Goethe's Visual World (Germanic Literatures) [1 ed.] 1907975896, 9781907975899

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Goethe’s Visual World

leGenda leeda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature association.

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GERMANIC LITERATUREs Editorial Committee Chair: Professor Ritchie Robertson (University of Oxford) Dr Barbara Burns (Glasgow University) Professor Jane Fenoulhet (University College London) Professor Anne Fuchs (University of Warwick) Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London) Dr Almut Suerbaum (University of Oxford) Professor Susanne Kord (University College London) Professor John Zilcosky (University of Toronto) Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland. The chronological scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages down to the present day. appearing in this series 1. Yvan Goll: The Thwarted Pursuit of the Whole, by Robert Vilain 2. Sebald’s Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, by Helen Finch 3. Goethe’s Visual World, by Pamela Currie 4. German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century, by Linda Shortt Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK www.legendabooks.com

Pamela Currie (1941–2012)

Goethe’s Visual World ❖ Pamela Currie

Germanic Literatures 3 Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2013

First published 2013 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2013 ISBN 978-1-907975-89-9 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Acknowledgements Introduction by T. J. Reed Goethe’s Mental Images Ambiguous Figures in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Specular Moment: Moment for Reflection Goethe’s Green: The ‘Mixed’ Boundary Colours in Zur Farbenlehre ‘Harmoniespiel der Farben’: Goethe, Meyer and Pietro da Cortona Classical Colour Harmony: Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on Jacques Louis David and his Pupil Gottlieb Schick, an ‘emporstrebenden jungen Maler’ in Rome ‘Mannigfaltigkeit des Farbenspiels’: Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on Harmony through Colour Variation An Alternative Antiquity? Ornament in Goethe, Meyer and Giulio Romano Bibliography Index

ix 1 5 19 31 45 61

93 109 133 149 163

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v

On behalf of our mother, Pamela Currie, we would like to express our gratitude to a number of individuals and institutions. Help in obtaining images was given by the photographic archive staff at the Palazzo Barberini and the Palazzo Pitti, photographer Nicolò Orsi Battaglini, and the past and present Directors of the Vatican Museums, Dr Francesco Buranelli and Dr Antonio Paolucci. Dr Guido Cornini of the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome, and Dr Christofer Conrad of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, enabled our mother to view paintings that were not on display to the public. The staff of various libraries and archives provided assistance over many years. These include the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Taylor Institution Library. Although researched and written in retire­ment, this book has benefitted in various ways from the contributions of for­ mer colleagues at Lady Margaret Hall and in the Oxford Sub-Faculty of German. Professor Jan J. Koenderink of the Buys Ballot Laboratory, University of Utrecht, kindly read and commented on an earlier draft of Chapter 4. We would like to thank Oxford German Studies for permission to reprint Chapters 1-3 and 5-7 and The Goethe Yearbook for permission to reprint Chapter 4. In the preparation of the manuscript, our series editor Professor Ritchie Robertson, copyeditor Richard Correll, and indexer Sue Dugen have played an important role. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to Professor T. J. Reed who first conceived of this book and since then has been so generous with his time, support, and knowledge. We are also indebted to Dr Graham Nelson for taking on this project and so expertly guiding it through to completion. Finally, our mother would have wished to thank our father, Robert Currie, for his unfailing encouragement in this endeavour, as in all others. Elizabeth and Daniel Currie, London, March 2013

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Introduction v T. J. Reed The essays collected in this volume are not a loose assemblage but the product of a remarkable and coherent research interest. Not a programme of the kind funding bodies now commonly demand, as if the scope of an enquiry could be delimited before it is undertaken; more a record of being led on from answering one question to asking the next. In the grateful shelter of retirement, Pamela Currie was able to spend ten years freely following where the themes led. Connectedness was not just a matter of her private curiosity. What began squarely in the field of literary studies, where she had earlier taught, contained the seed of work on psychology, cognition, light and colour, the history and theory of visual art. Connection was possible, indeed given, through the central figure of the essays. Goethe’s work and thinking arguably touched the world at more points than those of any other European writer. Most of those points were sensory: from early on he was a man confident in the ‘truth of his five senses’1 and very much a Man of the Eye, an ‘Augenmensch’, committed to seeing the world aright, and succeeding impressively in doing so. A man of the inner eye too: in Goethe a powerful visual imagination comes to meet the world and their contact makes poetry that is concrete and clearly defined. The first essay in this collection treats Goethe’s mental images and access to the visual world. It already moves into cognitive psychology and neurobiology and explores the thesis that we think first with images rather than with words, rejecting the ‘logocentism’ that surely leads to infinite regress. The theme then easily extends, in the second essay, into Goethe’s work as dramatist and novelist. Imagined literary characters are not transparent mechanisms, but can tax the understanding as much as people in real life. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novel is full of ambiguities that make it almost a mystery tale. And at a deeper level the protagonist’s ‘Bildung’ is not just a process of socialization but an education in perceptual objectivity, something that Goethe always intuitively and confidently claimed for himself. Did he then ever suffer from a ‘crisis of vision’? The third essay looks at recent psychoanalytic speculations about Goethe’s poetry — the most extensive work of this kind since Eissler’s systematic reading of the early Goethe.2 The intricate analyses under review are sympathetically rehearsed but finally seen critically. That is hardly surprising, since it is difficult to see ‘crisis’ in a corpus of poetry that is so precise in its perceptions and so luminous in their expression; not least in a poem central to the argument, ‘Willkommen und Abschied’, which graphically evokes darkness falling over a landscape and the dramatic imaginings of the man riding

2

Introduction

through it. At its extreme, the psychoanalytic enterprise under examination ends by ‘infantilizing the Goethezeit’, and may actually ‘hinder rather than further our understanding of Goethe’s work’ — a typically restrained remark by a scholar prepared to look seriously at all approaches without losing her sympathy for the viewpoint of ‘the general reader’, for whom Goethe is not a problem but a solution. Incidentally, amid all the talk of profound complexes, one must not forget what Freud said, in very common-sense terms, about the shaping inf luence of Goethe’s mother: having been a favourite child (‘Hätschelhans’) gave the man the certainty of success that often brings success.3 Not to mention Katharina Elisabeth’s vivacious letter-writing style,4 which shows what kind of language the future poet must have been fruitfully exposed to as he learned what was literally the ‘mother tongue’. The essays’ thematic interest gravitates naturally to actual visual representation — to painting. Visual art was a deep-rooted interest of Goethe’s own. Training to draw was part of the education his father organized for him when he was a child, and as a student in Leipzig he worked with Adam Friedrich Oeser, a friend of Winckelmann’s, as his drawing master. So it was not a big jump when some early poems used visual artists as masks from behind which to talk about problems of the writer.5 Goethe was in reality no mean graphic artist, as witness the five volumes of his collected drawings.6 He drew more than he painted: drawing’s instant feasibility paralleled the prompt response to the ‘occasions’ of everyday experience out of which he made poetry. He was still taking his talent seriously enough to occupy much of the time in Italy in 1786 to 1788 with the study and practice of art, as against writing. In this two-year sojourn he produced just two poems (though admittedly, he was also reworking earlier poetic and dramatic texts for a first collected edition). He was living among painters, with a pseudonym as a painter — his postal address in Rome was ‘Filippo Möller, pittore’ — and he took further lessons, or at least had guidance, from a not inconsiderable painter, Johann Heinrich Tischbein, for whom he also sat. Or stood: the back view of Goethe looking down from his window on the Corso, more informal than Tischbein’s famous portrait of the poet magisterially reclining in the Campagna landscape, is wonderfully suggestive of the fascination Italian life held for a fugitive northerner. But in Rome, despite or because of his intensive study of ancient art and his practice of drawing, Goethe began to appreciate the limitations of a talent that was so much slighter than his poetic gift. He nevertheless went on with it in this clearer awareness,7 and continued to draw on and off for the rest of his life. Whatever the quality of the work he produced, the concentration it involved was a route to precise seeing. Reading Kant in the autumn of 1788, immediately on his return from Italy, only confirmed his sense of seeing things aright, for Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had inspired confidence in human cognition by clearly marking out its limits. Goethe echoes him in an essay published in the Teutsche Merkur the following February, where he defines style as resting ‘on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as it is permitted to us to know it in visible and graspable forms.’8 In principle there was for Goethe no limit to worthwhile visual subjects right down to the most humble, as witness the demands on the graphic artist he

Introduction

3

formulated in some rough-and-ready lines dashed off to his friend Johann Heinrich Merck in 1774: Geb Gott dir Lieb zu deinem Pantoffel Ehr jede krüpliche Kartoffel Erkenne jedes Dings Gestalt Sein Leid und Freud Ruh und Gewalt Und fühle wie die ganze Welt Der hohe Himmel zusammenhält.9 [God grant that you may love your shoe, Every deformed potato too. Try to see each object plain, Its peace and power, joy and pain, And feel the whole world’s held in place By the high heaven’s grand embrace.]

An artist with such an embracing vision would, he concludes, be a master of draw­ ing, colour and above all of expression. In 1790, Goethe was diverted into a further branch of science (he had already gone fairly deep into several) when he saw, in a f lash of intuition, that Newton’s explanations of colour were wrong. From that fateful date on, he spent years experimenting and polemicizing, and writing one of his longest works. It involved fighting not just Newton’s theories but his unquestioned authority, which was such that Goethe’s independence was widely held to be the aberration of a mere dilettante, to his justifiable chagrin. Was this the open-mindedness of science in the face of prolonged conscientious commitment? The essay on ‘Goethe’s Green’ treats the phenomenon of ‘fringe colours’, but moves from the fringes of controversy into the central issue: was Goethe so wrong after all? Pamela Currie traces the ebb and f low of modern investigations, in this case the highly technical physics that underlies the perception of works of art, with as much scholarly thoroughness and aplomb as when she is peering into the depths of psychoanalytic criticism. In sum, she rescues some more ground for Goethe beyond what has long been secured in his favour, namely that his view and vision of ‘physiological’ colours are more persuasive, and indeed useful, to artists — most famously to Turner — than to physicists.10 Meanwhile Goethe’s engagement with visual art as a viewer, collector and critic continued as strong as ever, even while he was becoming less active in drawing. In Rome he had also made a decisive acquaintance with the art connoisseur, historian and (modest) executant artist, the Swiss Johann Heinrich Meyer. In 1791 Meyer accepted Goethe’s invitation to move to Weimar and was henceforth his oracle and ally in all matters of visual art. Meyer’s Winckelmannian classicistic tastes did not cause but did confirm Goethe’s conservatism.11 A not very happy result was the prize competitions mounted between 1799 and 1805 by the ‘Weimar Friends of Art’, Goethe and Meyer, joined by Goethe’s ally since 1794, Schiller. Prescribing subjects from classical antiquity was true to the academic orthodoxy that set history painting highest in the hierarchy.12 But it was a far remove from the spontaneous developments going on in contemporary art. Some of the younger painters — Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge — did take part in the competitions,

4

Introduction

but against the grain. ‘We are no longer Greeks’, Runge objected. ‘A work surely arises only in the moment when I clearly perceive a connection with the Universe.’ The new movement had its own excesses, in a religiose and heavily allegorical direction,13 and not every anti-classical Romantic innovator had the painterly talent of Caspar David Friedrich. But when Friedrich won a half-share of the prize with entries outside the prescribed subjects, the competitions with their heavy classicistic hand had plainly had their day. Meyer and Goethe appear in a less conservative light in the later essays of this volume, in that they are looking at — looking for — unusual, exceptional cases. That has analogies with Goethe’s empirical science, where he relished the pursuit of intermediate forms between the taxonomic categories to which Linnaeus and others had subjected natural species. Here we are in the thick of Renaissance art and its history, with Goethe’s often spontaneously perceptive eye pursuing colour ‘harmony’ among painters not of the first rank. The three essays with that keyword in their title must be collectively among the most thorough technical treatments of the concept; while the final essay, published for the first time in this volume, follows Goethe and Meyer on a track that leads away from classicistic orthodoxy into something nearer to ‘autonomous art’. Students of Goethe’s creative writing early become aware of the immense scope of his other interests and activities. It is a challenge to follow him into any one of them, and these essays follow him to some depth into two, as well as into constructs his work has generated. It is a very Goethean achievement. Notes to the Introduction 1. To Johann Caspar Lavater, 28 October 1779. 2. K. R. Eissler: Goethe. Eine psychoanalytische Studie, 1775–1786 (Basel: Stroemfeld, 1983). 3. Sigmund Freud, ‘Eine Kindheitserinnerung aus Dichtung und Wahrheit’ (1917), Studienausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1970), x, 257–66 (p. 266). 4. Briefe der Frau Rath Goethe, ed. Albert Köster, 2 vols (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1911). 5. These are the poems grouped as ‘Künstlergedichte’ in the Hamburger Ausgabe, i, 53–77. 6. Corpus der Goethezeichnungen, ed. by Gerhard Femmel (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1958–73). For a selection in folio format, with a substantial introduction placing Goethe’s work among the artists and successive trends of his long life, see Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Zeichnungen, ed. by Petra Maisak (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996). 7. Goethe to Duke Carl August, 6/7 July 1787. 8. ‘Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil.’ Hamburger Ausgabe 12, 32. 9. The poem,‘Hier schick’ ich dir ein teures Pfand’, was sent with a set of drawings and never published. Gedichte, Frankfurter Ausgabe 1, 1987, p. 189. 10. See Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. Chapter 7, ‘Newton and After’. On Goethe and Turner see pp. 303ff. Of Turner’s ‘Goethe paintings’, one (Kemp, Plate X) has an express reference in the title: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) — the Morning after the Deluge. 11. See the articles on Meyer in Effi Biedrzynski, Goethes Weimar. Das Lexikon der Personen und Schauplätze (Zurich: Artemis & Winkler, 1994), pp. 282–86, and in the Goethe-Handbuch ed. by Hans-Dietrich Dahnke and Regine Otto, 4 Bände und Register (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), vol. 4/2. 12. See Walther Scheidig, Goethes Preisaufgaben für bildende Künstler, 1799–1805 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1958). 13. See the essay by Goethe and Meyer, ‘Neudeutsch-religios-patriotische Kunst’, Weimarer Aus­ gabe, 49/1, pp. 23–59.

Chapter 1

v

Goethe’s Mental Images Goethe’s many records of his own life show that he experienced vivid mental images. Dichtung und Wahrheit relates his vision of a Doppelgänger riding towards him as he departed from Sesenheim; the Italienische Reise shows that landscapes left an inde­ lible impression on his mind; and his review, published in 1824, of J. E. Purkinje’s Das Sehen in subjektiver Hinsicht gives a striking account of his youthful ability to shut his eyes, conjure up a mental image of a f lower, and ‘see’ it generate a series of fantasy f lowers resembling in their regularity the ornaments created by sculptors.1 Goethe’s scientific work, much of which was devoted to visual perception, contains many references to mental imagery: memory images of emotion-laden objects, for example, or after-images in complementary colours.2 Given Goethe’s own practical and theoretical knowledge, it is hardly surprising that many of his fictional characters are virtuosos of the mental image.3 Werther claims in one of his earliest letters that heaven and earth rest in his soul like the form of a lover (8: 14). Later, when Lotte has become the object of his love, he describes the way in which her image pursues him: Wie mich die Gestalt verfolgt. Wachend und träumend füllt sie meine ganze Seele. Hier, wenn ich die Augen schliesse, hier in meiner Stirne, wo die innere Sehkraft sich vereinigt, stehen ihre schwarzen Augen. [...] Mach ich meine Augen zu, so sind sie da, wie ein Meer, wie ein Abgrund ruhen sie vor mir, in mir, füllen die Sinnen meiner Stirne. (8: 192)

Wilhelm Meister is likewise visited by persistent mental images of his love-objects, either in dreams or in his waking hours, when he ‘sees’ Mariane, the Countess, and especially Natalie, who imprinted herself on his mind as she appeared to him in the clearing, her head surrounded by a halo.4 His mental image of Natalie recurs to him in the same form at various significant moments, until he is eventually able to compare it with the woman herself, present to his senses once more.5 When he despairs of winning Natalie, he knows he will never free himself of her image: doch wird leider Natalie dir immer gegenwärtig sein. Schließest du die Augen, so wird sie sich dir darstellen; öffnest du sie, so wird sie vor allen Gegenständen hinschweben, wie die Erscheinung, die ein blendendes Bild im Auge zurück läßt. (9: 949)

Even at this late stage, Wilhelm seems to face the same fate as Werther. Die Wahlverwandtschaften contains equally striking examples of vivid mental imagery, most notably the ‘Ehebruch im Ehebett’ of Eduard and Charlotte, who

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Goethe’s Mental Images

make love to their mental images, of Ottilie and the Captain, not to one another, and whose child is, according to the superstition of the day,6 living proof, by its visual resemblance to these absent love-objects, that they were in its parents’ minds at its conception (8: 353). After his separation from Ottilie, Eduard discovers the capacity to see waking mental images of her, as well as to dream of her, while Ottilie, for her part, apparently begins to have hypnagogic hallucinations of Eduard.7 In Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Wilhelm’s own experience of vivid mental imagery is confined to his account of his childhood: on the same day that he lost his new-found friend Adolf by drowning, a young blond girl with whom he played left a strong image in his mind (10: 547). But mental images are not entirely relegated to the past. Lenardo cannot erase from his mind the image of Nachodine, the tenant’s daughter whom he failed to rescue from his father’s wrath (10: 397); while Hersilie has both Wilhelm’s and Felix’s image before her, but most powerfully that of Felix: ‘der kleine Schalk ist mir gegenwärtiger als je, ja es ist mir als ob sein Bild sich mir in die Augen hineinbohrte’ (10: 538). When Goethe’s characters talk of their mental images, they attribute them to the faculty of imagination: Einbildungskraft. Werther’s observation on Lotte: ‘meiner Einbildungskraft erscheint keine andere Gestalt als die ihrige’ (8: 112) is typical.8 Likewise for Goethe himself, mental images proceed from the imagination; indeed the imagination is definable as the faculty for making mental images. The evidence of the novels therefore sheds some light on Goethe’s view of the imagination, and much more can be learned from his many references to imagination in letters and in philosophical, aesthetic and scientific essays. Useful attempts have already been made to expound his ideas, as well as to compare them with contemporary theories such as those of Kant, Hegel and the Romantics.9 But the decades since 1945 have been notable for the prominence given in philosophy, psychology and cognitive and neuroscience to visual perception, imagination, and mental imagery. And some of the contrasting views which have evolved within these disciplines can help to situate Goethe’s ideas. An inf luential lineage of philosophers, beginning with Heidegger and including Sartre, Foucault and Rorty, has called attention to a supposed ocularcentrism in western metaphysics from the Greeks onwards. With Descartes in particular, this is said to give rise to a ‘spectatorial and intellectualist epistemology’ which is then blamed for modern technology’s reduction of the natural world to objects to be measured, surveyed, and manipulated for our purposes.10 As a result of this way of thinking, any preoccupation, such as Goethe’s, with things visual risks condemnation as dualistic and reifying. And Goethe has indeed been accused, on account of his approach to sight and imagery, of failure to escape dualism, and of ocularcentric subjectivism.11 Psychoanalysis attached great importance to mental imagery from its earliest days, as witness Freud’s preoccupation with the interpretation of dreams. But Jacques Lacan’s inf luential revision of Freud focused even greater attention on imagery and the imagination, which became, as the Imaginary, one of the three categories of his system, alongside the Symbolic and the Real. The imaginary order, as described by Lacan, is associated with the formation of the ego, in the mirror stage, through

Goethe’s Mental Images

7

narcissistic identification with the specular image. Because this manner of egoformation is specious, the Imaginary is a realm of ‘deception and lure’, its principal illusions being those of ‘wholeness, synthesis, autonomy’ and, ‘above all, similarity’. The purpose of psychoanalysis is thus to free the subject from the disabling fixations of the Imaginary by means of entry into the symbolic order, that is, the order of language associated with the name-of-the-father. If Lacan himself showed a ‘Cartesian mistrust of the imagination as a cognitive tool’,12 and was followed in this by the structuralists, other French thinkers who came to fame in the years immediately following 1968 adopted his categories while reversing his evaluations of them. For these writers, who include Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Entrance into society and structure is seen as a tragedy. Only a return to the imaginary, to a “preOedipal” state, could spell the end of sociopolitical repression, of the “Dictatorship of the Symbolic”.’13 In recent years attempts have been made, most notably by David Wellbery, to interpret texts including Werther and Goethe’s early poems using Lacan’s idea of a narcissistic fixation on the mental image of the counterpart in the mirror stage.14 But at the same time followers of Deleuze and Guattari have argued that Goethe, though ultimately in thrall to reason and the Symbolic, showed signs of sympathy with the Imaginary, manifested, for example, in his portrayal of Eduard and Ottilie.15 This argument, rooted in twentieth-century thought, can be pressed into service to refute the charge, first made by Novalis and often repeated, that Goethe rejected the poetic realm of the imagination for the prosaic world of reality. While psychoanalytic concepts of mental imagery and the imagination have appealed strongly to literary critics and theorists,16 cognitive science and neuro­ science have recently taken an ‘imagic turn’ which has yet to be examined for its relevance to ideas of the mental image in the arts. Earlier this century, the domi­ nance of behaviourism within cognitive science prevented the study of imagery. However, research conducted within the field of artificial intelligence has tended to reinstate the imagination as a cognitive faculty. Doubts as to the symbolic and logical nature of thought — the idea that thinking is ‘sentence-crunching’ — have led many theorists to reject pure logocentrism, concentrating instead on non-discursive representations, representations, that is, which are not symbols in the language of thought, such as prototypes, frames, or images.17 A large body of opinion now concurs with Antonio Damasio’s contention, in Descartes’ Error, that thought is made of images. Another leading researcher in the field, Stephen Kosslyn, has tried to demonstrate the cognitive functioning of mental imagery through experiments requiring subjects to match three-dimensional geometrical figures by rotating mental images.18 The part played by imagination in the lives of Goethe’s fictional characters seems closer to Lacan’s model than to that of current cognitive psychology. As I have indicated, various characters experience vivid mental images of their lovers; but the capacity for such images seems closely connected with disillusionment and even death. Those figures who profess to ‘see’ the image of their lovers ever before their eyes risk seeing nothing of the rest of the world, and falling into melancholia. This is true of course of Werther, but he analyses the experience of the drowned girl

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Goethe’s Mental Images

in the same terms: she sees nothing but her lover, so that when he leaves her the world turns to darkness and she takes her own life.19 Wilhelm Meister experiences visual attachment when he loves Mariane, and despair when he loses her; and this pattern repeats itself in connection with Therese and Natalie, each of whom he in turn idolizes and fears to lose.20 Eduard and Ottilie, each of whom is devoted to the image of the other, both die before their time, faithful to a love that cannot apparently realize itself in this life.21 The novels themselves show these events, but do not theorize about them. The recurrence of the pattern suggests that obsession with the mental image of a loved one brings death in its wake. But why that should be so is left unclear. The texts contain hints that the mental image of the loved person is not a memory image based on perception, but a creation of the lover’s imagination. When Wilhelm Meister tries to compare his mental image of the beautiful Amazon with his perception of Natalie herself, he — or the narrator — realizes that the image of the Amazon is tantamount to his own creation (9: 896). Similarly when Eduard describes his mental images of Ottilie to Mittler, he says he sees her doing all sorts of everyday things, but admittedly those that f latter his ego the most (8: 386–87). Goethe once commented to Riemer that lovers love their own image in the beloved: ‘Die wenigsten Menschen lieben an dem andern das was er ist, nur was sie ihm leihen, sich, ihre Vorstellung von ihm, lieben sie.’22 The danger of this is perhaps the one formulated by Anne Hollander in her discussion of the Narcissus myth: Narcissus, unlike non-mythological people, was unaware that he saw himself, and he fell in love with something he thought was truly Other, as most do and as he ought to have done. The drowning came not just when the ref lection reached out to match his own caress but when he knew it was only himself, and that he had made it up. The danger of the mirror boils down to the risk of letting the infinite and wayward power of the human eye turn on itself and make an uncontrollable, destructive creature out of the self-image.23

Attachment to a fantasy image of the self is non-relational, and therefore has death (or madness) as its consequence. Of course Lacanian psychoanalysis uses more complex language to make this point. For Lacan, the sort of love that begins at first sight, a love for which he used the German term Verliebtheit, belongs to the Imaginary. It is based on perception of the other as equivalent to the self: just as the infant supposedly identifies with its specular image, so the adult individual identifies in Verliebtheit with another who serves as counterpart to that image. Thus Verliebtheit is entirely narcissistic. It is also entirely delusionary: the Imaginary is merely imaginary. Verliebtheit attempts to achieve oneness and harmony, and so to escape alienation. But by its very nature it is doomed to failure.24 Do Goethe’s novels therefore anticipate Lacan’s theory, and can it in turn illuminate them? The apparent ‘fit’ between literary texts and the elaborate theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis need not surprise, since Freud and Lacan drew on literary sources. Lacan was introduced by his teacher Jean Hyppolite to Hegel’s account of the beautiful soul, whose solipsistic withdrawal from the world of action into an aesthetic realm was a response to the problem of alienation. Hegel’s concept of the

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beautiful soul was based on the literary tradition that began with Rousseau and passed through Werther and the ‘Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele’ to Jacobi and Novalis.25 When Lacan wanted an example of Verliebtheit, he cited Werther and Lotte.26 So Goethe perhaps illuminates Lacan, rather than the reverse. But the two appear to concur in their suspicion of love which idolizes — makes an eidolon of — the beloved object. And we are perhaps forced to assume that Goethe, like Lacan, was deeply suspicious of imagination. So was Goethe, like Lacan, a rationalist and a logocentrist? Or did he see an alternative to condemning the imagination outright? From the time of the first Italian journey, at the latest, Goethe seems to have drawn a theoretical distinction between two contrasting ways of using the imagination. The first way, which is exemplified by Werther and is explicitly censured by the older Goethe, may be described as subjective. It is a matter of imposing the self on the world, or, in Goethe’s formula, seeing only the self in the world. Our images of external objects are impregnated with our feelings, and will therefore change with those feelings. This phenomenon is known in cognitive science as top-down processing: prior cognitive bias or a particular frame of mind in the subject inf luences his or her image of the object.27 From about the age of thirty, Goethe evidently came to believe that, in his younger years, he had been guilty of this form of seeing, and could and should rid himself of it. He claimed success in this endeavour in Rome in 1787: ‘Da ich neuerdings nur die Sachen und nicht, wie sonst, bei und mit den Sachen sehe was nicht da ist’ (15/1: 378). His mature evaluation of subjective imagining is evident in his satirical treatment of Werther in the Briefe aus der Schweiz, written in February 1796: Werther has a minutely detailed recollection of mossy stones and waterfalls, their heights and depths, lights and shadows — presumably because he has simply transported his own feelings into them (8: 604). A letter to J. H. Meyer from the next month censures other people who see ‘sich nur in den Sachen’ (31: 176). In 1805, a return visit to the Bode valley in the Harz, made after many years, caused him to ref lect again on subjective mental images. When, he says, we compare our striking memory image of a place with the newly perceived, more sober reality, we conclude that ‘wir uns früher an den Gegenständen empfanden, Freud’ und Leid, Heiterkeit und Verwirrung auf sie übertrugen’ (17: 178). Though he perceives the perils of subjective imagination, the older Goethe need not condemn imagination outright because he has identified and defined a second way in which imagination can be used, namely an objective way. This is no longer a matter of seeing the world as self, but of seeing the self as world. The full antithesis, as formulated in his letter to Meyer of March 1796, is as follows: Wer in dem immerfort dauernden Streben begriffen ist die Sachen in sich und nicht, wie unsere lieben Landsleute, sich nur in den Sachen zu sehen, der muß immer vorwärts kommen, indem er seine Kenntnisfähigkeit vermehrt und mehrere und bessere Dinge in sich aufnehmen kann. (31: 176)

The reference to Goethe’s compatriots suggests that he perceives subjective seeing as a northern and German phenomenon. But that aside, his comment to Meyer seems to need explanation. For how does one ‘see things in oneself ’? Here Goethe

