As holder of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftungsprofessur (2023) Barbara Baert delivered this public lecture at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg on May 9th 2023. Taking her lead, amongst others, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Warburg’s Bilderatlas, she elaborated on the cluster of motifs around the figure of Niobe – hybris, lamentatio, the underworld – and on the ‘weeping rock’ as a paradigm of both petrification and fluidity, as an expression of das erstarrte Leben.