Guided Pathway

The most literal way to introduce someone in a community, to bring someone to someone, is to give birth to him/her. Nativity certainly appears as the most impressive motif in panel 46, variously evoked in birth scenes both from the Old and the New Testament: of Esau and Jacob (twins born from Isaac and Rebekah, in #15: Alfonso Lombardi’s bas-relief); of John the Baptist (#4, 5, 6.1); and of Christ (#2). We experience here a Steigerung (intensification) of the carrying-theme: servants and carriers offering food and presents to a puerpera [a woman who has just given birth] (as in #5, 6.1-2 and 15) replicate and amplify, in a sort of mise-en-abyme, the gesture of bearing performed in the highest form by the puerpera herself. From the vantage point of the antithetical semantic inversions made possible by the same syntactic structure – a crucial point in Warburg’s thought –a stimulating comparison might be suggested between the aforementioned birth scenes and #14 (Lot and his family escaping from Sodom – Genesis 19:15-26 – in Tribolo’s bas-relief): a montage of the tension between benign arrival vs dramatic departure.

In the economy of the panel, the birth of John the Baptist is given much more room than the birth of Jesus, in spite of the obvious minor role played by John in the economy of the New Testament; how, then, should we understand such a patent economic imbalance? At least two elements should be taken into consideration here to grasp the role of this threshold figure: firstly, John is precisely “the Baptist,” and through the rite of baptism he is the one who presents Jesus to the community; and in doing so, he introduces a man after whom the community itself (and the world as a whole) will be changed forever. Secondly, in his sermons given on the banks of the Jordan River he had foretold the coming of Christ. Thus he is actually defined as pródromos, forerunner and precursor of the Saviour himself, and in Warburgian terms we might say that the Baptist’s acknowledgment of his minor role compared to Christ (they are depicted together in #8.4: an illumination from Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s Istorie) is a form of Steigerung, as well: “Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui” (Jesus “must increase, but I must decrease”: John 3:30). From a typological perspective, we might connect the veterotestamentary typoi-twins Esau and Jacob (#15) – famously fighting for the right of primogeniture (Genesis 27:1-40) – to the neotestamentary antitypoi-“twins” John the Baptist-Jesus (#8.4) – where the “controversy” is solved in favor of the latter.