Imagery of Crisis and Resilience. A Parallel between Early Modern Traditions and the Present

In the first part of this contribution, I would like to take as my starting-point some of the claims most widely accepted in current discussions about the theory of resilience. Of course, I do not set out to provide full coverage of the innumerable studies that have been dedicated to the topic, as I do not intend to provide an exhaustive panorama of current debates. Subsequently, I outline some of the basic types of intervention that have been made, thereby adopting a typological approach to conceptual analysis which focusses on lexical choices, uses, and connotations. In the second part, I elaborate on some aspects of the imagery of crisis and resilience, retracing a visual tradition that connects past and present in the light of arboreal imagery and forgotten virtues. In the closing section, I relate my findings to today’s discourses of resilience, suggesting that they fit into a wider intellectual map of neo-stoic origins, and thereby marking some routes of interpretation which may contribute to a more detailed scrutiny of the cultures of resilience in the diachronic scenario of Europe’s crises.