The Magical Zwischenreich

I have a weird one for readers today: film as a hermetical working. The pedagogical power of making images or statues move has been recognized for millennia and was not lost on the intellectual elite of the Early Film Industry.

‘Hermeticism’ is a religious set of beliefs based on the writings attributed to a mythical Greco-Egyptian philosopher-priest named Hermes Trismegistus. (Pictured above; from the floor of the Cathedral in Siena.) In reality the texts probably represent a variety of Mediterranean authors from the third century A.D., who were inspired by Ancient Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian ideas. These writings are about finding shortcuts to power, health, or ‘enlightenment’ through magical means by harnessing divine power.

‘Hermetic’ beliefs flourished in the Medieval Islamic world, where they were married to Indian magic practices, and subsequently re-imported into Europe via the same slaving routes which the Galician Network would control a few hundred years later. The Medici family patronized Hermetic scholarship beginning in the mid 1400s through Marsilio Ficino’s translations of Ancient Greek texts on the subject— including many philosophical works by Plato. Ficino’s translations and Hermetic personal writings helped ignite interest in what was later labeled “Renaissance Hermeticism” (RH), which is the branch of Hermeticism I’ll write about today.

A representation of Marsilio Ficino held at the Palace of Versailles.

Hermetic knowledge was part of an arms-race for Medieval and Renaissance European rulers: a “doctor” or “alchemist” or “magician” versed in this knowledge could use it to create weapons; ‘cure’ illness; protect from poisons/curses or use these offensively; and even compel spiritual forces to act on the side of his patron. Indeed, application of this knowledge was one of the limited avenues for social advancement for Jews— expressed as the jewish “court physician”.

A “Natternzungenkredenz” [Adder-tongue sideboard decoration] made with fossilized shark’s teeth, which were believed to detect poison. This is held at the Art History Museum in Vienna and was probably part of the Hapsburg collection formed by Rudolf II.

A recurring theme in Renaissance Hermeticism is the “capture” of “star rays” or spiritual forces and their embodiment in an object or being, thereby imbuing the object/being with power or a limited form of sentience: the creation of slaves. This “star rays” aspect of RH is popularly attributed to the Islamic world by modern scholars, but my intuition tells me these ideas are likely far older than Islam. A similar idea exists in Jewish magic and the creation of “golem”-slaves, but in this case the animation (usually) comes from the divine power of the Hebrew alphabet, rather than the stars.

The most influential text dealing with this magical enslavement is the Picatrix, otherwise known as Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, attributed to various Arabic-speaking authors. It was first translated from Arabic to Spanish in the late 1250s at the court of Alphonso X (“the Wise”) of Castile by a man with limited knowledge of Arabic, probably Yehuda ben Moshe, and much of the more shocking material was bowdlerized. A Latin version appeared shortly thereafter under the title “Picatrix”; no one really knows how the Latin text got this name. Ficino drew heavily from the Picatrix to write his ‘On Obtaining Life from the Heavens’ (De vita coelitus comparanda) which he completed for Cosimo de Medici’s mentally ill son some time around 1485.

I’d like to say something about the psychology of people drawn to the Picatrix via Picatrix translators and scholars Dan Attrell and David Porreca in their introduction to Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic:

The most challenging facet of life for those inclined to practice magic is clearly what one might call “dealing with others” (roughly one-third of the rituals involve such concerns), whether these “others” be family, spouses, lovers, friends, associates or social superiors… It is also a category of rituals where the combination of the practitioner’s intently focused will with their target’s beliefs in the effectiveness of magical operations more reliably creates conditions for real-world effects…

…The large number of rituals directed at promoting— or more particularly, gaining the help or favor— of social superiors exemplify how important social hierarchy was to the author and intended readership of the Picatrix. Furthermore, this high number— roughly one-fourteenth of the rituals in the entire book— reflects the fact that those who were interested in these magical rituals were not at the apex of the social pyramid and were very cognizant of the need to appeal to social superiors in order to benefit materially or socially. This disproportion attests to the power social superiors exerted over their subjects, as well as the seeming inscrutability of the superiors’ decisions, favors, and dislikes— why else would one resort to the risky, often frowned-upon, and largely illegal practices of magic to influence them? That rituals directed at social superiors should exceed the number dedicated to love, sex, or relationships is a surprising find that underscores the importance and power of the social hierarchy at the time our author and his intended readers lived. These rituals conferred a perception of agency in the minds of those who otherwise lacked it so desperately.

