Guided Pathway

In a note in French from 1929 Warburg ironically remarks on the verso of #11.1-2: “Immortel Paganisme – est – tu – mort – on le dit – Mais Pan se mocque – et la Victoire en rit – Die Eilsieglinde” (“Immortal Paganism, are you dead? They say so, but Pan makes fun of this, and Victory laughs at it – the Eilsieglinde). The playful way that this comment focuses attention on the Roman female carrier clearly suggests Warburg’s profound sensibility for the Nachleben (survival, or rather posthumous life) of pagan antiquity into the Christian age. The neologism Eilsieglinde – Eil=hurry + Sieglinde=German female first name) hints both at the motor activity and at the plexus Sieg=Nike=victoria=victory. It is connected to other two slightly different neologisms, also nicknames for the Verona carrier, appearing in Warburg’s fragment on the Fundamental Concepts (Grundbegriffe: see Gombrich’s biography, p. 297): Eilsiegebring and Eilsiegbringitte, which both introduce beside the Eil-motif the Bring-motif, as well; the latter sounds like a sort of modification of the first name Brigitte. We thus come back to our first step in the phenomenology of bringing (the simple action of carrying an object): but now such quotidian carrying bears the most complex implications of cultural transfers across different epochs.

The Veronese “Hurry-Bring-it” is one of only  two images that on panel 46 undergo a disjunction between whole/detail: in the lower-left area she operates as the ancient counterpart of the true protagonist dominating the panel on the upper-right side: the Ninfa fiorentina (#6.1-6.2, on Ghirlandaio’s fresco already anticipated on panel 45). She appears here last for us, but she is first per se: being one of the most emblematic among Warburg’s iconic characters, she has comprehensibly attracted the hermeneutic efforts of eminent interpreters (Weigel, Agamben, Calasso, Didi-Huberman). Corresponding to the secular tradition of falling in love with images (that counts among others Pygmalion’s Galatea and Norbert Hanold’s Gradiva), Warburg himself developed an early erotic obsession with the nymph figure, one shared with his close friend from his Florentine days, the Dutch art and literary critic André Jolles, with whom around 1900 he had planned to write an epistolary novel centred on this Ninfa. The image on the panel is literally supported by the horizontal series of Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s pages, as the Tornabuoni family was actually the patron and client of Ghirlandaio’s frescos in Santa Maria Novella.