Discesa nello “spazio misterico” e “spaccio delle tenebre”: l'ultimo viaggio di Warburg in Italia

The last trip to Italy, undertaken between September 1928 and June 1929, the year of his death, assumed for Warburg the shape of an "expedition to the sources of European enthusiasm", an attempt to "live like a mystes the worship of Mithra from Rimini to the Sistine Chapel”. A journey of the soul, in which the scholar gradually left behind his German attitude, advancing into a territory which, like its wine “too rough” and its air “too thick”, broke but at the same time awakened the senses. Warburg’s journey in Italy was not only a trip to another country, but configured a mental movement regarding the idea of cosmic ascent and descent, considering the astrological depictions of planetary gods as well as the Neoplatonists harmonics in the Tempio Malatestiano; the fury of funerary daemons on Roman sarcophagi as well as Imperial triumphal art on arches and coins; the adhesion to Nature in Giordano Bruno’s works as well as its ascent to the light of reason; the mysterious depths in the mithraeum of Capua as well as the positive abandonment of the characters of Manet’s Djeuner sur l'herbe. In Warburg’s thought, the "space of mysteries" seems not so much an alternative to the "space of thought", but rather a source from which it's impossible, finally, taking leave.