburg's "Mnemosyne".
Neither Yashiro's work on Botticelli nor Warburg's "Mnemosyne" could have been realized
without photographic media. They not only needed the photograph as a technical condition,
but also were able to discover details for the first time by turning their own camera eyes to
works of art. Thanks to photographic framing, certain details retroactively turned into
cryptograms or symptoms in which God (or a Demon) dwells. The technology to transform
visual images also changes our knowledge about those images.

What kind of methodological contribution can the morphology of images make to art history?
As for Goethe, the study of nature and art were deeply related each other, and could not be
divided easily, thus the morphology of images weaves a new relation between "art" and
"history." The purpose of the morphology of images is to create a space where the scientific
analysis of history and knowledge through art meet and unite. It is the method focusing on the
"perceptibility or graphicness (Anschaulichkeit)" which Benjamin demanded of historical
description. Because this method is developed in an interval in which thinking by images and
scientific thinking by signs are interwoven, Warburg named his method "iconology of interval
(Zwischenraum)".
For example, Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema (Histoire(s) du cinema)" can be
interpreted as an example of such a method. In the work, the visual information such as
classical films and films by Godard himself, still photographs, pictures, characters and the
audio-information of narration and music are connected and compressed by montage
containing many gaps in a very short interval. What made it possible was video technology.
Furthermore, while "Histoire(s) du cinema" is a movie, which can be appreciated along a
linear time-axis, its DVD has become an archive of images with the index, chapters, and
references. Through many quotations of images, Godard told the "history of the cinema" on
the one hand, but on the other hand, he tried to constitute a "cinema of the history." In this
movie, cinematic art has gained a new relation with the knowledge about history of 20th
century. The montage in "Mnemosyne," "Passagen-Werk," and "Histoire(s) du cinema" is
itself a form of thinking.
Can it serve as a new method of history? "The morphology of images" by "thinking through
montage" must become a heuristic chance to reexamine the methodology of art history and to
connect art history with the new technologies.
As a similar attempt in the methodological reconsideration of art history, we can refer to the
studies of Georges Didi-Huberman. For example, through the analysis of the concept of
"survival" of images in Warburg's thoughts, Didi-Huberman criticizes Panofskian iconology
and deconstructs the concept of time, which the discipline of art history needs as
presupposition. There, he seeks the possibility of anthropological history of images (not
works of art). Hans Belting's "Image-Anthropology (Bild-Anthropologie)" is a similar
approach (but in a more moderate way).
About the isomorphic phenomena in myths and rituals, Ginzburg argues that the constant
re-elaborations to myths and rituals illustrate the "intermingling of history and morphology."
This also means the "intermingling" of history and anthropology. Didi-Huberman and Belting
are trying to find in this complex intermingling a kind of "after-history" of art history in the
Benjaminean sense. This anthropological approach can and should be applied not only to the
prehistoric age, but also rather to the present age. Because, in this age, the new form of
isomorphism seems to have appeared from the rapid stream of images flowing by information
technology globally and instantaneously in an overwhelming scale. In order to grasp the
meaning of this isomorphism, we need not only historical narrative but also a morphological
method that works with new technologies of image processing. Even if this science may be
not an art history in the traditional sense any longer, it will constitute an “art of the history”
like Godard's “cinema of the history.”