Guided Pathway

Crispijn de Passe’s “The Adoration of the Magi” (#18.1 and #18.2) alludes to the story via intertextual reference (see below). The diagonal organization of this sequence suggests a careful examination of how the passions will be controlled; the meaning of the “text” of this diagonal line, read from top left to bottom right, is clear when we get to its end. What Warburg wants us to see is the evolution of the relatively helpless Proserpina of Rubens, van Balen / van Haecht, and Moeyaert into the resolutely resistant Proserpina of Rembrandt, who thrusts her hand into Pluto’s face. The gesture is a Baroque one par excellence if we remember (as Warburg undoubtedly must have done) the 1621-22 statue of this same scene, completed by the young sculptor whose work then went on to define the era and its style, namely, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Bernini’s “Rape of Proserpina” highlights Proserpina’s determined gesture of defiance as she too attempts to twist out of the god’s grasp; Rembrandt’s painting quotes Bernini’s statue and thus freezes the action of the event via intermedial citation, laying hold of and shining a spotlight on the moment when the violence of the passions can – and must – still be fought.

Again, an important detail to watch for in this downward sweeping path of images is the fate of the flowers that Proserpina, the daughter of the fertility goddess Ceres / Demeter, has been gathering. Her abduction causes her mother and thus the earth to go into wintery mourning; the fateful spilling of the flowers suggests the sterility to come. But the scattered blooms of these images are rescued in the final image; de Passe’s engraving “repairs” the loss of fertility figured in the spilling of Proserpina’s flowers by depicting a tranquil young woman in control of both her body and her basket, which presumably contains offerings to the Christ-child, the figure of a new, calm-and-collected era. Proserpina’s rescued flowers are not literally visible in the de Passe basket of course; rather, they are intertextually and figuratively there, since the visual logic of #18.1 and #18.2 recalls both “The Girl with a Platter of Fruit,” (Workshop of Ghirlandaio, c. 1490), of Panel 44, #6, of the Atlas, who carries her bounty with the same serene, upright gesture, and the many nymphs of Lippi, Ghirlandaio, and Botticelli of Panel 46. Ironically, a similarly self-contained female figure also balances her “offering” carefully on her head in Panel 47 in works by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli (#23 and #25.1 and #25.2). But in this young woman’s basket there of course lies the head of Holofernes. The Renaissance Judiths of Panel 47 thus serve as visual precursors to Rembrandt’s Baroque Proserpina, with her passionate, yet controlled gesture of resistance; they also serve as her avengers, striking back at the rapist, but with a more spectacular degree of success. Panel 70 nevertheless somewhat perversely suggests that Proserpina’s rape was indirectly a good thing, since, in the end, it provides the opportunity to cleanse the world of tumultuous passions.