Hybris and Sacrificium. Aby Warburg and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Imagery

Abstract

The dialectic between Hybris and Sacrifice – which is deeply rooted in Greek tragedy – is ever-present in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and influenced the final years of Aby Warburg’s research towards the end of the 1920s. The German scholar had chosen the survival of Classical Culture, Nachleben der Antike, as the basis for his research, and found Ovid’s Metamorphoses to be a fundamental source of study on the original value of myths. The Ovid-Austellung was a small photographic exhibition ran in the oval room of the new library – the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg – to be held from the twenty-ninth of January to the sixth of February 1927. The notes – now kept at the Warburg Institute Archives in London – reveal it was Warburg’s decisive intention to focus on the wide-ranging subject of cultural migration in ancient myths, in terms of time and space, through images.