Over the past years Aby Warburg has become a key figure in the field of cultural thinking. Father of iconology and begetter of Kulturwissenschaft (Science of Culture), he has been repeatedly quoted in virtually every study concerning the image.
The main purpose of this paper is to establish the relevance of his working method -if it can be considered it truly exits- for the study and criticism of contemporary architecture. The way Warburg treated images proves to be particularly useful when approaching the fragmented present architectural panorama where the ambiguity of the real, escapes historiography’s own classifications.
However, this posthumous popularity has been accompanied by a number of delusions. What if the image we have of his Mnemosyne Atlas is a myth? And what if the assessment of his achievement has been inaccurate? Thus, some issues that tarnish his figure needed to be clarified. Among them the most relevant are the relation of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Proyects, and the true nature of Mnemosyne itself.