Der Weg von Rimini zu Rom: memoria dell’Antico e gradazioni di realtà nel viaggio di Gertrud Bing e Aby Warburg in Italia

This essay focuses on Aby Warburg and Gertrud Bing’s last Italian journey (1928-29) to follow their common exploration of a particular form of ‘memory of the antique’ that ran parallel to the Atlas’s preparation. During the first part of their trip from Milan and Bologna to Rome through Rimini, the two scholars recorded various forms of typological and figural representation (grisaille, liminal figures, painted architecture) culminating in the Sistine Chapel, which left a particular impression on Gertrud Bing. A close reading of an annotation by her in the Tagebuch der KBW allows us to unfold the aesthetic and cultural filters through which they looked – sometimes differing from each other – at the several «gradations of reality» that other observers before them (from Jacob Burckhardt to Carl Justi and Heinrich Wölfflin) had described and that we define here as the mediality of memory in Renaissance art.