Guided Pathway

The rite of baptism (from the Greek verb baptìzo: I wash, I immerse), symbolizing regeneration, purification, forgiveness of sins and finally admission to the Christian Church, belongs to a wide and complex constellation of rituals of initiation through immersion and ablution shared by many ancient religions. Besides the explicit reference to such a rite in the images representing John the Baptist in panel 46, that baptism signals the passage from a pagan/non-Christian condition to a Christian one is implicitly represented as well: in 603 the Lombard king Agilulf (#1) converted from Arianism to Catholicism. And we should not neglect the fact that in 1898 Aby Warburg himself, a Jew, had married Mary Hertz in a Christian rite and had showed deep interest in Catholicism himself.

While reiterating and amplifying the nativity-theme of the panel through its reference to a regenerative “re-birth,” baptism also raises the very delicate issue of transition itself in the dialectical tension “rupture vs continuity”: Christ’s advent marks an absolute fracture in the history of mankind, but at the same time (according to the typological reading of the Bible) it repeats and accomplishes figures and events that already happened in the Old Testament. Seen from an even wider perspective (both religious and cultural), this is true as well for the relationship Paganism-Christianity, and Antiquity-Modernity: again in #1, while converting from Arianism to Catholicism, Agilulf receives two classical Nikai or Victoriae in front of his throne. The theme of inter-cultural transition, passage, adoption and acceptation – what Warburg used to call Austausch (exchange: in the whole range of its spatio-temporal implications: North< >South, East< >West, Pagan< >Christian, Ancient< >Modern), is variously evoked on panel 46: beside the aforementioned type-veterotestamentary/antitype-neotestamentary connections, we might explore here: #3 (according to some Christian authors – e.g. Augustine, De civitate dei XVIII.23 –, the Erythraean Sibyl’s pagan prophecies had announced Jesus’ coming); #8.1-8.5 (Lucrezia Tornabuoni rewrites and transforms vetero- and neotestamentary episodes into Florentine Renaissance narrations); #10 (the verso of Niccolò Fiorentino’s medal representing Giovanna Tornabuoni as a Venus Virgo); #20 (Venus and the Graces visiting Giovanna Tornabuoni in Botticelli’s fresco); and #11.1 (the Christian church of San Zeno reuses, and therefore gives hospitality to a Roman pagan bas-relief).