This publication, the papers from a conference at the Warburg Institute, is edited by Rembrandt Duits, the assistant curator of the Institute's Photographic Collection, and constitutes the first part of a project intended to commemorate Jean Seznec's essay La Survivance des dieux antiques, published in 1940 by the Warburg. The second part of the project, prepared by François Quiviger, the Institute's librarian and webmaster, is a “digital library containing some of the most important early mythographical compendia discussed by Seznec and the contributors to [the] volume” (42) and is aimed at a larger audience, given that it is accessible online.
The book is structured in five sections: “Introductory Essays,” “Traditions,” “Forms,” “The science of mythology,” and “The influence of the manuals,” “in accordance with the division of Seznec's book” (34). The contributors are mainly Warburg Institute scholars and members of POLYMNIA, a research network on ancient and modern mythographers. Nine papers are in English and eight in French. The book is accompanied by six exhaustive indexes.
The two introductory essays are most informative: Elizabeth Sears profiles Seznec and presents in appendix his correspondence with various members of the Warburg Institute; and Rembrandt Duits discusses in an elegant text the history of the Warburg Institute (Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky) and the place of Seznec's “hybrid work” (21) in this milieu. However, an essential episode of the book's fortuna is missing here: the Seznec-Croce controversy, which initiated a polemical exchange of views between Ernst Gombrich, Carlo Ginzburg, and Otto Pächt; emblematic of the deep divide that segregates scholars that deal with art, it is responsible for the absurd suspicion with which the Warburg Institute is viewed, even nowdays, by some art specialists.
Research in astrological manuscripts has always been one of the strong points of the Warburg Institute (already true by the time of Aby Warburg's 1912 Rome conference): thus, it comes as no surprise that a considerable part of the publication is dedicated to it. Duits's presentation of illustrated constellation cycles revisits Saxl's thesis and, in the light of new research, concludes that instead of “a consistent set of classical constellation images . . . it appears that there were different parallel and sometimes interwining traditions” (100). In a less nuanced way, Kristen Lippincott, who studies the constellation of Eridanus, discards expediently altogether all previous work and Dieter Blume, in his paper on planetary astrology, is equally blunt: “there was in fact no survival of the pagan gods” (136).
In the “Traditions” section, Sabrina Vervacke proposes a dense, and at times confusing, text that seems to be part of a still ongoing work, on the intricate theme of Albericus's gods; she hypothesizes that these synoptic texts were mainly “mnemotechnic instruments or a kind of propaedeutic to the reading of pagan texts” (169), and that, consequently, they formed “a distinct genre” (170). A similar hypothesis is formulated by Huber-Rebenich in her lucid text on Ovid's illustrations: these “visualizations . . . were imprinted upon the memory of a large audience” (183).
In the field of iconology, Philippe Morel offers us a convincing reading of Luca Signorelli's “Court of Pan.” Two further essays in the “Forms” section open new perspectives: Ruth Webb pays a graceful tribute to Seznec in a paper dealing with the role of pantomime in the late antique world and its relationship to iconography of that period, a difficult subject that requires careful guesswork; she then compares this to the more static revival of the genre by Emma Hamilton in the nineteenth century. Sara Mamone, on the other hand, presents another fascinating topic: theater machinery in Florence. Taking the image of the cloud as an example, she traces the transition from Catholic imagery to princely autocelebration through the use of mythology under the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de’ Medici: the archival material quoted makes a delightful read.
The volume closes with two studies on Renaissance mythographers: Elizabeth McGrath places Seznec's essay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century context and questions Seznec's assertions on the artists’ limited liberty and shows that, thanks to mythographic handbooks, artists had a greater margin of initiative vis-à-vis their advisers, at least after the second half of the sixteenth century, than previously thought. Even more important, these manuals and their, often barbaric, gods were still consulted later, even by artists such as Rubens (who apparently used Valeriano) and Poussin (who regularly consulted Conti).
This is an impeccably planned publication that, thankfully, brings again to the forefront Seznec's pioneering work, which is too easily discarded, fifty years later, by several researchers who have, all the same, benefited from it. Indeed, although Seznec's essay now “cracks at the seams” (29), one wonders how Renaissance studies would have evolved without his systematization. The book reconsiders and revises, where necessary, Seznec's positions and therefore will be particularly useful to an audience wanting to follow the evolution of research in the relevant fields. At a moment when most of us follow with concern the discussions that will determine the future of the Warburg Institute, a book showing the continuity of its tradition cannot but be warmly welcomed.
