Le orride convulsioni di una rana decapitata”. Sulla redazione degli esemplari B e A della conferenza di Aby Warburg a Kreuzlingen (21 aprile 1923)

The text of the lecture Warburg gave in Kreuzlingen on 21 April 1923 is no doubt his most famous and widely circulated work. To date, however, no precise philological analysis has been made of the typescripts preserved at the Warburg Institute Archive in London which transmitted the text. We owe to Piermario Vescovo and to his great philological accurancy, the tracing of the complex genesis and transmission of the Kreuzlingen Lecture text. Warburg, as known, forbade the text to be published, and described it as the convulsions “of a decapitated frog”. The source of the image Warburg adopts is first identified in this contribution in a passage from Charles Darwin’s The expression of the emotions in man and animals. On the basis of Vescovo’s research which precisely delineates the relationship between the different versions of the text, the paper focuses on the materiality of the typescripts, and on their material making. The text B [WIA III.93.1] is the troubled fruit of Warburg’s own repeated revision of the text with the collaboration of Fritz Saxl; the text A [WIA III.93.1] had hitherto been regarded as the later, cleaned-up version of the text and had thus offered the basis of its translations in different languages. According to Vescovo’s reconstruction, however it is a version of an earlier text than B. Vescovo assumes that the person who physically typed the text preserved in A-A1 was the typist-girl who, according to Saxl’s testimony, Binswanger sent to Warburg from September 1922.