Moche panel fragment with four figures
Crossing geographic and disciplinary borders

About Us

The department encourages the crossing not only of geographic but also disciplinary borders through exploration of a wide range of fields including architecture, urban planning, critical and post-colonial theory, media studies, the sciences and social history.

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Upcoming Events

Apr 15
Tuesday 04:45 AM

Clarinda’s Power of Circulation

Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Apr 17
Thursday 05:15 PM

A Conversation on Suzi Ferrer

Johnson Museum of Art Robinson Lecture Hall
Apr 18
Friday 05:00 PM

Suzi Ferrer Exhibition Open House

Johnson Museum of Art
Apr 22
Tuesday 04:45 AM

Trap and Lure: Colonialism, Wax, and the Work of Art History

Goldwin Smith Hall G22
See all events

'Firing the Canon'

Associate Professor Annetta Alexandridis is featured in 'Firing the Canon: The Cornell Casts and Their Discontents':

Panels from the Mnemosyne Atlas
Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, panel 39 (recovered, detail)

Mnemosyne: Meanderings through Aby Warburg's Atlas

Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the Mnemosyne Atlas is Aby Warburg’s attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity,” or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany. Focusing especially on the Renaissance, the historical period where he found the struggle between the forces of reason and unreason to be most palpable, Warburg hoped that the Mnemosyne Atlas would allow its spectators to experience for themselves the “polarities” that riddle culture and thought.

Click here to explore ten panels from the Mnemosyne Atlas.

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Image caption:
Moche panel fragment with four figures (detail), 500-700 AD. Moche (Peru). Camelid wool on cotton. Bequest of Michael A. McCarthy, Class of 1956. Object number2002.122. Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art
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