By “illegal”, what the authors are referring to includes the use of harvested human body parts in the “workings” to capture the star-rays. In a podcast discussing the Picatrix, the authors go into more detail about various rituals designed to limit the agency of others (make slaves), including spells designed to assist in the homosexual rape of minors. The author of the Picatrix lived in a dark world, which didn’t respect other people’s freedom of choice.

Stepping away from magic and towards psychology: How does one inspire a “target’s beliefs in the effectiveness of magical operations”? The religious heritage of the Greco-Egyptian world was one where priests controlled the flow of information, both natural and divine. To assist this control, some devised systems where “images” or statues moved or appeared to speak, thereby giving the weight of divine authority to their messages in the eyes of credulous/willing believers. In the words of the curators of the Mechanical Art & Design Museum at Stratford-upon-Avon :

Philo of Byzantium wrote about mechanics and created a what was thought to be the earliest example of a working robot. Featuring a multitude of springs, pipes and tubes, and utilising air pressures, the result was a life-like maid who could automatically pour wine into a cup which had been placed in its hand by a visitor. The robot was even capable of mixing water into the drink as required.

The common theme of the stories arising from this period was a desire to re-create living things. Daedalus was a prolific inventor who was said to have made breathing, moving stone statues, whilst accounts exist of various mechanical birds who could fly and/or sing, such as magpies, pigeons and blackbirds…

In general, the presence of Automata in the palaces of the leaders of the time was highly desirable as they felt that these wonders of mechanics increased their armoury of influence. Inventors were only too happy to indulge the wishes of their rulers.

Daedalus and Icarus by Sir Frederic Leighton, 1869. We met Leighton’s work earlier through my discussion of mermaids in Ziegfeld’s Tableaux Vivants and “Glorifying the American Girl”. Daedalus, a slave of King Minos, earned the king’s favor by trapping the Minotaur in a Labyrinth. The Minotaur was said to be the product of unnatural sexual acts by Minos’s wife. You might say Daedalus helped Minos find a material means to hide his spiritual problems.

Note how all of this “magic” is an interplay between the well-developed will of the practitioner and the “target’s” willingness to believe. In 1913 Aleister Crowley, a scholar of the occult and probable British Intelligence Agent, wrote about his Hermetically-inspired religious beliefs in this way :

I. "DEFINITION."

MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. {XII}

(Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take "magical weapons", pen, ink, and paper; I write "incantations" --- these sentences --- in the "magical language" i.e. that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth "spirits", such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause changes to take place in conformity with my Will. [By "Intentional" I mean "willed". But even unintentional acts so-seeming are not truly so. Thus, breathing is an act of the Will-to-Live.])

Aleister Crowley was interested in the same philosophical/religious ideas that interested another operative, Aby Warburg. Warburg’s London Institute boasts an archive documenting Crowley’s work with the Order of the Golden Dawn. Both men were contemporaneous practitioners and scholars of Hermeticism.

Aleister Crowley in 1934, Encyclopedia Britannica

Aby Warburg was the son of Moritz Warburg, of the illustrious banking firm M. M. Warburg & Co in Hamburg, which participated in the lucrative 19th century market for government loans. The Warburg firm had family and business ties to Kuhn, Loeb &Co. of New York City, where Otto Kahn was a managing partner. Kahn’s firm and Goldman Sachs made up the big two financial firms which shaped Hollywood alongside the Roosevelt Family and the US Navy. You can listen to an overview of how Otto Kahn relates to our Monroe, WI celebrities Leon Goetz, Edith May Leuenberger, John R. Freuler and William Weseley Young here: Monroe, WI in Early Cinema: An Overview.

The troubled Aby Warburg wearing a katchina mask during his trip to the American Southwest.

