Guided Pathway

This “Guided Pathway” thus addresses Panel 70’s period logic, both within the narrative of the Atlas as a whole and as part of the internal organization of the panel itself. What are we to make of the narrative of Baroque (rather than Renaissance) control over the passions that organizes Panel 70 when it is read as a text in conventional fashion, from top to bottom, left to right? Moreover, given the celebratory story that unfolds in the arrangement of the panel’s images when read in this way, how are we to understand its place within the narrative of the Atlas overall, a narrative that would seem to reach a veritable crescendo here and in the ensuing six panels (#71-76), with their continuing tight focus on Rembrandt as the sole artist capable of achieving the “space of enlightened reflection” (Denkraum der Besonnenheit) (the title of Panel 73) so desired by Warburg, both for himself and his country? Given Warburg’s earlier commitments to the Italian (and hence “southern”) Renaissance and its reception of antiquity, that is, why does the Atlas – and indeed, why does so much of the work that Warburg undertook in the last five years of his life (1924-29) – reach what appears to have been its penultimate claim in an examination of a specifically “northern” culture (penultimate because the very last panels (#77-79) seem to be making a somewhat different point)? Investigating the psychomachic geo-logic of the story about the northern Baroque that Panel 70 tells allows us to interrogate the political-ideological implications of the Atlas project as it emerged out of a specific moment of historical unrest, and suggests that we read it as the staging ground of an ultimately quite traditional post-WWI / inter-war celebration not just of the Baroque (vs. the Renaissance) writ large, but also of a Baroque specifically (if indirectly) aligned with Germany and its “heroic” capacity to lead humanity to reason in crisis times.