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probably has in mind a process which begins with the sort of seeing to which he committed himself in his letter to Jacobi of 5 May 1786, a few months before he left Germany for the south and Rome: ‘ich halte viel aufs schauen, [...] so geben mir diese wenigen Worte [from Spinoza] Muth, mein ganzes Leben der Betrachtung der Dinge zu widmen’ (29: 629). While in Italy, Goethe insisted many times that he was concentrating on unprejudiced looking at the objects of art and nature. The Annalen passage for 1805, which comments on subjective images of landscapes, describes the alternative, objective way of looking as one in which we do not project our feelings on to objects, but ‘bei gebändigter Selbstigkeit ihnen das gebührende Recht widerfahren lassen’ (17: 178). As a result of this conscious effort to eliminate subjectivity, we can, Goethe believes, acquire a true impression or mental image of objects themselves: ‘Ich halte die Augen nur immer offen und drücke mir die Gegenstände recht ein’ (15/1: 130). In this way, we acquire an array of images of external objects, we are filled with world, we see objects in ourselves instead of projecting ourselves on to objects. Thus far Goethe is considering objective imagination as a reproductive fac­u lty, acquiring memory images of perceived objects. But the mature Goethe also con­ceives of objective imagination as productive. This seems to be the sense of the Fore­word to the Farbenlehre of 1810, where Goethe writes: ‘Jedes Ansehen geht über in ein Betrachten, jedes Betrachten in ein Sinnen, jedes Sinnen in ein Verknüpfen’ (23/1: 14). The note which Goethe wrote in 1816 on the Kantian philosophy proclaims imagination — now Phantasie — as ‘die vierte Hauptkraft unsers geistigen Wesens’, which mediates in many active ways between senses and reason (20: 605). Purkinje’s book on vision, which brought Goethe welcome confirmation of many of his own ideas about visual perception, inspired him to enthusiastic ref lections on the activity of the eye, after-images, and his own power to manipulate them: ‘Hier ist die Erscheinung des Nachbildes, Gedächtnis, produktive Einbildungskraft, Begriff und Idee alles auf einmal im Spiel’ (25: 826). A letter to Knebel from the same year as the Purkinje review28 offers Goethe’s most confident account of the imagination’s productive role: ‘Zur Anschauung gesellt sich die Einbildungskraft, diese ist zuerst nachbildend, die Gegenstände nur wiederholend. Sodann ist sie produktiv, indem sie das Angefaßte belebt, entwickelt, erweitert, verwandelt.’ And there is yet more: ‘Ferner können wir noch eine umsichtige Einbildungskraft annehmen, die sich bei’m Vortrag umherschaut, Gleiches und Ähnliches erfaßt, um das Ausgesprochene zu bewähren’ (36: 152). The role of imagination is, ultimately, to discover analogies. All of these comments show that imagination for the older Goethe is not primarily a faculty which conjures up phantasms and traps its victims in hopeless dreams, though that danger is always present, but a cognitive faculty, an essential means to knowledge. Goethe’s mature view of the imagination has found more critics than defenders in recent times, for it appears bound up with various scarcely sustainable philosophical positions. The claim to objective seeing seems to imply a direct realism that modern epistemology considers naive, though it may be argued that, even if we do see objects by means of mental representations, what we ultimately see is the objects, not the representations.29 A bigger difficulty has been Goethe’s metaphysical monism, the

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conclusion from imagination as bridge between sensation and thought, world and mind to the oneness of world and mind, the ‘Totalität des Innern und Äußern’ (23/2: 269). Despite the fact that the Cartesian dualism that Goethe rejected has itself fallen into disrepute, his own Naturphilosophie remains suspect, chief ly because of his inveterate opposition to Newtonian physics and his intemperate attack on Newton. The common perception is still that his science lacks a mathematical basis, and therefore has no serious substance.30 This is a pity, for Goethe’s later concept of imagination, if seen not as metaphysics but as a theory of the functioning of the brain, is remarkably perceptive. In fact it corresponds in several significant respects to the ideas of modern cognitive psychology and neurobiology. When Goethe talked of ‘Sachen in sich sehen’, he meant that we see objects as objects and that they enter our minds in such a way as to reconfigure our cognitive capacities, or, in his terms, open new senses in us. In Rome in June, 1787, he dreaded leaving because this process would be interrupted as far as he was concerned: ‘Jetzt wenn ich scheide werde ich nur wissen, welcher Sinn mir noch nicht aufgegangen ist’ (15/1: 377). The Meyer letter on subjective and objective seeing indicates the possibility of continual development: the person willing to see things in himself and not vice versa ‘muß immer vorwärts kommen, indem er seine Kenntnisfähigkeit vermehrt und mehrere und bessere Dinge in sich aufnehmen kann’ (31: 176). Goethe’s key comment on objects and our capacity to perceive them appears in his essay ‘Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort’: ‘Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf ’ (24: 596). This manner of looking which develops the mental faculties leads to a higher understanding that Goethe describes by referring to the Urphänomen in natural science, the symbol in art or the Reihe in both. In the Farbenlehre he charts a movement from empirical instances of a phenomenon to empirical categories and thence to scientific categories. He continues: Von nun an fügt sich alles nach und nach unter höhere Regeln und Gesetze, die sich aber nicht durch Worte und Hypothesen dem Verstande, sondern gleichfalls durch Phänomene dem Anschauen offenbaren. Wir nennen sie Urphänomene. (23/1: 81)

His insistence that the Urphänomen is a visual image recalls the much earlier exchange he claimed to have had with Schiller: when Schiller declared Goethe’s Urpflanze to be an idea rather than a perception, Goethe rejoined: ‘Das kann mir sehr lieb sein, daß ich Ideen habe ohne es zu wissen, und sie sogar mit Augen sehe’ (24: 437). Five years before his death, Goethe explained the Urphänomen in a letter to C. D. von Buttel: Ferner ist ein Urphänomen nicht einem Grundsatz gleichzuachten, aus dem sich mannichfaltige Folgen ergeben, sondern anzusehen als eine Grunderscheinung, innerhalb deren das Mannichfaltige anzuschauen ist. (37: 473)

Once again, he insists that the Urphänomen is visual, not discursive: it is a mental image. Thus far, Goethe’s picture of mental processes corresponds with current cognitive neurobiological thinking as expounded by the monist materialist philosopher Paul

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Churchland in The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. Goethe spoke of training himself to see by looking at objects. And recent neuroscientific theory likewise suggests that the mind can have knowledge only by training itself through exposure to the world of objects. Essentially, the nervous system must learn to represent the many dimensions of physical and possibly also social space. Learning takes place solely in the domain of observable things: the mind is trained on a large population of examples and can develop its abilities over time in response to new sensory experience. Through exposure to a particular domain of experience, we configure a population of neurones that constitutes the brain’s ‘activation space’ for that domain so as to represent the structure of the domain. For example, the brain ‘seems to represent faces with a pattern of activations [...] whose elements correspond to various canonical features or abstract “dimensions” of observed faces.’ Eyes, mouth and overall face shape, in that order, are of greatest significance for face discrimination. Representation in the brain’s face-space is achieved by vector coding: the location of different faces on several — perhaps up to twenty — dimensions, each with a number of increments of discrimination. ‘If humans represent faces with a ten-dimensional vector, with only five increments of discrimination along each of its ten dimensions, then we should be able to discriminate [...] roughly ten million different faces. And so, it seems, we can.’31 Goethe’s seeing led him to the idea of the Urphänomen. In similar fashion, cognitive neuroscience relies on the idea of the prototype. As infants partition their neuronal activation spaces for different sorts of perception — be it face recognition, colour discrimination or whatever — they develop an organized structure of concepts or categories. Categories are broad: they include all the observed possibilities of a particular object. Churchland cites the example of the concept ‘cat’, as configured in the appropriate brain space: ‘That special feline partition embodies a portrait of the difficult-to-describe facial configuration peculiar to cats, and of the ways in which it can vary, from f luffy Persian to lean Siamese for example. It embodies a portrait of typical cat-style behaviour.’ At the same time, the process of vector coding which makes possible the formation of such concepts or categories also generates ‘average or prototypical representations’. Embedded in the similarity space that includes many nonstandard possibilities — three-legged cats, cats without tails and so on — there is the standard or prototypical cat arrived at by taking the average of each feature of the cat to produce a general average of all sample specimens. Likewise we acquire a prototype of the human face which is the vector-average of all sample faces.32 What, it may be asked, has all this to do with mental images? Talk of configuring neuronal populations in brain space does not of course mean that we have little pictures somehow etched in our grey matter, and from time to time contemplate them. That would simply be a reversion to the discredited act-object model of the mind as mirror of the world, with some sort of homunculus present inside to contemplate the contents of the mirror. Churchland offers a more persuasive explanation, based on current brain research. He argues that visual imagination, the power to have visual images, involves the same brain areas that participate in visual perception itself: people who have sustained damage to the visual cortex cease to

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have visual dreams and to experience mental images.33 Once the brain spaces for the different kinds of sensory perception have been configured by a feed-forward process based on exposure to the world of objects, it seems that there may be feedback which produces visual imagery. In other words, recurrent axonal pathways descending from the configured areas make possible the systematic stimulation of the visual cortex, resulting in visual images.34 This explanation of visual imagery in terms of recurrent processes leads helpfully back to the remaining part of Goethe’s theory of the Urphänomen. For he does not merely describe the possibility of conceiving the prototypical plant, animal or whatever, but goes on to suggest what can be done with the prototype once it is formed in the mind. His letter to von Buttel described the Urphänomen as ‘eine Grunderscheinung, innerhalb deren das Mannichfaltige anzuschauen ist’ (37: 473). The Urphänomen is thus an instrument for the further understanding of phenomena, by means of a recurrent process which is outlined in the Farbenlehre: ‘Wir nennen sie Urphänomene, weil nichts in der Erscheinung über ihnen liegt, sie aber dagegen völlig geeignet sind, daß man stufenweise [...] von ihnen herab bis zu dem gemeinsten Falle der täglichen Erfahrung niedersteigen kann’ (23/1: 81). Here Goethe seems to be amplifying his idea of imagination’s role in perceiving analogies. The Urphänomen, it seems, may be activated in the mind as a mental image and used as a point of comparison with new percepts from the world of objects, in order to understand them better. Here Goethe is clearly describing analogical thinking, the process of seeing parallels between differing phenomena, and using knowledge of one sphere to illuminate another as yet unknown. He famously used this process in his scientific enquiries, claiming in particular that the polarity visible in magnetism, for example, could also be found in the sphere of chromatics, where he explained colour in terms of a polar opposition between light and darkness. Goethe’s analogical thinking has been disparaged. Lacan, for instance, commented: ‘Analogy is not metaphor, and the use that philosophers of nature have made of it calls for the genius of a Goethe, but even his example is not encouraging.’35 However, Churchland’s account of brain function serves to justify the Goethean analogical project. Once our prototypes are in place, Churchland argues, they have surprising applications. Since prototypes ‘typically represent far more information than is present in the sensory input that activates them on any given occasion’, they have ‘substantial predictive content’. Prototype activation can enable us to recognize something unfamiliar as an example of something already known, as when we recognize an animal in a photograph with poor definition. Prototypes also enable us to make sense of an ambiguous figure like the duck-rabbit.36 However, Churchland also credits prototypes with a role in creativity.37 Scientific discovery, he argues, is a matter of ‘toying with the figure of a duck until it suddenly re-presents itself as a rabbit, of puzzling over some scattered elements until they suddenly cohere as a man-on-a-horse.’ ‘We all have imaginations,’ Churchland argues, we ‘are all capable of recurrent manipulation of our cognitive response to a continuing input.’ ‘The unusually creative people among us’, he continues, are simply those who are unusually skilled at such recurrent manipulation, who are compelled to engage in it by a strong sense of delight or entertainment, who

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Goethe’s Mental Images are sufficiently learned to have a large repertoire of powerful prototypes whose novel deployments are worth exploring in the first place.

Churchland cites triumphs of analogical thinking in the sciences — the notion that light is a wave, for instance — but insists that the capacity for seeing complex analogies is equally important elsewhere, notably in the moral life or in the arts. From the point of view of brain function, he argues, art and science ‘are not remotely so different as is commonly believed’. Artists of all sorts, including literary artists, learn prototypes that become ‘fertile themes’ whose ‘possible combinations and variations’ are explored in their work.38 All of this comes very close to Goethe’s own self-understanding. His review of Purkinje, in which he describes his mental images of the metamorphosing f lowers, bears eloquent testimony to his own delight and skill in recurrent manipulation of his cognitive responses. He knew his skill was unusual, and drew the conclusion that artists are born not made: Es muß nämlich ihre innere produktive Kraft jene Nachbilder, die im Organ, in der Erinnerung, in der Einbildungskraft zurückgebliebenen Idole freiwillig ohne Vorsatz und Wollen lebendig hervortun, sie müssen sich entfalten, wachsen, sich ausdehnen und zusammenziehn, um aus f lüchtigen Schemen wahrhaft gegenständliche Wesen zu werden. (25: 826)

The breadth of Goethe’s intellectual activities itself suggests a belief in the oneness of artistic and scientific creativity, a belief to which he gave theoretical expression in his introduction to his morphological studies: Es hat sich daher auch in dem wissenschaftlichen Menschen zu allen Zeiten ein Trieb hervorgetan die lebendigen Bildungen als solche zu erkennen, ihre äußern sichtbaren, greif lichen Teile im Zusammenhange zu erfassen, sie als Andeutungen des Innern aufzunehmen und so das Ganze in der Anschauung gewissermaßen zu beherrschen. Wie nah dieses wissenschaftliche Verlangen mit dem Kunst- und Nachahmungstriebe zusammenhänge, braucht wohl nicht umständlich ausgeführt zu werden. (24: 391)

No wonder, then, that Goethe was gratified by the contiguity, in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, of teleological and aesthetic judgment (24: 444). The similarity between some of Goethe’s ideas and Churchland’s theories based on modern neuroscience suggests that Goethe had an intuitive understanding of brain processes and of the role of mental imagery in cognition. But his own use of analogical thinking in science may still seem to undermine rather than support the method. Here is not the place for a detailed defence of Goethe’s colour theory. Even there, however, analogy perhaps led him less far astray than is commonly supposed. He was convinced of the polarity of light and darkness, and the unity of light, to the point of obsession, though this brought him into conf lict with Newton. Now Dennis Sepper points out that towards the end of the nineteenth century it was shown that the wave theory of light (itself the product of analogical thinking) ‘can be interpreted as implying that white light is undifferentiated, that it is the refracting material that induces a change giving rise to colour.’ This constitutes ‘a new, mathematized version of the modificationist theories of colour that Newton had attacked so vigorously throughout his life.’39 Goethe extended the

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polarity analogy to argue that colour is explicable through three basic oppositions, between black and white, blue and yellow, and red and green. However, the conf licting Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory of colour vision, which began to be developed in Goethe’s own lifetime, gained general acceptance until well into the twentieth century, despite competition from Ewald Hering’s opponency theory. Today Hering’s theory, which involves the same three opponent pairs as Goethe’s, is considered essential to the understanding of colour perception, and, possibly, its evolution.40 One final point of agreement which demonstrates the closeness of Goethe’s understanding of cognition to that of modern neuroscience-based philosophy is the assessment of language. Goethe’s sense of the importance of mental images in thought had as its natural concomitant a scepticism, paradoxical perhaps in a master of the medium, about the cognitive function of language.41 This is matched by Paul Churchland’s insistence that language has no fundamental role in cognition. The pre-verbal has cognitive priority over the verbal, in that we can differentiate far more variations in the things we perceive, whether facial features, colours or whatever, than we have names for. Thus language is ‘comparatively impotent’ as a means of representing the world.42 No wonder that Lacan dismissed analogical thinking. As an exponent of a psychoanalysis that was based on linguistic sources and insisted on the entry into language as the only possible hope of some rescue from the delusory world of imagination, he found himself in the opposite camp from believers in the cognitive power of mental imagery, and could not but disparage it. If Goethe attributes cognitive value to vision, imagination and the mental image, does he in the last analysis fall under postmodernist strictures against ocularcentric subjectivism? This question of course has no meaning in the context of cognitive neurobiology, which thinks in terms of the brain’s adaptation to the natural environment as a precondition of survival. Goethe’s closeness to this perspective is in itself perhaps sufficient defence against the accusation of residual philosophical dualism. However, if a vindication in philosophers’ language is required, it can be found in Stephen Houlgate’s discussion of visual intuition in Hegel. Houlgate suggests that ‘modern technological subjectivity rests not so much on the “hegemony of vision”, but rather on a certain narrow conception of thought.’ Vision itself need not reify, as witness Hegel’s visual intuition which does not mark itself off from objects, stand over against and survey them, or reduce them down to mere objects ‘for us’. Rather, it gives itself to objects and lets them stand free, because it is itself nothing other than being attentive and open to, and so being filled with, what is independent of and outside of us.43

The same case can surely be made for Goethe, whose objective seeing is likewise a form of perception in which we are filled with objects and ‘bey gebändigter Selbstigkeit ihnen das gebührende Recht wiederfahren lassen’ (17: 178).

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Notes to Chapter 1 1. This article first appeared in Oxford German Studies, 28 (1999), 131–51. Unless otherwise stated, references to Goethe’s works, letters, etc. are to volume number and page number of the Frankfurt edition (= FA): Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. by Dieter Borchmeyer et al., 40 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–). Dichtung und Wahrheit, 14: 544–45; Italienische Reise, 15/1: 221, 271, 371; Das Sehen in subjektiver Hinsicht, 25: 825–26. 2. FA 23/1: 37, 44–45. 3. See, for example, Ilse Graham, ‘An Eye for the World: Stages of Realisation in Wilhelm Meister’, in Graham, Goethe: Portrait of the Artist (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1977), pp. 182–226; Hans-Jürgen Schings, ‘Symbolik des Glücks. Zu Wilhelm Meisters Bildergeschichte’, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: One Hundred Years of Continuing Vitality, ed. by Ulrich Goebel and Wolodymyr T. Zyla (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1984), pp. 157–77. 4. FA 9: 470, 801–03; 550; 562, 603; 590–91. 5. FA 9: 591, 598, 603, 660, 802, 896. 6. G. S. Rousseau, ‘Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica and Peregrine Pickle’, in Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 176–99 (p. 180). 7. FA 8: 386–88, 458–59. Peretz Lavie, The Enchanted World of Sleep, trans. by Anthony Berris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 70. 8. Cf. FA 9: 729. 9. See for example R. H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). 10. Martin Jay, ‘Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight’, in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. by David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 143–85 (p. 143); Stephen Houlgate, ‘Vision, Ref lection, and Openness: The “Hegemony of Vision” from a Hegelian Point of View’, ibid, pp. 87–123 (pp. 111, 113). 11. Andreas Anglet, Der ‘ewige’ Augenblick. Studien zur Struktur und Funktion eines Denkbildes bei Goethe (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), pp. 295–96; Jochen Hörisch, Die andere Goethezeit. Poetische Mobilmachung des Subjekts um 1800 (Munich: Fink, 1992), p. 127. 12. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 82, 83. 13. Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (London: Basic Books, 1978), p. 83. 14. David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 15. See e.g. Susanne Konrad, Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’ und das Dilemma des Logozentrismus (Heidelberg: Winter, 1995), especially Part II: ‘Goethes Konf likt mit dem Logozentrismus.’ 16. Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) suggests this is because people interested in literature and literary criticism ‘already have a high degree of tolerance for other equally indeterminate endeavours’ (p. 619). 17. Patricia S. Churchland, ‘The Co-evolutionary Research Ideology’, in Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, ed. by Alvin I. Goldman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 761. 18. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Picador, 1995). Stephen Michael Kosslyn, ‘Mental Imagery’, in An Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. ii: Visual Cognition and Action, ed. by Daniel N. Osherson, Stephen Michael Kosslyn and John M. Hollerbach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 73–97. See also Klaus SachsHombach, ‘Die Bilddebatte. Eine historische Einführung’, in Bilder im Geiste. Zur kognitiven und erkenntnistheoretischen Funktion piktorialer Repräsentationen, ed. by Sachs-Hombach (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 7–18; Mark Rollins, Mental Imagery: On the Limits of Cognitive Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 19. FA 8: 54, 106, 108–10, 112, 178, 192; 98–100. 20. Mariane: FA 9: 365, 385–87, 409, 437, 470; Therese: FA 9: 886; Natalie: FA 9: 949, 952, 987. 21. FA 8: 364, 384, 448–49, 458.

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22. Goethes Gespräche, ed. by Flodoard Frhr. von Biedermann, 2nd edn, 5 vols (Leipzig: Biedermann, 1909–11), ii, 261. 23. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 392. 24. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller. Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–54, trans. by John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 180–82, 282. 25. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Werke 3, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 603) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 275–83, 481–94. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, trans. by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 267–68, 285, 440–41, 512–17. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), pp. 80, 97–98. 26. ‘If the other saturates, fills this image [the image of the ego], he becomes the object of a narcissistic investment, that of Verliebtheit. Recall Werther meeting Charlotte just when she is holding a child in her arms [she isn’t: FA 8: 40] — that hits the bull’s-eye of the narcissistic image of the novel’s young hero.’ The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, p. 282. See also p. 142. 27. See Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 107–09. 28. 21 February 1821. 29. See Fred Dretske, ‘Seeing, Believing and Knowing’, in An Invitation to Cognitive Science, ii, pp. 129–48 (p. 136). 30. An attempt to show Goethe’s science in a positive light is Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. by Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker and Harvey Wheeler (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987). 31. Paul Churchland, pp. 319, 131, 123, 279, 245–46, 279, 124, 28–29. 32. Paul Churchland, pp. 131, 319, 245–46, 14, 278, 145, 29–30. 33. Paul Churchland, p. 157; Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 162. 34. Paul Churchland, pp. 107, 157. 35. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 53. 36. Paul Churchland, pp. 279–80, 117, 114, 121, 107. 37. Churchland is not alone in taking analogical thinking seriously: see Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 38. Paul Churchland, pp. 278–79, 15, 146, 294. 39. Dennis L. Sepper, Newton’s Optical Writings: A Guided Study (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 178–79. 40. Paul Churchland, pp. 24–25; Reinhold Sölch, Die Evolution der Farben. Goethes Farbenlehre in neuem Licht (Ravensburg: Ravensburger Buchverlag, 1998), especially Chapter 3: ‘Entwicklungsgeschichtliche Farbentheorien’, pp. 35–44; Chapter 4: ‘Die Mängel der Dreifar­ bentheorien’, pp. 45–66. 41. See for example Goethe’s comment on the inadequacies of colour terminology (23/1: 1299) and his letter of 11 March 1816 to C. L. F. Schultz (34: 577). 42. Paul Churchland, pp. 182, 144, 293. 43. Houlgate, pp. 106, 113.

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Chapter 2

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Ambiguous Figures in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre abounds in ambiguous figures: characters and objects that are capable of two contrasting interpretations. Gender ambiguity is particularly noticeable in the women loved by Wilhelm: Mariane, Aurelie, Therese and Natalie. Felix’s gender is never in doubt, but rather his paternity: is he Norberg’s son or Wilhelm’s? These and other ambiguities help to give the novel its structure of mystery and solution. But the text also contains ambiguous figures in a narrower sense: items which recall the puzzle pictures often cited by theorists of perception. For there are moments when a character, usually Wilhelm, contemplates something — either physical object or mental image — and sees it first in one way, then in another: he experiences the reversal of perception that has become known as a change of aspect or a ‘Gestalt shift’.1 These moments are worth exploring because recent writers on perception have suggested what is happening when we experience Gestalt shifts, and their ideas can show whether it is true to say, with Hans-Jürgen Schings, that Wilhelm has anticipatory images of his future happiness.2 The ambiguous figures most often cited in the theory of perception are the Necker cube, where the same surface can appear as the front or back of the cube; Boring’s ‘My Wife and My Mother-in-Law’, which can be seen as elegant young woman or old crone; and Jastrow’s ‘Duck-Rabbit,’ which is either a duck facing left, or a rabbit facing right (Figs. 2.1–3). People looking at this figure without preconceptions will see it as one of these creatures — say, the duck. Looking again, perhaps with prompting, they will be able to see it as a rabbit: the figure has not altered, but for the perceiver it has undergone a Gestalt shift, or ‘f lipped’ from one possibility to the other. Most viewers of such illusions can subsequently see them as one thing or the other at will, but not, it is usually argued, see both possibilities at once.3 Because puzzle pictures themselves do not change, shifts in the viewer’s perception of them suggest creative activity by the mind: not so much at the basic level of sense perception — seeing a picture of a duck; nor yet at the next level of cognitive perception — knowing that this is what we see; but at a third level of imagination — reinterpreting what we knew as a picture of a duck so that we know it as a picture of a rabbit.4 If we do indeed come to see a rabbit not a duck when we return to Jastrow’s figure, that is because we are expecting or ‘looking for’ a rabbit before we receive any visual stimulus. Ralph D. Ellis writes: ‘to execute a Gestalt shift is

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Fig. 2.1. ‘Kaninchen und Ente’, from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter: ‘Which animals are most like each other?’

Fig. 2.2 (left). ‘My Wife and My Mother-in-Law’, in a version printed in the magazine Puck, no. 2018 (6 November 1915) Fig. 2.3 (right). Necker’s cube: an optical illusion first published in 1832 by the Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker

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to purposely change the pattern of our expectations so that it will be fulfilled by a different pattern of eye movements.’ ‘In focusing on a Necker cube,’ he continues, we know how to make it shift from one Gestalt to the opposite by focusing on just the appropriate spot on the drawing. The expectations dictate the pattern of the eye movements, which in turn determine whether the object is ‘seen as’ this or that.5

It follows from this that our response to ambiguous figures can tell us about our own expectations: it can tell us about the state of our mind. As W. J. T. Mitchell writes, we might think of the ambiguous figure ‘as a device for educing selfknowledge, a kind of mirror for the beholder, or a screen for self-projection like the Rorschach test’.6 Theorists of the visual arts have extrapolated from ambiguous figures to painting in a way that is relevant to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre because of the part played by The Sick Prince. Roger Scruton suggests that the duck-rabbit figure is merely an ‘emphatic version’ of the normal process of looking at paintings.7 Semir Zeki argues that ambiguity is ‘a characteristic of all great art’. Painters use their technical skill to create images that possess a variety of aspects, ‘to represent simultaneously, on the same canvas, not one but several truths, each as valid as the others’. A painting like Vermeer’s Man and Woman at the Virginals contains the representation of many situations and can satisfy a variety of expectations in the viewer: the man and woman may be spouses, lovers or friends; their situation may be happy or sad.8 Ralph Ellis takes this notion further: ‘The painting is not so much a bearer of a meaning, which has “one correct interpretation”, as it is a matrix of symbolization possibilities, presenting us with tools to use in intensifying, explicating and carrying forward our own emotional lives.’ But emotional meaning cannot arise from a painting unless the viewer is in a ‘condition of readiness’: as with ordinary ambiguous figures the appropriate expectations must precede the external stimulus. ‘This means’, Ellis writes, ‘that the viewer must want to have the kind of experience that the work is capable of yielding for that viewer at that time.’9 Here again, the response will be a mirror of the viewer’s mind. None of these ideas would have surprised Goethe. He rejected the idea of optical illusions as ‘eine Gotteslästerung’ (23/1: 1116).10 But he was fully aware of cognitive bias, the part played by our expectations in the way that we perceive things. In the Introduction to Die Propyläen he wrote: Was man weiß, sieht man erst! denn wie derjenige, der ein kurzes Gesicht hat, einen Gegenstand besser sieht, von dem er sich wieder entfernt, als einen, dem er sich erst nähert, weil ihm das geistige Gesicht nunmehr zu Hülfe kommt, so liegt eigentlich in der Kenntnis die Vollendung des Anschauens. (18: 463)

This is an example of foreknowledge enabling us to see correctly. But Goethe also knew, not least from his own youthful experience, that preconceptions may distort our vision. From the first Italian journey onwards he struggled to train his eye so as to avoid imposing preconceived ideas on external stimuli and thus mistaking the nature of the world.11 Goethe knew, too, about the part played in perception by emotional readiness, as witness the 1787 text of Die Leiden des jungen Werther, in which

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the Bauernbursch’s story sends Werther in search of a love-object that he promptly finds in Lotte (8: 35,37). So a reading of Wilhelm Meister’s perceptions as a mirror of his mind is consistent with Goethe’s theory of perception, and illuminates it. Any consideration of Wilhelm Meister’s responses to ambiguous figures must rely for its context on the very considerable body of work already done on the novel. I am indebted to the school of psychological criticism represented by Herbert Ammerlahn, Hans-Jürgen Schings, Monika Fick and Manfred Engel, but especially to Per Øhrgaard’s Die Genesung des Narcissus. Though Øhrgaard makes use of psychoanalytical terminology, and is fully aware of the psychoanalytical literature on Goethe and his work, he attempts to explicate what he calls the ‘official’ symbolism of the novel itself, rather than impose a modern theory on it.12 In the process he offers an incomparably detailed analysis of the symbolic significance of the characters and their relationships, entirely within the framework of eighteenthcentury thinking about Ich and Welt, subject and object, preoccupation with self and involvement with others. His book-by-book discussion of the novel forms an essential guide to Wilhelm’s progress. The novel identifies childhood with self-absorption, and maturity with orien­ tation to others: specifically, it narrates a narcissist’s quest for a partner who is not a mere self-image. Accordingly, the ambiguous figures relate for the most part to Wilhelm’s sexual life, and affect the two dominant visual experiences of his childhood: the painting, The Sick Prince, and the Gerusalemme liberata of Tasso. The Sick Prince, which hung in Wilhelm’s childhood home as part of his grandfather’s art collection, showed, in Wilhelm’s words to the Abbé twelve years after the collection was sold, ‘wie der kranke Königssohn sich über die Braut seines Vaters in Liebe verzehrt’ (422). Research has shown that Goethe’s inspiration for the painting as it appears in the Lehrjahre was probably Antonio Belucci’s version of the episode from Plutarch in which Antiochus, son of Seleucus I, is diagnosed as being sick with love for his father’s young bride, Stratonike.13 The text of the novel makes clear that the painting Wilhelm knew contained at the very least the figures of the sick prince himself, his father, a doctor, and the young princess. It was a narrative painting, with the potential to be seen in a variety of different ways. Wilhelm’s interpretation suggests that as a boy during his grandfather’s lifetime he already perceived his father as a hostile figure standing in the way of his happiness. For Wilhelm says to the Abbé: Wie jammerte mich, wie jammert mich noch ein Jüngling, der die süßen Triebe, das schönste Erbteil, das uns die Natur gab, in sich verschließen, und das Feuer, das ihn und andere erwärmen und beleben sollte, in seinem Busen verbergen muß, so daß sein Innerstes unter ungeheuren Schmerzen verzehrt wird. Wie bedaure ich die Unglückliche, die sich einem andern widmen soll, wenn ihr Herz schon den würdigen Gegenstand eines wahren und reinen Verlangens gefunden hat. (422–23)

Sexual love is man’s highest bliss, but it is denied the young couple in the painting, so Wilhelm thinks, by the sick prince’s father. Wilhelm’s interpretation of the image must rank as an expression of the expectations he took into his adult life: he longed for love but perceived it under a negative sign, as a value withheld from him.

