The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture

Anita Traninger and Karl A.E. Enenkel

The nymph as a cultural sign has vanished. Having been a ubiquitous fixture in literature and art since antiquity, and culminating as a spur to the imagination and a transmitter of allegorical meanings in the early modern period, she departed sometime in the nineteenth century. But echoes remain. Indeed, the nymph continues to figure in the cultural imagination, manifesting in forms as diverse as the alluring temptresses in nineteenth-century depictions of the temptation of Saint Anthony to Nabokov’s Lolita and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Even Beyoncé, with her hair eternally wafting in the breeze of a nearby stage fan, is reminscent of a Renaissance nymph. And yet, despite these references, both explicit and implicit, the nymphs’ significance as a cultural sign has largely been lost. Whereas previously the nymph had been an important marker in the mental landscape, making multifaceted and frequent appearances in both literature and the visual arts, taking on a signifying func- tion in various intellectual, moral, religious, and artistic discourses, and exer- cising her powers to stimulate the imagination (not least as emblems of erotic fantasy), the modern-day nymph has been relegated to the margins of the symbolic world. The objective of this volume is to bring her back into the frame, to recover and explore the former uses, functions, and semantics associated with the nymphs of the early modern age. If we take the present state of research as a point of departure, it is far from clear what the signifié of “nymph” actually encompassed in the Renaissance.1 Modern perceptions are still deeply informed by Aby Warburg’s reflections on the Renaissance nymph, which have proven enormously influential. Yet Warburg’s focus was on features that were very far from what scholars or artists

1 Important aspects are highlighted in Kramer A., art. “Nymphs”, in Brill’s New Pauly Supplements I. vol. 4: The Reception of Myth and Mythology, ed. Maria Moog-Grünewald (Leiden: 2010) 433–443.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004364356_002 2 Traninger and Enenkel of the early modern period would have associated with a nymph.2 Warburg’s views emerged out of an imagined exchange of letters he had with André Jolles, the Dutch critic and literary historian, in 1900. Expressing his fascina- tion with a minor character in one of Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in the Tornabuoni chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Warburg identified a maid servant in the image as a “nympha” – quite counter-intuitively, actually, given the fres- co’s subject of the birth of St. John. According to Ernst Gombrich, Warburg’s biographer, she is confronting the late medieval group with ‘the eruption of primitive emotion through the crust of Christian self-control and bourgeois decorum.’3 Gombrich is of course reporting Warburg’s reading, which is informed by concerns that were topical at the dawn of the twentieth century, but are decidedly anachronistic for the Quattrocento. Warburg’s notion of a “goddess in exile” taking on the role of a servant girl is largely based on a reading of the style of dress. But even more important for Warburg is the dynamism of the figure: this, more than any sartorial code, points to the nymph and the “pathetic formula” (Pathosformel) that describes her symbolic essence. As both his studies and his illness progressed, Warburg increasingly saw the nymph as an overarching cultural archetype: first as ‘a universal ornamental type of the female form in motion’, and then later as one of two seminal principles informing culture as such.4 A few months before his death Warburg noted in his diary his conviction that all of Western cultural history was a continuous oscillation between two opposing yet conjoint psy- chological states. Warburg inserts the nymph into what is now called bipolar disorder: the ecstatic nympha is the manic, the dolorous river god the depres- sive pole.5

2 Warburg A., “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie. Domenico Ghirlandaio in Santa Trinita: The Portraits of Lorenzo de’ Medici and His Household (1902)”, in idem, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. Julia Bloomfield et al. [trans. from Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance, ed. G. Bing in association with F. Rougemont, Leipzig: 1932] (Los Angeles, CA: 1999) 185–221, here 201. 3 Gombrich E.H., Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: 1970) 125. The visual parallel with the annunciation is indeed a Renaissance idea. Leonardo da Vinci prescribes the same design of fluttering draperies for angels and nymphs, see Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura, ed. A. Borzelli (Lanciano: 1947) § 527. 4 Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie” 201. 5 Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna 156; ibidem no. 306: Warburg, Diary, 3 April, 1929, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg 303. See also: Pichler W. – Rappl W. – Swoboda G., “Metamorphosen des Flussgottes und der Nymphe: Aby Warburgs Denk-Haltungen und die Psychoanalyse”, in Marinelli L. (ed.), Die Couch. Vom Denken im Liegen (Munich: 2006) 161–186.