Guided Pathway

According to any number of accounts of the periodization logic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Brown and Holly, for example), the two periods of the Renaissance and the Baroque had been locked in a somewhat awkward historiographic embrace from the very beginning of these terms’ theorization, with the latter characterized as a “degenerate” form of the former at the time (differently, see Newman 2011, 44-64). Warburg appears to have agreed with this stance in his early essay on Dürer (1905, 181), for example, where he implicitly cites the definitive work of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (Renaissance and Baroque, 1888) to this effect; that he was deeply familiar with contemporary debates about period and style is in any case evident in a letter to Adolph Goldschmidt of August 9, 1903 (“Richtungen,” 672-9). Warburg’s co-worker and intellectual partner, Fritz Saxl, had studied for a semester with Wölfflin in Berlin and heard lectures by the other great theorist of the Baroque, Alois Riegl, when a student in Vienna, suggesting that Warburg would also have known the famous Riegl’s 1908 The Origin of Baroque Art in Rome through Saxl as well. In this context, it must strike us as odd that Panel 70, which is located nearly at the end of the project – and thus near the end of the argument of the Atlas overall – represents work done by artists that it was conventional at the time to associate not with the Renaissance, but, rather, with the Baroque, including Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), as well as the Baroque playwright, Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679), and opera composer, Jacob Struys (d. 1630). The panel would appear, in other words, to be at variance with, indeed, would seem to be playing something of a counter-intuitive role in the narrative economy of the Renaissance-endorsing, sophrosyne-championing Atlas overall. Or could Warburg be suggesting here that a specific form of the Baroque, namely, a “northern” one, could do the work of the Renaissance too? If so, how?