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Later in his childhood, after the sale of his grandfather’s pictures, Wilhelm took to reading chivalric romances, and Tasso’s characters became so vivid for him that he was able to see them in his mind’s eye, especially the warrior princess Chlorinde: ‘Besonders fesselte mich Chlorinde mit ihrem ganzen Tun und Lassen.’ ‘Die Mannweiblichkeit, die ruhige Fülle ihres Daseins’ attracted Wilhelm far more, he later confesses to Mariane, ‘als die gemachten Reize Armidens, ob ich gleich ihren Garten nicht verachtete’ (378). The cause of Wilhelm’s preference is never explained: Goethe leaves his symbols to speak for themselves. But if Wilhelm perceived himself as a callow youth warned off the love of women, then he might indeed prefer an androgynous object of desire, which incorporated the masculine attributes he lacked. If Chlorinde was to this extent a positive figure for Wilhelm, she nevertheless stood, like Stratonike, under a negative sign. For Tasso tells how Tancred, who loves Chlorinde, encounters her at dead of night, fights with her and wounds her mortally before discovering who she is. The lover who loves his own image in the beloved is condemned to destroy what he loves. Here, then, is a second dangerous prototype that Wilhelm brought to the understanding of his adult relationships. While his expectations are formed by the images he acquired in childhood, he risks disaster. Mariane, his first love, belongs to the theatre, which acts in the novel as a symbol of childhood narcissism. Wilhelm likes her to dress in military costume: in her, he loves the dashing young officer he would like to be. It is Norberg, Wilhelm’s rival, who desires Mariane as a woman: her white negligée is Norberg’s gift. The power of nature, no respecter of perceptions, provides Wilhelm with his ultimate salvation in the shape of Felix, the son Mariane bears him. But before Wilhelm knows he is a father, he has destroyed Mariane by his rejection of her.14 Wilhelm’s breach with Mariane plunges him into melancholia which all but suppresses his sexual instinct. Though Philine entices him, he prefers the company of the hermaphroditic Mignon and his own alter ego, the monkish harpist. When his desire stirs once more he lights on an unambiguously womanly woman, the Countess, who resembles Armida rather than Chlorinde. But Wilhelm is not escaping from his childhood prototypes, for the Countess is at the same time a Stratonike, a woman denied to the young Wilhelm by her much older husband. A second relationship ends in failure.15 Leaving the Count’s mansion, Wilhelm and his fellow actors are attacked by bandits. As he lies injured, he encounters a woman who challenges his percep­ tions. A ‘beautiful Amazon’, later revealed as the Countess’s elder sister, Natalie, app­roaches with a large retinue, dismounts, tends Wilhelm, takes off the man’s cloak she is wearing and, with permission from her great-uncle, its owner, wraps it around Wilhelm before disappearing in a glory of light (588–91). This episode is a decisive moment for Wilhelm. He may bring to his understanding of Natalie one or both of the negative prototypes that he has applied to his earlier relationships. If he looks in her for a doomed Chlorinde, he will turn her into another Mariane; if he looks for a forbidden Stratonike, he will turn her into another countess. But, conceivably, he may see the very prototypes, and so Natalie, in a new and positive way.16 In fact the episode in the clearing — an outside event which happens to Wilhelm — places his childhood prototypes in a new context, thus bringing about a shift in

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his perception.17 The figure whom he sees as a beautiful Amazon, because she is wearing a man’s cloak, presumably a military cloak, and is riding with a troop of hussars, takes off the cloak, to reveal her unambiguously female form. So Wilhelm sees that the androgyne can become, maybe even simultaneously be, a real woman. At the same time the womanly woman who has with her her protector in the shape of her great-uncle gives the cloak belonging to this father-figure to the injured young Wilhelm. So he sees that the woman can show allegiance to the son without offending the father. Hence when it turns out that Wilhelm has indeed associated Natalie with both Chlorinde and Stratonike, his perception of both these figures has undergone a shift: both now appear entirely positive. It is not forebodings but youthful dreams — ‘Jugendträume’ — that attach themselves to his mental image of Natalie: ‘Er glaubte nunmehr die edle heldenmütige Chlorinde mit eignen Augen gesehen zu haben; ihm fiel der kranke Königssohn wieder ein, an dessen Lager die schöne teilnehmende Prinzessin mit stiller Bescheidenheit herantritt’ (598). He muses on the possibility of experiencing, in childhood or in dreams, premonitions of our future, a foretaste of delights in store. Chlorinde now presages a noble companion, with no hint that her lover might destroy her. And the painting of the sick prince, which Wilhelm described to the Abbé as a heart-rending depiction of thwarted love, has become an image of the young woman’s tenderness towards the sufferer. Thus life changes Wilhelm’s perception of ambiguous figures from his early youth, and the new aspects that he has seen may now in turn guide his perception of life. Sexuality, whether narcissistic or not, was formerly attended in Wilhelm’s mind by presages of disaster; now it seems he may look for, and find, happiness in it. However, Natalie as Amazon-turned-woman does not immediately focus his desire. It seems that when he thinks of a womanly woman, it is another figure that comes to mind. His despair when he fails to find the Amazon is so very intense because she reminds him of the Countess: to his eyes they resemble one another as twin sisters do. He cherishes the memory of the Countess, and repeatedly, it seems, calls up her image: ‘Er rief sich ihr Bild nur allzugern wieder ins Gedächtnis.’ But he cannot keep this image in focus: it continually changes into that of the Amazon: ‘Aber nun trat die Gestalt der edlen Amazone gleich dazwischen, eine Erscheinung verwandelte sich in die andere, ohne daß er im Stande gewesen wäre, diese oder jene fest zu halten.’ Wilhelm is conscious of two images — to that extent the Amazon is a distinct entity for him — but he is as yet unable to preserve the distinction. He cannot ‘look for’ the image of the Amazon and hold it. His desire still seems too much set on the Countess, the negative figure from the past. But hard physical evidence helps to separate the two women in Wilhelm’s mind: the Countess’s handwriting, which he once admired, cannot stand comparison with the vigour and harmony of what he takes to be the Amazon’s (603). The Amazon’s handwriting, like her presence, is uplifting: almost, it seems, sublime. Wilhelm will eventually separate Natalie, the available sexual partner, from the forbidden Countess and so enter adulthood. But long after his experience in the clearing he continues to seek refuge from adult sexuality in androgynous love-objects. While with Serlo’s company, he befriends Aurelie18 and still hopes

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to find Mariane, ‘die mir noch immer statt aller andern Weiber in der Welt ist!’ (708). When he enters Lothario’s circle he pursues Therese, who is Jarno’s idea of the pure Amazon (816). Lothario, in many ways a parallel to Wilhelm, himself experiences a Gestalt shift which throws some light on Wilhelm’s situation. One spring day, Lothario rides to the former home of Margarete, the Pachterstochter whom he loved years before, to try to catch a glimpse of her. Looking through branches with the sun in his eyes, he sees a woman he takes for Margarete. When he has a clearer view, he is confused: ‘Es war meine Geliebte und war es nicht.’ She seems almost younger and more beautiful than before, despite the ten years that have passed (843). Of course there is an explanation for the likeness which comes and goes: Lothario is seeing not Margarete but her young niece. What he apparently wants to see is Margarete untouched by time, Margarete even lovelier than she was years before. In other words, Lothario wants to bring back an idealized past.19 But he soon sees Margarete herself again, with her young niece beside her at the spinning-wheel she herself used to use, and accepts the passage of time: ‘so stand ich in der sonderbarsten Gegenwart, zwischen der Vergangenheit und Zukunft’ (848). Thus in Lothario’s life, the shifting perception suggests entrapment in the past but he succeeds in distinguishing past from present, and assents to the latter.20 Wilhelm himself soon experiences a Gestalt shift with the same implications. This time the figure involved is not a female love-object but the child Felix who is, according to Barbara’s account, Wilhelm’s own son by Mariane. Repeatedly, the text implies, Wilhelm holds Felix up to the mirror to look for a resemblance between himself and the child. Wilhelm can, it seems, momentarily keep the resemblance in focus: ‘Ward es ihm denn einen Augenblick recht wahrscheinlich, so drückte er den Knaben an seine Brust.’ But Wilhelm’s fear of deceiving himself causes a Gestalt shift, the resemblance disappears, and Wilhelm puts the child down (867–68). At the ceremony in the Tower, the Abbé assures Wilhelm that Felix is indeed his: ‘empfangen Sie das liebliche Kind aus unserer Hand, kehren Sie sich um, und wagen Sie es, glücklich zu sein!’ (876). These words suggest that Wilhelm must reorient himself from the past to the future, from the sadness and suspicion of the broken relationship with Mariane to a happiness and certainty that are within his grasp. He can forget the mirror-image of Felix that does not resemble himself and fix on the one that does. Wilhelm’s initiation in the Tower completes the preconditions for his recovery from subjectivism. Philine reawakened his sexuality; now comes reconciliation with his father through the figure of the old king of Denmark, and knowledge of his own paternity. Finally he must look for and find a partner who is neither another’s bride nor an image of himself. His search involves an experience of ambiguity that has already been anticipated in the text. Lothario’s sister sends for Wilhelm because Mignon, who is in her care, has fallen ill. Wilhelm knows only one sister to Lothario, namely the Countess, but fears that if he goes to her he will lose Felix and, in consequence, lose his reason (888–89). Øhrgaard makes sense of this strangely hyperbolic passage when he suggests that a return to the Countess is incompatible with Wilhelm’s fatherhood because it represents regression to

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immaturity and melancholia.21 In fact, as Øhrgaard also suggests, Wilhelm is safe because of the very fact that he now has a son of his own: he is no longer in real danger of such regression. But the scene of his departure with Felix to find Lothario’s sister is still tense and strangely moving.22 The journey starts before dawn, so that Felix — the child long since likened by Philine to the sun (612) — experiences his first sunrise. In a small town on the way, Wilhelm pauses to consider whether he should go on. He takes out the note from Lothario’s sister, is filled with apprehension about what awaits him, and decides to break off the journey. But at the very moment of committing himself to this course, he glances again at the note and all is changed. Long before, he had seen the similarity of the Countess’s and the Amazon’s handwriting. Now, what he has taken for the writing of the Countess in the note about Mignon undergoes a Gestalt shift: he suddenly sees it as the Amazon’s: ‘Um Gottes Willen! rief er aus, was ist das? das ist nicht die Hand der Gräfin, es ist die Hand der Amazone!’ This happens, significantly, at a moment of inattention: ‘seine Augen ruhten ohne Aufmerksamkeit auf dem Billet’ (890). It seems that while Wilhelm’s fears are brief ly in abeyance, hope can enter his head, and alter his perception. Now he realizes that Lothario has two sisters, and makes haste to find his Amazon. But his anguish is not yet over. Three paragraphs which combine colour symbolism with the visual phenomenon of the ambiguous figure show how fragile is Wilhelm’s hope. Felix is eager to be off and, harbinger of light and joy that he is, urges his father on: ‘Vater, komm! o komm! sieh die schönen Wolken, die schönen Farben!’ (890). But the sun sinks, and Felix sleeps. With his luminaries gone, Wilhelm loses his new-found confidence, and experiences the reverse Gestalt shift: ‘Er nahm das Billet wieder vor, und bei dem abgehenden Tageslichte glaubte er wieder die Handschrift der Gräfin zu erkennen, seine Augen wollten im Einzelnen nicht wieder finden, was ihm sein Herz im Ganzen auf einmal gesagt hatte’ (891). Wilhelm’s state of mind affects what he sees, and his state of mind in turn depends on light and darkness, as Goethe suggested in a diary entry of 25 May 1807: ‘Blicken wir durch diese trübe organische Umgebung nach dem Lichte hin, so lieben und hoffen wir [...] nach dem Finstern, so hassen und fürchten wir’ (33: 188). Now only a ‘schwache Hoffnung’ of seeing his Amazon still shines through ‘die trüben Vorstellungen’ that beset Wilhelm (891). Yet he has almost reached his goal. It was his heart that told him the handwriting was the Amazon’s, she is what he wants; and what he wants, he finds. ‘O daß sie es wäre!’ is followed by ‘Die Amazone war’s!’ (892). Of course the lady of the house would be Natalie, whatever he wanted. But the fact that he can now find her as she really is symbolizes the reorientation of his desire.23 Even after the Amazon is found, some distinguishing remains to be done. Wilhelm does not know whether she is married or not: he fears a door will open and a husband appear. He hopes, it seems, that she can be a woman for him rather than an Amazon, and a woman, at that, who does not belong to another man. But his way of seeing her must still mature. When he compares his mental image of the Amazon with that of ‘seiner neuen gegenwärtigen Freundin’, he finds that the two images do not yet coincide: the Amazon has not merged with Natalie the

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woman. As the narrator comments, perhaps recording Wilhelm’s own thoughts about the images: ‘jenes hatte er sich gleichsam geschaffen, und dieses schien fast ihn umschaffen zu wollen’ (896). Natalie the Amazon was a perception modelled by Wilhelm on the figure of Chlorinde; Natalie the woman, now that he has developed eyes to see her, will reorient him, point him to the future: ‘umschaffen’ seems to echo the Abbé’s ‘kehren Sie sich um’ (876). Wilhelm’s encounters with ambiguous figures show changes taking place in the direction of his desire and consequently his perception of the world. What he looks for and finds at the end of the story is not the same as at the beginning. This casts doubt on Schings’s theory that Wilhelm exemplifies the phenomenon that Goethe called ‘Antizipation’, that is, the power to anticipate reality in the imagination. Wilhelm’s existence has continuity, Schings argues, in so far as mental images that he has harboured from an early age eventually become reality.24 For Schings, Wilhelm resembles the ‘besonders begabten Menschen’ of Goethe’s Winckelmann essay, who feel the need ‘eifrig, zu allem, was die Natur in sie gelegt hat, auch in der äußeren Welt die antwortenden Gegenbilder zu suchen und dadurch das Innere völlig zum Ganzen und Gewissen zu steigern’ (19: 177–78). The passage from the Lehrjahre that seems most strongly to support this hypothesis is the one in which Wilhelm muses on the possibility of ‘Jugendträume’ coming true (598).25 However, there is good reason to doubt that Goethe himself would have considered Wilhelm — ‘freilich ein armer Hund’26 — an exponent of ‘Antizipation’. For this is clearly the prerogative of great artists and scientists. Eckermann reports Goethe as having said ‘daß dem echten Dichter die Kenntnis der Welt angeboren sei und daß er zu ihrer Darstellung keineswegs vieler Erfahrung und einer großen Empirie bedürfe’ (39: 96–97). Thus Goethe attributed ‘Antizipation’ to Byron (39: 97), and of course to himself: completing Egmont in 1787, for example, he found it had foreshadowed recent events in Brussels, ‘so daß auch hier die poetische Antizipation wieder in Betracht kam’ (17: 16). Goethe likewise believed that everything ‘was wir Erfinden, Entdecken im höheren Sinne nennen’ amounted to ‘die bedeutende Ausübung, Betätigung eines originalen Wahrheitsgefühles, das, im stillen längst ausgebildet, unversehens mit Blitzesschnelle zu einer fruchtbaren Erkenntnis führt’ (10: 576). He claimed that when he saw the oneness of white light in Hofrat Büttner’s prism, he knew as if by instinct that Newton was wrong (23/1: 976). But alongside genuine ‘Antizipation’ in Goethe’s discussions of art and science is always the possibility of mental images that do not correspond with reality. In a manner reminiscent of Schiller’s thought-patterns, the Winckelmann essay sets alongside the specially gifted individuals whose ideas do coincide with reality two contrasting categories of relatively one-sided people: the ‘gewöhnlichen Menschen’ with a ‘lebhaften Trieb, von Kindheit an die äußere Welt mit Lust zu ergreifen’; and ‘vorzügliche Geister’ who tend to withdraw from reality in order ‘in sich selbst eine eigene Welt zu erschaffen’ (19: 177). Elsewhere, in scientific essays and in the Farbenlehre, Goethe indulges in some very un-Schillerian criticism of the latter category: idealist geniuses whose mental images have no real counterpart may lead humanity astray for generations, as Goethe believed Newton had done.27 Neither do such people benefit themselves. The art collector in ‘Der Sammler und die

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Seinigen’ asks: ‘sich ganz in sich zu verschließen, um die Gegenstände desto besser kennen zu lernen! Ist das wohl der rechte Weg?’ Then he gives the introspective idealist his proper name: ‘Hypochondrist’ (18: 679). As Die Leiden des jungen Werthers already made clear, to dwell entirely in the mind is to be a hypochondriac in the eighteenth-century sense of the term, that is, to be melancholic. Wilhelm surely belongs in the ranks of the idealists and hypochondriacs. His introspection and narcissism are after all common ground among Goethe scholars, and Schings himself insists on his ‘pathologische Innenbezüglichkeit [...] die zum Krisenherd der Hypochondrie wurde’.28 Wilhelm is precisely not a Winckelmannlike figure with innate mental images that prove congruent with the outside world but, despite anything that Aurelie might say (257), a character beset by acquired misconceptions — especially about his possible relationships with women — who has to stop imposing those misconceptions on the world and learn instead to see it as it is. He is able to change because his preconceived ideas are sometimes overridden by events or by his own feelings. In the clearing, Natalie’s actions present him with a new way of seeing The Sick Prince. In the carriage on the way to Lothario’s sister, an unthinking glance at the handwritten note lets him see it for what it is. His deepest longing for love and security overcomes his fear. Only in this sense, that he yearns for home and the love of woman, does Wilhelm anticipate what is to come to him. Schings uses his grander claims for Wilhelm’s power of ‘Antizipation’ to support the thesis that the novel culminates in a convincing vision of happiness: ‘Glück’. This is a bold defence of an ending that many interpreters find bloodless or even coldly repellent.29 So what sort of happiness is actually represented by Wilhelm’s winning of Natalie, given that no marriage ceremony takes place, nor of course do the pair live as man and wife in the Wanderjahre? It is as if Natalie were less a person than a means of putting right what was wrong in Wilhelm’s psychic economy: ‘das Geschehene ungeschehen machen’. Wilhelm suffers because of his estrangement from his father, his choice of a narcissistic love-object in Mariane, and his traumatic loss of her. He becomes symbolically reconciled with his father, and discovers his son; but he cannot have Mariane back for she has died, as the Chlorinde figure must. So in order to lay the past to rest, as Lothario does in a much lighter vein when he meets Margarete, Wilhelm must find a substitute for Mariane: everything must become as if he had loved a woman for herself, and that woman had given birth to his son. This, it seems, is the function of Natalie. Friedrich, the teller of truths in jest, suggests she will not marry ‘eher, als bis irgendwo eine Braut fehlt’, but will offer herself ‘als Supplement irgendeiner Existenz’ (565). She takes Mariane’s place in a recapitulation of past events which, this time, turns out happily. She symbolically gives birth to Felix and joins him and Wilhelm to form a group that recalls the holy family. Natalie’s name may suggest the rebirth of Mariane under different auspices, as well as the birth of Christ and a new Christmas to substitute for the one when Wilhelm received the puppet theatre. But Goethe may also have been alluding to the ancient Roman festival of the sun on 25 December, the dies natalis solis invicti.30 Natalie would then be the means of showing that Wilhelm finally becomes fully

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reoriented to the light and happiness that are already symbolized by Felix. No actual marriage would be necessary, and the sequel in the Wanderjahre, where the possibilities of The Sick Prince are explored again with Wilhelm taking the parts of father and doctor to Felix, would become more readily intelligible. The Lehrjahre is still a story about ‘Glück’, but that of learning to exchange one’s own negative ideas for positive reality: learning to stop seeing the backward-looking duck and begin seeing the forward-looking rabbit. Notes to Chapter 2 1. This article first appeared in Oxford German Studies, 29 (2000), 77–94. The idea of ‘aspectseeing’ is Wittgenstein’s; see Philosophical Investigations, trans. by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), Part II, Section ix, pp. 187–229 and Malcolm Budd, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (London: Routledge, 1991), Chapter 4, ‘Seeing Aspects’, pp. 77–99. 2. See Hans-Jürgen Schings, ‘Agathon, Anton Reiser, Wilhelm Meister. Zur Pathogenese des modernen Subjekts im Roman’, in Goethe im Kontext. Kunst und Humanität, Naturwissenschaft und Politik von der Aufklärung bis zur Restauration. Ein Symposium, ed. by Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984), pp. 42–68; ‘Symbolik des Glücks’; ‘Wilhelm Meisters schöne Amazone,’ Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 29 (1985), 141–206; and Schings’s text of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in the Munich edition (MA): Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, vol. v (Munich: Hanser, 1988), pp. 750, 757, 762. 3. See William J. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 45–57. 4. On mental activity at these different levels see Fred Dretske, ‘Seeing, Believing and Knowing’; D. W. Hamlyn, ‘Imagination’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. by Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 363. For Wittgenstein on the role of imagination in aspect-seeing, see Budd, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology, pp. 87, 94, 97, 108–09. 5. Ralph D. Ellis, ‘The Dance Form of the Eyes: What Cognitive Science Can Learn From Art’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6.6/7 ( June/July 1999), 161–75 (pp. 167, 164–65); cf. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, pp. 108–09. 6. Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 48. 7. Roger Scruton, ‘Imagination’, in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. by David E. Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 212–17 (p. 216). See also Cooper, pp. 211, 267, 372. 8. Semir Zeki, ‘Art and the Brain,’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6.6/7 ( June/July 1999), 76–96 (p. 86). See also Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 24–27. 9. Ellis, ‘The Dance Form of the Eyes’, pp. 169–70. 10. References to Goethe’s works are to volume and page number in the Frankfurt edition (= FA): Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 40 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–). References to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in volume 9 of this edition, are given by page number only. 11. Cf. Ellis, ‘The Dance Form of the Eyes’, pp. 168–69. 12. Per Øhrgaard, Die Genesung des Narcissus. Eine Studie zu Goethe. ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’, trans. by Monika Wesemann, Kopenhagener Germanistische Studien, 7 (Copenhagen: Copenhagen University, Institute of Germanic Philology, 1978), p. 295 n. 11. 13. Belucci’s painting was formerly attributed to Andrea Celesti. See Christoph E. Schweitzer, ‘Wilhelm Meister und das Bild vom kranken Königssohn’, PMLA, 72 (1957), 419–32. 14. Mariane is also a Stratonike figure, since she has an older lover in Norberg. 15. For Øhrgaard on Mariane and the theatre, see Die Genesung des Narcissus, pp. 46, 50, 75, 98, 141, 144f., 263; on Norberg, see ibid. p. 43; on Mignon, see ibid. pp. 64, 80, 104, 112, 137–39, 148, 206; on the Harpist, see ibid. pp. 62, 68, 104, 141–43, 224; on the Countess, see ibid. pp. 85–87, 91, 94f., 99.

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16. Cf. ibid. pp. 107–10, 113, 115, 163, 174, 239, 252–53. 17. Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Wiley, 1996), p. 39. 18. She is another Chlorinde-like figure: see Øhrgaard, Die Genesung des Narcissus, pp. 118–19, 302 n. 12. 19. Cf. ibid. pp. 181, 159ff. 20. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre contains two further examples of similar equivocation between past and future involving Susanne (10: 699) and the Major and Flavio (10: 476). 21. Øhrgaard, Die Genesung des Narcissus, p. 163. 22. Goethe’s own son August was five years old at the time the last two books of the novel were written ( Jan.–Aug. 1796). 23. See Øhrgaard, Die Genesung des Narcissus, pp. 194–95. 24. Schings, ‘Agathon’, p. 61. 25. Wilhelm claims to find all the ‘Vorgefühle’ he ever had about humanity realized in Shakespeare’s plays (552), and Aurelie credits him, also in the context of Shakespeare, with ‘eine Vorempfindung der ganzen Welt’ (621). However Shakespeare, whom Wilhelm reads with Mignon and the Harpist in a back room (545), is connected in the text with excessive subjectivity: see Monika Fick, ‘Destruktive Imagination. Die Tragödie der Dichterexistenz in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 29 (1985), 207–47 (pp. 223–25). 26. Kanzler F. von Müller, Tagebuch, 22 Jan. 1821 (36: 144). 27. See ‘Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt’ (25: 31–32); ‘Newtons Hypothese der diversen Refrangibilität’ (23/2: 129–30); Zur Farbenlehre (23/1: 796). 28. Schings, ‘Agathon’, pp. 67–68. 29. See, for example, Hannelore Schlaffer, Wilhelm Meister. Das Ende der Kunst und die Wiederkehr des Mythos (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), pp. 88–89; Giuliano Baioni, ‘Märchen — Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre — Hermann und Dorothea. Zur Gesellschaftsidee der deutschen Klassik,’ Goethe-Jahrbuch, 92 (1975), 73–127 (p. 114). 30. See Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 514–15.

Chapter 3

v

Specular Moment: Moment for Ref lection Freud continues to polarize sciences and humanities into two antagonistic cultures. Scientists critical of Freudian literary theorists accuse them of failing to apply truthcriteria; Freudian literary theorists find scientists’ ‘true or false’ analysis simplistic.1 The scientists assert the arbitrariness of Freud’s notions and the lack of hard evidence for them. The theorists argue that Freud investigates myth-making, not biology, and find his hermeneutic techniques highly relevant to the myth-making that is literature. Anyone unpersuaded by this defence risks rejecting a large body of interpretation, including a great deal of recent work on Goethe. A weighty example of recent Freudian criticism is David E. Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism.2 Wellbery uses semiotics, structuralism and discourse analysis as well as psychoanalytic concepts to present Goethe as the initiator of a modern lyric which ‘draws on the matrix of specularity’ (181), that is, for Wellbery, the subject’s relation to the mother.3 In fact, The Specular Moment offers an ideal moment for ref lection, if not a pause for thought, on what is happening when psychoanalytic concepts are applied to eighteenth-century texts. Wellbery’s first three chapters introduce ‘specularity’, which he presents as his own term of art rather than a borrowing from the psychoanalytic vocabulary (50). Chapter 1 uses the counter-example of Geßner’s idylls to help define what Wellbery sees as a ‘new lyric discourse’ (9) initiated by Goethe, in whose poetry love ‘becomes a privileged experience — a discovery of the self in the other’ (16). A first untitled text exemplifies Goethe’s ‘myth’ of love: Seh ich nur einmal dein Gesicht, Seh Dir in’s Auge nur einmal, Frei wird mein Herz von aller Qual [...]4

Here is the ‘specular moment’ that gives Wellbery’s book its title: ‘the loving subject’s look or regard into the loving regard of the beloved/addressee’. Vision, visual exchange, dominates the lyric, absorbing into itself ‘all the euphoric connotations of Love’ (19). Now ‘Love is the look, is the experience of absolute specularity’ (20). Wellbery discovers the equivalence of love and looking in Goethe’s poems rather than in psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis shapes his whole argument about the potency of vision.5

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‘Maifest’ contributes a second example of the specular moment, in the lines: O Mädchen Mädchen Wie lieb’ ich dich! Wie blinkt dein Auge! Wie liebst du mich!

The text as a whole reveals the role of the female beloved in the lyric fiction: speechless herself, she gives the poet the capacity for song, through the love expressed in the specular regard (26). Woman is a nurturing figure, able to communicate a special potency to the male subject. At the same time, ‘Maifest’ calls attention to the illusory nature of ‘Song sung from the Source of Song’, for the articulate ‘speech/writing of the text betrays the very intimacy of which it speaks’ (24). Here, then, at the outset, Wellbery distinguishes the specular moment, as ideal Wunschtraum of the new lyric, from its base reality in the order of signs. He exploits the psychoanalytic contrast between a pre-articulate world of feeling and the world of everyday utterance that, once entered, offers no way back. Chapter 2, entitled ‘The Crisis of Vision’, focuses chief ly on ‘Mir schlug das Herz’, with its climactic lines: Ich sah dich, und die milde Freude Floß aus dem süßen Blick auf mich.

This example of what Wellbery calls chiastic reciprocity enables him to take his crucial next step: ‘Seeing here moves in two directions; it is a mirroring’ (40).6 Henceforward, mirroring functions as the organizing concept of the book, holding together the psychological, philosophical, sociocultural and aesthetic claims that Wellbery will make. ‘Mir schlug das Herz’ immediately suggests a link between mirroring and identity-formation, for the speaking subject, at first ‘dispersed among its parts’, becomes, in the specular experience, ‘an identity or whole’, a user of the pronoun ‘ich’. ‘Seeing the beloved,’ Wellbery writes, ‘the protagonist finds himself: his identity — his “ich” — is constituted within the mirroring that allows him to see himself being seen’ (41). This formula is perhaps unclear, for reciprocal looking allows one to see the other seeing, rather than the self being seen; seeing the self being seen seems to presuppose a ‘second’ self as observer of the first. But at this stage, the idea is presumably that of the other’s loving look endorsing the subject’s own being. Chapter 3 widens the discussion by pursuing the specular moment in texts by Novalis and Hoffmann, a psychoanalytic reading of whose work enables Wellbery to pass beyond the identity-forming reciprocal regard of ‘Mir schlug das Herz’ to what he calls the ‘specular mirror of primary narcissism’ (78). Narcissism suggests a mirroring where the subject’s own image looks back at it: a mirroring which has come to play a salient part in psychoanalytic explanations of ego-formation. And Wellbery now invites a reading of the beloved who exchanges looks with the subject in poetry as equivalent to the subject’s own image looking out from the mirror: the specular moment is a narcissistic moment. However, primary narcissism is also used by Wellbery to suggest a mirroring where the beloved is at the same time a figure of the mother. Here mother and subject — mother and child — are identical: mirror-images of one another.

