Per monstra ad astra: Pegasean Poetics from Ovid to Aby Warburg
(2022) Between Two Worlds: Ovid Shaping Literary Tradition from Virgil to the Post-Classical, Classical Association — Location: Swansea, Wales
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- Abstract
- When Franz Boll died on 3 July 1924, Aby Warburg commemorated the author of Sphaera (1903) with a phrase now well known to anyone who has glanced at the frontispieces in London’s Warburg Library: per monstra ad sphaeram, ‘through monsters to the sphere’. Warburg’s variations on this motto, rich in a variety of associations, captured his personal struggles, but also his approach to classical reception; as he explained in a letter to his families, ‘fate has placed “the struggle with the dragon” before the liberation from fear…per monstra ad astra: the gods have placed the monster on the path to the Idea’. No single classical figure better exemplified this motto, for Warburg as for the classical tradition, than Pegasus. This paper, an archaeology of Warburg’s motto, shows how the figure of Pegasus served to structure works of poetry from antiquity to the Renaissance, and to exemplify a fused poetics of flight of the mind and the grotesque. At its core, this paper studies Ovid’s lifelong fascination—poetological, astrological, and zoological—with the figure of the Pegasus. Building on Philip Hardie’s work on Pegasus as later model for Fama, it demonstrates how Ovid built on the structure of Callimachus’ Aetia to make the Pegasus key to the structure of his own Metamorphoses. It then follows the traces of Ovid’s metamorphic Pegasus through the Third Vatican Mythographer (i.e. Albericus’ De diis gentium), Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, and finally in Warburg’s own copy of a translation of Bruno’s book to help show how Warburg’s Pegasean poetics, alive both to the sublimity and darkness of the classical tradition, came to be shaped.
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Citations
Kachuck, A. (2022). Per monstra ad astra: Pegasean Poetics from Ovid to Aby Warburg. Between Two Worlds: Ovid Shaping Literary Tradition from Virgil to the Post-Classical, Classical Association, Swansea, Wales. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101021