Aby Warburg researched the "survival of antiquity" in European culture. In the open structure of his image systems, he deciphered how images and gestures were transported across cultures and times—on early mobile image media such as carpets and prints, which he called "image vehicles." Aby Warburg was the first media scholar to expand the art history of masterpieces to include fashion, advertising, and everyday culture. After his death, his 1929 picture atlas Mnemosyne became a standard work of modern image studies. 

 In 2020, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, in collaboration with the Warburg Institute London and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, succeeded in producing the first complete and faithful "reconstruction" of this folio volume, long believed to be lost. In the first of two commentary volumes, now published, the authors present a detailed search for clues on the "wandering paths of culture" up to the Renaissance. Complementing the earlier publication, this book promises to provide an insight into Warburg's intellectual cosmos with precise research on the first 32 of a total of 63 plates.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929), scion of a Hamburg banking family, completed his doctorate in 1892 on the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. As a result, he comprehensively studied the interplay of myths, images and rites from different cultural contexts. This lead him to his main subject matter: the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance. With his attempt to break down the rigid boundaries of art history, Warburg is regarded as one of the fathers of modern pictorial science.
 
The art historian Roberto Ohrt (*1954) and the artist Axel Heil (*1965) have searched through the 400,000 individual pictures in the Photographic Collection at the Warburg Institute in London, looking for the images for the atlas. Their work is a comprehensive tribute to Aby Warburg's pictorial world.