Guided Pathway

If, after tracing both the diagonal top-left to bottom-right path and the vertical top-right to bottom-right one, we move across and down the panel to the bottom left, we catch sight of another cluster of images that are linked both thematically and visually to one another and to the overall thesis of the panel. This cluster comments, gloss-like (as an emblematic scriptura) on the pictura formed by the competing axes discussed above, which celebrate both Rembrandt’s version of the Baroque and Dutch neo-Stoicism as capable of pausing the action of the rape, by pointing out the prize to be gained by “seizing the opportunity” to reflect. The claim is nevertheless tempered by being embedded in stories of civil-political unrest that, in several of the images, can be tamed only by force. Is Warburg drawing our attention again here to a choice, this time between two possible economies of control, two ways of responding to chaos of the intra-European civil conflict that was World War One and to its aftermath, namely, reasoned reflection, on the one hand, and the strong arm of autocratic rule, on the other?