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Il Fiume e la Ninfa. Da Tiepolo a Warburg e ritorno

Alessandro Rossi

Published in December, 2022

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The River God and the Nymph. From Tiepolo to Warburg and back

In line with Warburg’s notion that the relationship between past and
present, understood as a unidirectional influence from former to latter, should
yield to a relationship of mutual exchange and interdependence, this essay seeks
to relate the so-called “erotic combination favoured by Tiepolo” – a gloomy

old man and an exuberant girl, expressed by the painter through various iconographic identities: River God and Nymph, Time and Truth, Hades and Persephone, etc. – to the diagnosis of Warburg, as psycho-historian, of the West’s

schizophrenia, recognizing in the autobiographical reflection of its images the
ecstatic “Nymph” (manic) on the one hand and the dejected (depressive) river
deity on the other. In turn this diagnosis should reveal the underlying meaning
of Tiepolo’s reiterated coupling of an Old Man and a Girl, freeing it from a solely
mythological-allegorical reading.

Binswanger, Benjamin, Calasso, Mariuz, Ricœur, Myth, Psychoanalysis, Prophecy.

DOI

10.53129/gcsi_02-2022-11