Guided Pathway

Sometimes the object of the offering can be a subject, a human being. Such a possibility is emblematically represented in panel 46 both by allegorical and religious scenes, respectively in #21 (a young man – perhaps to be identified with Lorenzo Tornabuoni – accompanied in front of the Liberal Arts, again in Botticelli’s fresco from Villa Lemmi) and in #12 (the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary – introduced as a child by her parents Joachim and Anne to the priests of the Temple, as recounted in the apocryphal Gospel of James –, painted by the Master of the Tavole Barberini).

In panel 46 this kind of presentation of someone to someone else is also explored from what might be called a mediological perspective: a major vehicle of the visual presentation of a subject to a community is actually the portrait (from the Latin verb protraho:drag forward, bring to light, reveal), here exemplified by two portraits of Giovanna Tornabuoni through different mobile and transportable media: one in Ghirlandaio’s painting (#9), the other in Niccolò Fiorentino’s medal (#10). A portrait crystallizes the dialectics between the image that the subject of the representation wants to offer to his/her community and the gaze given by the community to the portrayed subject: a dialectics “look at /be looked at” that is implicitly evoked by Warburg in #8.5 (from Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s Istorie in rima: Susanna and the Elders, a scene recounted in some versions of the Book of Daniel).

A remarkable number of pictures on panel 46 seem to allude to an identity-issue connected in heterogeneous ways to the (self-)presentation of the subject and to his/her unexpectedly becoming or revealing himself/herself to be somebody else. This is actually the case for: #8.5 (the honest Susanna is charged with adulterous behavior, and only thanks to Daniel’s testimony the accusation is disproved: Daniel 13:36-64); #8.2 (in Tobit 5:4-5 the angel Raphael helping Tobias in his journey is believed to be a human being, and reveals his true nature only at the end, in 12:15); #14 (having recourse to wine Lot’s daughters disguise their filial status in order to lie with their father); #15 (Jacob pretends to their father Isaac to be his firstborn Esau: Genesis 27:19-23); all the images related to John the Baptist (he acknowledges he is not the true Baptist, only Jesus is: “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?”: Matthew 3:14).