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7 Synderesis: The “Bruno-Reise” Reading Bruno Warburg and Bing sojourned in Italy from late September 1928 until June 1929. Their main goal was originally to collect material to supplement the ever-mutating Bilderatlas, which, when they left Hamburg, consisted of eighty panels and some 1,300 images.1 Another motive for the journey was Warburg’s desire to introduce “the pictorial realm” to Bing.2 Prompted, however, by an article by Leonardo Olschki, he resolves soon after they arrive: “We must read Giordano Bruno better .”3 By November 22, they begin to read Bruno in earnest (though in German); four days later there is an epiphany: “Nachmittags um circa 6 angefangen Giordano Bruno zu lesen. Zuerst mühselig durch die Wüste der Allgemeinheiten gepflügt. Dann begreift College Bing plötzlich mit bildschöner Sicherheit das immens complizierte Problem der Heiden-Götterwelt bei Giordano Bruno als explizierbar.” (Afternoon around 6 began to read Giordano Bruno. At first laboriously plowed through the desert of commonplaces. Then suddenly colleague Bing comprehends 1. See Warburg, WIA, GC 30535. 2. Warburg, WIA, GC 24906. Warburg’s wife, Mary, did not accompany them. The three traveled together to Florence, though, in October 1927. Warburg and Mary lived in Florence from 1897 to 1902. 3. GS, VII:350. The article is Leonardo Olschki, “Giordano Bruno,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 2 (1924): 1–79. Synderesis 195 4. GS, VII:373–375. 5. GS, VII:387. 6. GS, VII:489; also 480. Foreshadowing this turn, though, Warburg invokes Bruno thrice in the context of his discussion of Kepler and “Unendlichkeit” in the Boll Lecture. See “Per monstra ad sphaeram,” 118, 121, 127. 7. Warburg, WIA, III.121.1.2, Giordano Bruno. The notebook has been published and edited by Maurizio Ghelardi and Giovanna Targia in Cassirer Studies 1 (2008): 13–58. They also cite a 11/21/1928 letter to Wind in which Warburg mentions a title for a Bruno project: “Die Funktion der antiken kosmologischen Mythologie im Denksystem von Giordano Bruno.” 8. Nicholas Mann, “Denkenergetische Inversion: Aby Warburg and Giordano Bruno,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 82 (2003): 34. 9. The notebook also contains factual and bibliographic information about Bruno and Mithraism, as well as notes about Warburg’s health, travel arrangements, etc. 10. Warburg, Giordano Bruno, fol. 24. with beautiful certainty how to explicate the immense, complicated problem of the pagan pantheon of gods in Giordano Bruno.)4 Soon thereafter, Warburg acquired a collection of some 350 books by and about Bruno. Immediately, unhesitatingly, he greeted the acquisition as a watershed moment : “Ausserordentlich weit-tragende zweckdienliche Erwerbung: wird Folgen haben.” (Extraordinarily far-reaching, purposive acquisition: it will have consequences .)5 In this sense, the turn to Bruno was a turn back to the K.B.W. as a “Denkinstrument ,” even as labor continued on Mnemosyne. Indeed, provoked by the acquisition of the Bruno materials, Warburg later undertook another Umstellung of part of the Library.6 More importantly, had Warburg lived longer, all indications are that Bruno would have become a central, combinatory element in Mnemosyne. The clearest evidence for this is the notebook titled Giordano Bruno, forty-five pages in folio and kept from December 1928 to June 1929.7 The Bruno notebook, Nicholas Mann observes, was where Warburg transcribed “in its first spontaneous form,” the “feverish ferment of speculation” produced by his and Bing’s reading of Bruno, together with their Neapolitan sojourn (their Italian journey’s crucial, last leg).8 The latter included visits to Bruno’s birthplace in Nola, the Neapolitan church where Bruno trained as a young Dominican friar, and the site of a Mithras shrine in Capua where Warburg and Bing confronted paganism’s chthonic legacy. Even more than in the other late notebooks, the entries in the Bruno notebook are fragmentary, aphoristic, and often quite gnomic, for here Warburg is trying at once to distill and dilate new thinking.9 I will consider presently several instances of this characteristic distillation, but as for dilation the notebook contains several fascinating diagrams and tables, including one that juxtaposes “Don Quixote” with the phrase “Chevalier/errant/v. d. Unendlichkeit Begriffes” (Knight errant of the infinity concept), both of which appear in the same column that contains, working one’s way downward, the words “kategor. Imper.” (categorical imperative) and, at its bottom, “Florio! / Shakesp.”10 As Maurizio Ghelardi indicates, Warburg borrows here from Pierre Bayle’s entry “Brunus” in the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1st ed., 1697...

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