By bringing together, in one of his most celebrated essays, words and images as “documents” of the tragic history of the servitude of superstitious modern man, Aby Warburg foregrounds a research program: the natural unity between image and word resides in their reciprocal relations as means of expression, and the study of their migrations, metamorphoses, and survivals requires that “art history and the science of religion” sit together at the same worktable “in the laboratory of the scientific-cultural history of images” [im Laboratorium kulturwissenschaftlicher Bildgeschichte] (WARBURG, [1920] 2022, p. 485). The laboratory, which had once been an arsenal, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, is the meeting place where different disciplines come together to realize this research program, whose methodology, as Edgar Wind synthesizes it, is based on “attention to culture in its totality [Gesamtkultur]” and guided “by the specific interest in the function of surviving ancient elements” (WIND, 1934, p. VI), articulating Jacob Burckhardt’s historical-cultural vision with the anthropological orientation inaugurated by Hermann Usener’s philological research.

The essay to which we refer, Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920), gathers texts and engravings as complementary documents—far removed from mere illustration—capable of demonstrating the survival of ancient pagan prophecy “in the age of Faust.” Warburg dedicates to Usener’s memory the effort undertaken there, for the program he advances updates, in its own way, the very method of philological-historical research into the mythical and religious beliefs and rituals of the ancient world, precisely through the articulation of “art history with the science of religion.” In the age of Faust, “in which the modern scientist—halfway between the practice of magic and cosmological mathematics—seeks to conquer the space for reflective thought [Denkraum der Besonnenheit] between himself and the object” (WARBURG, 1920 [2022], pp. 484–485), Warburg identifies the phobic and formal survival of astral demons, secured by astrology in its dual legacy as logic and magic, conceptual designation and “superstitiously aggregating linkage” [abergläubisch zusammenziehende Verknüpfung] (Ibidem, p. 427). The essential polarity of surviving symbols demands that the scholar of images cast upon them a “philological gaze”, through which it becomes possible to look toward their common ground and perceive that the cosmic demons are, “from the Harz to Hellas, all cousins,” as the verses by Goethe chosen by Warburg as the epigraph to that same essay declare; all united by kinship, ramifications of a common trunk. It is in this sense that Gertrud Bing points out that Warburg, by adopting the term Kulturwissenschaft (rather than holding to Kulturgeschichte, cultural history), aligns himself with the tradition of classical scholarship [Altertumswissenschaft], which “recognizes no separation between archaeology and philology,” for it understands that “texts and monuments complement one another as testimonies, mutually supporting each other” (BING, [1964] 2019, pp. 188–189).

One of Warburg’s greatest intellectual references was the philologist Hermann Usener, whose lectures on comparative mythology he attended enthusiastically between 1886 and 1887 at the University of Bonn. Those lectures made an indisputable impression upon him, and if Warburg, in his mature phase, recognized an affinity between his work and the thought of Giambattista Vico, the philosopher who constituted Usener’s great inspiration, this may well have been due to his recollection of his master’s teachings. For there is no mention whatsoever of Vico in Warburg’s writings, except in a letter sent on March 4, 1925, to Alfred Giesecke, the editor responsible for the fields of philology, history, classical studies, and modern languages at the publishing house Teubner-Verlag. There Warburg writes: “[…] that it may be known that our new direction of research in fact realizes an idea of Vico” [dass man von unserer neuen Forschungsrichtung die eigentlich eine Idee von Vico verwirklicht, Kenntnis nimmt] (Warburg apud WEDEPOHL, 2014, p. 391). He does not specify exactly what he refers to, yet it seems to us that the “idea of Vico” mentioned by Warburg concerns above all the conception, expounded by Vico in paragraphs 382 and 447–448 of the Scienza nuova, according to which fear imagined the gods into the world (VICO, [1725] 2005, p. 219; pp. 283–258).

For Warburg as well, to employ Andrea Pinotti’s expression (PINOTTI, 2004, p. 73), phobos acts as an origin, as the Ur in the Urworte, in the primordial words of human expression. Let us consider, in broad terms, Warburg’s particular updating of Vico, emphasizing the mediation of Usener. Let us briefly examine, on the one hand, how this mediation becomes especially evident in the specific question of the names of the gods and, on the other hand, how, beyond such mediation, there exists a strong affinity between Warburg and Vico in the problematic of memory underlying their philosophies of history.