Aby’s interest lay in art history, not banking, and he worked with the Prussian government to promote Imperial German “soft power” via his Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy. At around the time Crowley wrote the words above, Aby located a copy of the Picatrix and began ‘his’ translation of it alongside two Austrian WWI veterans: Fritz Saxl (Warburg’s minder and art historian) and orientalist Helmut Ritter (who actually did the translating). Ritter’s translation, as sponsored by Warburg during his lifetime, first appeared in 1933.

Fritz Saxl courtesy of Wikipedia.

Helmut Ritter courtesy of Encyclopedia Iranica

While Ritter worked on Aby’s copy of the Picatrix, Aby himself was preoccupied with an art project which he would never finish: his “Mnemosyne Atlas”. The “Atlas” consisted of about 60 (by my count) black wooden panels on which were arranged pictures from books, magazines, newspapers and other wide-spread print media. The pictures were arranged in groupings with somewhat opaque titles that I list at the end of this post. As an example of what these boards contain, here is an image of the first and most straightforward board, “Table A”, as featured in the 2012 work Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Herausgegeben von Martin Warnke und Mitarbeit von Claudia Bank. [The Picture-Atlas Mnemosyne, edited by Martin Warnke with the collaboration of Claudia Bank]:

The three images, top to bottom, represent 1) an astrological map of the stars, source of the ‘star rays’; 2) A map of Europe; 3) a Geneology of the Medici family drawn out by Aby Warburg.

Warburg’s intention is that the viewer provide the ‘willingness’ to understand what he’s saying: there is no text explaining the relationship of these images and information to each other. The viewer must supply the ‘missing information’ that, in a more forthright but less subliminal work, would be displayed in the “between space” separating the images. I think, however, what Warburg is saying is quite clear from a Hermetical point of view. The socioeconomic and ethnic milieu to which Warburg belonged identified strongly with the Medici banker-princes.

The progression of ideas through all 60-odd panels presents a peicemeal Renaissance Hermetic interpretation of history through the eyes of someone steeped in the Wiener Moderne, complete with the destruction of the Church and State authority; inversion of creative energies; theft and violent/liberated sexuality; flowering of narcissism; etc. I would describe the panels’ message broadly as the “Age of Aquarius” narrative that will be quite familiar to consumers of post-WWII American media. Aby was, perhaps, more honest in his “working” than his modern fellow-travelers, as he portrays in the panels a struggle between cultures and peoples with a merchant-elite ‘royal lineage’ coming out on top of a debased world.

Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – The Original, 2020. Installation view from Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.

Philippe-Alain Michaud is the preeminent modern writer interpreting Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas for contemporary readers. In his book “Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion” Michaud explains how the art installation works upon those who perceive it:

Appendix One: Zwischenreich.

Mnemosyne, or Expressivity Without a Subject

“Our realm is that of the intervals [Zwischenreich]”.--Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, April 16th, 1896

Mnemosyne, the atlas in images Warburg was working on before his untimely death in 1929, remains one of the most fascinating and enigmatic objects in the history of contemporary art... Its [incomplete] reconstruction was shown for the first time in Vienna in 1994... until a critical edition of the atlas is published, this attempt at a reconstruction allows us to begin to find our way through the strange landscape imagined by Warburg, in which a new style of apprehending aesthetic phenomenon is elaborated-- where knowledge is transformed into a cosmological configuration and the rift between the production of the works and their interpretation is abolished.”

That Warburg conceived of Mnemosyne topographically, beyond the montage of maps on the preliminary panel of the atlas, appears to be suggested in the enigmatic phrase “iconology of the intervals” which he used in his journal of 1929... To grasp what Warburg meant by the “iconology of the intervals,” one must try to understand, in terms of introspection and montage, what binds, or, inversely, separates, the motifs on the irregular black fields that isolate the images on the surface of the panels and bear witness to an enigmatic prediscursive purpose. Each panel of Mnemosyne is the cartographic relief of an area of art history imagined simultaneously as an objective sequence and as a chain of thought in which the network of the intervals indicates the fault lines that distribute or organize the representations into archipelagoes, or, in other words, as Werner Hofmann has put it, into “constellations.”

