"For the violence of my emotions": On Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne and his untold impact on Western perfumery

Aby Warburg's legacy and intuitive work on the correlations between arts and psychology are at the foundation of any multi-disciplinary approach to sciences or humanist studies. And it's time we also acknowledge Warburg in perfumery.

blog post and collage by Didi

  Each time I have to write a personal statement for a university, no matter the position I am applying for, I cannot omit the relevance of Aby Warburg on my educational background and understanding of mostly anything I came across in my life.

Very few people -especially outside from academia- acknowledge how Warburg did not exclusively shaped history of art or art reviewing, and I like to think that anyone engaging with his work borrows something from him.

Any art historian knows ad memoriam his description of Botticelli's Primavera and the Birth of Venus, or cannot face the discipline nowadays without encountering his Theory of Social Memory, further developed by Gombrich and other scholars. 

While some tend to view Warburg's work as an unrequieted, impulsive and emotional absorption of art, his vision was not uniquely characterized by a gut feeling, or as we should say better, the impetuous approach to such disciple was only possible because of his classical training and the parallel advent of social sciences and psychoanalysis. Warburg was the founder of "Visual Anthropology" rather than just a mere art historian. 

A brief introduction to the figure of Aby Warburg: Aby was born in Hamburg, the 13th day of June 1886. Son of a wealthy dinasty of German Jewish bankers, he was since childhood an unconventional character. A bookworm and impulsive teenager, Aby's main influences were Plato, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Mauss, Freud and Jung, allowing him to widen his interdisciplinary approach to history and art intersecting them with anthropology, sociology, literature, music, psychology and religious studies.

 While his parents wanted him to preserve the family's banking affairs just like with his siblings, he opted to pursue art studies in Florence and Berlin.  It's important to consider the historical era, and keep in mind how the fervent movements of rebellion against traditional approaches to disciplines like history and literature gave birth in that period to modern social sciences and psychoanalysis. Travelling around the globe, Warburg met many intellectuals like James Mooney or Carl Justi. But his erudite background is not possible to limit to art history: he briefly pursued a medical degree (allowing him to get in contact with the discipline of psychology and psychoanalysis), and was a keen archeologist. It is not quantifiable how he transformed Western approach to visual studies, but his legacy still remains alive with the Warburg Institute, University of London. (I recommend Ernst Gombrich's interesting biography to learn in more details about Warburg and his legacy). 

He entirely devoted in the last years of his life to the project of a lifetime, Mnemosyne (in Greek's mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory), an  attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity". While he didn't manage to finish the Atlas, his contributions allowed many contemporary intellectuals to elaborate his theories and to found the disciplines of cultural and visual studies. 

  When it comes to perfumery, art seems only stepping in the visual side for bottle design or marketing advertisement. 

Some perfumes might try to draw inspiration on certain paintings or sculpture, and most of fragrance fanatics like to juxtapose some collective imaginaries to scents. We often see amateurs pairing scents with greek or roman mythology, astrology or certain undefined collective images like "old money", "first love" etc.

I can see why for many professionals reviewing or recommending scents based on such abstract images rather than objective technical insights is perceived as an issue, and I am convinced on this merit it's worth dedicating an entire post in the next weeks. 

In defense of amateur reviewers now, I want to offer a Warburgian approach on scent reviewing, or even just consuming. 

 We can start from asking ourselves, in Warburgian terms, if fragrances are pathosformel.

For pathosformel, a term coined by Warburg, we mean social if not cultural collective  languages or images recurring in Western art. Pathosformel deals with folkloritstic symbolism as much as psychology, and can be seen as the art adaptation of the so-called Jungian archetypes. The meaning of certain objects and their positionality within a space, the relevance of light and colors on a canvas are all products of the painter's emotional and intellectual background, with the painting resulting to the spectator A) immediately familiar for some unclear and unconscious reasons or B) causing unexpected reactions (melancholy, sandess, anger, happiness an so on). Such process requires empathy from the viewer, the ability of collecting social or personal body and emotional languages and transform them in symbols, in order to be repeatedly recognized and adapted in other contexts.

So, can a scent be included in such definition? 

With perfumery, probably the debate must undertake an even more meta-physic discourse. We are not only dealing with the form. And while clearly traditional art has been challenged on this aspect multiple times, perfumery fluctuates between the olfactory sense and the visual. Dealing with perfumery on a collective scale requires mostly the ability of reconstructing olfactory memories and impressions. Descriptive words like "marine", "green" or "sweet", they all immediately evoke a wide range of images and smells, and its amplitude can to an extend become problematic and clearly generalized.

We collect different stimuli, depending on various factors like our geographical position, our emotional background, our education and our senses. 

For example, a green scent can be herbal, fresh, but those terms might assume different meanings varing on the spectator, and we hardly are able to get in more details in order to make our descriptive vocabulary more inclusive and correct.

Same happens when we associate images or memories to a scent. A pioneer in this industry on such theme is the Maison Martin Margiela line, with their perfume names like "Beach walk", "Jazz Club", "Matcha Meditation", appearing relatable and easily accessible for someone not very familiar with notes and compounds. Using images or words able to evoke an atmosphere even on an olfactory scale, seems to sell well.

I am more than confident in saying Warburg must be acknowledged also in perfumery. If perfumery is also an art, and deals with the visual, the material and the emotional, we must get familiar with Warburg's work and so with his scholars. While language can be an obstacle in reviewing honestly a scent (and so can be associating common imaginaries), the ambiguity of this field can be slightly fixed with engaging on different topics and readings, which at first might seem distant, but soon blends perfectly with perfumery.

I am looking forward to write more on Warburg, and exploring his work under some "scented" lens. Hopefully I will cover soon his Theory of Social Memory in relation to perfumery and scents.

 For now, I hope this introduction to his figure for fragrance enthusiast can spark some curiosity to engage with perfumery and fragrances also considering other disciplines. To learn more about Warburg, scents and art, I left few external readings as usual under "additional resources".

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Books on Aby Warburg:

-Aby Warburg: an Intellectual Biography by Ernst Gombrich

-Botticelli by Aby Warburg

-Bilderatlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg

-Schlangenritual by Aby Warburg 

-The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity by Aby Warburg  

 

Books on Scents and art:

-Art and Senses by Francesca Bacci, David Melcher

- Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts by Larry Shiner

 

Mnemosyne virtual tour:

-Aby Warburg Bilderatlas Mnemosyne  by Warburg Institute 

Academic articles on Aby Warburg (please note academic articles require access login via academic institution, this means most of the listed articles are only available for university scholars and staff):

-Aby Warburg's History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images, by Kurt W. Forster

- MNEMONICS, MNEME AND MNEMOSYNE. ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF MEMORY, by Claudia Wedepohl

-Ur-Words of the Affective Language of Gestures: The Hermeneutics of Body Movement in Aby Warburg by Isabella Woldt

- Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History, by Michael Diers, Thomas Girst and Dorothea von Moltke

Academic articles on scents and art:

-Scent-evoked nostalgia, by Chelsea A. Reid, Jeffrey D. Green, Tim Wildschut & Constantine Sedikides

-Scented Scenographics and Olfactory Art: Making Sense of Scent in the Museum by Viveka Kjellmer

-Heritage and scent: research and exhibition of Istanbul’s changing smellscapes, by Lauren Davis