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This issue 201 of “Engramma” is published exactly one hundred years after the subject it focuses on: the conference on The Serpent Ritual given by Aby Warburg in Kreuzlingen on 21 April 1923. The research presented in Engramma 201 aims at highlighting the theoretical importance of the shift between the two different versions of the conference conclusion, as first observed by Monica Ferrando and Monica Centanni on the occasion of the publication of Warburg and Living Thought (2022). The background to the conference complex publishing history is here reconstructed by Flavio Cuniberto, interviewed by Silvia De Laude. Cuniberto appears as a translator together with Gianni Carchia; he was actually revising a translation that was to be based on an original provided by the publisher, and published ten years earlier by Wagenbach in Berlin. Was it really an ‘original’, since it lacked the ending present in the first translation? What had happened? To try to answer this question, Piermario Vescovo in Ein wenig Licht. Indagini filologiche sullo Schlangenritual presents a philological reconstruction of Aby Warburg’s lecture delivered in Kreuzlingen. Through the study of archive material Vescovo establishes the relationship between the extant drafts and reconstructs the chronology of the text’s composition. In addition to the work of philological reconstruction based on variants, Monica Centanni in “Le orride convulsioni di una rana decapitata”. Sulla redazione degli esemplari B e A della conferenza di Kreuzlingen offers an overview of the situation in which the conference text was composed and summarises the hitherto known data on the material drafting of the exemplars that transmitted the text. In Saggio per un’edizione critica de Il rituale del serpente, Giulia Zanon indicates the criteria that will be used for the forthcoming critical edition and presents an introductory sample of the firsts and last paragraphs. In Warburg: una ‘teologia senza nome’?, Monica Ferrando investigates Warburg’s motivations for the choice of the lecture’s theme. The passage of the artistic image from devotional term to aesthetic object left its delicate anthropological and theological-philosophical status unexplored by art historians. Contact with the Hopi was significant precisely in the light of the idea of a theological otherness that unleashes its power through the artistic symbol. Warburg’s attraction to the Hopi cultural world in comparison to the western world is widely demonstrated by Miriam Gualtieri and Salvatore Inglese in Hopi, a ovest del mondo. The authors discuss the outcomes of Warburg’s journey in the United States. In particular, they focus on Warburg’s theses in A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, which convey a cultural misunderstanding: Hopi religious practices are a stage of development in a universal process of working through fearful impulses to achieve rational responses to the world. In Verso una storia naturale dell’arte. Aby Warburg davanti a un rinascimento indoamericano Salvatore Settis argues that Warburg’s reflections on Hopi culture are consistent with his scholarly work for three fundamental thematic points of his research: the survival, or rebirth, of ancient forms, the relationship between ritual and its images, and the role of artistic creation in defining human culture. In addition to this important essay, in Reperti Scartati. Postilla (2023) Settis recalls the day in 1991 when he saw the materials of Aby Warburg's collection in the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg, recently returned from a storage in a former GDR area, where they were kept to prevent bomb damage. A section of this Engramma issue includes rare texts, such as a contribution written by Saxl in the winter of 1929-1930—published in English by the Warburg Institute in 1957— and as Warburg’s Visit to New Mexico. In this contribution the journey to the ‘new world' is considered as central to a new way of seeing Antiquity. In the same section, we repropose a small writing on the Hopi, Die Indianer beschwören den Regen. Großes Fest bei den Pueblo-Indianern, written by Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl, which encapsulates the core of the Kreuzlingen lecture as delivered in fairy-tale style. The issue closes with an interview, Le traversie della collezione etnografica di Aby Warburg where Silvia De Laude dialogues with Christine Chávez, curator of the American section of the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum. Chávez traces the history of the collection Warburg gathered since returning from his trip to the United States and preserved until today. |