Philological Gaze

In the lecture he delivered at the University of Bonn in 1882, Usener compared the mythological giant Antaeus — the son of Gaia who renewed his strength whenever he came into contact with mother earth — to the historian who adopts a philological posture and is able to extract new information and expand his knowledge with each immersion in the letter of the sources. This declaration is programmatic and synthesizes his defense of philological practice as essentially linked to history, a conception grounded in the idea of the existence of “a sort of common heritage, […] [of] a more or less subterranean connection between cultures and populations apparently heterogeneous and foreign to one another” (SAN LIO, 2024, p. 257). A shared heritage that, according to Usener, must be investigated through a historical-comparative key.

Warburg follows this line of philological-historical inquiry. He embraces the philological practice proposed by Usener, itself suggested to him by Vico, which consists in articulating the analysis of the word (in his case, the primordial words of the language of gestures) with subsequent, broader historical interpretation and understanding (seeking both a common nucleus and a historical sense of the progressive differentiation of cultural forms among peoples). This practice allows him to investigate the vitality [Lebensfähigkeit] of images (WARBURG, Fragment 3, June 22, 1888, 2015a, p. 42) — literally, their life capacity — as well as the afterlife [Nachleben] of archaic strata of the human psyche.

This is Warburg’s theoretical substratum when, a few years after attending Usener’s lectures, he began, in a series of letters never sent to his friend André Jolles, to reflect upon the female figure entering the scene in Ghirlandaio’s painting The Birth of Saint John the Baptist; this “Florentine nymph,” as he calls her, required him “to direct his philological gaze toward the ground from which she emerged” and to “ask [himself] in astonishment: Does this strange and delicate plant truly have its roots in the austere Florentine soil?” (Idem, [1900] 2018, p. 72, emphasis added). Warburg directed his philological gaze toward art history, seeking to explore the profundity of the passionate nature of the human spirit and “the achronologically stratified matter” [der achronologisch geschichteten Materie] within memory (Idem, [1929] 2022, p. 633) — both hereditary organic memory and the artifacts constituting cultural heritage.

According to Warburg, the imagistic experience is conducted through a process of mnemonic transmission of images and forms linked to the expression of pathos, and therefore capable of keeping past expressive experiences alive. Thus, the question concerning the pathetic nature evoked and represented by images reverberates into reflection upon the role of the image within culture as a whole, since it implies another, more general question: what is the matrix that imprints genuine “pathos formulas” upon memory and effects the transmission of symbolic meanings? For Warburg, as for Vico, this matrix is phobic.

Like Vico and also Usener, Warburg seeks the deep roots of the earliest states in the history of civilization—that is, the origins of religions, myths, and traditions, as well as their persistence in the history of spirit (GHELARDI, 2016, p. 135). He understands that there is a phobic origin in the expression of emotions through gestures or images; the original phobic trauma leaves “scars” upon the archaic stratum of human consciousness and survives in all kinetic vital manifestations of the human being (WARBURG, [1929] 2018, p. 223). Thus even our gestures and facial expressions are symbolic remnants of what was originally biologically useful (GHELARDI, 2016, pp. 61–62; GOMBRICH, 1970, p. 72); they preserve the terrifying edges of the original phobic experience. Images demonstrate this and, to that extent, constitute traces of man’s bonds with the world, with its own age, with cultural tradition, and with human condition itself. Warburg investigates them in representations of movement that shape emotions and agitations of the soul, and he reads images as endowed with life — they both transmit and stimulate it. For him, culture is a totality within which art performs a necessary function. Art is an act — an act of singularization of an entire expressive framework shared by social or collective memory.