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Primary narcissism is, Wellbery claims, a ‘phantasy of oneness, wholeness, and erotic union within the mother/child dyad’ (75). His inspiration here seems to be what psychoanalysis terms the phallic stage of childhood libidinal organization, in which the child knowing only one genital organ, the phallus, believes his mother possesses it, and that he is the little phallus in the mother.7 This understanding informs Wellbery’s interpretation of Anselmus’s look into the eyes of Serpentina in Hoffmann’s Der goldene Topf. Here the specular moment is a matter of narcissistic identification between subject and mother: ‘It urgently affirms: “Yes, you have the little phallus which I am. There is oneness and the Same. And I am one in that your oneness shines back on me” ’ (77). Chapter 4, ‘The Originary Donation’, returns to Goethe, to make the central claim that the ‘sexualization of specularity’ described in relation to Romantic materials was ‘already carried out in Goethe’s poetry of the early 1770s’, so that the ‘narcissistic complex’ that governs Hoffmann’s Anselmus ‘structures the movement of Goethe’s texts as well’ (87). First, however, Wellbery adduces the specular encounter between Agathon and Psyche, in the first book of Wieland’s novel, as a means of reformulating the essential characteristics of specularity. His description at this point is worth retaining. Agathon’s ‘desire is fixed on the mirror of primary narcissism, the mirror which endows him with the schema of his own identity’. The specular encounter ‘allows him to recover his unity with the Origin, with a primordial, childhood love governed by the law of the Same, a love in which his own inmost identity (his psyche) is constituted in the reciprocal regard exchanged with his familial counterpart’ (90). The ‘mirror of primary narcissism’ is one in which the subject exchanges looks with his sister or equally his mother. The poem ‘Auf Cristianen R.’ then confirms that in Goethe, as later for Hoffmann, the specular moment is ‘a narcissistic self-investment enfolded within the mother– child dyad and having the phallus as its phantasmatic center’ (104). The exchange of looks in the sexualized specular moment is ‘a f low of energy that empowers the male subject, gives him the gift of the phallus’ (103), which gift enables the subject to assert his ‘identity as an erect phallic self ’ (114). In ‘Pilgers Morgenlied’, then, the narcissistic myth of phallic identity in the mother–child dyad calls up its Freudian complement, a myth of castration. Here castration anxiety is successfully resolved by the subject’s separation from the specular moment and repudiation of his ‘narcissistic identification with the Mother’ in order to identify with a male figure whose desire he will ‘simulate on the field of adult sexual love’. But at the same time the subject preserves the specular moment in memory, as wellspring of poetic inspiration (119). Thus while Goethe’s lyric myth as reconstructed by Wellbery may recall the Freudian pattern of psychic development, it radically differs from Freud in crediting the mother with power to ‘give’ the phallus, and to remain the source of cultural production after the castration complex is resolved. Wellbery’s lengthy Chapter 5, ‘Genius and the Wounded Subject of Modernity’, builds on the antithesis between narcissism and castration to present genius and castration as antitheses. If the narcissist invests in a phallic identity, so likewise the concept of genius ‘includes a phallic component’; indeed ‘the genius is [...] the existence who identifies with — who is — the phallus’ (128). In other words, the genius

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is ‘the paradigm of unsevered fullness and subjective unity’ (157). Or so, Wellbery seems to wish to argue, the genius was at least in the past; for the modern subject is phallic only in so far as he receives the phallus from the mother, in the originary specular donation. Now this route to phallic identity is presented as problematical: ‘imbrication’ with the female imports an inescapable alterity (158) into the modern subject which prevents him from attaining to true genius. The modern subject, as created by the mother, is a wounded subject, and the ‘wound modernity inf licts [...] is castration’ (157). So the mother is at once blessing and bane, giver of the phallus and castrator. And since castration also symbolizes the alterity inherent in the order of signs, the figure of the mother is held mythically responsible for the condition of language in the modern world, the ‘semiotic catastrophe in which the phallic symbolization of the self breaks apart’ (171).8 According to Wellbery, three of Goethe’s early poems show differing responses to the problem of genius and the modern subject. In ‘Mahomets Gesang’ the subject’s debt to the mother is repressed; in ‘Wanderers Sturmlied’ the debt returns as the catastrophe of castration; but in ‘Künstlers Morgenlied’ the debt is accepted and the aspiration to rival Apollo as genius is abandoned in favour of a new modern form of art grounded precisely in sexualized specularity. Wellbery concludes his account of this ‘matrilinear recoding of art’ with the suggestion that the ‘maternal source of modern art is not the real mother, but the Mother as Phantasie’, so that modern art is an art of imagination (178). Imagination is not, however, to be understood as a capacity to create out of nothing, but a ‘capacity of transference’ in the Freudian sense of that word. The aesthetic imagination transfers onto the aesthetic object the experience of the specular moment, which is itself an experience of transference. The mother is the ‘matrix of modern art’ because she ‘occupies the opposite pole (the complementary position) within the transferential structure in which the subject is constituted’. Here the mirror-relationship between mother and subject seems complete: ‘subject and Mother [...] exchange [...] their identities’ (182–83).9 Having formulated this crucial claim, Wellbery explores some of its further implications, beginning in Chapters 6 and 7 with its linguistic correlate. The lyric’s ‘myth of itself ’ (206) is a return to the maternal voice, to a primordial, prelinguistic orality which is the ‘oral/aural version of specularity’ (199). The two great poems of poetic vocation ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Harzreise im Winter’, which Wellbery explores in his final two chapters, seem to have less to do with specularity. Yet if ‘Prometheus’ makes no reference to it, that is because its central figure has ‘internalized the specular donation of language’ in the drama fragment of the same name (343–44). Likewise in ‘Harzreise’ the poet has internalized the specular donation and thus ‘ finds a path through the desolation of absence with the help of a “supramaternal guidance”’, whereas the outsider is ‘consumed by the negative phantasm of the absent corporeal mother’ (378). In short, Wellbery’s use of psychoanalytic terminology enables him to move step by step from reciprocal looking to mirroring, from mirroring to identityformation, from identity-formation to narcissism, and from narcissism to the figure of the mother.10 But it is indeed psychoanalytical terminology (87) that he uses,

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rather than psychoanalysis as a system, which he nowhere expounds or evaluates. He frequently appeals to the authority of Freud, but in connection with discrete points of textual analysis, rather than major issues such as the nature of narcissism or the mother–child relationship. References to Lacan are far fewer, and mainly second-hand, but the f lavour of Wellbery’s book is in fact strongly Lacanian, with its emphasis on vision and phallicism, and its vocabulary of desire, the subject, severance, morcellation, captation, the speaking being and the order of signs.11 However, no analysis of Lacan’s ideas is offered to justify the use of this vocabulary, and it is especially remarkable that in a lengthy treatment of specularity Wellbery mentions neither the mirror-stage nor the distinction between look and gaze.12 While implicitly claiming the authority of Freud and Lacan, he selects from psychoanalysis only those materials that facilitate the moves he wishes to make from reciprocal looking to the mother as matrix of modern art. In Freud and Lacan, the relations between mirroring, identity-formation, narcissism and the mother–child dyad are more complex than Wellbery suggests. Neither Freud nor Lacan provides clear support for reading the reciprocal regard of lovers as a reciprocal regard of mother and child, as Wellbery seems to do. In psychoanalytic theory, the mother–child relationship does not involve mirroring; neither does mirroring involve mother and child. It is hard to find corroboration in psychoanalysis for the idea of mother and child looking at one another in the ‘mirror of primary narcissism’ (90). The older Freud’s version of ‘primary narcissism’, a primitive state of blissful oneness with the mother, is typified by intra-uterine existence, or by the infant at the breast.13 Since the suckling infant supposedly cannot yet distinguish self and mother as separate entities, there is no question at this time of any mirroring of child in mother, mother in child. For the younger Freud, ‘primary narcissism’ meant something else, namely a later stage when the child’s formerly isolated sexual instincts came together into a single whole and took as their object himself, his own body, his own ego.14 If there is mirroring in primary narcissism so defined, the figure in the mirror is decidedly the self, not the mother. But Freud did not develop the idea of mirroring suggested by his use of the term narcissism. That was left to Lacan. Freud had argued that there must be a precipitating psychical cause of primary narcissism as he first understood it, and Lacan supplied that cause in his theory of the mirror-stage, a central concept of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which recasts Freud by appealing to the sense of sight and specifically the sight of one’s own image as the trigger for (delusory) identity-formation.15 The mirror-stage has become a commonplace of critical writing in the humanities, suggesting all manner of connections between vision, self-identity and access to lost origins. But what the mirror-stage does not do is equate the image in the mirror, whose eyes look back at the child, with the mother: on the contrary, the mirror-image is the unitary gestalt of the as yet incompletely perceived self. The baby first perceives the image or counterpart as a rival that provokes aggression, but resolves this by identifying with the image, thus forming the ego. The mirror-stage falls under the image of the counterpart, not that of the mother.16 It is true that the place of the self-image in the mirror may be taken by the imitative gestures of a real counterpart, that is,

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another child, or an adult.17 Here is perhaps a hint that the mother could serve as mirror-image, but Lacan does not elaborate the possibility. In fact Lacan eventually gives the mother a quite different role in the mirror experience, that of a witness and, even in this pre-oedipal time, a representative of the symbolic order, who ratifies the image seen by the child.18 This role is precisely the one played by the mother in Phillipp Otto Runge’s painting Mother at the Source, which is reproduced at the beginning of Wellbery’s book. Here the mother looks on as the child stares at his own image in the pool, and would no doubt confirm the link of child and image were he to turn in appeal to her as Lacan suggests. Strangely, Wellbery never explores the implications of Runge’s painting. The child’s turn to the mother for confirmation might seem to imply an exchange of looks between child and mother that is otherwise missing from the mirror-stage, except for the fact that in Lacan’s scheme of things the mother’s look stands in for the gaze, which cannot enter into a reciprocal relationship with the look of the child.19 Both Freud and Lacan distinguished, after the constitution of the ego, a so-called phallic phase or moment in the psychic life of the child, and both regarded this as contemporary with the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, the child in the phallic phase believes that both sexes possess the phallus: the boy ‘scotomizes’ his perception that the mother lacks a penis.20 For Lacan, the phallic phase is not a dyad, but a triangular relationship of mother, child and phallus, in which the child thinks that the mother desires the phallus, and seeks to satisfy her desire by identifying with the phallus and playing at being the phallus for the mother.21 Both Freud and Lacan think of the phallic phase as one in which the child initially enjoys a blissful relationship with the mother, before castration anxiety sets in. But neither Freud nor Lacan associates the early phallic phase with reciprocal mirroring of mother and child. The essential ideas here seem to be the child’s association of itself with the phallus, and its fascination with the mother as love-object.22 As to the mother, so far as Lacan is concerned, and as is already the case in the mirror-stage, she is not engaged in an exchange of identities with the child but, in desiring the phallus, is looking to a wider world beyond him.23 Thus it is only by careful selection from and conf lation of Freud’s and Lacan’s ideas about mirrors and mothers that Wellbery succeeds in turning the reciprocal look of lovers, the motif actually present in many of Goethe’s early poems, into a ‘psychoanalytic’ myth of specular oneness and sameness with the mother. But does it matter that Wellbery’s categories look psychoanalytic, especially Lacanian, yet hardly correspond to Lacan’s thought? Wellbery would probably say not. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen drew attention to Wellbery’s conf lation, in an analysis of Werther, of Lacan’s ‘complex of severance’, organized by the maternal imago, with structures established only later, during oedipalization. Wellbery’s response was twofold: orthodoxy was not his concern; and the confusion of levels was hardly a grave transgression, since Lacan insisted that the maternal imago continued to inform later phases of psychic life, even ‘the most highly evolved forms of love’.24 In defence of The Specular Moment, Wellbery might equally well argue that orthodoxy need not concern him; and that in any case the mother figure dominates the whole of the infant’s early life, thus justifying her importation into the mirror experience.

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Be that as it may, Wellbery’s reworking of psychoanalytic materials has effectively generated a novel schema, namely his ‘specular mirror of primary narcissism’ (78), in which the male subject is said to experience his wholeness and oneness in the reciprocal regard of the mother. Wellbery then invests this phallic moment of psychic life with prodigious explanatory force. The putative mirror-relationship with the mother becomes the source of identity, masculinity and cultural productivity, albeit only in recollection, after the bond with the mother has been severed. As enabler, the mother exercises immense positive power, while at the same time it is her negative qualities that are made responsible for the ills of the modern world. With this evaluation of the mother’s role, Wellbery parts company with classical psychoanalysis. Both Freud and Lacan were driven by the need to demonstrate how male identity might be established despite what they saw as overwhelming maternal inf luence in the earliest stages of infant life.25 Their systems centre on the Oedipus complex, in which the father’s intervention in the mother–child relation­ship detaches the child from the ‘maternal’ world of nature, vision, sameness and idealization, so that he may enter the ‘paternal’ world of culture, language, differentiation and acceptance of imperfection.26 Wellbery’s emphasis on the mother means that he diminishes all the other roles in the psychoanalytic cast-list, including the ego, the counterpart and the genital love-object, but most especially the father. Clearly the myth-making lyric subject, the modern wouldbe genius, has passed through the Oedipus complex to the order of speech, for he is a writer of poetry. But Wellbery, who never so much as mentions the Oedipus complex, does not examine this passage into the paternal sphere or under the nomdu-père: it seems to have disappeared down a crack between actual infancy and its re-emergence as Wunschtraum.27 The outsider in ‘Harzreise im Winter’ suffers not, as might be expected, from an incompletely resolved Oedipus complex, but from ‘an unsuccessfully negotiated socialization’ (378). When the father does appear in The Specular Moment,28 he usually assumes the rather novel role of authorizing the son’s preoccupation with the mother. Thus the Archivarius Lindhorst plays the benevolent father by fixing Anselmus’s desire ‘on the specular mirror of primary narcissism’ (78), just as Archytas presides over Agathon’s ‘internalization of the Origin under the auspices of the paternal law’ (91). Whereas the purely maternal form of specularity is eventually described as regressive, specularity ‘authorized by a paternal instance’ is a progressive return to the origin, a mediated, teleological closure, a structure of identity that is achieved not by going back to the natural source, but by passing the limits of nature and at the same time preserving nature within the cultural domain. (144)

It would be nice to know how the second possibility, realized, apparently, in ‘Mahomets Gesang’, actually works; but we never find out what the father has to do to make the difference. That would require a concentration on the father that would surely modify and greatly reduce the alleged importance of the mother in the formation of the modern lyric subject. Wellbery’s reliance on the phallic period of the child’s life as an explanation of poetic creativity inevitably has the — somewhat odd — effect of infantilizing

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the Goethezeit, whose imaginative paradigms turn out to be those of a one-yearold child. Wellbery does not shrink from this effect: on the contrary, he adduces sociocultural evidence to support it. The lovers’ reciprocal look in Goethe’s love poetry, and the mother–child relationship Wellbery connects with it, are historicized with the help of Friedrich Kittler’s discourse analysis.29 It is only in the eighteenth century, Wellbery suggests, that the mother takes control of the child’s primary socialization: Shaped by the tender guidance of the Mother, charged with the emotionality of the intimate bond with her, and protected from the constraints and the tumble of public life, childhood becomes a kind of affective cocoon that the adult subject retrospectively invests as the site and source of its most intimate identity.

As a result of this cultural-historical change, the infant psyche indeed comes to determine the creative process: now, ‘for the first time in the history of Europe, the poetic imagination draws its energies from the domain of infantile sexuality’ (93). Wellbery is by no means alone among contemporary Freudian critics in asserting the importance of infantile sexuality as inspiration for eighteenth-century literature. One of the scholars Wellbery acknowledges is Dorothea von Mücke, whose reading of Agathon helped set the scene for his psychoanalytic treatment of Goethe’s poems. In Virtue and the Veil of Illusion she argues that the epistolary novel and the domestic drama of mid-century draw on Oedipal material, but claims, like Wellbery, that the literature of the period from 1770 to 1800 reaches farther back into childhood, to primary narcissism, for its inspiration. Herder’s aesthetics supposedly exemplify this infantile narcissism: the beholder of a Greek statue, appreciating ‘via a certain imaginary identification the wholeness and health of his own body’, recalls Lacan’s infant of the mirror stage contemplating his own image.30 Similarly William Davis, who uses Lacanian categories to interpret Die Leiden des jungen Werther, claims that Werther’s ‘very strategy of self valorizes a form of masculinity that can be characterized as regressive’, and cites Julia Kristeva’s comment: ‘In short there is infantilism and perversion on the margins of western inwardness.’31 This conclusion from infantilism to ‘perversion’ is inevitable within psychoanalysis, for there the dominance of infantile narcissism in adult psychic life is precisely linked to perversion (especially, in Freud, homosexuality), neurosis and indeed psychosis.32 But not all Freudian critics seem inclined to pursue their argument to its logical end. Wellbery, along with other like-minded writers, finds himself but a step away from a diagnosis of mental illness in his lyric subject purely because he chooses to rely exclusively on what psychoanalysis has to say about childhood libidinal development. Given the interest of Freud and Lacan in adulthood as well as childhood, and in normal adulthood as well as neurosis and psychosis, it is however perfectly possible to find in their work support, indeed explicit support, for a very different reading of eighteenth-century phenomena from that offered by modern infantilizing exegetes. Wellbery’s starting point is the specular regard of lovers, which, prima facie, might well be illuminated by Freud’s concept of adult love or Verliebtheit. In fact this concept was subsequently discussed at length by Lacan and precisely related by him to Werther’s love for Lotte, a prime example of eighteenth-

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century specularity. Freud’s understanding of adult love is to some extent testable and can command support from the general reader, while the committed psychoanalyst would doubtless follow Lacan in using it, rather than childhood narcissism, to illuminate Goethe’s myth of the lyric. The crucial text for Verliebtheit is Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’ of 1914.33 Near the beginning, Freud sets out his famous analogy: self-love is to love of objects as the body of an amoeba is to the pseudopodia which it puts out (75). The two sorts of love are inversely proportioned, the highest possible development of object-love being seen, so Freud claims, ‘in the state of being in love (Verliebtheit), when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis’ (76). Later, Freud distinguishes two types of object-choice, which he calls anaclitic and narcissistic (87–88). The choice is anaclitic when the sexual instincts attach themselves to the self-preservative instincts, taking as object a figure resembling the woman who first cared for the child. Object-love of the anaclitic type is characteristic of the male, that is the post-pubertal, adult male, and shows the sexual overvaluation of the object that marked the child’s early love of self. ‘This sexual overvaluation’, Freud writes, ‘is the origin of the peculiar state of being in love’ (88), and reveals it as narcissistic in a general sense. When the infantile conditions for loving are fulfilled in later life, the male idealizes the object that fulfils them, and falls in love (100–01). Thus in this text, Freud sets up the fairly uncontentious schema of a relationship in which the young adult male idealizes a female partner whose attraction lies in reawakening memories of his mother.34 Lacan discusses the phenomenon of Verliebtheit at length in his first Seminar.35 Following Freud, he distinguishes properly narcissistic from anaclitic object-choice, and selects Werther as an illustration of the anaclitic, even embroidering the text in his enthusiasm: ‘Remember the first time Werther sees Lotte, as she is cuddling a child. It’s an entirely satisfying image for the Anlehnungstypus on the anaclitic plane. It is the way the object coincides with Goethe’s hero’s fundamental image that triggers off his fatal attachment’ (142). There is no doubt that for Lacan anaclitic object-choice is a form of narcissism: ‘It’s one’s own ego that one loves in love, one’s own ego made real on the imaginary level’ (142). But there is also no doubt that in the case of Werther, Lacan is not talking about childhood narcissism. Love takes place on the imaginary level, but only after the subject has entered the symbolic, for love ‘provokes a veritable subduction of the symbolic [...] Love reopens the door — as Freud put it, not mincing his words — to perfection’ (142). Lacan’s understanding of Werther is thus very different from others, such as, for example, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus’s or indeed Wellbery’s own (172), that depict him as arrested in a pre-oedipal stage of development, rejecting his father in childhood, putting aside the fear of castration, and remaining under the sway of the omnipotent mother.36 Lacan encourages a reading of Werther as an adult, subject to a confusion between imaginary and symbolic, and incapable of regulation because ‘when you are in love you are mad’ (142), but still someone whose libido has reached a certain ‘maturation of desire’ (180). Thus within psychoanalysis itself there is good authority for the proposition that specular love as seen in Goethe’s myth of the lyric is not a regression to primal bliss in the womb or at the breast,

40

Specular Moment

nor yet a fixation in the phallic phase of childhood experience, but, less excitingly though more convincingly, a youthful infatuation with an idealized beloved whose appeal owes something to childhood affections. To read the ‘specular moment’ in this way might seem to return criticism to a prepsychoanalytical state, and restrict it to the sort of simplistic, banalizing, biographical readings that Wellbery criticizes. However, the schema of infantile sexuality could equally well be thought to hinder rather than further our understanding of Goethe’s work, because psychoanalysis as a heuristic device for eighteenth-century material raises a serious theoretical problem. As Wellbery’s texts, and Goethe’s novels, amply demonstrate, the eighteenth century itself devised a highly complex sexualized language to explore the issue of subjectivity and the subject’s relation to the ancient dualisms of body and mind, nature and culture. Psychoanalysis, in many respects a late heir to eighteenth-century traditions of thought, learned from this language: Freud’s knowledge of and preoccupation with the work of Goethe and Schiller is well documented.37 The psychoanalytic story of the mother as nature, the father as bringer of culture, and humankind’s forever unassuageable nostalgia for a lost or imagined childhood is an intensification of the eighteenth century’s notions of Greeks, moderns, and sentimental longing for the naive.38 Alex Potts has argued that psychoanalysis is a late way-stage in an ever more frantic quest for subjecthood that has pushed the vision of self-sufficiency — both dream of oneness and nightmare of solipsistic isolation — further and further back in the life-span, from early manhood as exemplified by the Greeks to the infant at the breast.39 In the process the ideological ballast of the thought-pattern has become ever weightier, with woman perceived in classical psychoanalysis as a threat to the successful establishment of masculine identity.40 Wolf Kittler saw the relationship between eighteenth-century ideas and psychoanalysis, claiming that Goethe helped to produce a discourse that Freud would decipher.41 But Goethe is more fitted to throw light on Freud than the other way about. Freud the latecomer does not decipher Goethe’s language so much as embroider it. Likewise modern psychoanalytic readings do not in fact decipher Goethe’s language so much as transpose it into a later and far more f lorid derivative of itself. Such readings exemplify what Paisley Livingston called ‘megaphone criticism’: ‘amplificatory restatement’ of the meaning of texts rather than explanation of how they come to be as they are, or evaluation of what they have to say.42 Goethe can only be properly understood through his predecessors in the religious and philosophical tradition, not through his intellectual descendants in Romanticism and psychoanalysis.43 His use of reciprocal looking should be seen against the background of the same motif in Plato, Augustine and the Pietists; while love such as Werther’s for Lotte takes its symbolic significance from the eighteenthcentury context of Cartesian mind–body dualism and the opposition to it.44 Specularity, the look into the loved one’s eyes, undoubtedly does signify narcissism or self-absorption, but in the sense of entrapment in interiority, in the mind. Goethe himself said, as Lacan did later, that falling in love is loving a creature of one’s own mind: ‘Die wenigsten Menschen lieben an dem andern das was er ist, nur was sie ihm leihen, sich, ihre Vorstellung von ihm, lieben sie.’45 This realm of the mind that

Specular Moment

41

Goethe evoked in many of his texts exists in the distance of vision, but dissolves at a touch. It is ideal: vast, moonlit, awe-inspiring.46 But Goethe’s project is to emerge from mind, from the condition of taking one’s own mental products for reality. Instead of making a world out of self, he will make a self out of the world. ‘Wer in dem immerfort dauernden Streben begriffen ist’, he wrote, ‘die Sachen in sich und nicht [...] sich nur in den Sachen zu sehen, der muß immer vorwärts kommen.’47 Self and world are the poles of his thinking; his symbolism is arrayed between them.48 Of course Freud’s work is all about escape from self-absorption too: ‘In the Freudian Bildungsroman, the hero struggles to free himself from the reactionary forces of narcissism massed in the unconscious.’49 But in Freud the antithesis of self and world has become so heavily encrusted with myths of infantile sexuality that it is barely discernible. In fact the psychoanalyst André Green seems to think of it as a striking revelation when he writes that ‘a new metapsychology, a sort of third topography, may have slipped surreptitiously into psychoanalytic thinking without our noticing it, the theoretical poles of which would be the Self and the object.’50 Surely that ‘third topography’ is already there to be found in Goethe. Notes to Chapter 3 1. This article first appeared in Oxford German Studies, 32 (2003), 105–26. See Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier Science, 1991), pp. 521–61, on scientific objections to Freudianism; and ibid. p. 619 and Peter Lamarque, ‘On the Irrelevance of Psychoanalysis to Literary Criticism’, in Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science, ed. by Peter Clark and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 257–73 (p. 258), on humanists’ willingness to accept it. 2. David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment. 3. For an appreciative review with many pertinent points of criticism, see Jane K. Brown in Modern Language Quarterly, 58 (1997), 351–55. It should be noted at the outset that Wellbery has concentrated on twenty verse texts which provide a narrow base for the elaborate structure that he builds on them. The motif of (reciprocal) looking and its vocabulary of Auge, Blick and sehen are pervasive in Goethe’s early poetry from the very beginning, see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedichte, 1756–1799, ed. by Karl Eibl (Sämtliche Werke, i) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 32, 33, 41, 43, 52, 53, 56, 58, 61, 69, 70, 72–74, 93–95, etc. Some of the more noteworthy examples that Wellbery could have considered, though the circumstances of the looking do not necessarily help his case, are ‘Ein grauer trüber Morgen’ (p. 134), ‘Elisium’ (pp. 138–40), [‘Neue Liebe neues Leben’] (p. 167), ‘Warum gabst du uns die tiefen Blicke’ (pp. 229–31), ‘Lili’s Park’ (pp. 293–96). 4. Never included by Goethe in his own corpus but attributed to him by Wellbery with nearcertainty because of its connections with undisputed works (p. 405). See Eibl p. 846 on the question of authorship. 5. See, for example, pp. 118, 421 n. 26, 422 n. 32. 6. For a doubt about the reciprocity Wellbery finds in this text, see Jane Brown, pp. 353–54. 7. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London: Karnac and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1988), pp. 309–11; Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, pp. 140–44. 8. For the negative female figure (phallic snake, poisoner, Medusa, castrator, etc.), see also pp. 77, 116, 142–43, 152, 157–59, 161, 173, 220–21, 232. This whole aspect of Wellbery’s interpretation often shows signs of strain, e.g. Adelheid’s being a poisoner does not account for the ‘wound’ of Götz (159); mother nature in ‘Der Adler und die Taube’ is hardly a figure of lack merely because she restores fullness (161); ‘schlangewandelnd’ in ‘Mahomets Gesang’ does not convince as a

42

Specular Moment

trace of the poison the genius supposedly bears with him (143, 157). And surely the ‘Du’ in ‘Du hast ihn nicht erhört, und ich bin der Letzte’ (426 n. 34) refers to God rather than Götz’s wife Elisabeth? 9. The ‘mother function’ can be fulfilled by virtually any woman (201). 10. Note that his general strategy is to allege equivalences using the formula ‘x is y’, where the semantic content of the copula is often unclear, e.g. ‘Love is the Look’ (20); ‘seeing is a mirroring’ (40); ‘The specular moment is a discourse of narcissistic identification’ (77); ‘genius [...] is [...] the phallus’ (128); ‘Modernity is the wound of genius’ (129); ‘Castration is a kind of semiotic catastrophe’ (171). 11. For the focus on sight as part of Lacan’s recasting of Freud, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 330. For Lacan’s use of the terms, see Evans, Introductory Dictionary. 12. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 363–64. Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus’s use of the mirror-stage has been criticized by Wellbery in his ‘Morphisms of the Phantasmatic Body: Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” ’, in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von Mücke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 181–208 (pp. 185–86). 13. Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, pp. 337–38. 14. Ibid. 46, p. 337. 15. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [hereafter SE], 24 vols (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), xiv, 77; Charles Shepherdson, ‘Telling Tales of Love: Philosophy, Literature and Psychoanalysis’, Diacritics, 30.1 (2000), 89–105 (p. 99). 16. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, pp. 1–7. Compare Evans, Introductory Dictionary, pp. 28–29, pp. 114–16; Émile Jalley, Freud, Wallon, Lacan. L’Enfant au Miroir (Paris: EPEL, 1998), p. 204. On the evolution of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, see Jalley, Freud. 17. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 50–52, 54. Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Michael Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 105 n. 9, suggests that the child needs only ‘to perceive, or recognize, an image as being similar, as, for instance, the image of the mother’. 18. Jacques Lacan, ‘Remarque sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache. “Psychanalyse et structure de la personnalité” ’, in Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 647–84 (p. 678). Compare Weber, Return to Freud, pp. 116–19; Evans, Introductory Dictionary, pp. 113, 116. 19. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Split between the Eye and the Gaze’, in Lacan, The Seminar. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 67–78; cf. Evans, Introductory Dictionary, pp. 72–73; Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 363–64. 20. See Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’ (1923), SE, xix, 141–45; ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), SE, xix, 173–79; ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’ (1925), SE, xix, 243–58; ‘Fetishism’ (1927), SE, xxi, 149–57. 21. Lacan, Écrits, trans. by Sheridan, pp. 197–98, 282, 289. 22. Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 350–52, 354–55; Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, pp. 309–11. Wellbery’s idea of reciprocal mirroring of mother/phallus and child/phallus is close to Weber, Return to Freud, pp. 144–46; cf. Wellbery, Specular Moment, p. 421 n. 26. 23. Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 194. 24. Wellbery, ‘Morphisms’, p. 193; Specular Moment, p. 327 n. 22. 25. Kelly Oliver, ‘Fear of Birth: Freud’s Femininity’, in Returns of the ‘French Freud’: Freud, Lacan, and Beyond, ed. by Todd Dufresne (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 35–42 (pp. 39–41); John Forrester, ‘Lacan’s Debt to Freud: How the Ratman Paid off his Debt’, in Returns, ed. by Dufresne, pp. 67–90 (p. 85). 26. For a brief account of the Oedipus complex in Freud and Lacan, see Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, pp. 282–87, 328–29; Evans, Introductory Dictionary, pp. 127–30. 27. Wellbery drastically curtails the Freudian ‘family romance’. Compare Brown’s comment: ‘Since

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43

Wellbery is a structuralist, his myth has an array of motifs rather than an ordered biographical plot’, p. 352. 28. References are few, for example pp. 77, 82, 91, 106, 114, 119, 143–44, 238, 383. 29. Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Munich: Fink, 1987), pp. 31–75. In contrast to Kittler, recent work on the family questions the thesis that mother–child intimacy is a recent development; see The History of the European Family, i: Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500– 1789, ed. by David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Steven Ozment, Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 30. Dorothea E. von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 162, 176. For Wellbery’s debt to von Mücke, see The Specular Moment, pp. ix, 417 n. 49, 419 n. 5. 31. William Stephen Davis, ‘The Intensification of the Body in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther’, The Germanic Review, 69 (1994), 106–17 (p. 111); Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’Amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), p. 112 (author’s translation). 32. Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’ (1911), SE, xii, 61; ‘On Narcissism’, SE, xiv, 88. See also Evans, Introductory Dictionary, p. 129; Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 354–55. 33. SE, xiv, 73–102. 34. This idealization of the loved one in adult life is ‘secondary narcissism’, a ‘permanent structural feature of the subject’: Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, p. 337. 35. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 36. Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, ‘Werthers Krankheit zum Tode. Pathologie und Familie in der Empfindsamkeit’, in Urszenen. Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, ed. by Friedrich A. Kittler and Horst Turk (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 76–138 (pp. 116– 22). 37. See Graham Frankland, Freud’s Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 38. For the eighteenth-century dualism of nature and culture, male and female, see L. J. Jordanova, ‘Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality’, in Nature, Culture and Gender, ed. by Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 42–69. For psychoanalysis as a continuation of the eighteenth-century approach see Kelly Oliver, Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3, 6. 39. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 151, 181. 40. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 83. 41. Wolf Kittler, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften. Soziale Verhältnisse symbolisch dargestellt’, in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’. Kritische Modelle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos Literatur, ed. by Norbert W. Bolz (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), pp. 230–59 (p. 254). 42. Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 233. 43. The same point is made by Brown, pp. 354–55, about Wellbery’s use of Derridean theory. 44. Hartmut Böhme, ‘Sinne und Blick. Variationen zur mythopoetischen Geschichte des Subjekts’, Konkursbuch. Zeitschrift für Vernunftkritik, 13 (1984), 27–62 (p. 51), has Augustine’s account of the believer’s look into the eye of God, exactly paralleling Wellbery’s interpretation of Anselmus’s exchange with Serpentina (p. 77); David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 137–42, argues that the Cartesian subjectivist requires the mirroring of others to confirm his sense of reality. 45. Goethes Gespräche, ed. by Flodoard Frhr. von Biedermann, 2nd edn, 5 vols (Leipzig: von Biedermann, 1909–11), ii, 261. 46. Pamela Currie, Literature as Social Action: Modernist and Traditionalist Narratives in Germany in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), pp. 202–04.

