Atlas is the name given in Greek mythology to a titan who, along with his brother Prometheus, contested the power of the gods of Olympus in order to make that power available to man. Legend has it that while Prometheus had his liver torn out by a vulture in the far East, Atlas was forced (in the West, between Andalusia and Morocco), to bear on his shoulders the weight of the celestial vault. It is also said, that from this weight he gained an unsurpassable knowledge of the world and an – albeit hopeless – wisdom.
He is the ancestor of astronomers and geographers; some even say he was the first philosopher. He gave his name to a mountain (Mount Atlas), to an ocean (the Atlantic), and to an anthropomorphic architectural form (an atlas or atlantes) which is designed to support an entablature.
Atlas, finally, gave his name to a visual form of knowledge: a gathering of geographical maps in a volume, and more generally, a collection of images intended to bring before our eyes, in a systematic or problematic way – even a poetic way, at the risk of being erratic, if not surrealist – a whole multiplicity of things gathered there through elective affinities, to use the words of Goethe. The atlas of images became a scientific genre in itself in the 18th century (we can think of the plates of l’Encyclopèdie) and it developed considerably in the19th and 20th centuries... (learn more at: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/2011/atlas_en.html)
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