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The Nympha kept coming back for the same reason that every musical comedy has a second lead who sings soprano: it is a convention.

We reaped the profits as images proliferated, growing in intensity and varieties of possible meaning: Nympha, born on a sarcophagus, could, multiplying through the ages, end happily on a stamp.

Perhaps the most beautiful set piece in the lectures comes in the one on the “ecstatic spiral,” a lecture obviously haunted by Warburg’s Nympha: “We twist in agony, we twist in ecstasy, we twirl in the dance. A leaf in an eddy of wind rises in a spiral, so does a waterspout. Flames curl upwards, to comfort or destroy, as matter is transformed into energy.”

Warburg’s favorite illustration was what he called the “Nympha” figure: the young woman in flowing drapery who gives the illusion of rapid and graceful movement and can be found dancing through Western art for two thousand years, from Hellenistic sarcophagi to Botticelli’s “Primavera” and Isadora Duncan.

He created large collages of maps, manuscript pages, and photographs taken from many sources, high and low alike, including his beloved Nympha figure, and arrayed them on black linen screens.