Before the Moodboard: Aby Warburg and the Art of Thinking with Images
- Jun 5
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 13
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 a relation to appear. Sometimes it's a shared atmosphere. Sometimes a detail passes from one image to another. Sometimes the same gesture returns in a different form.
A raised arm, a face turned towards the sky. We tend to read such images as products of their own time: a Renaissance painting, a film still, a fashion editorial. Aby Warburg looked for what passed between them. 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's question was not about taste or reference. It was more fundamental: why do certain images return?
The Man Who Saw Memory in Forms
Born in Hamburg in 1866, Aby Warburg is usually described as an art historian, though his field extended far beyond art. He studied religion, ritual, astrology, mythology, folklore and the visual culture of everyday life, tracing the forms that moved between them.
Rather than asking only what an image meant, he asked why it remained active.
Warburg understood thought as something carried not only by language but by gestures, repetitions and visual forms. An image, in his work, was never entirely self-contained. It could retain something of the culture that produced it and transmit that charge into another time.
The Afterlife of Images
One of Warburg’s central ideas was the Pathosformel, usually translated as “pathos formula.” The term describes recurring gestures through which intense emotions take visible form. Grief, ecstasy, fear, desire, violence and triumph appear in bodily poses that can survive long after their original context has disappeared.
A wind-blown figure from 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 setting changes, the gesture persists.
Warburg called this survival Nachleben. Images don't disappear. They wait. Then return when a new moment needs them.
Warburg used the word Nachleben to describe this survival: the afterlife of images. It does not imply simple repetition. Each return alters the image, but something of its earlier force remains legible.
The light of a Renaissance painting can reappear in a luxury campaign. The pose of a saint can enter a pop image. A runway silhouette can recall an antique statue. These are not necessarily deliberate quotations. Warburg’s work allows us to recognise them as part of a longer visual inheritance. Trends fade, images remember.
Mnemosyne: An Atlas of Visual Memory
Warburg gave this method its most radical form in the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Begun in the late 1920s and left unfinished at his death in 1929, the atlas consisted of reproductions pinned to large black panels: artworks, maps, diagrams, newspaper photographs, astrological charts, bodies, fabrics, gestures, symbols.
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Panel 32 Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Panel 7 Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Panel 8
There was no continuous text and no orderly chronology. Instead, Warburg placed images beside one another so that correspondences could become visible. A classical figure might appear near a Renaissance painting, a cosmic diagram beside a newspaper photograph, a mythological body next to an image from ordinary life.
Meaning was produced not by any single image, but by the intervals between them. This is where the connection to the moodboard becomes clearer. A moodboard is commonly used to establish a palette, atmosphere or visual direction. Warburg’s atlas demonstrates another possibility: arranging images can itself be a form of inquiry.
Long before Pinterest boards, campaign references and Instagram carousels, Warburg understood the force of proximity. Placing one image beside another changes how we see both. The Mnemosyne Atlas was therefore less a catalogue than an instrument. Its panels could be rearranged as Warburg’s thinking developed. The relations between images were never final.
A Library Where the Past Keeps Moving
His library worked in much the same way, bringing distant subjects together through proximity, resemblance and surprise. Warburg founded it in Hamburg, and Fritz Saxl turned it into a research institute in 1921. In 1933, the collection, its staff and even its furniture were transferred to London. The Institute became part of the University of London in 1944 and moved into its Woburn Square building in 1958. The building reopened in 2024 following the Warburg Renaissance renovation.
The shelves don't follow conventional academic divisions. The collection is organised around four broad themes: Image, Word, Orientation and Action. It also follows what Warburg called "the law of the good neighbour": a reader comes looking for one book and finds another beside it that changes the question.
The Archive Has a Sound
The Department of Euterpe (1926–2026) extends this associative method into another medium. Presented in the Warburg Institute’s Kythera Gallery until 3 October 2026, the installation imagines a forgotten department devoted to sound. Conceived as an institutional fiction, it proposes a semi-hidden division that might have existed at the edges of the Institute since its early years.
Named after Euterpe, the Greek muse of music and lyric poetry, the project approaches the archive through listening. The gallery becomes part office, part archive and part audio laboratory. A continuous sound work brings together music, recordings, fiction, archival material and historical research, accompanied by imagined custodians, collections, classification systems, musical evenings and sound essays.
The project asks how an archive can be approached when evidence is not limited to documents and images. Warburg’s atlas made thought visible by placing images beside one another. The Department of Euterpe asks whether sound can do the same.
It also widens Warburg’s question: when an image, a gesture or a sound returns, what returns with it?
Opening image: Aby Warburg’s unfinished Bilderatlas Mnemosyne brought together 63 black panels and 971 images as a moving atlas of visual memory.
Photos: Courtesy of The Warburg Institute