Visualized arguments and verbal descriptions. On a less known episode of Aby Warburg’s last stay in Rome

In March 1929, Aby Warburg visited the Vatican Ethnological Museum and was struck by an object he would have liked to include in his Mnemosyne Atlas. In the African section, Warburg, writes, there was a “Victory among the Benin bronzes,” which suggested to him connections both in terms of political iconography and in broader morphological terms. Based on archival sources and contextual evidence, this paper proposes identifying this object as a statuette from Benin that is still preserved today in the ethnological collections of the Vatican Museums. The relevant passages from Warburg’s diaries and notebooks offer clues for reconstructing the constellations of images within which a reproduction of the statuette would have been placed.

The interpretation of this case can shed some light on Warburg’s way of visualizing arguments and on his use of condensed verbal descriptions. At the same time, it suggests a more general reflection in regard to the categories of cultural translation and the memory of images, inviting us to consider the Atlas not only as an object, but also (and perhaps mainly) as a tool for orientation within contemporary visual culture