Before the Moodboard: Aby Warburg and the Art of Thinking with Images
- Jun 5
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Long before the moodboard became a digital habit, Aby Warburg understood that images think differently when placed beside one another.
The Moodboard Before the Moodboard
Today, we are used to seeing images in clusters. A brand moodboard, an Instagram carousel, a campaign reference: images gathered together, waiting for some kind of relation to appear. Sometimes it is only a mood. Sometimes a detail connects one image to another. Or an image returns without announcing itself.
A gesture, a raised arm, a face turned towards the sky. We often read these images as if they belonged neatly to their own time: a Renaissance painting, a film still, a political photograph, a fashion editorial. Warburg saw something more restless. For him, images were not fixed to the moment in which they appeared. They moved across time, taking on new meanings while carrying older ones.
The moodboard, in this sense, was never only a design tool. It was also a way of thinking with images. Warburg understood this from another century. His question was not about taste or reference, but something stranger: why do certain images return?
The Man Who Saw Memory in Forms
Born in Hamburg in 1866, Aby Warburg is often introduced as an art historian, but that description feels too narrow. His work was not only about art, nor only about history. He was interested in the emotional life of images: how certain forms, poses and symbols move through culture, carrying fragments of older worlds into the present.
For Warburg, an image was not a closed object. It was a trace, a disturbance, a carrier of memory.
He looked at art, religion, ritual, astrology, myth, folklore and everyday visual culture not as separate worlds, but as connected fields of human expression. His question was not simply, “What does this image mean?” It was closer to: “Why is this image still alive?”
This is what makes Warburg feel so contemporary. He understood that thought does not belong to language alone. It also moves through gestures, repetitions, forms and visual memories we may not even recognise.
The Afterlife of Images
One of Warburg’s most important ideas was the Pathosformel, often translated as a formula of pathos. The term sounds academic, but the thought behind it is almost physical. Some emotions, Warburg suggested, return through the body. Grief, ecstasy, fear, desire, violence, triumph: they take shape in gestures and postures that repeat across centuries.
A wind-blown figure in antiquity might reappear in a Renaissance painting. A religious pose might return in a fashion photograph. A composition of mourning might echo in a news image. The emotion changes its setting, but the visual charge remains.
This is why some images feel strangely familiar even when we are seeing them for the first time. They do not feel new because, in some way, they are not. They belong to a deeper archive than taste.
Warburg called this survival Nachleben: the afterlife of images. It is one of the most beautiful and useful ideas in his work. Images do not disappear. They wait. They sleep inside culture, then return when a new moment needs them.
Today, this idea feels strangely close. We live among repetitions, references and returns, even when we do not name them as such. The light of a Renaissance painting reappears in a luxury campaign. The pose of a saint slips into a pop image. A runway silhouette recalls the weight of an antique statue. Even a casual Instagram pose may carry older gestures of power, surrender or display.
Warburg helps us see that these are not only aesthetic choices. They are cultural recurrences. Trends fade; images remember.
Mnemosyne: An Atlas of Visual Memory
Warburg’s most radical work, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, made this visible. Begun in the late 1920s and left unfinished at his death in 1929, the atlas was not a book in the usual sense. It was made of images pinned to large black panels: reproductions of artworks, maps, diagrams, newspaper photographs, astrological charts, bodies, gods, fabrics, gestures, symbols.
There was little explanation. No tidy chronology. No single argument leading the viewer from beginning to end.
Instead, Warburg placed images beside one another and allowed meaning to emerge in the space between them. A classical figure could sit near a Renaissance painting. A cosmic diagram could speak to a newspaper image. A mythological body could echo through an everyday photograph.
The atlas did not tell the viewer what to think. It asked them to stay with the images a little longer.
This is where the connection to the moodboard becomes more than a convenient comparison. A moodboard is usually treated as a practical tool: a way to define a palette, an atmosphere, a visual direction. Warburg’s atlas suggests something less straightforward. To arrange images is not only to organise them. It is also to begin thinking through them.
Long before Pinterest boards, campaign references, editorial decks and Instagram carousels, Warburg understood the force of proximity. He knew that images change when they are placed beside one another. A detail becomes louder. A gesture repeats. One image changes the way we look at another.
The Mnemosyne Atlas was not an archive in the usual sense. It was a field of relations.
That is why it feels so close to the present. We are surrounded by images that arrive without much context, gather quickly, create moods and disappear into the next sequence. We scroll through fragments, but what they stir in us is often older than the screen itself.
A Library Where the Past Keeps Moving
Warburg’s thinking also resists the idea that culture moves in a clean line from old to new. In his world, antiquity does not end. It returns. Myth does not vanish. It changes costume. The past is not behind us; it is folded into the present.
This is perhaps why the Warburg Institute remains such a singular place. Now part of the University of London, the Institute grew from Warburg’s library and his unusual way of organising knowledge. It is not simply a library of art history. Its collections move through Renaissance studies, magic, astrology, folklore, religion, philosophy, science, ritual and visual culture.
Its logic is not purely alphabetical or disciplinary. It is associative. One subject leads to another. Images, symbols and ideas seem to approach one another across time. A book on astrology may sit near a study of Renaissance art. A question about ritual may lead towards politics, theatre, memory or the body.
The Institute gives form to the idea that knowledge is not always a straight corridor. Sometimes it is a room full of echoes.
The Archive Has a Sound
The Department of Euterpe (1926–2026) enters this history almost naturally.
Presented at the Warburg Institute’s Kythera Gallery from 17 June to 3 October 2026, the installation imagines a forgotten department devoted to sound. Described as an institutional fiction, it suggests a semi-hidden department that might have existed quietly at the edges of the Institute since its early years.
Named after Euterpe, the Greek muse of music and lyric poetry, the project asks what happens when an archive is approached through sound. If Warburg asked how images remember, The Department of Euterpe asks whether sound might remember too.
The gallery becomes a listening room, somewhere between an office, an archive and an audio laboratory. A continuous associative sound piece plays through the day, bringing together music, recorded sound, fiction, archival fragments and new historical research. Around it, the installation imagines custodians, collections, classification systems, musical evenings and sound essays as part of the Institute’s unofficial life.
This connection to Warburg does not feel forced. His work was always concerned with the movement of memory across forms. Euterpe changes the medium. The archive no longer only asks to be read or seen. It asks to be heard.
A library, after all, is never completely silent. It contains footsteps, pages, whispers, rituals of attention, the private sounds of people thinking. The Department of Euterpe brings that hidden register forward.
To look at Warburg today is to see that visual culture is never only contemporary. The images around us may belong to the present, but many of them carry older desires, fears, gestures and myths. They belong not only to now, but to a longer, more restless memory.
Photos: Courtesy of The Warburg Institute
