Guided Pathway

Reading the “text” of the images on Panel 70 in standard fashion from top-left to bottom-right allows us to see that the opening argument of the panel, as stated here, revolves around the question of how best to use art to control the human (animal) passions. In the hands of the Dutch Savery, Orpheus tames the “creatures” with his song in the foreground of #1.2; the right background of this same image nevertheless provides a salient comment on what happens when such instincts are not controlled, with human lust driving a male figure to pursue a woman in desperate flight. Interestingly, #1.3 depicts a moment of the Orpheus story, as told by Ovid (43 b.c.e. – 17/18 c.e.), after the Thracian women tear the singer limb from limb, and thus also after the events of the scene that Albrecht Dürer illustrated in the 1494 drawing of the “Death of Orpheus,” about which Warburg wrote in 1905. Here the naiads mourn the death of the poet-singer (see Ovid, Metamorphoses XI, ll. 42-50), displaying gestures of tenderness that cancel out the Thracian women’s rage. The god of the Underworld, Pluto, whose rape of the nymph, Proserpina, is at the center of most of the other images of the panel, has succumbed to the dangerous side of the equation on display in this opening sequence; like Orpheus’ song, Warburg’s artful, even “Baroque” arrangement of these images will tame the passions run amok by challenging viewers to pause and reflect on how these several “northern” versions of the “Rape of Proserpina” relate to one another.