Guided Pathway

From Japan back to Rome

Nearly touching the Bernini image, then, is a photograph of the hari-kiri ceremony (#5) and another depicting Japanese corporal punishment (#6). Such ritual, state-sanctioned violence appears, though, to be balanced by a newspaper clipping (#11) showing the signing of the 1925 Locarno Treaty, which Warburg believed would put an end to the demons of WWI in a way that the Versailles Treaty did not. At the same time, the political yields again to the religious in the six contiguous photographs showing a Eucharistic procession and parade of Swiss Guards in St. Peter’s Square, from the summer of 1929, on the occasion of the signing of the Latern Treaty, which recognized the full sovereignty of the Holy See. Here symbolic practice has become a mass phenomenon—the crowds and troops, Bauerle suggests, could just as easily belong to a Fascist rally. However, according to Arnaldo Momigliano’s account, Warburg reveled in the chance to witness these mass (in both senses of the word) ceremonies: “There were in Rome tremendous popular demonstrations. . . . Mussolini became overnight the ‘man of providence,’ and in such an inconvenient position he remained for many years. Circulation in the streets of Rome was not very easy on that day, and it so happened that Warburg disappeared from the sight of his companions. They anxiously waited for him back in the Hotel Eden, but there was no sign of him for dinner. Bing and others even telephoned the police. But Warburg reappeared in the hotel before midnight, and when he was reproached he soberly replied something like this in his picturesque German: ‘You know that throughout my life I have been interested in the revival of paganism and pagan festivals. Today I had the chance of my life to be present at the re-paganization of Rome, and you complain that I remained to watch it’” (92).