Guided Pathway

Warburg summarizes his lecture on Rembrandt of 29 May, 1926, by explaining that it is the “tragic struggle about monumental style in northern Europe” (emphasis added) in which he is interested, the struggle that unfolds as a result of the “polarized tension” that characterized the “art and the contemplation of art” in Holland in the seventeenth century (cited in Leuschner, 577). We see this struggle unfold in no uncertain terms in this shorter segment of the diagonal that slices through Panel 70. When read from top-left to bottom-right, this shorter path leads from a detail of Willem van Haecht’s “Apelles Painting Campaspe” (#10.1 and #10.2, here in a version from 1630 that differs from a similar painting by van Haecht of 1628, entitled “Alexander the Great in the Studio of Apelles”) to the choice staged in the juxtaposition of Moeyaert’s “The Rape of Proserpina” (c. 1635) to Rembrandt’s “The Rape of Proserpina” (c. 1630). Van Haecht’s painting displays a “Rape of Proserpina” attributed to the Flemish artist Hendrick van Balen (1575-1632) (see Golahny, 30) that is just one of the myriad canvases that crowd van Haecht’s “gallery painting”; there are in fact so many paintings in the picture that van Balen’s must sit on the floor, propped up against a cabinet and partially covered by the edge of a woman’s dress. While the scene is set in the ancient past of the Apelles story, van Haecht has included enough identifiable historical paintings to suggest that these are the kinds of works that were desirable enough to be purchased by the Antwerp spice merchant, Cornelis van den Geest (1577-1638), who was van Haecht’s patron and whose art collection the artist oversaw. That the painted collection includes a canvas that depicts a Proserpina (namely, van Balen’s) who, powerless, falls rather than pulls away from the lustful Pluto, suggests it was this horrendously helpless version of her wild gesticulations and inability to defend herself from the god that was popular enough to be collected at the time. The van Haecht detail thus represents the kind of “sentimentale Floskel” (sentimental cliché, Leuschner, 573) and merely gestural impassioned response that Warburg disdained, yet feared might usurp the serious treatment of how to contain the passions’ threats. He includes it here as a prelude to, indeed, a provocation to chose between the two options – Moeyaert’s and Rembrandt’s differing versions of the story – that follow on this axis’ downward slope.