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47. Goethe, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 1794–1805, ed. by Volker C. Dörr and Norbert Oellers (Sämtliche Werke, xxxi) (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), p. 176. See above, Chapter 1. 48. For non-psychoanalytical explorations of this symbolism as it appears in Goethe’s fiction see, for example, Per Øhrgaard, Die Genesung des Narcissus; Hans-Jürgen Schings, ‘Symbolik des Glücks. 49. John Farrell, Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), p. 86. 50. André Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. by Andrew Weller (London: Free Association Books, 2001), pp. xvii–xviii.

Chapter 4

v

Goethe’s Green: The ‘Mixed’ Boundary Colours in Zur Farbenlehre Goethe’s first look through a prism showed him the coloured fringes that became the foundation for his whole theory of colour. In his Beiträge zur Optik (1791), he described a series of experiments showing the fringe colours — now usually called boundary colours — produced by looking through a prism at a white strip on a black surface and a black strip on a white surface.1 The white strip on black gives violet/blue and yellow/orange fringes with white space between. If the viewing distance is increased or the strip is narrowed so that the fringes overlap, blue and yellow eventually give place to green. The remaining sequence is therefore violet– green–orange. The black strip on white gives yellow/orange and violet/blue fringes with black space between. If the strip is narrowed so that the fringes overlap, orange and violet eventually give place to magenta. The remaining sequence is therefore yellow–magenta–blue (see Fig. 4.1).2 Rupprecht Matthaei, the twentieth century’s most knowledgeable writer on Goethe’s colour theory, argued convincingly that Goethe used the six boundary colours to construct his colour circle.3 The circle’s top half consists of the inner boundary colours from the white strip, orange and violet, to left and right, with magenta between them in the centre. Its bottom half consists of the inner boundary colours from the black strip, yellow and blue, to left and right, with green between them in the centre (see Fig. 4.2). Goethe believed that his circle, which joined the two ends of Newton’s open, linear spectrum, thus remedied its lack of structure, bringing symmetry into the realm of colour.4 And of course the circle is indeed a closed, continuous arrangement of the colours, complete by construction.5 For Goethe, however, it was not so much a colorimetric convenience as a proof of his deepest philosophical and metaphysical beliefs. A dualist in the tradition of Aristotle, he understood colour as a product of the opposition between light and darkness. Therefore he saw yellow, the colour he considered closest to light, and blue, which was closest to darkness, as a pair of polar opposites fundamental to the world of colour. Green, which had appeared in the boundary experiment in place of blue and yellow, was a mixture of these two in their basic, unaltered form. But yellow and blue were capable, according to Goethe, of a Steigerung or heightening, to orange and violet respectively. If these two heightened forms of the basic colours were mixed together, as in the boundary experiment, the result was magenta,

Figure 1. Figure 1.

46

(a) Schematic representation of the fringe colours

Goethe’s of Green (i) representation a wide white strip, (a) Schematic of the fringe colours and (i) (ii) a wide narrow white strip. of white strip, and (ii) a narrow white strip.

(i) (i)

(ii) (ii)

VB YO VB white YO white

V G O V G O

Fig 4.1a. Schematic representationof of the fringe colourscolours of (b) Schematic representation the fringe a widerepresentation and (ii) aof narrow strip.colours of (i)(i) a white widestrip, black strip. (b) Schematic the white fringe and (i) (ii) a wide narrow black strip. of black strip. and (ii) a narrow black strip. (i) (i)

(ii) (ii)

YO VB Y M B YO black VB Y M B black Fig 4.1b. Schematic representation of the fringe colours of (i) a wide black strip, and (ii) a narrow black strip. See Goethe, Beiträge zur Optik, 1. Stück, § 59 (FA, XXIII:II, 34-35) and Zur Farbenlehre. Didaktischer 213-17 Goethe, Beiträge zur §59 Optik, 1. 34-35) Stück, § Farbenlehre. 59 §§ (FA, XXIII:and II, SeeSee Goethe, Beiträge zur Optik, 1. Stuck, (FA 23/2: and Teil, Zur 1 :ITafel , 92-93 Abb. 2).Abb. Tafel II (FA, 34-35) and ZurXXIII Farbenlehre. Didaktischer Teil, Didaktischer Teil, §§213-17 and II (FA,and 23/1: 92-93 and 2). Note§§ that213-17 and XXIII :I,in 92-93 and Abb. 2).1in (b), and that the (FA,and theTafel positionsII of black white (a) are the reverse of those positions of the fringe colours in (a) are occupied in (b) by their complementaries.

1

Note that the positions of black and white Note of black and fringe white in (b),that and the thatpositions the positions of the in and that the positions of the fringe (b)(b), by their complementaries. 1

(b) by their complementaries.

in (a) are in (a) are colours in colours in

the the (a) (a)

reverse of those reverse of those are occupied in are occupied in

Figure 2.

Goethe’s Green

Goethe’s colour circle based on the six fringe colours.

47

magenta

orange

violet

yellow

blue (cyan)

green

Fig Goethe’s circle based on the fringe colours. See4.2. Goethe, Zurcolour Farbenlehre, Tafel I.1six(FA 23/1: Fig. See Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, Tafel I.1 (FA 23/1: Fig. 1).

1).

which thus ranked as the culmination of the whole structure: the dominant colour that subsumed the rest within itself.6 Clearly Goethe’s own interpretation of his colour circle tended to devalue orange, violet, and green, which were, respectively, nothing but the heightened variants and the ‘mixture’ of yellow and blue, while elevating yellow and blue themselves, and their culmination, magenta, to the status of primary colours. Goethe’s explanation of the circle printed to illustrate Zur Farbenlehre stated: ‘Gelb, Blau und Rot sind als Trias gegen einander über gestellt; eben so die intermediären, gemischten oder abgeleiteten’ (FA 23/1: 1013).7 The colours of the prismatic experiment with a black strip on a white ground thus came to take precedence in Goethe’s mind over those of the experiment with a white strip on a black ground. This arrangement had a polemical purpose: Goethe was setting ‘his’ colours above those he thought of as Newton’s, which he regarded as a mere derivative of the coalescence of fringes.8 Goethe’s partisanship is nicely attested by visual materials that he commissioned, such as the picture card showing a rainbow with blue, magenta and yellow bands from the top down, reversing the order of orange, green and violet in nature; and Heinrich Meyer’s ceiling fresco of Iris in the entrance-hall of Goethe’s house in Weimar, likewise showing the reversed rainbow.9 The scientist Wilhelm Ostwald, an energetic critic of Goethe despite a similarity between their approaches to colour, objected in particular to Goethe’s ‘false doctrine that Yellow, Red and Blue are the three Primary Colours’.10 Goethe’s intemperance about Newton’s theory of colour helps to explain the strength of hostility, among contemporaries and successors alike, to his own. But physicists would always have suspected his approach because he preferred to work with boundary colours rather than analysing the spectrum into its constituent wave­ lengths.11 His interpretation of his colour circle has proved especially vulnerable at the point where he claimed that green and magenta, which he correctly recognized as complementaries and afterimage contrast colours, were formed in the same way,

48

Goethe’s Green

by a process of mixture involving yellow and blue in the case of green, and orange and violet in the case of magenta. The problem here lies with green. For in an inf luential paper on colour mixture, published in 1852, Hermann von Helmholtz showed that when spectral lights are superposed at right angles through a V-shaped slit, blue and yellow merge to form not green but white.12 Despite some detailed qualifications of this result, Helmholtz used blue and yellow as his prime example of the difference between mixtures of lights and mixtures of pigments, where blue and yellow do make green. From his time onwards, textbooks on colour have regularly insisted, without qualification, that blue and yellow lights add to white. This leaves a puzzle for the uninitiated: if the green in Goethe’s experiment cannot be formed by mixing of blue and yellow, how is it formed? Surprisingly, perhaps, this question continued to provoke argument almost to the close of the twentieth century. Matthaei never managed a complete explanation. One that he considered, only to reject it forthwith, involved the Bezold-Brücke effect.13 Much more recently Michael Duck of Harwell likewise suggested that this psychophysiological phenomenon, which causes the fading of spectral blue and yellow with diminishing intensity of the light, could explain the prominence of green between orange and violet in Goethe’s experiment.14 However, Duck’s explanation is not satisfactory because it relies on diminished light through increased viewing distance in an objective prismatic experiment with a screen, whereas the green effect Goethe talks about can equally well be obtained subjectively by tilting the prism to narrow the strip, without decreasing the intensity of the light.15 The standard explanation, already offered by scientific contemporaries of Goethe such as C. H. Pfaff, but periodically lost to view, is that green arises precisely through this narrowing of the strip (see Fig. 4.3).16 A wide white strip produces only boundary colours on either side of a white centre, as Goethe saw when he first looked through Büttner’s prism and became convinced that Newton’s theory of light was wrong. Here the central white is formed by the overlapping of rays of all wavelengths. Eventually, as the strip narrows, only such rays overlap at the centre as together produce the appearance of green. Now, the boundary sequence of violet, blue, white, yellow and orange is reduced to the familiar violet, green and orange of Newton’s spectrum, separated only by comparatively insignificant bands of blue and yellow. Thus the green of Goethe’s boundary experiment is usually explained as being nothing more nor less than the range of monochrome lights that look green in neutral adaptation, that is, the wavelengths between about 495 nm and 566 nm. Though it involves a range of wavelengths, this ‘spectral green’ is in no wise a mixed colour. The test is that it cannot be broken down by refraction into separate yellow and blue parts. The magenta which appeared in Goethe’s second prismatic experiment is a different matter altogether. Here, as he himself correctly assumed, the new colour indeed arises as orange light merges with violet, and is a true mixture, which can therefore be broken down by refraction to reveal its orange and violet constituents.17 The difference between fringe green and fringe magenta as thus explained has earned Goethe many a rebuke from editors of Beiträge zur Optik and Zur Farben­ lehre. Manfred Wenzel, commenting in the Frankfurter Ausgabe on Plate 5 of Zur

Figure 3. The formation of the fringe colours of: (i) a wide white strip, and (ii) a narrow white strip.

Goethe’s Green

49

(i) violet blue green yellow orange V B fringefringe

white centre space

Y O fringefringe

(ii) b

violet blue green yellow orange V

G

O

Fig 4.3. The formation the fringe colours of: (i) aBouma, wide white strip, andAspects (ii) a narrow Based onof P[ieter] J[ohannes] Physical of Colour: An Introduction to the Scientific Study An of Introduction Colour white strip. Based on P[ieter] J[ohannes] Bouma, Physical Aspects of Colour: Stimuli and Colour Sensations, ed. W. de Groot, A. A. Kruithof to the Scientific Study of Colour Stimuli and Colour Sensations, ed. W. de Groot, A. A. and J. L. Ouweltjes (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 113-15, and Kruithof and J.Figs L. Ouweltjes (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 113–15, and Figs 53 and 54. 53 and 54.

Farbenlehre, points out that it incorrectly shows the green of Newton’s spectrum arising from the mixing of blue and yellow, and states that Goethe erroneously believed that green and magenta were formed by an identical mixing process (FA 23/1: 1451). Elsewhere Wenzel frequently explains that Goethe, writing as he was well before Helmholtz clarified the rules of mixture, could not know that the process of adding blue to yellow yields green in paints but only white in lights (FA 23/2: 343–44).18 Rupprecht Matthaei and Horst Zehe, editing Goethe’s colour treatises for the Leopoldina edition of his scientific works, took the same view.19 Presumably these editors simply intended to explain how scientific thinking had progressed since Goethe’s time. But, decades earlier, Ostwald had seized on the difference between fringe magenta and fringe green as a clinching argument against Goethe’s entire metaphysics: ‘Wir haben hier ein schönes Beispiel für die Trüglichkeit jenes allgemeinen Gedankens der Polarität, den Goethe so ungemein hoch bewertete. Denn das Purpur des zweiten Versuches kann man mit dem Prisma alsbald in seine Bestandteile zerlegen, das Grün des ersten ist dagegen unzerlegbar.’20

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Goethe’s Green

Under such an onslaught, the symmetry of Goethe’s circle appears to collapse, calling the value of his system of boundary colours into question. If the relationship of the six colours is not in fact as Goethe understood it, then it must seem that the Newtonian linear spectrum is the only possible basis for colorimetry. But despite Ostwald’s certainty, matters are not so clear cut. For Ostwald, in insisting that fringe green could not be broken down, was aligning himself with a largely Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy, whereas a less well-known but still strong continental tradition took the boundary colours more seriously, and developed a more differentiated view of fringe green in particular. One key representative of this tradition was August Kirschmann, author of ‘Das umgekehrte Spektrum und seine Komplementärverhältnisse’ (1917). Kirschmann may have been the first to describe as ‘inverted’ the spectrum formed by overlapping the boundary colours of a black strip on a white background, and dominated by blue, magenta and yellow. Other terms in use are ‘negative’ or ‘complementary’ spectrum. Kirschmann is perhaps most notable for describing the colours of both boundary spectra as strikingly vivid, and suggesting that this vividness arises in different ways for different colours: for violet and orange through a single narrow band of wavelengths; for magenta and green through the combination of two bands of wavelengths; and for blue and yellow through the whole spectrum minus a single narrow band of wavelengths. His claim, quite novel for its time, f lew in the face of a common assumption that monochromatic beams produced the most vivid colours. Helmholtz had observed that spectral green was not very vivid; now Kirschmann asserted that the more vivid fringe green was composed of ‘two’ bands of wavelengths, by which he presumably meant blue-green and green-yellow.21 The colour relationships described by Kirschmann were eventually analysed mathematically by P. J. Bouma in his Physical Aspects of Colour, first published in Dutch in 1946, and still the fullest account of the boundary colours. Using standard illuminant B, an approximation to sunlight, Bouma calculated the chromaticity coordinates of the colours at ten equidistant numbered points in the boundary spectrum visible at the left margin of a white strip on a black background. He described the colours at the specified points, starting from the black background, as follows: ‘the violet tints of very low brightness (1 to 3) come first; then the colour gradually changes into a pure blue with increasing brightness (4 to 6); next greenish-blue colours appear (7 to 9) with ever increasing brightness but continually decreasing saturation; and finally the colour passes into white.’ At the right margin of a white strip on black, he found, beginning from the white centre of the strip, ‘the sequence is as follows: greenish yellow with increasing saturation and slowly decreasing brightness (1 to 4); saturated yellow (5 to 6); then, with gradually further decreasing brightness, orange (7), orange-red (8), and red (9).’ These colours of course included no pure green. The reason, Bouma found, was the absence of all wavelengths between 495 nm and 566 nm.22 Bouma next explored what happens when the white strip on a black background is narrowed, as in Fig. 4.3(ii). His results can be plotted on the CIE chromaticity diagram (see Fig. 4.4), which arranges all possible colour stimuli in a space bounded by a curve whose ends are joined by a straight line. The curve represents the

Figure 4. Location on the CIE standard chromaticity diagram of the greens seen as the white strip narrows.

Goethe’s Green

51

1.0 y 0.8

G

SPECTRAL GREEN

520 d

540

FULL COLOUR GREEN 560

0.6 500

c

b

0.4

575 580

A

600 ACHROMATIC POINT

0.2

O

480 0 0

470 a V

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

x

1.0

Fig 4.4. Location on the CIE standard chromaticity diagram of the greens seen as the white strip narrows.

Key:

G, Othe indicate position of the V, G, OV,indicate position ofthe the primary colours violet,primary green andcolours orange onviolet, the green and orange on the tongue-shaped curve of the diagram. tongue-shaped curve of the diagram. The line AG, linking the ACHROMATIC POINT to the curve at 520 AG, nm, islinking the locusthe of theACHROMATIC ideal greens,POINT with the The line tobright, the unsaturated curve at 520 is white the strip locus the ideal withof the thenarrow bright, green ofnm, the wide closeofto A, and the dull, greens, saturated green green of the wide the white strip A, from and A the white stripunsaturated close to G. The bold arrow indicates line of travel close of fringetogreen dull, saturated green of the narrow white strip close to G. to G as the white strip narrows. The line ab shows the wavelengths (from 470 nm to its GREEN . green complementary, 575 nm) indicates that participate the FULL The bold arrow thein line of COLOUR travel of fringe Thefrom line cd shows the the smaller range of wavelengths A to G as white strip narrows.in SPECTRAL GREEN.

Based Bouma,the pp. wavelengths 117, 122-23, and(from Figs 58470 and nm 64. to its compleThe line abonshows mentary, 575 nm) that participate in the FULL COLOUR GREEN. The line shows(beginning the smaller of wavelengths in nm) SPECTRAL spectral colours fromcdviolet at a range wavelength of around 400 via GREEN.on 520 nm to orange (beginning at around 600 nm). The straight green centring line is the locus of the non-spectral purples, including Goethe’s magenta. As all spectral colours mix to white, white light appears in the middle of the colour 23 122-23, and Figs 58 and 64. Based onachromatic Bouma, pp. 117, space, at the point. Bouma showed that as the two coloured edges of the white strip come together and eventually overlap, the left-hand border of the strip causes ‘orange’ wavelengths greater than 616 nm and the right-hand border of the strip causes ‘violet’ wavelengths smaller than 436 nm to disappear from the boundary spectrum. When these components have disappeared, the colour visible

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Goethe’s Green

at the centre of the strip, a colour with a wavelength range of 436 nm to 616 nm and a dominant wavelength of 520 nm, is a green of high brightness and low saturation, close to the achromatic point on the CIE diagram. If the strip is narrowed further, fringe green rises from the achromatic point and moves closer and closer to the spectrum locus at 520 nm (see the bold arrow in Fig. 4.4). ‘This result is to be expected,’ Bouma wrote, ‘for if we look through a prism at a very narrow strip of light we have Newton’s arrangement and we see an ordinary spectrum.’ With the very narrow strip, then, we arrive at a point where fringe green has a range of as little as 500 nm to 540 nm. It has increased in saturation as it has moved far away from the achromatic point, but has lost in brightness to the extent of appearing somewhat dull. And it coincides, as Goethe’s detractors from Pfaff onwards have observed, with ordinary spectral green.24 However, further analysis by Bouma showed that Pfaff ’s assertion, though valid, missed the essential point about fringe green, which in common with the other boundary colours has some special characteristics. Fringe green, at all stages of its progress along the line linking the achromatic point of the CIE diagram to the spectrum locus at 520 nm, is an optimal colour: that is, it has the greatest possible brightness for its chromaticity. Optimal colours have a particular form of spectral lumi­nance factor curve (see Fig 4.5). An ordinary green leaf or green-painted surface ref lects some light at most wavelengths, so that its spectral ref lectance is repre­ sentable by an irregular, curved line.25 Optimal colours, by contrast, ref lect light of any given wavelength either completely or not at all, and ‘jump’ between the two possibilities at no more than two places in the spectrum. Their spectral luminance factor curves are therefore angular, and show large blocks of wavelengths as wholly present or wholly absent. The curves for various stages of fringe green show that at any given stage it involves only a band of wavelengths from the central part of the spectrum; wavelengths above or below these are entirely absent from its light.26 As optimal colours, the various stages of fringe green are all maximally bright for their chromaticity. But this does not mean that an observer will perceive them all as being equally ‘colourful’. Brightness and saturation vary in inverse proportion. As we have seen, a narrow spectral green ranging from 500 nm to 540 nm is saturated but not very bright, whereas fringe green located close to the achromatic point of the CIE chromaticity diagram is bright but lacks saturation. Therefore it is reasonable to suppose that the best compromise will be found near the middle of the line linking the spectral locus at 520 nm and the achromatic point. And it is indeed near the middle of this line that the most colourful fringe green is located (as shown in Fig. 4.4). It belongs to the subset of optimal colours to which Goethe’s critic Ostwald gave the name ‘full colours’ (Vollfarben). He also called them ‘semichromes’ because, crucially, the range of the spectrum that produces them is bounded by complementary wavelengths. In the case of the most colourful fringe green, these wavelengths are 470 nm and 574.86 nm. The green that Goethe and Kirschmann found so striking in their prismatic experiments was this colour, shown by Bouma’s meticulous measurements to be quite different both from the green of Newton’s ordinary spectrum, and from the pale, near-achromatic green that is the first to appear when the boundaries of the white strip begin to coalesce.27

Spectral reflectance curves. Figure 5. (i). Typical reflectance curve of a non-optimal colour. Spectral reflectance curves. 1 Goethe’s Green (i). Typical reflectance curve of a non-optimal colour. reflectance 1 0.5 reflectance 0.5 0 400

500 600 wavelength

53

700

0 marked wavelengths within the curve has a value of None of the 400 500 600 700 0 or 1. wavelength A surface with this sort of reflectance curve would be perceived as a light green. None of (i). the marked wavelengths curve has colour. a value of Fig 4.5 Typical spectral ref lectancewithin curve ofthe a non-optimal 0 or 1. None of the marked wavelengths within the curve has a value of 0 or 1. A surface with this sort reflectance (ii). Reflectance of an of optimal colour. curve would be A surface with this of curve ref lectance perceived as sort a light green. curve would be perceived as a light green. 1 (ii). Reflectance curve of an optimal colour. reflectance 1 0.5 reflectance 0.5 0

400

500 600 wavelength

700

0 (ii).marked Fig 4.5 Spectral ref lectance curvewithin of an optimal All of the wavelengths the colour. curve have a 400 500 700value of 1. value of 1.within Allreflectance of the marked wavelengths the curve600 have a ref lectance wavelength This is the reflectance curve of an optimal green. (This is the ref lectance curve of an optimal green.) Based wavelengths on Bouma, pp. 117-120. All of the marked within the curve have a reflectance value of117-120. 1. Based on Bouma, pp. This is the reflectance curve of an optimal green.