In arranging the images on the black cloth of the panels of his atlas, Warburg was attempting to activate dynamic properties that would be latent if considered individually. His inspiration for this technique of activating visual data was a concept formulated in 1904 by Richard Semon, a German psychologist who was a student of Ewald Hering's.... Semon defined memory as the function charged with preserving and transmitting energy temporally, allowing someone to react to something in the past from a distance. Every event affecting a living being leaves a trace in the memory, and Semon called this trace an engram, which he described as the reproduction of an original event.

Warburg's atlas externalizes and redeploys in culture the phenomenon described by Semon within the psyche. The images in Mnemosyne are “engrams” capable of re-creating an experience of the past in a spatial configuration. As conceived by Warburg, his album of images represents the place in which original expressive energy can be rekindled in archaic figures deposited in modern culture and in which this resurgence can take shape.

Sigmund Freud was no stranger to the occult; it was a favorite topic of conversation between he and his lover Wilhelm Fleiss. In fact, the psychology and history of Hermetic mystery cults was influential for Freud’s conception of “narcissism”, a mental health label which I believe is useful for interpreting the inner state of the author of the Picatrix, as described by Attrell and Porreca.

L to R: Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fleiss

Aby’s beliefs about the “expressive energy” of his Mnemosyne groups was shared by critics of the Early Film Industry, who felt the movies produced were pornographic and a miseducation for youth. Historian Kia Afra elucidates (emphasis added):

Since the MPPC [Motion Picture Patents Company, ‘Edison Trust’] did not consider exhibitors as a reliable or sufficient partner in the fight against censorship, the Edison Trust had also sought out a relationship with the newly formed National Board of Censorship, which had been founded in March 1909 by the People's Institute and its executive secretary, John Collier....Their underlying approach to cinema, however, was consistent with the psychological studies commissioned by the City Club of Chicago in 1907: “Every person in an audience has paid admission and for that reason gives his attention willingly.... Therefore he gives it his confidence and opens the window of his mind and what the movie says sinks in.” This understanding of cinema dovetailed with the theories of psychological susceptibility that informed the Supreme Court's Mutual v. Ohio ruling in 1915 and shows that the board differed from other reformers in its means of organizing film censorship and not the ends. In line with its Progressive objectives, therefore, the Board of Censorship represented a compromise between several conflicting interests, with the industry on one side and the reformers on the other.

Ironically, pro-censorship critics of the Early Film Industry credited film with the same intellectual influence as Aby— whose brothers were business partners to key movie-investor Otto Kahn— credited to his picture-intervals. The intellectual leadership of the Hollywood juggernaut secretly shared Aby’s opinions, too. Writing two years after Warburg’s death in 1929, William Wesley Young’s boss Benjamin B. Hampton kicked off his book The History of the Movies this way:

CHAPTER ONE: Living Pictures and Peep Shows

MANY MEN, through many years, searched for ways to make pictures appear to move. No one can be said to have been the first to conceive the idea. Indeed, the scholarly mind may trace static pictures and movies to a common source, and see the progenitor of film shows in the first artist who scratched images of animals and men and women on the walls of his cave. For thousands of years, people have been interested in pictures, and the desire to see representations of figures in motion is indicated by the drawings of the hunt discovered on the walls of pre-historic homes and carved on bone and ivory. Evidently the "chase" in pictures was one of the earliest forms of entertainment, and as mankind moved along toward civilization the interest in pictures grew broader.

The invention of the "magic lantern" was a part of this search for pictorial motion... Although none of these devices were perfect or even practical, their exhibition in halls and other public places aroused interest in the subject of photographing life in motion and encouraged further research.

The "zoopraxascope"—nearly all of these early inventors insisted that they were scientists and to prove it selected long, unpronounceable Greek names for their apparatus—exhibited by Eadweard Muybridge at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, was seen by many people and created widespread discussion of the possibilities of moving pictures. By 1893-4, the subject of photographing life in action appeared frequently in newspapers and technical journals and in the conversations of the many Americans constantly fascinated by visions of new inventions and discoveries.

Of course there is no motion whatever in a "motion picture." On the screen each successive photograph stands still for about one-sixteenth of a second, but the eye is tricked into believing that the flow of movement is continuous. The early experimenters were searching for the number of pictures per second necessary to create this illusion; some of the experiments were placed at as few as six per second and others as high as forty or fifty. Sixteen was finally established as producing the most satisfactory results.

