With this volume, Per monstra ad sphaeram, readers have for the first time at their disposal a thematically and chronologically coherent selection of unpublished texts by Aby Warburg, in a philologically reliable edition prepared in collaboration with the Warburg Institute. They are the fruits of the work carried out by the author during his recovery in the psychiatric clinic of Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, and they are also the testimony of his cure. This book shows that Warburg never stopped, even during the most critical period of his life, from reflecting on the problems that interested him, and that the famous lecture The Serpent Ritual was not an isolated phenomenon, a bolt from the blue. Kreuzlingen serene night sky. The texts after this conference that are collected in Per monstra ad sphaeram can be considered the original core of Atlas Mnemosyne, his capital work.

Aby Warburg offers here, for the only time, the closest thing to a synthesis of his work, and guides the reader through the labyrinth of his thought: the survival of images, like a psychic unconscious that crosses the ages; the eternal dynamic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between the form and the dark forces that govern our existence; the great cosmological dance in which the chaotic and disintegrative forces are contained, counteracted by an order that provides balance... The illuminating reading of these texts allows us to live, together with the author, the experience of a personal and true catharsis.