Giocare con il Bilderatlas. Due casi e una questione teorica : tavole 56 e 53

The paper raises some issues with regard to Panels 56 and 53 of the Menemosyne Bilderatlas, but also raises a more general methodological question about the use to which the Panels lend themselves, insofar as their associative structure calls for two different and not mutually exclusive modes. The first mode is historical-philological and consists in the attempt to anchor the images in the documentation left by Warburg and his circle in order to determine the reasons and meanings each montage had for them. The second mode, on the other hand, takes as its starting point the constitutive indeterminacy of the association between two or more images, and then functions in a way similar to the association in Freudian analysis, where it reveals the subterranean workings of dreams and the unconscious.