Keywords
How to Cite
Abstract
This article examines Ninfa fiorentina, the project jointly conceived
by Aby Warburg and André Jolles in 1900 in the form of a fictional
correspondence. It explores how the fascination with the «figure
in movement» was distributed between the two interlocutors:
Jolles, adopting the role of the enamored aesthete, and Warburg,
by contrast, assuming critical distance in order to elaborate his
philological–historical method. Drawing on notes and unpublished
preparatory materials preserved in the Warburg Institute Archive
[WIA], the article demonstrates that the epistolary genre was not
merely a rhetorical device but a genuine theoretical principle,
grounded in a carefully articulated division of roles. It argues
that this framework made possible an exceptional and necessary
doubling between passion and prudence. In this dynamic interplay,
Jolles’s tempestuous passion and Warburg’s historical–artistic
prudence reveal the duality at the core of Warburg’s reflection on
Ninfa, the image in movement.