Symbolic delimitation of perimeters

Here one may discern one of the great affinities between Warburgian thought and Vico with regard to the role of memory, reflection, and imagination or fantasy, as emphasized by Christopher Johnson (JOHNSON, 2024, p. 81), who cites Vico: “fantasy is nothing other than relief in reminiscences, and ingenuity nothing other than work upon the things remembered” (VICO, [1725] 2005, p. 526). Imagination, a poietic act, reactivates sensory impressions stored in collective memory — “Memoria è la stessa che fantasia” (Ibidem, p. 623)— whereas ingenuity, the creative capacity to operate upon these mnemonic materials, establishes relations, creating, according to Vico, living metaphors and generating the “poetic characters” that found culture; invention (poetic, juridical, linguistic) is thus a “work upon the things remembered,” a process deeply rooted in the sensible and emotional experience of primitive humanity, preserved by memory. For Warburg as well, memory plays a fundamental role in invention, it aids the artist (who oscillates between the poles of a religious worldview and a mathematical one), for it captures the full force of passionate-phobic impetus [es greift die volle Wucht der leidenschaftlich-phobischen] (WARBURG, [1929] 2022, p. 629), conferring upon any representation of dynamism the confines of an unsettling original experience.

We may further unfold this affinity (in their conceptions of reflection, imagination, and memory) from the intuition of another commentator who brings the two authors together. William Heckscher, likewise without indications of direct influence, draws attention to the tripartite stages of perception established by Vico in § 218 of the Scienza nuova, according to which: “Men first feel without noticing. Next, they register [impressions] with a mind that is disturbed and agitated. Finally, they reflect intellectually” (HECKSCHER, 1974, p. 129). Heckscher understands that, owing to his attention to details of figures, such as hair and garments in motion, Warburg’s method approximates the second and third stages of perception in Vico (since Warburg himself would contemplate images with a disturbed spirit and afterward reflect upon them) (Ibidem., p. 129). It seems to us, however, that beyond this so-called method, the very theoretical foundation of Warburgian analysis approaches the tripartition proposed by Vico if we consider precisely the first stage of perception in light of the importance Warburg attributed throughout his intellectual trajectory to Robert Vischer’s concept of empathy [Einfühlung]—not coincidentally, another Vichian author. Although the term currently indicates relations between subjects, in its original meaning Einfühlung concerns the relation not merely with another human being but above all with inanimate objects, whether natural or artificial. Empathy, as theorized by Vischer in his essay On the Optical Sense of Form (1873), is an involuntary and necessary act within the perceptual process, consisting in the transposition [Übertragung] of our own feeling, thanks to which we project our bodily sensation into forms and fill them with our own psychic content (VISCHER, 1873, p. III). Vischer asserts that the human being operates through analogies and “knows reality on the basis of his own bodily configuration” (PINOTTI, 2001, p. 209); this means, for him, that the perception of forms is expanded through a labor of imagination, which produces images of each sensory event, combining them with the image of the self. From this it follows that empathy is “the natural mother of religious personification” (VISCHER, 1873, p. III). Through this symbolic modality of transfer, we anthropomorphize things, plants, and animals.

Robert Vischer’s aesthetic-psychological explanation bears a profound affinity with the tripartite scheme of perception that, for Vico, grounds human equivalence as the first mode of appropriating phenomena that provoke terror: the Vichian idea that human beings, perceiving, fearing, and failing to understand the universe surrounding them, make themselves the rule of that universe. As § 405 of the Scienza nuova states, man “makes himself an entire world. […] [He] makes things and, by transforming himself into them, comes to be” (VICO, [1725] 2005, p. 241).

The regulation of the universe, therefore, arises from fear, terror, primordial panic; it is in this confusion that the intuition of a superior being emerges, from which the rules of the universe derive. As Francesco Valagussa aptly notes (VALAGUSSA, 2023, p. 211), this process described by Vico is very similar to Warburg's conception of a symbolic determination of extension. For Warburg began systematizing his study of human symbolism during his university years, driven precisely by his interest in anthropomorphism as a psychic response of phobic origin (which he observed both in Quattrocento artworks and in the history of mythology). He articulates the question of anthropomorphism with the artistic capacity to isolate figures that thereby become symbolic: symbolic becoming results from the process of symbolization through the isolation of parts within the whole by means of the delimitation of a perimeter or extension, “Symbolismus als Umfangsbestimmung”.

