Ancient and resurgent, half-lolita, half-goddess, the nymph is, according to G. Didi-Huberman, following in the footsteps of Aby Warburg, a recurring character in the history of art, whom she irrigates with her nimbus and its sumptuous fluidity.
Ninfa fluida takes us into a theory, that is to say, according to one of the Greek meanings of the word, a procession. Following the art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), founder of iconology, a discipline supporting the heterogeneity of the image and its cultural interpretation, Georges Didi-Huberman follows in the footsteps of Ninaa young girl in movement, sometimes a goddess, sometimes a canephor servant, who spans the entire history of art. Warburg had recognized her, from her thesis on Botticelli in 1893, for a “survival” of Antiquity in the resurgent Florence, a figure from another time, who disturbs and animates representation. Didi-Huberman provides proof by example of the fruitfulness of Warburg’s work while explaining the fascination exerted by Nina.
Didi-Huberman had already, in Ninfa moderna. Essay on the fallen drape (2002), followed this young woman until XXe century, observing the fall of the nymph, until only a rag remains from which the body is absent, like the gutter mops photographed by László Moholy-Nagy. He announces in the Postscript a third opus, Ninfa profundawhich will explore the survivals of Nina in romantic art, particularly in the work of Victor Hugo.
In Ninfa fluidaDidi-Huberman focuses on the appearances of the nymph in the Quattrocento, in Ninfa fiorentina. Young girls with flowing hair and agitated drapery were sweeping through Renaissance art, as Erwin Panofsky, a disciple of Aby Warburg, observed:
(…) only the Maenads were represented with sparse hair, in classical Antiquity, and even for a limited period. At the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, this highly specialized motif was adopted so generally and so enthusiastically that it became, so to speak, the “guarantee mark” of the maniera antiqua.
Didi-Huberman focuses on a disturbing quality of Nina : Nina is “fluid”; it participates in air and water and moves through its movement. Didi-Huberman interprets Warburg at the same time as he describes Ninaso he attaches himself to the same nymphs: princess draped in the bas-relief of Saint George and the dragon by Donatello, graces and nymphs caught in transparent veils in the Spring by Botticelli – the work which is at the heart of Didi-Huberman’s work -, servant carrying fruit, nymph in gray or mothers vainly trying to protect their massacred children in the Tornabuoni chapel frescoed by Ghirlandaio.
Didi-Huberman shifts the gaze from faces to hair and drapery in the chapter titled “Moving Movements, the Nymph’s Accessories.” Nina is not just a formula all’antica, but also, according to the concept invented by Warburg, a Pathosformala “formula of pathos”, that is to say “the indissoluble entanglement of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula”. It is therefore a “formula of intensity” (p. 43), a moving figure, and a “dialectical formula” (p. 44) which ties together contradictory properties: the drapes are folded without any link being visible , the hair is at the same time tied very delicately and floating, Nina is both ancient and resurgent. It introduces a disorder into the representation and is an amoral symptom, since it can be a figure of pleasure and abundance, a spectral figure or Salome.
Then, Georges Didi-Huberman studies the “imaginary breeze”, extending a reflection by Aby Warburg according to which the artists of the Quattrocento “resorted to ancient works whenever it was a question of embodying animated beings moved by an external cause to them” (p. 64). For Renaissance artists, Antiquity was not populated by “immobile goddesses”, according to the expression of Winckelmann (quoted p. 63), but by figures in movement, and sometimes even in trance, like the ancient Maenads . Now for the Florentine nymphs as for the Maenads, exterior movement is the expression of interior animation. The sculptors and painters of the Quattrocento do not hesitate to shake the clothes of a character with a wind that does not reach the others, to break the aerial coherence of the representation to produce a pathetic disruption. Didi-Huberman notes the proximity between Botticellian representation and possible ancient rhetorical sources, in particular one of the precepts highlighted by theOratory institution of Quintilian, namely the movere (p. 76), literally the capacity to set an audience in motion, to move them, that is to say to capture their attention, in order to instruct them (docere) and to please (delectare).
Finally, in the chapter entitled “ Genitalis spiritusor the turbulence of desire”, Didi-Huberman shows that the turbulence of the moving accessories represents desire by displacement, like the “erotic pursuit” of Zephyr and Chloris which agitates the right part of Spring. Object of carnal desire and source of a fertile spirit, Ninfa fluidathrough its ambivalence, operates a subtle transition between two orders, from the physical to the psychic, from seduction to the creation of the world. The emotion takes shape, and “empathy” becomes “a force configuring the style”, according to Warburg’s expression (p. 93).
From object to method
Faithful to the spirit of the “Art and Artists” collection, Georges Didi-Huberman delivers here a essay : we will discuss two proposals.
First of all, on first reading it may seem that the book has two distinct objects: the exposition of Aby Warburg’s method, in the first chapter, “In Search of Lost Sources”, and the investigation on what makes the nymph fluid, in the following three chapters, the theses of which we have briefly summarized.
