Guided Pathway

The final, triumphant wrestling of such violence to the ground is visible in the de Passe image of serenity at the lower right, whose doubling calls special attention to a basket-carrying young woman who balances her offering to the new-born Christ-child on her head, showing how the loss can be redeemed and the riches of the past handed on to the future intact. Worthy of note in this story of a successful afterlife of antiquity is of course that it is a specifically northern version of the Baroque as both period and style, from Savery to de Passe (with Rubens, van Haecht, Moeyaert, and Rembrandt along the way) that, when understood collectively, is shown to be capable of shouldering the burden of a pathos-containing Renaissance here. ****

Warburg had already made an argument about a specifically German “reason” that could function as the savior of the “intellectual and religious liberation of modern man” in his earlier “Ancient-Pagan Prognostication in Word and Image in Luther’s Time” (531). Published in 1920, the essay was originally written as a public lecture in the dark wartime days of the Luther jubilee year of 1917 (see Newman, 2009); the lecture was itself a reprise of Warburg’s 1905 essay on the rejection of an only gestural, Italianate Baroque by the German “Künstlerfürst” (prince of artists), Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) as he (Dürer) moved into his maturity. Saxl’s insistence on Warburg’s disavowal of nationalism and endorsement of internationalism notwithstanding (McEwan, 97-8) then, Panel 70 makes a clear argument about the superiority of a certain version of the “northern” over the “southern” “Baroque,” with the Dutch Rembrandt inheriting the mantel of a German Dürer as the victor in the West’s “battle” for reason. It is interesting to note that in making this argument, Warburg rewrites and reverses Wölfflin’s use of these very same artists, Dürer and Rembrandt, to distinguish between the Renaissance and the Baroque and their styles (1915, 18, for example).