The Serpent as a Symbol of Time of Latin American Art

Abstract

This paper, part of my doctoral project “In Search of Snakes: an Investigation into the Temporality of the History of Art from Aby Warburg onwards”, is based on the fragmentary and enigmatic notes found in Warburg’s Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer (Images from the Territory of the Pueblo Indians). Those texts were used by Warburg for the conference on the Ritual of the Serpent, presented on April 21, 1923 to an audience composed just by other internals at Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, an academic venue that granted Warburg a certificate of mental health and his return to Hamburg. In those sketches, Warburg asks himself: “What are the properties that make the snake a relevant metaphor in literature and art?” While answering this question, Warburg displays the migrations, disappearances, resurrections, mutations and permanencies of the symbol of the snake, allowing the understanding of this pictorial and cultural matrix, present in many cultures, as an anthropological constant linked to rain, life, death, etc.