Figure della Malinconia attraverso l'Atlante della Memoria : Galleria ragionata delle immagini dal Bilderatlas

A "reasoned gallery of images from the Bilderatlas" in the first part of the essay that traces a route throughout Aby Warburg’s whole Atlas. This track follows a postural formula that qualifies various figures that are displayed in the Atlas panels, as a specific expressive brand: a head, a face leaning on the hand. This is the posture that characterizes the enigmatic central figure of one of the better known engravings of the Renaissance: the Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer. The gallery proposed here, and that crisscrosses through all the Atlas panels, shows a gestural and postural link that connects different figures, male and female, according to precise tangent lines and marked by a well-defined position: the hand to the face, committed to support the weight of the head, as if the point where the face finds support is the precise place where the gravity of the body posture in an act of contrition or neglect is channeled most insistently, almost free-falling, be it leaning against a support, or slumped, semi-lying or all-lying. In assembling the gallery, the figures are not set in chronological order according to the date of composition, but rather in a thematic-formal articulation that starts off from the posture of pondering and reflecting (SERIES I. From the pondering Muse to the posture of the humanist-intellectual), or of anguish or mourning (SERIES II. Melancholy on the stage of commiseration), accidie (SERIES III. Figures of idleness (and old-age), and abandonment (SERIES IV. Ariadne or the figures of abandonment). Each of these presents a prototypical image in ancient repertoire: the thinking Muse (I); the mourning accompanying the deceased (II), Accidie (III), Arianna (IV).