Hampton claims to have written his History of the Movies with the help of Will Hays and the staff of the Shallenberger’s Photoplay magazine. Muybridge fits in with this crowd quite nicely, as Dave Thompson describes in his work Black White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR:

A sequence depicting a galloping horse is Muybridge's best-known creation, but when Edison began purchasing sequential-action photographic plates from him in the late 1880s, he was astonished to discover the man's researches went far beyond the trotting ponies and gamboling wildlife that other pioneers were so keen to depict.

From a selection of 733 plates, Edison discovered no less than 448 nudes or partial nudes-- 205 men, 243 women, including cricketers, boxers, wrestlers and baseball players. There were large breasted women going about their daily chores, nude women bathing together and an all but naked mother being handed a bouquet of flowers by her similarly unclothed daughter.

Eadweard Muybridge moving image stills— this is the type of thing Edison was talking about. Britannica

To both social commentators and Hermetically-inspired developers of the Early Film Industry, the optimal “iconology of the interval”; the most effective demand on ‘willingness’; the best duration of the magical ‘Zwischenreich’; was scientifically determined to be 1/16 of a second.

“Aby Warburg (far right with outstretched hands) asks his four brothers to support the Institute that bears their name. Hamburg, 21 August 1929.” From the “Support Us” page of the Warburg Institute at the University of London.

—

[For insight to how Renaissance Hermeticism was practiced in Bavaria by the family of Empress Sisi of Austria (wife of Franz Joseph) see my post Animating the Image: Sisi’s Stars.]

These are my rough translations of the titles of the boards of Aby Warburg’s ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’ as described in the 2012 work Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Herausgegeben von Martin Warnke und Mitarbeit von Claudia Bank. I will update them as I learn of more accurate translations.

Titles of Mnemosyne Atlas Boards

Panel A

Different systems of relations in which the human being is adjusted, cosmic, earthly, genealogical. The use of all these relations is imaginative thinking, because sorting of ancestry, place of birth and cosmic situation requires a mental performance. 1) orientation; 2) exchange; 3) social classification.

Panel B

Different degrees of erosion of the cosmic system on the human being. Harmonic equivalent. Later reduction of the harmony to the abstract geometry instead of the cosmically conditioned (Leonardo)

Plate C

Development of the concept of Mars. Detachment from the anthropomorphic conception of image - harmonic system - signs

Table 1

Removal of the cosmos on part of the body for divination purposes. Babylonian State-Star belief. Originators in oriental practice

Table 2

Greek. Concept of the Cosmos. Mythological figures in the sky. Apollo. Muses as companions of Apollo

Plate 3

Orientalization of ancient images. God as a monster. Enrichment of the inheritance. (Zodiac + Dekane). Transfer of the Globe to the flat. Cosmological dice board. Perseus legend

Plate 4

4-8 Ancient Protrusions

Struggle. (Giants) robbery. Hercules-States. Underworld? Earthbound (river god, Paris judgment) and ascent. Departure and fall (Phateon). The suffering redeemer. (Prometheus. Fetching fire. Arrogance)

Plate 5

Magna mater, Cybele. Robbed mother. (Niobe, escape and horror). Destructive mother. Furious (insulted) woman. (Manade, Orpheus, Pentheus). Lament for the dead (son!). Transition: conception of the underworld (robbery of Proserpine). Reach for the head (Manade, Kassandra, priestess!)

Plate 6

Robbery (Proserpine, underworld). Sacrifice (Polyxena). Sacrificial Manade (priestess). Death of the priest (Laocoon). Conclamatio. Dance of the priest (Isis). Grave dancers. Achilles on Skyros (as a Choir-leader?)

Plate 7

Victorious Pathos. Roman triumph. Triumphal arch. Nike. Apotheosis (successful departure). Emperor as god. Prey (Gemma Augustea) sign elevation, apotheosis as sign elevation with Napoleon. Ride. Indulge. Departing vehicle as a sun symbol. Submission (province). Reach for the head.

Plate 8

Ascent to the sun

Plate 9- 19 missing

{Judging by previous material, these missing plates should involve the history of the Jews between their expulsion from the Holy Land by the Romans and their flourishing in European Spain (1492).}

Plate 20

Development of the Greek cosmology to the arab. Practice. Abur Mazar. Planetary occupations.

