Guided Pathway

Notwithstanding her emblematic character, one should not address Ghirlandaio’s nymph as the nymph, but only as a nymph: she historically embodies one of the innumerable variations of the formula “nymph”, that – precisely like Goethe’s morphological Urpflanze (originary plant) in relation to any vegetal phenomenon – appears as a structural theme never given in itself and yet circulating among all its endless variations, which can never exhaust it and are in turn all recognizable (despite their semantic and symbolic differences, even of their energetic oppositions) as belonging to the same family. As Wittgenstein might put it, a “family resemblance” gathers them together.

The family of nymphs conjured up on panel 46 is one of canephores carrying beneficent gifts (food, drinks, etc.: #1, 6.2, 11.2, 17, 18, 20; victory: #1; help in parturition and other difficult deeds: #2, 4, 5, 8.2, 15; positive messages: #2, 3, 8.4, 19; water to douse the fire: #16; salvation from destruction and genocide: #8.1, 14; rites of passage: #12, 21): they are literally “vehicles” (from the Latin vehiculum, from vehere: “to carry, bear, convey”; but also “to pass, sail, ride”) carrying objects, presenting people, transferring cultures.

Nevertheless, the presence of Judith in #8.3 (from Lucrezia’s Istorie) hints at a potential inversion: the type of the “head-hunter” (Judith with Holofernes, Salome with the Baptist) as a menacing correlative of the benevolent maiden, thoroughly explored by Warburg in the subsequent panel 47. As the Jolles-Warburg 1900 fragments suggests, the peculiar mobile posture of the advancing nymph appears as a neutral formula (Formel) that can embody itself in various characters expressing a different Pathos: in a Dionysian maenad and in a humble servant, in Salome and in Judith, in a joyful bridesmaid at the Marriage of the Virgin and in a terrified mother in the Massacre of the Innocents, even in a seraphim or in the angel Gabriel announcing the birth of Jesus. Variations on a theme which in itself is one of the two poles delimiting the whole range of human expressivity: namely mania (the ecstatic nymph), as opposed to melancholia (the depressive river god: as investigated in panels 4 and 55). 

The explicit of panel 46, the enigmatic presence of a peasant woman (#18), evokes – last but not least – the extremely delicate issue of the relationship between art and life, image and reality: Warburg’s history of images as the documentary history of human expression becomes here a dynamic, weight-bearing threshold between existence and its representation.

I am very grateful to Christopher Johnson for his generous help in revising my text and for his valuable comments. - AP