Il problema della sopravvivenza delle forme pagane nell’iconografia cristiana delle origini: A. Warburg o E. Auerbach?

As it is well known, the first Christian iconography made wide use of pagan formulas and motives. The phenomenon has had several explanations in the history of Christian art and archaeology. The careful selection conducted, since the very beginning, by the Christian figurative work on pagan themes — some of these selected, most of the others rejected — does not make so plausible to explain this phenomenon as the effect of a pure and simple “acute Hellenization of Christianity”. A topic about to which the Protestant culture was particularly sensitive, and it traced back, in the end, to exogenous causes the adoption of the image by Christian culture. Instead, I would say that the interpretative lines that ascribe the phenomenon of the birth of the Christian image and its characters to “internal” causes, such as the formation and development of Christian doctrine and form of life, rather than to external cultural influences and pressures, appear more pertinent. In this respect, the matter can be posed according to two different perspectives. The continuity can be explained either in the anthropological terms of the Warburg’ s theory of survival of the images, or on the basis of the “historicist” approach of Eric Auerbach. The article compares the two perspectives and discusses positions, analogies, differences.