Given that the Vollfarbe fringe green involves such a wide range of wavelengths, Based Bouma, pp. 117-120. including someonthat in isolation would look blue, some that would look green, and some that would look yellow, it ought, despite Ostwald’s insistence that it was unmixed and irrefrangible, to break down when refracted by a prism, revealing yellow and blue elements. André Bjerke, a Norwegian Goethe scholar who became better known for his creative writing, attempted to refute Ostwald by showing that, given the right experimental conditions, fringe green will break down. Bjerke’s essay, originally published in Stockholm in 1961, has scarcely been noticed, much less subjected to serious scientific review, although the experiments he described were conducted with the help of a physicist, Sven Oluf Sørensen. Horst Zehe, commenting on Zur Farbenlehre. Polemischer Teil in the Leopoldina edition, dismissed Bjerke in two lines as a misguided Goethe-fanatic.28 Bjerke’s argument nevertheless merits further consideration, given the proven nature of Vollfarbe fringe green. He described parallel experiments on fringe green and fringe magenta. If fringe magenta is projected on to a screen and viewed diagonally through a prism, its component parts are differentially refracted and it splits into partially

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Goethe’s Green

overlapping patches of violet and orange light, with the overlap still appearing as magenta. This confirms Newton’s 7th Experiment in Opticks (1704), Book I, which likewise shows that fringe magenta, mixed from the violet and orange ends of two superimposed spectra, splits into its component parts when refracted by a second prism. But Bjerke also showed that if fringe green is similarly projected onto a screen and viewed diagonally through a prism, under conditions which exactly reverse those of the magenta experiment, the green also splits, into partially overlapping patches of blue and yellow light, with the overlap still appearing as green. This can also be shown using Newton’s technique in the 7th Experiment. Bjerke was likewise able to demonstrate that under different experimental conditions, magenta as well as green can remain intact when refracted through a second prism.29 His results seem to tally with work published a few years later in the American Journal of Physics by Tørger Holtsmark, professor at the University of Oslo, who claimed that so far as boundary colours are concerned, ‘rays which are complementarily coloured have the same refrangibility’, so that, remarkably, ‘no systematic correlation between colour and refrangibility can be recognized’.30 The literature thus provides confirmation of two distinctive forms of green (among the infinite number that are possible): spectral green, which is unmixed in the sense that all of its component wavelengths in isolation would appear green; and a fringe green which is a Vollfarbe bounded by complementary wavelengths and capable of being broken down into components of which in isolation some would appear yellow, some blue and some green. Ironically, given the confusion that has so long surrounded this issue, both Newton and Goethe seem to have been fully aware of the existence of and the difference between these two particular forms of green. Newton described in the Opticks how two ‘homogeneal’ spectral colours could mix to form a colour ‘like in appearance’ to the homogeneal colour lying between them. Yellow and green would form a yellow-green, and then, he continued, if blue be added, there will be made a green the middle Colour of the three which enter the composition. For the yellow and blue on either hand, if they are equal in quantity they draw the intermediate green equally towards themselves in Composition, and so keep it as it were in AEquilibrion, that it verge not more to the yellow on the one hand, and to the blue on the other, but by their mix’d Actions remain still a middle Colour. To this mix’d green there may be farther added some red and violet, and yet the green will not presently cease, but only grow less full and vivid, and by increasing the red and violet, it will grow more and more dilute, until by the prevalence of the added Colours it be overcome and turned into whiteness.31

Here Newton effectively described the progress of fringe green as a white strip against a black background widened. Goethe, for his part, noted in his Konfession des Verfassers at the close of Zur Farbenlehre that the white strip on a black background, seen at a particular distance through the prism ‘das bekannte Spektrum vorstellte, und vollkommen den Newtonischen Hauptversuch in der camera obscura vertrat’ (FA 23/1: 977). The greater or lesser viewing distance, which Goethe here identified as critical, is of course equivalent to a narrowing or widening of the white strip. Goethe knew that the white strip experiment produced the green of Newton’s

Goethe’s Green

55

spectrum before the strip became so narrow that the colours disappeared altogether into darkness. Even if it is accepted that the Vollfarbe fringe green is a mixture to the extent that it involves both blue-green and green-yellow wavelengths, this still leaves unanswered the objection to Goethe’s colour circle that green and magenta result from different types of mixing. Goethe, who did not know the difference between the additive mixture of lights and the subtractive mixture of pigments, assumed that green and magenta were both formed by a process of addition, and therefore paralleled one another. Then Helmholtz showed that blue and yellow lights, when added, approximate to white. But Bouma explained, entirely consistently with Helmholtz, that fringe green results from a form of subtraction akin to that effected by coloured filters, or indeed by the mixture of pigments. As the white strip narrows, its left-hand border eventually causes wavelengths greater than 575 nm and its right-hand border eventually causes wavelengths smaller than 470 nm to be subtracted from the white light at its centre.32 This explanation of the way in which the Vollfarbe fringe green is formed still appears to place it in a different category from fringe magenta. Though Bouma, in a rare example of equivocation, sometimes implied that its formation might also be described as subtractive, magenta is generally held to result from additive mixing of violet and orange lights.33 Commenting on the essay ‘Von den farbigen Schatten’, begun in 1792, Wenzel remarked of green and magenta: ‘Goethe behandelt diese Farben bereits hier parallel als Mischfarben, da ihm zeitbedingt nicht bewußt sein kann, daß hier zwei völlig unterschiedliche Arten der Mischung (subtraktive und additive Mischung) zugrunde liegen’ (FA 23/2: 343–44).34 So the symmetry of Goethe’s colour circle still seems to have been a delusion. Even if he did not equate a mixed with a non-mixed colour, as Ostwald alleged, he did equate a subtractive mixture with an additive one. Yet this is not in fact a problem. The colours of the inverted spectrum (blue, magenta and yellow) are the exact complements of those seen in the ordinary spectrum (orange, green and violet). And this is so because the white strip on a black ground and the black strip on a white ground are themselves complementary in a geometrical sense: they exactly reverse the spatial roles of light and darkness.35 But, being geometrical reversals of one another, green and magenta must necessarily involve opposite forms of mixing. Green emerges by subtraction of wavelengths as the light of the white strip gives way to darkness, while magenta emerges by addition of wavelengths as the darkness of the black strip gives way to light. Their opposition is an essential part of the colour circle’s geometrical lawfulness. Only if both involved addition or both subtraction of light, as Goethe’s critics apparently prefer, would that lawfulness be destroyed. Though he could not explain the relationship of green and magenta, he was right to trust his intuitive perception of the circle’s structure: its six colours do indeed relate to one another in a manner that is remarkable for its economy and its beauty. Rupprecht Matthaei’s attempted reconstruction of the circle gave only a partial sense of these qualities. Matthaei used optimal rather than full colours and set the boundaries of green at 491 nm and 570 nm.36 In other words, he regarded the green

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Goethe’s Green

of the boundary experiment as equivalent to the green of the ordinary Newtonian spectrum, defined by Bouma as 495 nm to 566 nm. So a truer approximation to the circle Goethe had in mind can be constructed on the basis of the Vollfarbe fringe green, extending from 470 nm to its complementary wavelength, 575 nm. Given the complementary relationships among the colours themselves, all six can of course be expressed in terms of the subdivisions of the spectrum created by these two wavelengths. Green, which occupies the centre of the ordinary spectrum, lacks both the short end below 470 nm and the long end above 575 nm. Magenta, its complementary, consists of those wavelengths that are missing from green. Blue lacks only the wavelengths above 575 nm, and orange, its complementary, consists of those wavelengths that are missing from blue. Yellow lacks only the wavelengths below 470 nm, and violet, its complementary, consists of those wavelengths that are missing from yellow. Despite Goethe’s justified enthusiasm for the system of boundary colours, it has had little resonance even in those sections of the scientific world that have been willing to consider ideas other than Newton’s. The reason for this seems to have been not so much theoretical as practical. Bouma, who was able to show that the boundary colours and their combinations fill the whole space in the CIE chromaticity diagram between the spectrum locus and the line of the pure purples, argued that Goethe was therefore quite correct in thinking that boundary colours could form the basic building blocks for all colour mixing. But, Bouma argued, scientists had adopted spectral colours or monochromatic radiations instead, for the simple reason that they were much easier to use.37 Now, however, some within the scientific community are questioning this practical superiority. Jan J. Koenderink and Andrea J. van Doorn of the Uni­versity of Utrecht have recently suggested, iconoclastically enough, that so far as colorimetry is concerned, ‘the monochromatic beams are nothing special’, for they ‘rarely occur in real life’ and ‘can only be produced problematically and approximately’. By contrast, Goethe’s boundary colours ‘are more robust than monochromatic beams and can actually be produced easily in the laboratory’.38 Accordingly Koenderink and van Doorn have proposed a new way of measuring the colour circle, based on the boundary colours and Ostwald’s closely related Vollfarben. Initial commentary on the proposal was favourable. Donald A. MacLeod welcomed its ‘liberating effect’. ‘It loosens the grip of the Newtonian paradigm on current thinking about colour and colorimetry’, he wrote, ‘and revives the unduly neglected tradition of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Ostwald.’39 Paul Whittle noted: ‘The authors do a fine job of historical rehabilitation on both Goethe and Ostwald.’40 This is not to say that Goethean boundary colours are about to replace Newton’s spectrum as a colorimetric resource. But it does mean that so far from being trivial or sheerly erroneous, Goethe’s observations were firmly founded in fact, and are sufficiently interesting to provoke thought almost two hundred years after Zur Farbenlehre was published.

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57

Notes to Chapter 4 I am grateful to Professor Jan J. Koenderink of the Buys Ballot Laboratory, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. 1. This article first appeared in the American Goethe Yearbook, 17 (2010), 259–74. Where possible, references to Goethe’s works are to volume and page number in the Frankfurt edition (= FA): Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Karl Eibl et al. (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–). Here FA 23/2: 34–35 (Beiträge zur Optik, 1. Stück, § 59). See also FA 23/1: 92–93 (Zur Farbenlehre. Didaktischer Teil, §§ 213–17). 2. To avoid confusion, I call the fringe colours of the white strip (the ‘additive primaries’, which are sometimes known in the scientific literature as red, green and blue), by their names in ordinary parlance: orange, green and violet. For the colours of the black strip (the ‘subtractive primaries’), I use the names yellow, magenta and blue. The printers’ term ‘magenta’ gives a clearer sense of the colour than would either ‘red’ or ‘purple’. I retain ‘blue’ because of its familiarity, but its colour approximates to the blue that printers call ‘cyan’. For helpful coloured illustrations of Goethe’s experiments, and thorough discussion of them, see Goethes Farbenlehre, ed. by Rupprecht Matthaei, 2nd edn (Ravensburg: Otto Maier, 1988). For illustrations of the two basic fringe experiments, see pp. 26, 106–07, 112. However readers should if possible carry out the experiments for themselves, because printed illustrations do not convey the quality of the fringe colours, which can immediately be seen by looking through a prism at Figure 1. To see the colours marked in Figure 1(a)(i) and (b)(i), place the page on a horizontal surface in bright light. To see green and magenta, either tilt the prism, or hold the page vertically at almost 90° to the eyes. 3. Matthaei, ed., Goethes Farbenlehre, pp. 50–53. 4. Reinhold Sölch, Die Evolution der Farben (Freiburg: Urania, 1998), p. 91. 5. Compare Jan J. Koenderink and Andrea J. van Doorn, ‘Perspectives on Colour Space’, in Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World, ed. by Rainer Mausfeld and Dieter Heyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–66 (pp. 3, 29). 6. Goethe first set out all of the details of the circle in ‘Über die Einteilung der Farben und ihr Verhältnis gegen einander’ (probably written in 1793), see FA 23/2: 116–19. He gives the same interpretation in Zur Farbenlehre (FA 23/1: 26–27, 226–29). 7. Cf. the ‘Einleitung’ to Zur Farbenlehre (FA 23/1: 27). 8. Sölch p. 91. 9. For the picture card, see FA 2: 689, 1207 and Fig. 23. There is a colour reproduction in Matthaei, ed., Goethes Farbenlehre, p. 88. On Meyer’s rainbow, see S[iegfried] Rösch, ‘Der Regenbogen in der Malerei’, Studium Generale, 13 (1960), 418–26 (p. 426). A colour reproduction of the painting is available on the website of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg [accessed 21 November 2007]. 10. Wilhelm Ostwald, Colour Science: A Handbook for Advanced Students in Schools, Colleges, and the Various Arts, Crafts, and Industries Depending on the Use of Colour, trans. by J. Scott Taylor, vol. i (London: Winsor & Newton, 1931), p. 15. Ostwald (1853–1932) was professor of physical chem­ istry in Leipzig from 1887 to 1906, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1909. After retiring from his chair, he published numerous works on colour, including Die Farbenfibel (1916) and Der Farbenatlas (1917). He constructed a colour solid based on twenty-four hues and the modi­ fications obtained from each of them by adding consistent quantities of white, black and grey. 11. Professor Jan J. Koenderink, personal communication. 12. Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘Über die Theorie der zusammengesetzten Farben’, Annalen der Physik und Chemie, 87 (1852), 45–66; English translation: ‘On the Theory of Compound Colours’, Philosophical Magazine, Series 4, 4 (1852), 519–34 (for the cited experiment see pp. 526, 528). Helmholtz (1821–1894), who made important contributions to both physiology and physics, held a succession of chairs from 1849 to 1877 and later became director of the PhysicoTech­n ical Institute at Berlin-Charlottenburg. He published his Handbuch der physiologischen Optik in 1867.

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13. Rupprecht Matthaei, ‘Goethes Spektren und sein Farbenkreis’, Ergebnisse der Physiologie, 34 (1932), 191–219 (pp. 200, 202–03). 14. Michael Duck, ‘The Bezold-Brücke Phenomenon and Goethe’s Rejection of Newton’s Opticks’, American Journal of Physics, 55 (1987), 793–96; Duck, ‘Newton and Goethe on Colour: Physical and Physiological Considerations’, Annals of Science, 45 (1988), 507–19. 15. Michel Treisman, ‘Why Goethe Rejected Newton’s Theory of Light’, Perception, 25 (1996), 1219–22 (pp. 1219–20). 16. Christoph Heinrich Pfaff (1773–1852) was appointed professor of chemistry at Kiel in 1802, and wrote chief ly on galvanism and electromagnetism. He was acquainted with many of the outstanding scientists of his time, including Cuvier and Volta. For his criticism of Goethe, see Pfaff, Über Newtons Farbentheorie, Herrn von Goethes Farbenlehre und den chemischen Gegensatz der Farben (Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1813), pp. 154–59. Cf. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, Leopoldina Ausgabe, ed. by K. Lothar Wolf et al. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1947ff ), 2. 5A: 258. (Subsequent references to this edition are given in the form LA, followed by section, volume and page number.) On the narrowing of the strip, see Treisman, pp. 1221–22. Figure 3(i) corresponds to Figure 1(a)(i), and Figure 3(ii) to Figure 1(a)(ii). Whereas Figure 1 illustrated the fringe colours seen by looking at a white strip on a dark ground, Figure 3 now shows the pattern of rays that gives rise to those fringe colours. The fringes and the centre space are shown as columns, and the various overlapping rays that produce each of the five fringe colours and the central white can be read off from the rows. 17. See George A. Wells, ‘Goethe’s Scientific Method and Aims in the Light of his Studies in Physical Optics’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s., 38 (1967–68), 69–113 (pp. 87–91) for a detailed discussion of green as a spectral and magenta as a compound colour. 18. See also FA 23/2: 360, 375, 389; FA 23/1: 1230, 1451. Goethe was not in fact wholly ignorant of the differences between pigments and lights: for instance he was well aware that violet and orange mix to magenta in lights but not in pigments, see FA 23/1: 228–29, 261. 19. Goethe, LA 2. 4: 302–03; 2. 5A: 350. 20. Cited by André Bjerke, Neue Beiträge zu Goethes Farbenlehre, trans. by Louise Funk (Stuttgart: Verlag Freies Geistesleben, 1963), p. 57. 21. A[ugust] Kirschmann, ‘Das umgekehrte Spektrum und seine Komplementärverhältnisse’, Physik­alische Zeitschrift, 18 (1917), 195–205 (pp. 195–97, 201–02). Kirschmann (1860–1932) held a chair in psychology at the University of Leipzig from 1922 to 1930. His observations ought not to have been contentious, since the relationship between the spectrum and the inverted spectrum is a trivial application of Babinet’s principle: see Koenderink and van Doorn, p. 28. 22. P[ieter] J[ohannes] Bouma, Physical Aspects of Colour: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Colour Stimuli and Colour Sensations, ed. by W. de Groot, A. A. Kruithof and J. L. Ouweltjes (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 110–13. Bouma’s numbered points can be envisaged as running across the lower edge of Figure 3(i), with the first set of ten points beginning at the left-hand (violet) edge and running towards the white centre; and the second set of ten points beginning at the white centre and running to the right-hand (red, i.e. orange) edge. 23. The coloured version of the CIE chromaticity diagram may be found in Sölch, p. 50, and in many colour handbooks. For a detailed explanation of the diagram, see D. L. MacAdam, ‘The Physical Basis of Colour Specification’ in Readings on Colour. Volume ii: The Science of Colour, ed. by Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 33–63. 24. Bouma, pp. 110, 115–17, 122–23. 25. For the ref lectance curves of various specific green leaves and pigments, see for example Koenderink and van Doorn, p. 26 and Plate 6; Frederick W. Clulow, Colour: Its Principles and their Applications (London: Fountain, 1972), Plate 23 (after p. 132); Ralph Mayer, The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques, 5th edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), pp. 77–82. 26. Bouma gives a diagram of a spectral luminance factor curve for fringe green (p. 118). Koenderink and van Doorn, p. 33 and Plate 11, illustrate spectra of optimal colours. 27. Bouma, pp. 121–22, 124. Bouma’s Fig. 64 shows the Vollfarbe fringe green at point 3. Koenderink and van Doorn, p. 30 and Plate 9, show some spectra of Vollfarben. 28. Goethe, LA 2. 5A: 269–70.

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29. Bjerke, pp. 50–59 and Figures 19–27; Isaac Newton, Opticks (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 48–52 (Book I, Part I, Prop. II, Theor. II). 30. Tørger Holtsmark, ‘Newton’s Experimentum Crucis Reconsidered’, American Journal of Physics, 38 (1970), 1229–35 (p. 1233). 31. Newton, Opticks, pp. 132–33 (Book I, Part II, Prop. IV, Theor. III). 32. Bouma, pp. 115, 117, 177. 33. Bouma, pp. 115–16, says that magenta appears when the wavelength range from 436 nm to 616 nm is ‘missing’. He also generalizes by stating: ‘when combining boundary colours, there can be no question of additive mixing’, p. 117. 34. The same point is made by Holtsmark in his edition of Zur Farbenlehre: Goethes Farvelære, ed. by Tørger Holtsmark (Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal, n.d. [c. 1994]), p. 101. 35. Koenderink and van Doorn, p. 28; Paul Whittle, ‘Colorimetry Fortified’ (Commentary on Koenderink and van Doorn), in Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World, ed. Mausfeld and Heyer, pp. 63–66 (p. 66). 36. Matthaei, Farbenlehre (n. 2), p. 48. 37. Bouma, pp. 117, 176–77. 38. Koenderink and van Doorn, pp. 29, 53, 31. 39. Donald I. A. MacLeod, ‘From Physics to Perception through Colorimetry: A Bridge Too Far?’, in Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World, ed. Mausfeld and Heyer, pp. 57–62 (p. 57). 40. Whittle, p. 66.

C\ Taylor & Francis ~Taylor & Francis Group http://tayl ora ndfra nci s.com

Chapter 5

v

‘Harmoniespiel der Farben’: Goethe, Meyer and Pietro da Cortona In Renaissance and Baroque, Heinrich Wölff lin drew his famous distinction between a ‘linear’ and a ‘painterly’ style in art. ‘Painterly’, he said, was not to be confused with ‘colourful’, for colour ‘was not an essential component of the painterly style’. In Baroque art, he claimed: it was not used to make a chromatic harmony in which each colour brings out the purity and local qualities of its neighbours; local effects, on the contrary, were broken up with infinite modulations and transitions and subordinated to a unifying tonal scheme, so that nothing could disrupt the main effect based on an interplay of light and shade.

This passage nicely evokes the chief characteristics of what many writers prefer to call chiaroscuro painting or ‘Helldunkelmalerei’, which f lourished in Western Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this tradition, the lightness or darkness of colours — that is their ‘tone’ or ‘value’ — acquires an importance of its own in contradistinction to their hue, and contributes to the higher purpose of painting, which is ‘to represent all the vitality and variety of light’.1 Although shadows were present even in ancient art, the development of ‘painterly’ painting in Wölff lin’s sense waited on Leonardo da Vinci’s attempt to tackle the problems posed by the medieval approach to colour. As James Ackerman has pointed out, Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte, which ref lects the practice of Giotto and his followers, recommended that fully saturated hues — colours at full intensity — all be whitened by the same stages to suggest relief, despite the fact that they differ intrinsically in value: saturated yellow, for instance, is much lighter than saturated blue. The result was that a blue cloak and a yellow shirt worn by the same figure appeared to be ‘in two different conditions of lighting’.2 Leonardo’s answer to this problem was to model his scenes achromatically, using the tonal scale from black to white through grey, and only then to impart colour to this chiaroscuro, making sure that the hues in the illuminated parts or ‘lights’ had the same degree of lightness, and in the shadowed parts or ‘darks’ the same degree of darkness.3 John Shearman dubbed this innovation ‘tonal unity’. It meant that ‘colour ceased to play the active role in the creation of form and line; it begins, on the contrary, to be brought into a dynamic relationship with light.’ Leonardo reduced the richness of colour, replacing it ‘by a homogeneous resonance in a distinctly lower key’. Thus he

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began to achieve ‘a new unity of colour compared with the Quattrocento: this is a sfumato unity achieved by achromatic means.’4 And as Ackerman observed, the light of Leonardo’s paintings has its own colour ‘which it casts on to objects and which mixes with the color of the objects’. So colour became immersed in chiaroscuro in ‘a new, more harmonious and unified style of painting’.5 For this reason, art theorists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often discussed the question of harmony under the rubric of chiaroscuro or light and shade, while restricting ‘coloris’ or ‘Kolorit’ to colouring in its mimetic function of reproducing as nearly as possible the truth of nature.6 Goethe’s most striking contribution to the theory of colour in painting was to depart from this tradition by breaking the link between harmony and chiaroscuro.7 In his paper for Die Propyläen on Denis Diderot’s Essais sur la peinture, he complained about the confusion by contemporaries such as J. G. Sulzer of ‘Harmonie der Farben’ with ‘Helldunkel’: Da man auf den Grund der Farbenharmonie nicht gelangen konnte und doch harmonische und disharmonische Farben eingestehen mußte, zugleich aber bemerkte daß stärkeres oder schwächeres Licht den Farben etwas zu geben oder zu nehmen und dadurch eine gewisse Vermittlung zu machen schien, da man bemerkte daß die Luft, indem sie die Körper umgibt, gewisse mildernde und sogar harmonische Veränderungen hervorbringt, so sah man beide als die allgemeinen Harmonisten an, man vermischte das von dem Kolorit kaum getrennte Helldunkel, auf eine unzulässige Weise, wieder mit demselben, man brachte die Massen herbei, man redete von Luftperspektiv, nur um einer Erklärung über die Harmonie der Farben auszuweichen. (FA 18: 595)8

Goethe felt that in the hands of many artists the techniques of chiaroscuro painting did not so much harmonize colour as suppress it. He repeated the argument in Zur Farbenlehre, where he objected equally to the bleaching or greying out of colour and to its submergence in dark shadow, as well as to the application of a general tone, usually some form of golden yellow, to whole paintings (FA 23/1: 277, 280–81). All of these devices seemed to him to evade the real challenge of painting, which was to create a truly chromatic harmony, a harmony of hues rather than tonal values.9 In keeping with this view, he removed the question of harmony from the rubric of chiaroscuro to that of ‘Kolorit’, which in his own work and that of his friend and advisor the painter and theorist Heinrich Meyer10 now comprised two subdivisions: ‘Harmonie der Farbe’, and ‘Kolorit’ properly so called, that is, colouring in imitation of nature. Meyer wrote: Die Harmonie also, für sich allein betrachtet, besteht im schicklichen, zweck­ mäßigen Nebeneinander- und Gegeneinandersetzen der Farben; Kolorit hingegen, im strengen und eingeschränkten Sinne, bedeutet nur die künstliche Mischung derselben und die treue Darstellung der Natur. (766)

The ‘nur’ in this sentence shows that chromatic harmony was the more important of the two.11 Goethe explained what he meant by it in the section of Zur Farbenlehre entitled ‘Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe’. His central tenet was that a truly harmonious effect could be achieved only when ‘all’ the colours were used in equilibrium — ‘im Gleichgewicht’ (275). ‘All’ the colours refers back to his prismatic experiments. Through the prism he saw

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six fringe colours: yellow, blue, green, violet, orange and red (87–102), that he regarded not as a mere aggregate but as a structure created by what he saw as the basic principles of nature as a whole, ‘Polarität’ and ‘Steigerung’ (226–29). Yellow, which he considered closest to light, was the polar opposite of blue, closest to darkness; these were the two fundamental colours, from which the others derived. Yellow could be heightened to orange, and blue to violet; these heightened polar opposites could combine to form a red — a carmine or magenta — which Goethe often called ‘Purpur’, and regarded as the highest manifestation in the whole colour realm. If yellow and blue were combined in their original state, the result was green. To show these relationships, Goethe arranged his colour circle with yellow rising to orange on its left side, blue rising to violet on its right side, red between orange and violet at the top, and green between yellow and blue at the bottom.12 Harmony could be achieved by combining variants of these six representative colours, which provided painters with a far better guide than the rainbow, deficient as it was in the most magnificent colour of all, non-spectral ‘Purpur’ (259). But though Goethe’s reference to ‘all’ the colours is therefore clear enough, he did not explain what he meant when he said that harmony required them to be used ‘im Gleichgewicht’. Rupprecht Matthaei’s suggestion, that they were to be spread over equivalent surface areas in a painting, seems implausibly mechanical.13 A better solution may be found in the theory of harmony developed by the eighteenthcentury neoclassical painter A. R. Mengs. Goethe knew Mengs’s ideas as early as 1778, studied them more deeply during his second visit to Rome, and remained an admirer into old age.14 Mengs’s handbook for art students identified the painters’ primaries, red, blue and yellow, and the secondaries that could be mixed from them, orange, green and violet. Any further mixing would, he believed, destroy the beauty of the hues: in theory, at least, he advocated the use of pure colour in painting.15 Interestingly, Mengs insisted on the need for ‘Gleichgewicht’, which he interpreted as complementarity. A painting should ‘balance’ any one primary colour with its complement, that is, a mixture of the remaining two. Thus balance consisted in the presence or suggested presence of all three primaries. If ‘one employs pure yellow’, Mengs wrote, ‘one should accompany it by the violet, because this is composed of red and blue.’16 Goethe agreed. The historical part of Zur Farbenlehre noted Mengs’s belief that, to be pleasing, a pure colour must be balanced — ‘gewissermaßen aufgewogen’ — by its complement. Through open-mindedness and sound artistic taste, Mengs had discovered the true law of chromatic harmony, Goethe stated, quoting Mengs’s paragraph on ‘Gleichgewicht’, and offering his own physiological explanation for this law (943–44). At the outset of Zur Farbenlehre, Goethe had argued that physiological colours, previously dismissed as aberrations of the visual process, could reveal the muchdisputed law of chromatic harmony (31). When the eye is confronted by one colour, Goethe noted, it automatically produces a second, after-image colour which is the complement of the first, and contains the remainder of the circle. Thus the very physiology of the eye tends towards a total experience of colour: ‘Das Auge verlangt [...] ganz eigentlich Totalität und schließt in sich selbst den Farbenkreis ab’ (50). Though writing of physiological colour rather than pigment mixture, Goethe

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admitted that in order to exemplify his point he had to posit three primaries: red, blue and yellow. Yellow had as its complement violet, which is a mixture of blue and red, and so on (50). The appearance of the painters’ primaries at this juncture is perhaps further confirmation of Mengs’s seminal importance. In any event, these three primaries were the only set of colours that Goethe could readily cite in support of his claim. The painters’ secondaries do not behave in the same way: violet’s complementary, yellow, for example, is not a mixture of orange and green paint. Coloured lights would have helped Goethe to make his point, but he was not fully conversant with the mixtures that they formed.17 Goethe’s argument, that after-images proved a physiological need for a total colour experience, therefore rested on a somewhat shaky foundation. But after-images themselves of course only hinted at the hues ‘missing’ from the experience of any single colour: the need for totality could be fully satisfied only when all the colours were physically present. So the colour circle could be regarded as aesthetically pleasing in itself (259). This conviction of Goethe’s is perhaps partly explained by the fact that his circle, unremarkable when represented by pigments, actually derives from the fringe colours, which strike the best possible balance between saturation and luminosity.18 Goethe’s first name for fringe red, the evocative ‘Pfirschblüt’, peach-blossom (FA 23/2: 96), was intended to suggest a delicate carmine painted on porcelain (254). Goethe found further support for his physiological theory in Schiller’s aesthetics, which prompted him to argue that the sight of a single colour subjects us to pathological constraint, while all the colours together set us free, thus providing us with a properly aesthetic experience (258–59). So Meyer regularly linked chromatic harmony with free play or ‘Spiel’ in his concepts of ‘Farbenspiel’ or the ‘Harmoniespiel der Farben’ (768, 774). Yet the idea that harmony requires the presence of all the colours seems startling in its baldness. Can Goethe really have wanted to suggest that every painting should feature all the hues of the circle? He seems to have had his own misgivings about the uniformity likely to result from the application of this doctrine, because he immediately qualified his definition of harmony, both by dividing it into two distinct forms, ‘das Glänzende’ and ‘das Angenehme’, and also by acknowledging that even these would still be in some sense uniform and characterless (275). Goethe seems to have been confused at this point. The category of ‘das Glänzende’ had in fact already been introduced (274), but as a third form of what he called ‘charakteristisches Kolorit’, alongside ‘das Mächtige’ and ‘das Sanfte’; and its counterpart, ‘das Angenehme’, remained undefined. The confusion may perhaps be resolved by assuming that ‘das Glänzende’ and ‘das Angenehme’ are more fully harmonious versions of ’das Mächtige’ and ‘das Sanfte’. These two, which Goethe likened to major and minor modes in music (276), are calculated, like them, to produce opposite effects on the viewer: ‘das Mächtige’ requires a preponderance of the warm, active hues yellow, orange and orange-red, with a little violet and blue, and even less green; ‘das Sanfte’ requires a preponderance of the cool, passive hues blue, violet and violet-red with a good deal of green and only a little yellow and orange (275). The two forms of harmony proper, ‘das Glänzende’ and ‘das Angenehme’, would thus be biased towards the warm and the cool colours

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respectively, but much more slightly than would ‘das Mächtige’ and ‘das Sanfte’, hence the danger of characterlessness. Thus Goethe’s theory seems to have driven him towards a harmony based on equality of all the colours, while his aesthetic sense, which always required that the particular remain visible in the general, held him back from anything quite so universal and unspecific. He would probably have preferred to define as harmonious such paintings as rely chief ly on the warm or the cool colours, but include just sufficient of their opposites to evoke the whole circle. Thus far Goethe was of course speaking of only one aspect of colour, that of hue. But any attempt at harmonization must necessarily also involve decisions about the other two aspects: saturation or strength of colour, and value or its lightness and darkness. Goethe did not write systematically about these, but many of his and Meyer’s comments suggest that they subscribed to a notion of harmony that originated with the elder Pliny’s remarks on the modelling techniques of Greek painters. Pliny had used the terms tonos and, crucially, harmogê with reference to the creation of relief by dividing the visible surface of objects into darks, mid-tones and lights, with lustre as a further subdivision of the lights. Winckelmann understood Pliny’s tonos to mean object-colour (the unmodified hue of an object) used as midtone, and mixed with black for darks, and white for lights. Harmogê then signified gentle transitions between object-colour and darks, and object-colour and lights. Winckelmann’s interpretation, which was expressly endorsed by his editor, Meyer, helped to reinforce the view, already widely held before the eighteenth century, that harmony consisted for the ancients, and ought always to consist, in gentle transitions not merely between the modelling tones of single objects, but between all the contiguous colours of a painting. This view informs Goethe’s and Meyer’s further thoughts on the ways in which the six hues ought to be used.19 Fully saturated pigments contrast strongly with one another rather than blending gently together. Therefore Goethe insisted that colours should not be used at full strength — ‘in ihrer ganzen Kraft’ — lest a painting appear garish or ‘bunt’ (264, 278). Instead pigments were to be lowered in saturation by the various means available, such as breaking, mixing and underpainting, and made to shade into one another at their edges, so as to bring about the gentle transitions that were the essence of harmony. Goethe and Meyer searched constantly for examples of this interaction of colours, as witness the wide vocabulary they used to describe it: ‘Abschattierung’, ‘Abstufung’, ‘Brechung’, ‘Nuance’, ‘Übereinstimmung’; and ‘Annäherung’, ‘Einwirkung’, and ‘Mitteilung der Farbe’.20 Goethe’s interest in ‘Mitteilung der Farbe’ led him to consider the value of ref lected light in painting. In nature, light falling on a brightly coloured surface is ref lected off that surface. If the ref lections or ‘Widerscheine’ then fall on a more shadowed area, they give it something of their own colour, thus modifying its original hue.21 Though Goethe criticized chiaroscuro painters for turning effects of light and shade into a substitute for colour harmony, he did not hesitate to recommend the use of ‘Widerscheine’, probably because they did not blacken or bleach colours or otherwise reduce them to near-monochrome, but served to harmonize them while preserving their colourfulness. In the early essay in colour

