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.