Guided Pathway

“Quos ego” —Warburg cites Neptune’s arrested speech in the panel’s heading. As the god of rivers and oceans addresses the guilty storm winds, his utterance is broken off before the verb: “Whom I—.“ In this pause, he chooses not to retaliate, and curbs his retort in order to calm the storm. The ambivalence of this linguistic fracture, the god’s powerful refusal of his own anger, stutteringly repeats in four images on the panel. Neptune’s stoical pause situates his force in his own ambivalence. On this panel, Warburg extends the moment of that ambivalence so that it becomes another site for thinking.

John Ruskin said of Neptune, in Queen of the Air: A Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm, “Spiritually this King of the waters is lord of the strength and daily flow of human life; he gives it material force and victory; which is the meaning of the dedication of the hair, as the sign of the strength of life.” (3.1, 3.2)