A symbolic determination of extension, for example, in the “drapery in motion,” which, in early fifteenth-century Florentine art, “is regarded and employed as the characteristic of a psychological amplification” (WARBURG, Fragment 34, April 4, 1889, 2015a, p. 62, author’s emphasis). Symbolic circumscription also occurs in the process by which the forces of nature are transferred to divine powers, in the fusion of these powers with a biomorphized divinity, and in the delimitation of its extension within a name. These are, for Warburg, forms of establishing protective limits—both materially and psychologically — “against the chaos of the surrounding world” (AUERBACH, 2012, p. 352). Precisely like the metaphor of Jove (Jupiter, the thundering sky), whose name, for Vico, derives from an onomatopoeia relating to the noise accompanying lightning and thunder — a denomination that, by objectifying the phenomenon, masters immediate terror.

Name of the Gods

Here Usener’s mediation seems unavoidable, for more than a century after the publication of the Scienza nuova, he claimed the task of scientifically systematizing Vico’s intuition and proposed “to produce the last great attempt to make etymology the dominant method of mythology” and to delineate, from hundreds of names, a “morphology of religious conceptualization [Begriffsbildung]” (Usener apud KANY, 1985, p. 1277) in his principal work, published in 1896, Names of the Gods [Götternamen]. Like Vico, Usener understands the gods as primordial mythical concepts; fear and chaos as the origins of myth; the gradual generalization of divine figures as the result of processes of increasing rational control over mythical anxieties; and lightning “as the terrifying motive that leads mythically thinking man to the idea of a divine force” (Ibidem).

These convergences extend to Warburg, whose historical vision is particularly akin to Vico’s insofar as both understand culture as the product of a process oriented toward protection against phobos, within which “poetic wisdom” nevertheless remains as latent and neutral survival. The contradiction that Auerbach points out in Viquian's reflection regarding metaphor being "both the origin of thought and a critical gesture that repeats itself ad infinitum", since the original metaphorical transfer "both precedes the rational wisdom of the age of men and is also active in modern conceptual language" (AUERBACH, 2012, p. 351, emphasis added), finds an echo in Warburgian thought.

Warburg expresses this through the motto Per monstra ad sphaeram—coined by him (in 1925, the same year as his reference to Vico) for the ex libris of his friend Franz Boll, another philologist whose research unfolds within Warburgian iconology. The motto, from phobos to its sublimation, attests to the conviction that myths, particularly owing to their phobic origin, are modes of knowledge and primordial cells of meaning. In the ambiguous sense of the Warburgian articulation between a Darwinism of ideas and a morphological interpretation that is essentially polar and metamorphic, opposing poles coexist and, transmitted through memory (both organic memory and cultural heritage), may be actualized either as monstra or as sphaera.

An illustrative example is the mythical hero Perseus, the great wanderer of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Perseus slew the monster and appears at the zenith of the ceiling in the Hall of Galatea at the Villa Farnesina; yet, in the illumination included in Plate C of the Atlas, clad in his heavy armor, he “reminds” us that, as Warburg wrote in a letter to the philologist Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,

the religious metaphors, which in Greek science absorbed into the heavens their function as ordered perimeter determinations [ordinende Umfangs-Bestimmungen], degenerated once again into monstra, and from their external appearance the believer—as the haruspex from the sacrificial victim—interrogates the future (WARBURG, [1924] 2014, p. 36).

In Plate C, Perseus, “half European warrior, half constellation” (Idem, Mnemosyne Atlas, [1926–29] 2020, p. 28), is a “dark executioner” (Idem, [1924] 2014, p. 36), a mere imagistic vector of prognostications, an image concealing the myth of the hero as the symbol of winged redemption. How, then, Warburg asks in the same letter, “can the monstra recover their wings?”—that is, how can Perseus attain the zenith in the Villa Farnesina, transformed into a prince stripped of all phobic power; or, furthermore, how mythical symbols can once again become a conceptual framework and undergo a metamorphosis, like Raphael’s Athena, from cult image into idea, free from any trace of symbolic expressive value belonging to the monstrous agonistic complex?

