ABSTRACT
Underneath the reproduction of the fresco the figure o f Speranza (Hope) from Giotto’s cycle of grisailles in the Arena Chapel echoes in its gestures and posture a female figure to the left o f Raphael’s fresco-both echoing the pas
sionate nympha purified into spiritual fervor.38 Next to Speranza, Botticelli’s rendering of St. Jerome’s last Holy Communion echoes another moment of
the Eucharist, the sharing of the sacrament by the believers. To the right of
the fresco, which shows the papal court of Raphael’s time (1511) as taking part
in the mass of 1263 (thus emphasizing the timelessness of the ritual) are
reproductions of the Eucharistie Procession in Rome in 1929. In Warburg’s
interpretation, the demonstration o f the host in a public procession had to be
seen as the reenactment of the “tragic ‘Hoc est corpus meum’”, a reference to
the Canon Missae, and, through it, to its institution during the Last Supper. If
we move on to the more peripheral pictures of the plate, two images refer to
the culture of the Japanese Empire, the one on the left to “harakiri,” or ritual
suicide; the other picture shows parts o f the body-hands, legs, a head-
referring to bodily punishment as practiced in Japan. To the right of these,
the press photograph of the signing o f the Locarno Treaty is placed. The pres
ence of the Japanese “sacrificial images” is explained by a newspaper-clipping
in the archive, written by the German historian Ludwig RieE39 about
Imperial Japan’s use of earlier religious rituals around the turn of the century
that had already been superceded by the Buddhist-“more spiritual”— reli
gion for the purpose of forming a modern nation state. Beneath these is a
whole page from a Hamburg daily newspaper showing a motley array of
pictures. We know why it is there-Warburg had used this page for a
half-humorous, half-serious speech he gave to graduates (Doktorfeier) on
30 July 1929.40 Among other points he made in this speech, he bemoans the
insensitivity of those who had done the lay-out of that page. The photograph
of a successful swimmer intrudes upon the image o f the Eucharistic
Procession (the same procession as on the left) and Warburg comments:
I ask myself: does this swimmer know what a monstrance is? Does this
brawnist-I do not refer to his person but to the type-need to know the
meaning of that symbolism which is rooted in paganism and which provoked
such strong resistance in the N orth that Europe was split in half? [...] The
brutal juxtaposition shows that the cheerful hoc meum corpus est can be set beside the tragic hoc est corpus meum w ithout this discrepancy leading to an outcry against such barbarous breach of decorum.41