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theory, ‘Einige allgemeine chromatische Sätze’, written in 1793, Goethe relied on ref lected light and coloured shadows as a means of desaturating colour and creating harmonious transitions. He distinguished ‘Lokalfarbe’, by which he meant the colour an object appears to have when fully illuminated by normal daylight, and ‘apparente Farbe’ or its colour as modified by ‘der Mäßigung des Lichts und den farbigen Schatten’. He then defined ‘Farbengebung’ as ‘Harmonische Verbindung der Farben durch Zusammenstellung und Vereinigung der Lokal- und apparenten Farben’ (FA 23/2: 113–14). In other words, ‘accidental’ effects of coloured light ref lected between objects were to alter excessively strong and disconnected objectcolours, uniting them into a harmonious whole. At the same time, ref lected light in shadow inf luenced Goethe’s thinking about the range of colour values appropriate to painting. Between the essay of 1793 and the 1810 edition of Zur Farbenlehre, coloured shadows seem to have acquired a further function: as well as helping to desaturate and blend colours, they could rescue them from the darkness of chiaroscuro. Goethe now discussed the action of ref lected light under the heading of ‘scheinbare Mitteilung der Farbe’, and explained it thus: Wirkt dieser Widerschein auf lichte Flächen, so wird er aufgehoben, und man bemerkt die Farbe wenig, die er mit sich bringt. Wirkt er aber auf Schatten­ stellen, so zeigt sich eine gleichsam magische Verbindung mit dem skierôi. Der Schatten ist das eigentliche Element der Farbe, und hier tritt zu demselben eine schattige Farbe beleuchtend, färbend und belebend. Und so entsteht eine eben so mächtige als angenehme Erscheinung, welche dem Maler, der sie zu benutzen weiß, die herrlichsten Dienste leistet. (197)22

Painters had often created shadows by desaturating hues with black, thus depriving them of much of their distinctive character. But if instead of adding black to his rose red, for example, the painter tempered it with its complementary or an adjacent colour, he could lower its saturation to suggest shadow without actually darkening it. By treating all of his hues in this way, he could increase their variety and retain much of their colourfulness. Darks and lights alike might be made of colour.23 This has important implications for the painter’s palette as a whole, and for the sort of harmony he will create. If shadows do not appear black or even very dark but colourful instead, then the mid-tones will necessarily be lighter, and the lights lighter still. In contrast to the dark manner of chiaroscuro painting, which modelled down from the most saturated colour in the lights, Goethe was effectively envisaging as the ideal of chromatic harmony a far more high-value, ‘blond’ manner that could model up from relatively full saturations in the shadows or mid-tones.24 Because chiaroscuro painting places saturated colour in the light, in keeping with optical reality, and contrasts it with strong, dark shadow, it can imitate nature to a striking degree, even to the extent of deceiving the eye.25 By contrast Goethe’s chromatic harmony, which must place its more saturated colours in the darks or mid-tones, does not imitate optical reality so much as take liberties with it, multiplying the tonal gradations in the upper value range beyond the number that the eye perceives in nature. This is a non-naturalistic, unambiguously artistic and decorative form of painting, which Goethe and Meyer aptly described as cheerful or ‘heiter’.26

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If chiaroscuro painting depended on oil techniques, then Goethe’s concept of chromatic harmony seems more akin to the aesthetic of fresco, with its colourful but cohesive palette of traditional pigments, and its lack of dark shadow.27 Goethe’s and Meyer’s comments on individual schools and painters confirm the affinity of chromatic harmony and fresco. In fact the two friends found their earliest example of ‘Harmonie der Farbe’ in Roman and Campanian painting. It is true that the Italienische Reise records Goethe’s visit to the museum at Portici without mentioning any of the wall decorations taken from Pompeii and Herculaneum (FA 15/1: 228–29). However, the essay ‘Von Arabesken’ that Goethe published in Der Teutsche Merkur in February 1789 shows that he had been impressed by Campanian and Roman frescoes, not least because of the freshness of their colour (FA 15/2: 877– 80). Meyer, who visited Naples in that year, wrote to Goethe in May describing the colouring of the Portici paintings. He noted that the artists never used colour at full strength for drapery but always desaturated it somewhat to avoid excessive contrast: ‘nie sieht man ein rothes oder grünes oder blaues p. in dem höchsten, vollesten Ton der Farbe’, but ‘immer gemildert und sanfter gemacht’. The painters generally preferred the higher value range — ‘die heiteren, schwachen Tinten’ — and instead of modelling by adding white to already light colours, often used subtle hue shifts or cangianti, as when green rises to yellow-green or to pale blue.28 Nearly forty years later Meyer found in F. W. Ternite’s coloured copies of Campanian frescoes ‘eine deutliche Anschauung der merkwürdigen Farbenharmonie der antiken Gemälde’. In one fresco from Herculaneum showing three women, violet predominated, with green and brown accompanying it ‘in schöner Mäßigung und Übereinstimmung. Alle heben einander gegenseitig und lassen dabey den Fleischtinten ihr ganzes Recht’ (FA 22: 378).29 Though he does not say so, Meyer is perhaps perceiving in green and brown (a darkened orange) the split complement of the dominant violet. Meyer’s decisive encounter with Roman painting came in 1796 when he copied the Aldobrandini Wedding, a Second Style fresco discovered on the Esquiline in 1605 and preserved until 1818 in the garden of the Villa Aldobrandini.30 The copy was installed in the Juno room of Goethe’s house on the Frauenplan, and the fresco became the centrepiece of Meyer’s essay for Zur Farbenlehre on colouring in ancient art, as well as the subject of a book-length study in collaboration with C. A. Böttiger. Especially in poor reproductions, the Aldobrandini Wedding hardly seems at first sight to contain all of the colour necessary to Goethean harmony. The viewer is most conscious of whites, greenish blues and violets in draperies, walls and sky. Meyer found white, yellow, green and violet to be present in varying nuances but more or less equal quantities evenly distributed throughout, with little pure blue but rather more ‘Purpur’, especially in the shadows. According to him the colours were light and cheerful: ‘hell’, ‘fröhlich’, ‘heiter’, ‘munter’. They never clashed unpleasantly with one another but were harmonized through ref lections or ‘Widerscheine’. In the bed coverings, for example, he stated that the greens were delicately touched with yellow, and yellows with green.31 The only absent colour, Meyer said, was orange, which would militate against the ‘fröhlichen und doch sanften Farbenspiel’, whose tone was set by violet (592). He could however have pointed out that the dark red-brown complexion of the male figure (possibly not a bridegroom, as Meyer

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Fig. 5.1. The Aldobrandini Wedding, detail, first half of the first century C.E., fresco. Vatican Museums, Vatican City. Photo: Vatican Museums

thought, but Hercules in the house of Admetus) combines with the violets and greens to give a strong sense of the three secondary hues, balanced by the yellow and smaller quantities of blue and red.32 Meyer evidently believed, and Goethe was happy to have him say, that Campanian and Roman frescoes exemplified their idea of chromatic harmony. That idea, therefore, corresponds to a very specific mode of painting. The basic palette of the frescoes, red and yellow ochre, green earth, chalk white, carbon black, and blue frit, was much as Meyer thought.33 These colours were sometimes applied in fully saturated form to plain wall-surfaces, backgrounds and borders, creating a bright and even garish effect. But in figure paintings such as those that Meyer liked, as in landscapes and still lifes, they were also used at lower saturations with great lightness and delicacy. Second Style decorations usually show a fine balance between warm and cool colours. Yellow and red-brown often appear in conjunction with violet and green-blue, so there is a definite sense of complementarity about the colouring, with yellow and violet clearly responding to one another, and, depending on the relative strength of the hues in the other pairing, red calling to green or brown to blue.34 Mabel Gabriel, whose descriptions of the paintings are still as detailed as any, found countless examples of ref lected light and delicate passages of colour, as in a figure of Dionysus from Pompeii, whose f loating drapery was ‘first bluish grey, then mauve, light blue, pink, and an exquisite pale green, becoming white at the turned-over edge’.35 More recently, Philippe Heuzé has described the best of the

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painters as highly skilled colourists, capable of exquisite chromatic effects. The painting of three women so admired by Meyer in coloured reproduction was chosen by Heuzé to exemplify the pastel harmonies characteristic of these frescoes. He called attention to its light f lesh tints, tinged sometimes with carmine and sometimes with ochre, set off by draperies in pale mauves and greens or broken white.36 Judged by examples like this, Goethean chromatic harmony indeed equates to traditional fresco, with its chiaro palette and ornamental aesthetic. It is therefore no great surprise that, though Meyer must have seen numerous medieval paintings during his research visit to Italy, he did not find chromatic harmony in them. And though Goethe eventually admired the Boisserée brothers’ collection of pictures, he made no detailed comment on any aspect of their colour.37 Medieval painting associated beauty with vividness of hue, and often created striking carpet-like chromatic patterns by repeating a small number of colours carried to the edges of clearly outlined planes.38 Goethe’s and Meyer’s failure to judge such painting harmonious, even though it might thus be said to have satisfied the requirement that all colours of the circle be present, underlines the importance they attached to relative desaturation of hues in order to avoid garishness and ease transitions. Meyer likewise found Michelangelo’s cangiantismo, a successor to Cennini’s absolute colour, disharmoniously bright in its juxtaposition of what have been called ‘pure, vivid hues, frequently in the same piece of drapery’.39 By contrast Raphael came nearer to achieving Goethe’s and Meyer’s ideal. Raphael, often regarded in the eighteenth century as the greatest painter of all time, was prized for his skill in drawing and composition and for the nobility of his sentiments rather than for his colouring, which Meyer generally found true to life rather than harmonious (765).40 Meyer’s notes on Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola, which he copied in colour for Goethe, do however record a harmonious arrangement of polar and complementary hues: In der Mad. della Seggiola hat Raph. seine Farben weislich vertheilt das gelb vom Gewändchen oder Hemdchen des Kindes das Roth vom Ermel der Maria harmoniren zum Fleisch & bezeichnen, ziehen das Auge auf den Mittelpunckt des Bildes[.] Das Grün & das Blau vom Gewand und Halstuch der Madonna fassen diese lebhafte Stelle od. Mittelpunckt des Bildes gut ein.41

Much the same point has recently been made by Oberhuber: ‘The traditional four colors, green and red, yellow and blue, are tightly interlocked here, the cooler ones surrounding the warm ones in the center.’42 Of the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, Meyer found the School of Athens superior to the Disputa and the Parnassus because its colours were ‘in allgemeinem Einklang und Verbindung unter sich selbst’.43 He looked in vain in the Mass of Bolsena for examples of ref lected light, but he did see ‘daß die aneinandergrenzenden Farben einander mittgetheilt sind, um Harmonie zu erzwecken, zB. in dem im Vorgrunde sitzenden Weib sind in dem grünen Untergewand rothe Striche da wo der rothe Mantel an dasselbe grenzt’.44 Though his comments were brief, Meyer was finding harmony where he might be expected to do so. For Raphael, following on Leonardo’s sfumato mode, is now credited with preserving the huefulness of medieval painting, while overcoming its discordancy, by adapting colours to one another in a manner unknown since

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Roman times. This he did, typically in the frescoes of the Stanza della Segnatura, by avoiding pure colours, instead reducing saturation to between 25 and 50 per cent, and avoiding extremes of light and dark. The result is a decorative form of ‘coloristic harmony’ known as unione. Subtle hue-shifts using colours that are close in saturation and value serve to increase the ornamental effect.45 The School of Athens, where Meyer discovered the greatest unity, has recently been hailed by Janis Bell as ‘a landmark in the history of coloring’. In it, she claims, Raphael created the effect of far more hues than the six or seven normally found in the fresco palette, while at the same time harmonizing them by skilful juxtapositions, blurring of boundaries, and accidental effects like transparent shadows.46 Meyer’s harmonious female figure in the left foreground of the Mass of Bolsena has been described by Marcia Hall as coloured in the unione mode, ‘with delicate, indistinct, hue-shifted pastels of high value and low saturation’. It is perhaps especially telling that Meyer should find chromatic harmony in this particular figure, for the Mass of Bolsena as described by Hall is one of the rare examples of paintings which incorporate two different modes: unione for distanced historical figures grouped on one side, and the more naturalistic chiaroscuro for contemporaries on the other.47 In keeping with his response to Raphael, Meyer preferred Correggio to Titian. He admired Titian for his verisimilitude in colouring, but thought his palette too restricted to delight the eye ‘vermittelst des harmonischen heitern Spiels des gesamten Farbenkreises’ (767). Correggio, though chief ly concerned with chiaro­ scuro, nevertheless achieved greater harmony in his colours: ‘Das Farbenspiel ist [...] in seinen Werken mannigfaltiger, lebhafter und fröhlicher als in den tizianischen’ (768). Meyer appreciated not only the richness of Correggio’s palette but also his ‘künstliches Nebeneinanderstellen und Entgegensetzen der Farben’ (768), exemplified in The Madonna Adoring the Child, in the Uffizi: eine Graulichte Gase bedeckt den Busen der Madonna & begränzt das Fleisch. Die Haare sind lichtbraun[.] Diese beyden Farben machen den Übergang v. dem Fleisch zu den starken bunten Farben der Gewänder sehr sanft & angenehm[.] Das Untergewand der Mad. ist hochroth mit etwas Verwandtschaft zum Gelb. Der Mantel blau das Futter desselben gelbgrün. Vorsichtig läßt der Mahler überall diese Farbe auf die beleuchteten Stellen des Untergewandes stoßen & das Blau gränzt nur in den Schatten an dasselbe.48

The red of the Madonna’s gown has some yellow in it that links it with the yellow-green lining of the cloak; transitions between darks and lights are made through modulating shadow. In an essay of 1820 Goethe showed his appreciation for Correggio’s colour, describing the Dresden Gallery’s Madonna and Child with Saint George as a magnificent transparency since it simulated back-lighting through richness and clarity of colour, and the softening effect of glazing (FA 20: 528). Today, Correggio is credited with achieving greater chromaticity than Leonardo, while preserving the soft transitions of the sfumato mode of painting.49 He was a logical choice for Meyer as an example of chromatic harmony. Goethe himself was usually far more willing to discuss the meaning of paintings than their colouring, which he would leave to Meyer.50 But one painter, born shortly before Correggio died, stirred Goethe at the outset of his Italian journey to

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formulate his future theory of harmony in one delighted response. When Goethe saw Paolo Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander (now in the National Gallery in London) in Venice in 1786, he wrote in his diary: Es ist frisch, als wenn es gestern gemahlt wäre und seine große Kunst, ohne einen allgemeinen Ton, der durchs ganze Stück durchginge, blos mit den abwechselnden Lokalfarben, eine köstliche Harmonie hervorzubringen, ist hier recht sichtbar. (FA 15/1: 707)

As this entry indicates, Goethe’s joy in colour and his understanding of how local colours could be preserved from darkness and made to harmonize were very much his own; they did not wait on any promptings from Meyer and the circle of German-speaking painters in Rome. When Goethe revised his diary impressions for the Italienische Reise, he attempted a circumstantial explanation of Veronese’s colouring: a painter in Venice must see everything more clearly and more vividly than northern Europeans in their gloomy surroundings that subdue all ref lected light. Watching brightly clad gondoliers working in the sunlight on pale green waters against the background of a blue sky, Goethe had felt as if he was looking at a magnificent Venetian painting: Der Sonnenschein hob die Lokalfarben blendend hervor, und die Schattenseiten waren so licht, daß sie verhältnißmäßig wieder zu Lichtern hätten dienen können. Ein Gleiches galt von den Widerscheinen des meergrünen Wassers. (FA 15/1: 93)

Everything in this landscape was light upon light, without darkness, even in shadow: so much so that if in a different painting you used the shadow colours as lights, you could still model down from them without becoming immersed in darkness. Meyer for his part found in Veronese the most cheerful play of colour among the Venetians (769), again not least because of the ref lected hue he imparted to his shadows. The Saint Helena in Rome suggested that Veronese’s ‘Grundsatz [...] über die Harmonie’ was ‘viel Schatten zu gebrauchen & denselben wieder überall mit Ref lexen zu erhellen zu mäßigen & also den größern Theil des Bildes in eine Art von Halblicht zu setzen’.51 The modern perception of Veronese corresponds with Goethe’s, and perhaps even owes something to it: Charles Dempsey, for example, cites the ‘remarkable passage’ on the gondoliers. Dempsey sees Veronese as close to Correggio in his ‘strength and purity of hue and his naturally transparent light effects’. By using the higher range of the palette and omitting the darker shades, Veronese was able to ‘maintain strength of hue in the shadows of his paintings’. This meant that he could harmonize colours, or relate them to one another ‘through the action of ref lected light, each object partaking of qualities of light and color which are ref lected from its neighbor’.52 Joy Thornton likewise draws attention to Veronese’s use of colour in shadow, describing his technique as a tempered form of hue painting: ‘Hue painting [...] is based on the idea that through the activity of direct and indirect light, both the half-lights and the shadows (of f lesh, of drapery, of spaces) contain color. In the half-lights are light (tempered) hues; in the shadows are saturated, pure hues.’ Using this technique, she writes, Veronese creates ‘a highly controlled

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value composition in the colors’. The multitude of individual hues are adjusted to one another through ‘imprimature, underpainting, overpainting, scumbling, glazing, juxtaposition and mixing’ in order to create ‘an amply ornamented harmonious whole’.53 These technical refinements may seem a far cry from the practice of Roman and Campanian painters. But Veronese was himself a fresco artist, and perhaps owes some of the characteristic features of his colouring, such as his chiaro palette and use of cangianti, to that medium. According to Thornton, he could even have thought of himself as heir to a classical tradition.54 In choosing Veronese as a prime example of chromatic harmony, Goethe and Meyer once more identified it with the decorative aesthetic of fresco. A contemporary of Veronese also noted for striking treatment of colour was Federico Barocci of Urbino. In Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, he is described by Meyer as a painter ‘der, mit eigentümlichem Talent, geistreich, lieblich, ja manch­ mal unübertroffen zart gedacht’ (FA 19: 19). This comment presumably refers to his ‘new brand of popular domestic sentimentalism’55 rather than his colouring, about which Meyer had reservations (768–69). But where Barocci is concerned, Goethe’s actions perhaps speak louder than could any words: in 1788 he purchased one of Barocci’s portraits of Francesco Maria II della Rovere, duke of Urbino, and gave it pride of place in the blue salon which then became known as the ‘Urbino Room’.56 This court portrait is sombre in the manner of the genre, but still capable of displaying in its f lesh tints something of the characteristic approach to chromatic harmony which Meyer appreciated in one of Barocci’s most famous works, the Madonna of the People in the Uffizi: Das Gemälde ist weder bunt noch grell, lärmt nicht wiewohl die Farben alle in ihrem reinsten glänzendsten Zustande sind. Die schönen blassen Schatten tragen viel zu dieser harmonischen Wirckung bey.57

And indeed Barocci, who was inspired by the unione style of his fellow-townsman Raphael as well as by Correggio, excelled precisely in his ability to use clear local colours without garishness, harmonizing them through tricks of lighting that blurred boundaries and contrived gentle transitions.58 Dempsey argues that practice with pastels taught Barocci to rescue chroma from chiaroscuro by using the natural differences in brightness between hues in order to render light and shade.59 Marcia Hall describes the resulting colour style as ‘frankly ornamental’, involving a palette that is ‘delicious and sensuous, even voluptuous’. Barocci used blues and even greens for the shadows on f lesh, and frequently exploited ref lections: ‘A charming instance is in the Madonna del Popolo, where a baby who reaches impudently into the prayerbook held by the women behind picks up the hot red on his mother’s robe on his already deliciously pink cheek.’ But Barocci is also capable of still more sophisticated devices: for example, lightly brushing strokes of a contrasting colour over body colour, so that they fuse at a distance to give ‘a vibrancy to the surface’.60 Barocci inf luenced Rubens (who knew the two altarpieces he had painted for the Oratorians’ church, S. Maria in Vallicella in Rome), as well as Annibale Carracci, leading exponent of ‘Baroque classicism’ and mentor of other leading Bolognese painters including Domenichino and Guido Reni.61 But Goethe and Meyer

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thought of Rubens’s colour as true to life rather than harmonious, and valued the Bolognese school for draughtsmanship rather than colouring.62 Surprisingly at first sight, they found the most outstanding exponent of chromatic harmony, not merely of the seventeenth century but of modern times, in Pietro Berrettini da Cortona (1597–1669), who with Bernini and Borromini formed the great triumvirate of High Baroque art in Rome.63 Meyer rightly thought himself unusual in his liking for Pietro, whom he once described to Goethe as ‘Der von den neuern Kunstphilosophen und philosophischen Künstlern so verachtete, heruntergesetzte, verschmähete Cortona’.64 For Pietro’s vast, decorative, illusionist frescoes had not appealed to Winckelmann or Mengs, and did not correspond with the canons of taste that they had established.65 But Pietro had not fallen entirely out of favour in the eighteenth century, even with critics sympathetic to neoclassicism: C.-N. Cochin, who shared many of Goethe’s and Meyer’s views, liked Pietro’s work, as did Luigi Lanzi, who praises it in his guide to Italian art.66 Goethe’s own knowledge of Pietro is unclear: he certainly visited the Barberini Palace (FA 15/1: 397), but did not comment in the Italienische Reise on the ceiling fresco in the Gran Salone. He admired the sixteenth-century saint Filippo Neri and knew his church, S. Maria in Vallicella, which, as well as Barocci’s altarpieces, contains frescoes by Pietro in the nave, dome, apse and sacristy.67 Goethe may have encountered other work by Pietro in Roman churches and galleries as well as in Florence, which he visited in 1788.68 He owned drawings or copies of drawings by Pietro, as well as a number of engravings of his pictures.69 Meyer praised Pietro in letters to Goethe: by January 1796, when Meyer was writing from Rome, Pietro was ‘unser Peter Cortona’.70 While in Italy Meyer made copious notes on individual oil paintings of Pietro’s in Roman galleries, as well as on his frescoes in the Barberini Palace and in the Pitti Palace.71 Meyer probably spent at least as much time on Pietro as on any of the great Renaissance painters. More than twenty years later, Goethe and Meyer advised K. J. Raabe, an artist whose attempts to learn chromatic harmony from classical frescoes had been denounced by the Nazarenes in Rome, to make copies from Pietro’s pieces in the Pitti.72 In his ‘Entwurf einer Kunstgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts’, published in 1805 as part of Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, as well as in his Geschichte der Kunst, which was probably written between 1809 and 1815, Meyer presented Pietro as modern Europe’s greatest master of chromatic harmony.73 But Meyer expressed himself most forcefully in the pioneering essay entitled ‘Geschichte des Kolorits seit Wiederherstellung der Kunst’, which he wrote for inclusion in the ‘Historischer Teil’ of Zur Farbenlehre (761–79).74 Meyer was not unskilled as a writer, and this essay shows signs of having been carefully crafted to emphasize Pietro’s importance. Its pendant piece on colouring in ancient art culminated in praise for the Aldobrandini Wedding (589–95). In similar fashion, the modern essay built up to the figure of Pietro. Meyer first considered the Renaissance painters as imitators of colour in nature, and as colour harmonists, identifying Correggio as the greatest in the latter respect. Then, having discussed imitation of colour in nature during the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Meyer introduced the figure of Pietro, as one who had created many outstanding works in oil and fresco at the time of

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Pope Urban VIII and his successors. Pietro’s claim to fame was ‘die Austeilung der Farben zum Behuf allgemeiner Harmonie’, and, Meyer continued, ‘wir getrauen uns zu behaupten, daß Berettini hierin der größte Meister gewesen’ (773).75 Then a rapid recapitulation of the shortcomings of the Venetians, Correggio, the Flemings and the Dutch enabled Meyer to formulate Pietro’s contrasting achievements all the more vigorously. He created, wherever appropriate, ‘ein fröhliches mannigfaltiges Farbenspiel’. ‘Immer’, Meyer wrote, ‘sind [...] verwandte, befreundete Farben, die sich wechselseitig heben, nebeneinander gesetzt und widerwärtige Kontraste finden sich niemals in seinen Werken’ (774).76 The essay concluded with a brief sketch of colouring in the eighteenth century, which was treated as a period of decline, and a final hope for the eventual reappearance of harmony. Thus Meyer structured his survey according to Goethe’s new subdivision of ‘Kolorit’ into imitation of nature and chromatic harmony, and in proposing Pietro as supreme harmonist, made him into an exemplary figure comparable with Mengs’s famous triad: Raphael for line, Correggio for chiaroscuro, and Titian for verisimilitude in colouring. Despite staking his reputation on Pietro in this bold manner, Meyer never worked up a detailed analysis of the paintings from the lengthy notes he made in Italy. These usually provide just such information on the placing of the six basic hues as would enable Meyer to recall the works in future, or Goethe to attach some idea of colour to those he knew only from engravings.77 But some of Meyer’s descriptions address subtler aspects of Pietro’s art, and help to explain why he found it harmonious. Discussing the Barberini ceiling, which he considered to be Pietro’s greatest achievement, Meyer noted Immortality, the figure with the crown of stars (Fig. 5.2), ‘die in ein hell violettes Peplon & gelbes Untergewand gekleidet ist[.] ein Streif eines grünlichten Schleyers geht zwischen diesen beyden Farben durch & verbindet solche harmonisch.’78 Here the hue which is darkest by nature, violet, is lightened and brought close in value to its complement, yellow, while the linking ‘greenish’ hue is adjacent to yellow in the circle. This conjunction of three hues is one for which Meyer seems to have had a special liking, not least, presumably, because it figures prominently in the Aldobrandini Wedding. Meyer next turned to Charity (Fig. 5.3): ‘Eine Figur mit purpurnem Mantel & gelb & viol: changeantem Untergewand hält und trägt unten den Lorbeerkranz empor in welchem die Barbarinischen [sic] Bienen stehen. Sie ist die hellste & anziehendste & hat ihren Plaz mitten im Bild.’ Charity’s gown involves the same complementary pair, yellow and violet, while the red of her cloak, that is, ‘Purpur’ or non-spectral magenta, is an adjacent of violet. Another figure, Hope (Fig. 5.4), had ‘ein röthlicht & blaulicht changeantes Untergewand / welches von ferne ein hell violet aussieht / und einen Mantel oder großen Schleyer [...] der hell gelb & schön grün changeant ist’. Here Meyer perceptively noted tints of pink and blue combining optically to create violet, which is again paired with its complement yellow and the adjacent green. Elsewhere Meyer found the rules of harmony particularly well observed in the figure of Lasciviousness, for Pietro had usually put yellow against the white of her gown, but had shaded the white where it met the red of her cloak, so that no harsh contrasts arose.79 Meyer found Pietro’s work at the Pitti Palace uneven.80 A letter to Goethe

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Fig. 5.2. Pietro da Cortona, The Triumph of Divine Providence, detail (Immortality), 1632–39, fresco. Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Photo: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma

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Fig. 5.3. Pietro da Cortona, The Triumph of Divine Providence, detail (Charity), 1632–39, fresco. Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Photo: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma

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Fig. 5.4. Pietro da Cortona, The Triumph of Divine Providence, detail (Hope), 1632–39, fresco. Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Photo: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma

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Fig. 5.5. Pietro da Cortona and Ciro Ferri, Scene from the Life of Justinian, 1647–61, fresco. Palazzo Pitti, Florence. By permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. Photo: Nicolò Orsi Battaglini. All Rights Reserved

lamented a loss of touch in certain unspecified frescoes, which seem to have been those in the Sala della Stufa, where according to Meyer’s notes the colours were ‘zwar fröhlich aber eher bunt als harmonisch’.81 By contrast Meyer described the four lunettes in the Apollo Room, which are more restrained in their colouring, as ‘von solcher Harmonie in ihren Farben [...] daß wir mit unserer besten Kunst und Theorie es nicht anders machen könnten oder doch nur wenig zu ändern fänden’.82 The lunette he liked best represented the reforming emperor Justinian ordering obsolete law books to be burned (Fig. 5.5). Justinian sits on a golden throne wearing a reddish-orange cloak over an iron breastplate and violet tunic and breeches, which are shaded on the side where they meet the pale red garment of an onlooker. Next to this man is a figure in a brown cloak over a red tunic, and next to him again another carrying a stack of law books and clad in a cloak with yellow highlights and green middle tones and darks, over an orange tunic. The figures in the background burning books are dressed in muted greenish and blueish shades. This lunette, whose colour Meyer attempted to describe with some subtlety, may have appealed to him so strongly because it corresponds quite closely to Goethe’s prescription for the powerful form of ‘characteristic colouring’ (275). This required a preponderance of yellow, orange and warm red, with a little blue and violet and less green, and was of course suited to heroic subject matter. Given Meyer’s repeated endorsements of Pietro, Pietro’s works are themselves some of the best evidence we have for Goethe’s, or at the very least Meyer’s, concept of chromatic harmony. Even with due allowance made for different states of preservation, Pietro’s frescoes still produce the colour effects that impressed Meyer, even if he did not always fully understand how they had been achieved.83 Pietro