Myth is a structured form of thought and, in this sense, its figurative cause constitutes an essential orientation for creative processes, such that magical-religious concreteness may be reinterpreted in the direction of intuitive-spiritual abstraction. For Warburg, mythology and allegory are structurally similar to the natural sciences and may therefore be considered their precursors. Perseus, in his migration and metamorphosis from dark executioner to winged hero (the ideal of humanity overcoming the monster), contains opposing poles within himself. He demonstrates that the biomorphic element delimiting phobos survives, becoming the very medium through which its semantic charge may be resignified, thanks to the function of memory in the synthesis of images. Although monsters, once captured, become concepts, concepts may once again degenerate into monstra, for, as Warburg wrote in 1928 in a letter to his brother Max, “the path from concreteness to abstraction is not an innate opposition but represents an organic cycle within human intellectual capacity” (Warburg apud GHELARDI, 2011, p. XVI). Opposing poles mutually imply one another, such that the process of passage from cosmic monsters to the phobic emptying-out of the stars is never completed: the planetary offspring survive insofar as they lend their names to planets and constellations.

The names of the gods, this primordial determination of a perimeter [Umfangsbestimmung] within the imaginary whole, survive in the stars. These names preserve the history of symbolic manipulation, of the anthropomorphization of natural phenomena and objects in the attempt to control the phobos they awaken. These names preserve, among the stars, ghostly survivals—and, for Warburg, the tragic history of the servitude of superstitious modern man.

With Hermann Usener, Warburg understood astrological biomorphism as a “projection of the fetishism of the name,” corresponding to the psychic necessity of the human being, who “oscillates between a religious and a scientific attitude” (Ibidem, pp. XVIII–XIX). Just as Usener and Vico do etymologically, Warburg’s kulturwissenschaftliche research seeks “to show in what manner mythical potentials remain vital. On the one hand, they may exert a liberating effect […]. On the other hand, they may bring back to life the ‘dark’ aspects of pagan antiquity” (KANY, 1985, p. 1282). For this reason, the Mnemosyne Atlas seeks to investigate, as Warburg says, the inheritance of phobic memory [Erbmasse phobischer Engramme] — its heredity in addition to its cultural transmission —, for phobos acts as an “originary power prior to the minting of form” and “determines the first practices of symbolization (rituals and archaic cults) as attempts to control primordial anguish” (PINOTTI, 2004, p. 73). As for Vico, so too for Warburg there is no knowledge without language, nor language without anthropomorphic metaphors. Investigating the symbolic efficacy of these survivals, Warburg performs a philological, historical, and anthropological labor of interpreting their uninterrupted metamorphosis — considering the monster as an illuminating act and as a surviving nucleus even within our most ordinary gestures — which leads him to understand every artistic or cultural creation as a recapitulation of the totality of human history and as a potential resignification of the past. Here emerges the core of a philosophy of history grounding the understanding of symbols in the manner of a figural chain: the present resignifies the past insofar as, in the singularization of individual moments, one glimpses the entirety of human history.

This is why anthropomorphism constituted a fundamental question for Warburg from his university years onward. This symbolic determination of extension survives in the “archaeological transport of the ancient gods into the realm of sculptural beauty initiated by Raphael and his school”; such a realm of beauty leads theorists to regard the pagan gods as already obsolete superstitions, yet “the demonic force of the pagan gods, of astrological stamp, must be considered precisely as their oldest and most proper primordial function, which survived the [Renaissance] period of spiritualization” (WARBURG, [1929] 2015b, p. 355, modified translation).

From phobic horror to its rational sublimation, images reveal, to a philological gaze, one face of the human psyche that reason never fully succeeds in controlling. Inserted within a long chain stretching back to an archaic period, whose indelible marks reveal “spiritual techniques” and functions of memory, of images, Warburg says that “one may deduce a vegetal physiology of the circulation of sap”, but only “for those capable of examining life within its subterranean web of roots” (Idem, [1929] 2018, p. 221). 

Isabela Gaglianone

Universidade de São Paulo

June 8, 2026 

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