But a closer reading reveals that the object of the book as a whole is to shift the object of analysis (the fluidity of Nina) to the method of analysis itself. Indeed, Aby Warburg is interested in moving accessories, fluid objects and beings. However, according to the first chapter, his search for the sources of Spring led him to identify what Georges Didi-Huberman calls “fluid” sources. The sources, far from being a single point of reference, are an alluvial space, a ramification of influences which are only partially taken up, which are always reworked and which always escape. That it is impossible to identify the basic text, a unique text of which the table would be the complete illustration, because such a text simply does not exist, we can grant Didi-Huberman. On the other hand, this does not imply that “philosophical ideas are themselves fluids” (p. 19); it is in fact enough that she are treated like fluidsif by this we mean that they are branched, partially absorbed, partially escaped. It is important not to confuse the artist’s freedom in his use of sources with the thesis according to which philosophical ideas have no stable identity.
In addition to the spun metaphor of the source, Didi-Huberman produces other relationships between the object of Warburg’s research and his method. So, Nina is a survival of Antiquity in Renaissance art, the unexpected appearance of the Maenads in representations of sacred Christian history, when the fruit-bearing servant of Ghirlandaio enters carried by a wind which blows only for her in the Virgin’s room. More generally, the painter paints by assembling different sources (p. 23). Finally, according to Didi-Huberman, Warburg proceeds by association of an ancient physics inherited from Lucretius with a psychology of the modern imagination inherited from Freud (p. 102). This analogy suggests that all artistic creation is a montage, and that Warburg’s history of art is an artistic creation, but it ignores (no doubt deliberately) the difference between a montage which integrates its elements and gives rise to a pictureand a montage which juxtaposes its elements in the aftermath of a interpretation.
These relationships are not involuntary: Georges Didi-Huberman assumes them, and even claims them. However, we can wonder if this metaphorical transfer is founded and if it is something other than a simple coincidence. Aren’t the sources of the representation of an object less fleeting, less animated than the nymph just as ramified? The unity of the work is metaphorical: it revolves around the poetic image of water, but it is presented as a theoretical unity, as a manifestation of the theoretical sensitivity of Warburg who knew how to adapt his method to his object. .
One of the essential contributions of the work, less an achievement than a promise, is the attempt to identify Ninanot despite, but thanks to its fluidity, its evanescence, questioning our relationship to images and their understanding.
Nina Is it just an image? The progression of the chapters mentioned above demonstrates the opposite: Nina is not reduced to an iconographic motif identifiable in the form of a fleeing young woman, she is “paradigm” (p.126) or “theoretical character” (p. 127). If Didi-Huberman seems to hesitate between the two terms, the second has his preference, insisting more forcefully on the vitality and dramatic charge animating Ninfa. However, in the absence of any definition, the expression “theoretical character”, hapax of the work, confines the reader’s interpretation to the confines of supposition.
We guess that the theoretical character is none other than the particular expression of a “pathos formula”, a concept formed by Warburg to designate a gesture or posture worked by a powerful emotion. More precisely, Nina as a figure of the physical fluid, the breeze and internal turbulence would be the personification of a danced or choreographed gesture (Didi-Huberman, 2002, p. 256-257)
To understand what a “Pathos formula” is, we must take into account the fact that the relationship of representation is coupled with a consideration of the influence of the image on the thought of images, like of Gradiva for Freud, a reference which generously irrigates Ninfa fluida. In Freudian analysis, the character is attributed a decisive hermeneutic power, redefining fiction, which is not the simple fanciful transposition of an effective psychic reality, but the source of its own unconscious. From this point of view, Ninain addition to being the incarnation of the fluid, is also the index. Nina is the means by which a new heuristic approach is invented revealing “the life of images” (Didi-Huberman, 2002, p.103), or even “the unconscious of art history” (Didi-Huberman, , 2002, p.275), like a series of mishaps, of figures, receptacles for Warburg of the essential gestures of humanity. For Didi-Huberman, Ninfa is the emblem of a thought of the image which attaches itself to fleeting figures, manifesting a fragile grace carried through the eras.
The theoretical character therefore takes on at least two dimensions: it is a figuration and a revival of the thought of the image. What relationship does the “theoretical character” have with the “conceptual characters” portrayed by Gilles Deleuze in What is philosophy? (Minuit, p. 60-81) Despite the glaring nominal proximity, the two notions are hardly superimposable. The scene of the theoretical character is that of expression, expression of affect, expression of pathos through gesture, dance, body posture; conversely the conceptual character moves on the plane of thought, on the plane of the concept, although affect can constitute a possible bifurcation, a way of taking philosophy from behind. “Art does not think less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts,” noted Deleuze, while philosophy thinks through concepts. Perhaps we can understand the “theoretical character” as this singularity in which a thought of art is embodied, a voice which carries affects and percepts.