Guided Pathway

Thus the panel could be simplistically reduced to the contrast between guardianship and assault, as it plays out in scenes drawn from the New Testament and the Old. This schematic analysis is complicated, however, by three remaining images that do not exhibit any of the primary themes, but that serve to stitch the four quadrants together. One, in the top left corner, is the earliest monument depicted on the panel (#1), while another, at bottom right (#26), is the latest. They establish a notional chronological axis on the diagonal that is roughly observed by the images in between. The third outlier (#7) marks a vertical seam at the panel’s center that blurs the distinction between guardians at left and killers at right.

The panel’s very first image is a drawing of a late antique sarcophagus (#1) on which Christ is flanked by the apostles and a personification of Ecclesia (the Church), all sheltered beneath an arcade. Here Christ appears as a young man, and without his parents, in contrast to the other images at top left. However, the sarcophagus’s arcade forges a connection with the pictures in the panel’s uppermost row. It is followed by a leaf from a Gothic manuscript (#5) with a frame of three trefoil arches, and two reliefs by Donatello (#16 and #17), in which the action occurs before two more arcades.

Although these architectural frames form a little tripartite history of European architecture (“Ancient,” “Medieval,” “Renaissance”), they appear on some of the earliest works depicted on the panel. Even Donatello’s reliefs date to the earliest decades of the Florentine Renaissance. The future, as shown by the images further down on the panel, was outdoors. The removal of the “vault of heaven” from European cosmology held great significance for Warburg, who remarked in a lecture of 1925 that “the entire Promethean tragedy of man lies in this phrase. There is no solid vault above us. But we must make use of this image as an aid to help our eye as it stands, clueless, faced with infinity.” Its removal encapsulates the daring and the hubris of the Renaissance.