Publius Ovid (43 BC-17/18 AD) describes in his Metamorphoses

Niobe’s transformation into a weeping rock. Niobe’s transformation

incorporates the form and matter of the medium of sculpture. According

to the humanist paragone debate, painting and sculpture struggle

to be the medium with the highest qualities of virtuosity. Aby Warburg

(1866-1929) refers to the Niobe motif’s Nachleben in his Tafel

5: Beraubte Mutter. (Niobe, Flucht und Schrecken). This displays the

images of both the bereaved mother (Niobe) and the murderous mother

(Medea). The montage also introduces the theme of the descent to the

underworld. It becomes clear how the cluster of motifs around the figure

of Niobe - hybris, lamentatio and the chthonic substrate -

functions as a direct entry to a bipolar hermeneutics of the visual

medium: the ‘historical psychology of human expression’ that navigates

between Apollo and Dionysus. The ‘weeping rock’ that according to legend

still stands on Mount Sipylus in Turkey, draws upon deeper

anthropological patterns. Petrification indicates inertia, frigidity and

a Medusan psychosis of fear. In nature, stones and rocks have a

‘slumbering insistence’ that can be captivating. Stones are after all

visible but impenetrable, they index an irrevocable absence in their

presence, and ‘have abode’ in an otherworldly region of utter blindness

and silence. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Niobe’s petrifaction

symbolises the straitening of her life and the loss of anima within a

culture divorced from authentic feeling, nature, and instinct. Here

Niobe meets Echo.