Guided Pathway

The threat posed to the “north’s” ability to surpass its merely gestural “southern” twin in its reliance on Italian / Italianate engravings and etchings to be copied had already been a matter of concern for Warburg in the 1905 essay, “Dürer and Antiquity in Italy.” There, Dürer is nevertheless said to have outgrown his juvenile reliance on the Italian models he found in Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and Antonio Pollajuolo (1432-98) in the 1490s in the Orpheus drawing of 1494 by allowing his “down-to-earth” (“bodenständig”) Nuremberg habitus to emerge. According to Warburg, the later Dürer was able to successfully resist mimicking the “antiquifying” baroque Mannerism of (fifteenth-century) Italy (1905, 180). As for Dürer, then, so too for Rembrandt here, the northern artist is shown as having passed through his southern models to get to a northern version of the period capable of rebirthing antiquity in the correct way.  It is worth noting that Fritz Saxl, who was a Rembrandt expert, had written extensively in 1923 about Rembrandt’s ongoing reliance on both Renaissance and Baroque Italian art; although a “genius,” the artist was in permanent debt to a variety of “Italian ideas” (1923, 152). In Panel 70, Warburg appears to be working through many of the same issues, but ends by making a different claim about Rembrandt’s “northern” autonomy, his “better” Baroque.