Guided Pathway

The panel’s final image, at lower right, is a drawing of Giambologna’s statue of Samson clobbering a Philistine with the jawbone of an ass (#26). The work was first installed in 1562 in a Florentine fountain, whose plan appears in the drawing’s corner, that was erected at the behest of the Medici Dukes. In medium it is a fitting heir to the quattrocento: a statue set under an open sky. Formally, its closest match on the panel is Donatello’s statue of Judith. Politically and morally, however, it could seem a world apart. It is a product of the Tuscan duchy that overthrew the Florentine Republic, and Samson is no defender of freedom, but a proud brawler who kills for an insult, the very type of the cavalier. 

Yet Warburg chose to reproduce Ghirlandaio’s Judith once more alongside Giambalogna’s brute (#25.2). Did the proud optimism of the fifteenth century foreshadow the tyranny of the sixteenth? The question is often posed of Machiavelli, as a politician the guardian of republican virtue, as a philosopher the inventor of mercenary virt__ù. Here Warburg puts it to the ninfa, who emerges, not as a hollow image, but as a liquid one, well-suited to an age of exchange value. She brings us what we want: fruit, our enemy’s head on a platter, all good things.