Gli atlanti fotografici della memoria di Aby Warburg, Gerhard Richter e W.G. Sebald

The role of photography in W.G. Sebald’s works has been widely analysed under the scope of the implicit or explicit reference to the Shoah made by the images contained in his essaystic and narrative books. If it is truth that photography aims in Sebald’s works at giving voice – and even face – to the people who were perse-cuted during the Holocaust and eventually became victims of the past, one cannot forget that the author’s iconotexts also aim at discolising what the writer himself defined as the «metaphysical lining of reality». Thus the images operate in a dual register in Sebald’s writing: on the one hand, the documetary and, on the other hand, the «self-consciously literary», as Martin Swales called Sebald’s purpose to intimate in his books this sense of the «metaphysical lining of reality». Also with respect to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne (1924-1929) and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962-2013) this paper aims at investigating this double meaning of photography in Sebald’s works, by revealing how his books can be considered as iconic atlas of documents and memories arranged by specific «pathetic formula», that represent individual and collective methaphysical challenges and fears.