Plate 21

Oriental antiquity. Ancient gods in an oriental version [first had to come: Atlas Farnese, Denderah, unrolling and enrichment]

Plate 22

Spanish-Arabic practice. (Alfonso). Handling. Cosmic system as a game-board. Prophecy. Sorcery. Stone magic

Plate 23

South-Italian-Arabic antiquity. Salone as a giant book-page for the purpose of determining fate. Dante scheme. (Missing Angelli)

Plate 23 a

Regular body as a disposable micro-universe. Leafing through books as reading the universe (Losbuch, Lorenzo Spirito) [missing point books] Lorenzo Spirito = transition to the North. Presentation of Radfortuna as an inevitable fate

Plate 24

Doctrine of the Planetary Children. (North?) Theoretical basis of the practice

Plate 25

Rimini: pneumatic conception of the sphere in contrast to the fetishistic antique form

Plate 26

Total systematic cosmological calendar (Tycho Brahe) as a transition between Rimini and Schifanoja

Plate 27

Palazzo Schifanoja

Plate 28-29

Contemporary busy life (transition: 3rd Tract of Schifanoja) Tournament, juggler, race, hunt, battle. Cassoni as the bearer of these representations

Plate 30

Peiro della Francesca. Monumentalization and distancing. In addition Gozzoli. Palaeologus

Plate 31

Then: the North. Devotional image. Flanders portrait of Italians. Entombment. Rene as customer and collector of Hss. Hieronymus im Gehaus.

Plate 32

Grotesque. Focus on dancing around the woman. Voeu du Paon. Quaresima. Monkey grimace. Grotesque of the monkeys. Women dance around the ‘Hose’ {Trousers?}. [cf. Dance of the Prize, Death of Orpheus]. Device as a vehicle.

Plate 33

Mythographic text illustration. Ovid, Christine de Pisan, Boccaccio, Storia Trojana, Albricus. Leading on to 34: amalgamation with the contemporary life.

Plate 34

Tapestry/Wall-Hanging/Carpet as a vehicle. Topics: hunting and pleasure. Working peasants. Antiquity in contemporary garb (Trojan. War. Alexander) = Departure. Narcissus and Entombment as ordered tapestry themes?

Plate 35

Antiquity alla French. Hercules, Paris (robbery) Paris (judgment) Orpheus. Venus with graces (astrological!) Polyxena. Burgundian antiquity. Ancient heroism. Exchange Mars and Helena!!

Plate 36

Pesaro = antiquity ala French in the South

Plate 37

Penetration of antiquity as sculpture. Archaeological drawing (Giusto da Padove, Pisanello). Grisaille = painted sculpture. Equestrian statue. Schagenmann (drawing) Labors of Hercules (Pollaiuolo): engraving, armor [relief] statuary painting. Hercules and Nessus = release of temperament in connection with other scenes of robbery. Dancing frieze of Pollaiuolo

Plate 38

Mixed style in relation to antiquity. Court life. Love symbolism. Preliminary stage to Botticelli in dealing with antiquity. Tapestry replaced by engraving (hunting). Love box. Distance in advertising: Punishment of Cupid. Noli me tangere. Punished cold (nostagio) and heart food. Cupid's triumph. Hose {Trouser?} fight and Quaresima Italian. Paris and Helena in mixed style. Baldini version 1 Sun.

Plate 39

Botticelli. Ideal style. Baldini 1st and 2nd Cupid antique. Pallas as a tournament flag. Venus images. Apollo and Daphne = metamorphosis. Horn of Achelous

Plate 40

Breakthrough of the ancient temperament. Continuous representation (as a triumphal procession of ancient figures? = Frieze). Child murder = raging mother? Excess of the pathos formula

Plate 41

Destruction Pathos victim. Nympha as a witch. Release of Pathos

Plate 41 a

Pathos of suffering. Death of the priest

Plate 42

Pathos of suffering in energetic inversion (Pentheus, Manade on the cross). Civil lament for the dead, heroized. Church lament for the dead. Death of the Savior. Entombment. Death meditation.

