Per monstra ad sphaeram

With this volume, Per monstra ad sphaeram, readers have for the first time at their disposal a thematically and chronologically consistent selection of unpublished texts by Aby Warburg, in a philologically authoritative edition prepared in collaboration with the Warburg Institute. They are the fruits of the work carried out by the author during his recovery in the psychiatric clinic of Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, and they are also the testimony of his cure. This book demonstrates that Warburg never stopped, even during the most critical period of his life, from reflecting on the problems that interested him, and that the famous lecture The Ritual of the Serpent was not an isolated phenomenon, a lightning bolt in the sky. serene night sky of Kreuzlingen. The texts after this conference that are collected in Per monstra ad sphaeram can be considered the original nucleus of the Atlas Mnemosyne, his main work. Aby Warburg offers here, for the only time, the closest thing to a synthesis of his work, and guides the reader through the labyrinth of his thought: the persistence of images, like a psychic unconscious that crosses the ages; the eternal dynamic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between form and the dark forces that rule our existence; the great cosmological dance in which the chaotic and disintegrating forces are contained, counteracted by an order that provides balance... The illuminating reading of these texts allows us to live, together with the author, the experience of a personal and true catharsis.