Plate 43

Sassetti- Ghirlandajo as an exponent of civil culture. Penetration of the portrait - self-esteem. Devotional pseudo-Nordic

Plate 44

Victorious Pathos near Ghirlandajo. Grisaille as the first stage of approval. Against: fall. (Phaeton, melee) Metamorphoses of Nike

Plate 45

Superlatives of sign language. Exuberance of self-consciousness. Individual heroes stepping out of the typological grisaille. Loss of the "As the metaphor"

Plate 46

Ninfa. “Express delivery” in the Tronabuoni circle. Domestication

Plate 47

Ninfa as a guardian angel and as a headhunter. Bringing the head forward. “Returning home from the temple” as protection of the child abroad (Tobiuzzolo pictures as votive pictures)

Plate 48

Fortuna. Differentiation symbol of the liberating person (businessman)

Plate 49

Bound pathos of victory (Mantegna). Grisaille like "As the metaphor", distancing

Plate 50-51

Division and preparation. Muses. Virtues and vices. Harmonic system. Departure. Grave dancers.

Plate 52

Justice of Trajan = energetic inversion of overcomming. Ethical reversal of the pathos of victory. Magnanimity of Scipio

Plate 53

Muses. Heavenly and earthly Parnassus. (Raffael) Connection to Mantegna and Schifanoja. Departure

Plate 54

Olympization accompanying horoscope practice and the government of heaven by God the Father. (Chigi) Departure

Plate 55

Paris judgment without departure. According to the sarcophagus: Peruzzi and Markanton. Ascent and descent. Narcissism [sic]. Plein air as a substitute for Olympus. Borrowed from Manet-Carracci. Promenade couple

Plate 56

Departure and fall (Michelangelo). Apotheosis of death on the cross. Last Judgment and Fall of Paeton. Breach of the ceiling.

Plate 57

Pathos formula in Duerer. Mantegna. Copies. Orpheus. Hercules. Woman robbery/rape. Overcome in the apocalypse. Triumph

Plate 58

Cosmology with Duerer

Plate 59

Planet migration to the North

Plate 60

Festivities in the North, courtly. Sea Mastery - Age of Discovery. Virgil. Fortune of the seafarer, brutal seizure (Rubens)

Plate 61-64

Neptune as “serving God”. Quos ego tandem. “Virgil”

Plate 65-69 missing

{These will have to do with the ascendancy of the merchant class in the Early Modern Period.}

Plate 70

Baroque Pathetics in robbery. Theatre.

Plate 71

Oath and elevation of a shield in the theater. "Official Art"

Plate 72

On the other hand, Rembrandt. Holy meal: Claud. Civ., Last Supper, Jupiter with Philemon and Baucis. Why the “Ninfa” at Samson? Child murder (role model) "raging woman"

Plate 73

Medea in the theater and with Rembrandt - thought space of prudence. Official Art with the pathos of child murder. Women in battle. Battle on the bridge. Tacitus takes the place of Ovid.

Plate 74

Prudence. Peter with Masaccio, Raffael, Rembrandt. Distance: healing without touch. Hundred guilder booklet. Pisanello - transformation in Rembrandt = inner change. Magnanimity of Scipio

Plate 75

Magical anatomy. Gedarmschau - Search for the seat of the soul. Scientific Anatomy = contemplation by effusive lament for the dead. Animal anatomy - human anatomy {sym?}pathetic and contemplative see Carpaccio

Plate 76

Protection of the child at risk: Tobiuzzolo and rest on the run = Elsheimer-Rembrandt. Home-journey from the temple. Mother as Niobe (Pieter von der Borcht) and as a robed figure (Rembrandt). Helpless protective mother

Plate 77

Delacroix Medea and child murder. Brand: Barbados - Quos ego tandem, France - Semeuse, Arethusa. Nike and Tobiuzzolo in advertising. Hindenburg monument as a reverse apotheosis. Goethe "24 legs"

Plate 78

Church and state. Spiritual power renouncing the worldly.

Plate 79

Consuming God. Bolsena, Botticelli. Paganism in the Church. Blood host miracle. Transubstanziation. Italian criminal before the last anointing.