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has always been highly regarded as a colourist, yet although every modern survey of Baroque art pays general tribute to this aspect of his work, there is still no single detailed analysis of it. However, recent restorations, including that of the Barberini ceiling, have yielded a great deal of important information about his pigments and his techniques. As understood today, Pietro was an entirely consistent choice for Goethe and Meyer as the leading exponent of their concept of chromatic harmony. A diligent student of ancient art and an excellent draughtsman, he copied the Aldobrandini Wedding for Cassiano del Pozzo’s ‘paper museum’, and more than once used motifs from it in his own work.84 He also copied Raphael’s Galatea, a fresco in the unione mode, as well as several works by Correggio and Veronese, whose Triumph of Venice in the Doge’s Palace eventually helped him with his design for the Barberini ceiling.85 In the frescoes that he painted in the 1630s, Pietro used the traditional palette of ‘plain’ colours, red and yellow ochre and smalt, occasionally enriched by ‘f lorid’ colours such as cinnabar and ultramarine.86 Unlike Botticelli, who is said to have created about twenty reds or pinks from three or four pigments in the Adoration of the Magi, or Raphael with his many blues in the School of Athens,87 Pietro seems to have imposed quite a strict chromatic discipline on himself: accents of similar reds, oranges, greens and blues widely spaced across the Barberini ceiling serve to integrate the vast design. The colours are strongest, though only around medium saturation, in the dominant figures such as Divine Providence, and close to pastel in some of their companions such as Hope or Faith.88 Pietro avoided black almost entirely, probably relied on desaturation rather than darkening for shadows and sometimes rose to near-white for highlights. In many of his draperies he used cangianti, which added to the decorative effect of his light palette. Though like most of his predecessors he would move from yellow to violet, he otherwise tended to avoid complementary shifts, more unusually preferring combinations of adjacent colours. Thus Minerva’s cloak has tones of yellow, orange and red, and Papal Authority’s gown is blue with shades of green. Lorenza Mochi Onori, who has reported on the recent restoration of the Barberini ceiling, admires Pietro’s virtuosity as much as did Meyer, like him pointing out especially the hue-shifts from blue to rose to violet and from green to yellow in the figure of Hope.89 Pietro’s cangianti colours are not harshly juxtaposed, with hard edges like Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel, but softly blended into one another to create gentle transitions. Likewise in the whole of his design Pietro attempts by a variety of means to harmonize his colours by merging them together. Lights are placed next to lights or shaded where they meet darks; darks fuse in patches of shadow; one colour will be hatched over another. Though Meyer was not conscious of ref lections in the paintings, they are undoubtedly there, and part of his pleasure in Pietro’s work probably derived from them.90 One of Pietro’s favourite techniques was a form of stippling, apparently executed with considerable skill in buon fresco, which unites colours and creates an effect of scintillation.91 These devices produce such fine gradations across the surface of Pietro’s paintings that in black-and-white reproduction they could almost be taken for drawings or tapestries. It is tempting to hypothesize that Pietro, who produced numerous designs for the new Barberini

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tapestry works, may have learned something from the skilled Flemish craftsmen who brought to Rome their techniques of working in subtly differing colours of silks and wools.92 In any event, Pietro achieved a new and characteristic form of unione, allowing colours to blend into and emerge from one another without discordance. As Meyer wrote: ‘widerwärtige Kontraste finden sich niemals in seinen Werken’ (774). The special effect of Pietro’s colour relies to a great extent on its separation from the human form. Raphael achieved new subtleties in The School of Athens, but there the brighter colours are applied to upper and lower garments that fit underlying body shapes: colour does not become independent of the figures. The same is still true of the Bolognese classicism that f lourished in Rome in the early 1600s. In Domenichino’s Saint Cecilia frescoes in S. Luigi dei Francesi or Guido Reni’s Birth of the Virgin in the Quirinale, the figures clad in tunics and cloaks of separate and distinctive local colour created a rather miscellaneous, patchy effect.93 Some of Pietro’s early work such as the frescoes in the Villa Sacchetti at Castelfusano looks much the same,94 but in the Barberini and the Pitti palaces, the beautifully blended colours rather than the figures to which they are attached determine the overall effect. The great frescoes do not lack clearly visible human forms: the Barberini ceiling displays multitudes of muscular male nudes. But Pietro obscures the anatomy of his more brightly clad female allegories, covering their limbs and often averting or occluding their faces, and turns them into supports for vast, billowing draperies that form irregular patches of colour independent of body shapes.95 The garments of Rome, Religion, Faith, Hope and Charity are made to simulate an inanimate object, the hollow ‘escutcheon’ in the centre of which the Barberini bees hover against a patch of sky. The female bodies are subsumed into a grandiose design where swirls of red, gold and violet are set off by spikes of bluish green. And over the whole great ceiling the brightest drapery colours are repeated at intervals and call across to one another, gathering all the various scenes into a single whole. The compositional importance of colour is presumably what Meyer had in mind when he wrote of Pietro: ‘Er ist aber hingegen so weit gekommen, daß er Gewicht der Farbe dem Gewicht von Figuren entgegengesetzt hat.’96 Goethe’s and Meyer’s admiration for Pietro appears to sit oddly with the classical aesthetic that they otherwise professed. Seventeenth-century French academic classicism had already turned preoccupation with form, which supposedly abstracts and generalizes, into mistrust of colour, which particularizes and specifies.97 In Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth century, classicism frequently went hand in hand with outright chromophobia. Winckelmann associated beauty with whiteness, Kant defined beauty without reference to colour, and Schiller, visiting the Dresden gallery, wished that the paintings were not coloured, because pure outline would provide truer images unaffected by the vagaries of light.98 At the same time, classical painting itself gradually rejected colour. Instead of integrating it in a general pattern of light and shade, as the chiaroscuro painters had done, J.-L. David and his followers, whose approach to their work was primarily linear, increasingly confined colours to the garments of some few prominent figures set against dark or neutral backgrounds.99 Once colour had become isolated in

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this way, the trend continued towards its complete elimination. In Rome in the 1790s, the German neoclassicist A. J. Carstens tinted some of his chalk drawings but carried out very few of his projects in oils, while John Flaxman, the English sculptor, became famous for his illustrations in pure outline. This general hostility of contemporary classicism to colour raises the question of whether Goethe and Meyer perceived any incongruity between their concept of chromatic harmony and their own classicizing aesthetic. The answer is probably that they did not, for several reasons. The first was geographical: ancient art had developed in a colourful setting. Mediterranean landscape and culture made an indelible impression on Goethe during his first visit to Italy. The contrast between northern gloom and southern brightness had already become a commonplace of German cultural ref lection by the time that Goethe wrote of Werther’s love for the Homeric world. But the Italian journey turned it into an intensely personal experience, as witness, for example, the ‘Roman Elegies’, where the dark north induces melancholic introspection and self-doubt, while the sunny south brings uncomplicated happiness and life-affirmation. As a world of light and life, the south is also and essentially a world of joyous, playful colour: equally far from northern darkness as it is from the whiteness that Goethe associated with sterility and death.100 He wrote of Italy as a land where ‘die Seele ein lebhaftes freudiges Bild der harmonisch-farbigen Welt unter einem reinen glücklichen Himmel empfing’ (FA 23/2: 21). In Venice where he suddenly understood Veronese, in Rome, and especially in Naples and Sicily, he felt himself newly born to colour as to so much else.101 In an attempt to convey the special quality of Italian landscape to his northern correspondents he wrote: Die blauen klaren Schatten stechen so reizend von allem erleuchteten Grünen, Gelblichen, Rötlichen, Bräunlichen ab, und verbinden sich mit der bläulich duftigen Ferne. Es ist ein Glanz, und zugleich eine Harmonie, eine Abstufung im Ganzen, wovon man nordwärts gar keinen Begriff hat. (FA 15/1: 464–65)

The revelation of Italian colour was something that Goethe never forgot: ‘Wer es gesehen hat der hat es auf sein ganzes Leben’ (FA 15/1: 249). And it guaranteed that his version of classicism would value colour, not reject it. The second reason was art-historical: ancient art was far more colourful than many of Goethe’s contemporaries allowed. Winckelmann’s achromatic classicism was chief ly inspired by sculptures which had been so bleached by centuries of neglect that those who rediscovered them did not know they had originally been coloured. Goethe, however, was so much a painter that he had almost turned forty before he decided to commit himself definitively to poetry. He might well have considered including ancient paintings as well as sculptures in the canon of classical art even if he had not fallen in with Meyer. As it was, Meyer, also of course a painter, drew Goethe’s attention to the Aldobrandini Wedding and thus provided him with a Roman pedigree for a classicism that incorporated harmonious colouring in the fresco register.102 The Campanian discoveries of Goethe’s lifetime added greatly to the historical evidence for colour in ancient art. But Meyer, whose neoclassical position had become increasingly embattled by the time that Zur Farbenlehre was published, struggled to establish still earlier and more prestigious antecedents for

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the use of the full range of colours. He argued that since Greek painters enjoyed a high reputation for harmony in their own day, and harmony required all the colours of the circle, the Greeks must have used not only the four colours mentioned in classical sources — white, yellow, red and black — but blue which, mixed with yellow, could also give them green (584–86).103 This argument succeeds only if ancient authorities shared the Goethean understanding of harmony. But Meyer was evidently intent on making the best possible historical case for a neoclassicism that would involve colour as well as line. No doubt he believed that such a programme would be more likely to win him recruits in the battle with the Romantic tendency. The calculation was probably sound, but no such adjustment could have enabled the neoclassical aesthetic to prevail in the increasingly hostile intellectual climate of the early nineteenth century. The third and final reason was philosophical: classical art aspired to create an ideal world, of which harmonious colour was itself a proper part. When Wölff lin insisted that ‘chromatic harmony’, in which ‘each hue brings out the purity and local qualities of its neighbours’, formed no part of the naturalistic, chiaroscuro, ‘painterly’ approach to art, he made clear where it does belong: precisely with the ‘linear’, formal, intellectualist approach, which can, if it chooses, ‘idealize’ colour along with everything else, by displaying radiant hues in lawful relation in universal light.104 Despite this pointer, art historians have emphasized classicism’s tendency towards achromatism far more than its potential to accommodate chromatic harmony. This has begun to change with Hall’s and Bell’s work on Raphael as a colourist in the unione mode, and Dempsey’s and Thornton’s understanding of the principles followed by Veronese, the most linear of the Venetian painters.105 Bell has also pointed out that seventeenth-century classical theory was sometimes capable of formulating an idealist approach to colour. G. P. Bellori, the champion of Annibale Carracci against Caravaggio, applied classicizing standards to ‘disegno and invenzione — naturalism tempered by the ideal, expression tempered by reason, clarity, and legibility’, and considered them equally relevant to colour. He was wary of ‘ref lections and accidental light’, it is true, because he found Venetian paintings unnatural. What he valued was a capacity to select from light and colour in nature so as to create a harmony equally far from the extremes of darkness and of light. In fact, Bell suggests, he argued the case for the unione mode of colouring practised by Raphael.106 Goethe’s position was essentially the same. His emphasis on physiological colour and the ‘accidents’ of vision has made him seem to some the opposite of an idealist in his colour theory.107 But in fact he believed — and believed he had proved — that eye and world, appearance and reality were one (FA 23/2: 269); what some might call ‘accidents’ were an essential part of the law-governed interaction between nature and the human perceiver. So at the outset of Zur Farbenlehre he could make the apparently sceptical statement that the eye sees no forms, but only light, dark and colour (‘Hell, Dunkel und Farbe’), then immediately proceed to construct an idealistic aesthetic out of these naturalistic-looking ingredients: Und so erbauen wir aus diesen Dreien die sichtbare Welt und machen dadurch zugleich die Malerei möglich, welche auf der Tafel eine weit voll­

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kommner sichtbare Welt, als die wirkliche sein kann, hervorzubringen vermag. (FA 23/1: 24)108

And what could be more appropriate than that the more perfectly visible world of painting should incorporate ‘Harmonie der Farbe’, the manifestation of nature’s law?109 So Goethe’s campaign for chromatic harmony, though unique among classical aestheticians in his time, remained within the bounds of classical thought, rather than making common cause with classicism’s opponents. Precisely because Goethe’s positive view of colour was not shared by most of his contemporaries in the classical tradition, he and Meyer could find few satisfying examples of ‘Harmonie der Farbe’ created in their own lifetime. Pietro da Cortona’s inf luence had passed by way of Luca Giordano to Giambattista Tiepolo and the great Baroque ceiling-painters of southern Germany, who still had imitators in the late eighteenth century. But Goethe did not visit the relevant sites, most of which lay in the Catholic cultural sphere, and was almost entirely ignorant of this tradition.110 Meyer, completing his essay on colour in modern painting in 1809, deplored the lack of chromatic harmony in recent work, but did find one glimmer of hope. A young painter in Rome, he said, might even yet be about to reawaken a desire for ‘harmonischer Nebeneinanderstellung der Farben’ (779).111 This young painter whom Meyer did not name must have been Gottlieb Schick, a Swabian who studied under David in Paris but broke free of his inf luence when he went to Rome in 1802. There, after intensive study of Raphael, he exhibited two canvases, Noahs Dankopfer in 1805 and Apoll unter den Hirten in 1808, to great public acclaim. Like Carstens, Schick was an excellent draughtsman, but worked far more in colour, favouring a light palette and subtle blending of hues. He once described himself as striving for the effect of fresco in oils. Goethe knew of Schick before he went to Rome and followed his progress there through letters from Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt, who knew him well, and reviews by A. W. Schlegel and others.112 Whatever hopes Goethe and Meyer had of Schick were dashed in 1812 when he died in his mid-thirties. By this time younger theorists like Hegel and the Schlegel brothers were already fighting the cause of colour in their own fashion, against both chiaroscuro painting and achromatic classicism, and the Nazarenes were experimenting with fresco hues inspired not so much by Raphael as by his predecessors. In keeping with his view of medieval art, Meyer argued that Overbeck’s and Cornelius’s drapery colours contrasted too starkly with one another, that ‘die Farben der Gewänder nicht auf erforderliche Weise gebrochen sind’ (FA 20: 123), despite the fact that the two painters would certainly have been skilled enough to create ‘Werke heiterern Sinnes, angenehm in die Augen fallend’ (FA 20: 122), if only they had wanted to do so.113 Meyer likewise remarked of Caspar David Friedrich that he ‘bey Anwendung der Farben deren Milderung und Uebereinstimmung nicht beachtet’ (FA 20: 123). No new Schick arose in Germany to attempt chromatic harmony within the classical tradition, neither did Goethe and Meyer travel sufficiently in the last twenty years of their lives to appraise neoclassical painting still being done elsewhere, such as that of Ingres. Nothing in their work suggests that any colour harmonies created in their lifetime ever

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impressed Goethe as much as Veronese’s, or Meyer as much as Pietro da Cortona’s sumptuous Barberini ceiling. Notes to Chapter 5 1. This article first appeared in Oxford German Studies, 37 (2008), 173–202. Heinrich Wölff lin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. by Kathrin Simon (London: Collins, 1964), pp. 34–35. On the representation of light in painting, see Wolfgang Schöne, Über das Licht in der Malerei (Berlin: Mann, 1954). On Schöne’s principal categories, see Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Bemerkungen zu Wolfgang Schöne: Über das Licht in der Malerei (Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1954)’, Hefte des kunsthistorischen Seminars der Universität München, 5 (1959), 29–51, (esp. p. 31). 2. James S. Ackerman, ‘Alberti’s Light’, in Ackerman, Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 59–96 (p. 84). For Cennini’s text, see Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. by Daniel V. Thompson (New York: Dover, 1960). 3. Janis C. Bell, ‘Light and Color in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus’, artibus et historiae, 31 (1995), 139–70 (p. 141). 4. John Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 25 (1962), 13–47 (p. 31). See also p. 33. 5. James S. Ackerman, ‘On Early Renaissance Color Theory and Practice’, in Ackerman, Distance Points, pp. 151–84 (p. 167). 6. See for example Birgit Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung und Farbenlehre in der deutschen Malerei um 1800 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1982), pp. 27–28, 31; Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Le Voyage d’Italie (1758), ed. by Christian Michel (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1991), p. 33; Carl Ludwig Fernow, ‘Über den Begriff des Kolorits’, in Fernow, Römische Studien, ii (Zurich: Gessner, 1806), pp. 201, 224, 227, 229, 250. 7. Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, pp. 87, 94–95. 8. References to Goethe’s works are to volume and page number in the Frankfurt edition (= FA): Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 40 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–). References in the text to Zur Farbenlehre, in volume 23/1 of this edition, are given by page number only. Where possible, references to Heinrich Meyer’s essays are also to the Frankfurt edition of Goethe’s works, which includes many of them. 9. Cf. Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, pp. 34, 36, 40, 47, 94. 10. Meyer, who was born in Zürich in 1760, first met Goethe in Rome in 1786, was called by him to the Weimar Zeichenschule in 1792 and worked with him on all his projects relating to the arts. For the relationship between Goethe and Meyer, see Otto Harnack, ‘Goethe und Heinrich Meyer’, in Harnack, Essais und Studien zur Literaturgeschichte (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1899), pp. 151–69; Max Hecker, ‘Zur Einführung’, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Max Hecker, 4 vols, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft 32, 34, 35 and 35:ii (Weimar: Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1917–32), i, pp. v–xx; Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli, Goethes Kunstmeyer und seine Welt (Zürich: Artemis, 1959); Jost Schillemeit, ‘Goethe und Heinrich Meyer. Zu den römischen Anfängen der klassischen Weimarer Kunstlehre’, Abhandlungen der Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, 44 (1993), 119–29; Jochen Klauss, Der ‘Kunschtmeyer’. Johann Heinrich Meyer. Freund und Orakel Goethes (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2001). The essays that Meyer contributed to Goethe’s book publications and periodicals were produced in close collaboration with Goethe and were edited and corrected by him. See for example FA 18: 1240–42; 21: 739–46; 22: 1048–49, 1063–64; and Wiederholte Spiegelungen. Weimarer Klassik, 1759–1832, Ständige Ausstellung des Goethe-Nationalmuseums, ed. by Gerhard Schuster and Caroline Gille, 2 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1999), i, 432, 445. For specimen pages of Goethe’s corrections, see Johann Heinrich Meyer, Geschichte der Kunst, ed. by Helmut Holzhauer and Reiner Schlichting (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1974), plates I and II, after p. 240. Meyer’s manuscript notes on works of art in Italy are held in the Bestand Heinrich Meyer at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Stiftung Weimarer Klassik und Kunstsammlungen, Weimar. I am grateful to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv for copies of the following bundles: ‘Reiseaufzeichnungen aus Italien und von

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der Reise nach Italien’ (GSA 64/89), ‘Gallerien zu Florenz’ (GSA 64/91), ‘Kirchen in Rom’ (GSA 64/92), and ‘Gemälde und Antiken in den Palästen Roms’ (GSA 64/94). 11. In theory, ‘Harmonie der Farbe’ was compatible with excellence in ‘Kolorit’ (see FA 23/1: 274), and Goethe has sometimes been thought to have attached more importance to the latter (see Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, pp. 93–95). However the differing technical requirements of the two, and their achievement by different sets of painters, show that in practice Goethe and Meyer found them to be incompatible. 12. Goethe’s wheel is illustrated in colour in FA 23/1, plate 1 (after p. 1040). 13. He did allow that a small area of strong colour could be balanced by a larger area of a weaker colour. See Goethes Farbenlehre, ed. by Rupprecht Matthaei, 2nd edn (Ravensburg: Maier, 1988), p. 184. There is an American translation of this volume by Herb Aach (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold; London: Studio Vista, 1971), with the same pagination as the German edition. 14. For Goethe’s knowledge of Mengs, see FA 23/1: 1350 and 1426; Ernst Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde. Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), p. 99. For Meyer and Mengs, see Schillemeit, ‘Goethe und Heinrich Meyer’, pp. 124, 128. 15. On Mengs’s theory, see Heinz Matile, Die Farbenlehre Philipp Otto Runges. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Künstlerfarbenlehre (Bern: Benteli, 1973), pp. 75–78. Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, p. 49 points out that Mengs did not use pure colour in practice. 16. The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, trans. from the Italian, ed. by Joseph Nicholas d’Azara, 2 vols (London: Faulder, 1796), ii, 134. 17. Given the right conditions, it is true to say that any two lights separated on the colour circle by one intervening light will mix to form that intervening light. Thus despite allegations to the contrary, broad-spectrum blue and yellow lights can mix to form green, as Goethe claimed. For a good explanation of this, see P. J. Bouma, Physical Aspects of Colour (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 113–15. Goethe has often been accused of failing to distinguish mixture of pigments from mixture of lights. But by the time he published Zur Farbenlehre he knew quite well, for example, that orange and violet mixed to red (‘Purpur’) only in lights, see FA 23/1: 261. 18. Bouma, Physical Aspects of Colour, pp. 117–20, 122–25. The fringe colours are what Wilhelm Ostwald called ‘full’ colours. 19. Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 29; and see The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, trans. by K. Jex-Blake with a commentary and introduction by Eugénie Sellers (London: Macmillan, 1896), p. 97. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Schriften und Nachlaß, iv/1. Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, ed. by Adolf H. Borbein et al. (Mainz: von Zabern, 2002), p. 551. For Meyer on Pliny, see Winckelmanns Werke, ed. by Johann Heinrich Meyer and Johann Schulze, 8 vols (Dresden: Walther, 1808–20), v (1812), 505. On the Pliny passage see also Jonas Gavel, Colour: A Study of its Position in the Art Theory of the Quattro- and Cinquecento (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1979), p. 107. 20. See for example Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 108, 195, 352; FA 15/1: 110, 465; 18: 420; 22: 378; 23/1: 196–97, 589–90, 594, 772. 21. On ref lections in painting, see Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 77, 79, 81, 97, 106–07, 110–11, 158, 166, 174, 178. 22. skierôi: ‘dem Dunklen, Schattenhaften’, from skierôn (1123). In keeping with this paragraph, Goethe elsewhere refers to ref lected light as ‘der erhellte Schatten’ (268). 23. Cf. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. The New Version (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 320, 361. On the creation of shadow in painting without the use of black, see Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour’, p. 39 (on Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo); Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 102–03 (on Raphael’s Stanze). 24. For the use of the term ‘blond’ to signify a light palette, see for example Marcia B. Hall, ‘From Modeling Techniques to Color Modes’, in Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting: Italy and the North, ed. by Hall (Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1987), pp. 1–30 (p. 14). 25. Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour’, pp. 28–30; Linda Caron, ‘Choices Concerning Modes of Modeling during the High Renaissance and After’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 48 (1985), 476–89 (pp. 479–81, 485–87).

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26. For the contrast between the naturalistic and the decorative approach, see Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Glückstadt: Augustin, 1977), pp. 23–25. The association of a light palette with cheerfulness is at least as old as Alberti: see Ackerman, ‘On Early Renaissance Color Theory and Practice’, in Distance Points, p. 163. For examples of ‘heiter’ used by Meyer to describe chromatic harmony, see FA 23/1: 588, 593, 767, 768, 769, 779. 27. Cf. Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1978), pp. 117–19; Daniel V. Thompson, The Practice of Tempera Painting (1936) (New York: Dover, 1962), pp. 4–6, 137. 28. Letter of 5 April 1789 in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hecker, i, 32–33. 29. The Ternite version of the fresco is reproduced in black and white at FA 22: plate 33 (after p. 1408). The original is in the Museo Nazionale, Naples, cat. no. MN 9387. See L. Richardson, Jr, A Catalog of Identifiable Figure Painters of Ancient Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 75–76; Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Pittori di Pompei (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1963), p. 97 (colour reproduction); Philippe Heuzé, Pompéi, ou, Le Bonheur de peindre (Paris: De Boccard, 1990), pp. 109–13 and plate 14. 30. The Aldobrandini Wedding is well reproduced in Leonard von Matt, Die Kunstsammlungen der Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rom (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1969), pp. 19–28, and also in Gigetta Dalli Regoli et al., Vatican Museums, Rome (London: Hamlyn, 1969), pp. 40–43. I am grateful to the Director of the Musei Vaticani, Dr Francesco Buranelli, and to Dr Guido Cornini of the Pinacoteca Vaticana for kindly enabling me to see the fresco in the Sala delle Nozze Aldobrandini, which is in process of reorganization. 31. C. A. Böttiger and H. Meyer, Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit (Dresden: Walther, 1810), pp. 183, 200–01. Meyer’s essay in this volume is also reprinted in Johann Heinrich Meyer, Kleine Schriften zur Kunst, ed. by Paul Weizsäcker (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1886), pp. 145–66. 32. On Heracles in the house of Admetus as the subject of the fresco see Ross Stuart Kilpatrick, ‘The Early Augustan Aldobrandini Wedding Fresco: A Quatercentenary Reappraisal (1601–2001)’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 47 (2002), 19–32. It is interesting to note that in 1807 Meyer himself produced a watercolour of Herkules im Trauerhause des Admet; see Zeichnungen von Johann Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hans Wahl, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 33 (Weimar: Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1918), p. 13 and plate 6. 33. Roger Ling and Lesley Ling, ‘Wall and Panel Painting’, in Making Classical Art: Process and Practice, ed. by Roger Ling (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), pp. 47–61 (p. 58). 34. Apart from the frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, with their striking Pompeian red, the Second Style includes the Odyssey Landscapes in the Musei Vaticani and the decorations of the villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, the villa at Oplontis that eventually belonged to Poppaea, wife of Nero, and the villa of Livia at Prima Porta. On complementarity in the colouring, see J. L. Benson, Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements: A Cosmological Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, 2000), [accessed 26 July 2008], pp. 93–94. 35. Mabel M. Gabriel, Masters of Campanian Painting (New York: Bittner, 1952), p. 52. (Gabriel’s attributions of paintings to different ‘masters’ have not been accepted.) 36. Heuzé, Pompéi, pp. 29, 111. 37. In 1820, reviewing a painting by L. S. Ruhl, Meyer stated that even the best Italian painters before Raphael had not yet learned ‘Mäßigung der Farben’: see FA 20: 532–34 and Fig. 8. For Goethe’s few remarks on colour in the Boisserée brothers’ paintings, see FA 20: 80–82, 86, 88. For their collection and its principal visitors, see Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, ‘Die Sammlung Boisserée in Heidelberg. Anspruch und Wirkung’, in Heidelberg im säkularen Umbruch. Traditionsbewußtsein und Kulturpolitik um 1800, ed. by Friedrich Strack (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), pp. 394–422. 38. Barasch, Light and Color, p. 106. See also Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. by Hugh Bredin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 25, 43–46; Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour’, p. 16; John Shearman, ‘Isochromatic Color Compositions in the Italian Renaissance’, in Color and Technique, ed. by Hall, p. 151. 39. Janis Bell, ‘Color and Chiaroscuro’, in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’, ed. by Marcia Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 85–113 (p. 87). See also Hall, ‘From Modeling

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Techniques’, pp. 13–16; Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour’, p. 39. Meyer wrote of the Tondo: ‘die Farben sind nicht harmonisch[,] von Widerscheinen ist keine Spur’ (‘Reiseaufzeichnungen aus Italien’, GSA 64/98). 40. See also Meyer, Kleine Schriften zur Kunst, ed. by Weizsäcker, p. 215. 41. ‘Reiseaufzeichnungen aus Italien’, GSA 64/89. The painting is in the Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. 42. Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel, 1999), p. 143. 43. Meyer, Kleine Schriften, p. 216. 44. ‘Reiseaufzeichnungen aus Italien’, GSA 64/89. 45. Hall, Color and Meaning, pp. 94, 101, 108; Hall, ‘From Modeling Techniques’, pp. 14, 17, 18, 21. 46. Bell, ‘Color and Chiaroscuro’, pp. 108, 92–93, 98, 102. See also the reappraisal of Raphael as a colourist in Janis Bell, ‘Re-visioning Raphael as a “Scientific Painter” ’, in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. by Claire Farago (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 90–111. 47. Hall, ‘From Modeling Techniques’, p. 18. See also Caron, ‘Choices Concerning Modes of Modeling’, p. 484. 48. Quoted by Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, p. 104. 49. Hall, ‘From Modeling Techniques’, p. 22. 50. Goethe regularly looked for allegorical or anecdotal meanings in paintings: see Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, pp. 30, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 336; Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 2000), p. 240. 51. ‘Gemälde und Antiken in den Palästen Roms’, GSA 64/94. The painting is in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome. 52. Dempsey, Annibale Carracci, pp. 21–24. 53. Joy Thornton, ‘Paolo Veronese and the Choice of Colors for a Painting’, in Nuovi studi su Paolo Veronese, ed. by Massimo Gemin (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1990), pp. 150–51, 153–54. 54. Ibid. pp. 158–59. 55. Nicholas Turner, Federico Barocci (Paris: Adam Biro, 2000), p. 65. 56. Gisela Maul and Margarete Oppel, Goethes Wohnhaus (Munich: Hanser, 1996), p. 112. For the portrait, painted in 1583, see Harald Olsen, Federico Barocci (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1962), p. 27 and cat no. 36. 57. ‘Gallerien zu Florenz’, GSA 64/91. 58. Hall, Color and Meaning, pp. 196–97; Charles Dempsey, ‘Federico Barocci and the Discovery of Pastel’, in Color and Technique, ed. by Hall, pp. 55–65 (p. 64); Turner, Federico Barocci, pp. 95, 121, 131. 59. Dempsey, ‘Barocci’, p. 62. 60. Hall, Color and Meaning, p. 195. 61. Michael Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo completo, trans. by Germano Mulazzani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 10; Dempsey, Annibale Carracci, pp. 9, 14, 21, 27–29. 62. Meyer discussed colouring in the Flemish and Dutch masters at FA 23/1: 771–72, and in the Bolognese school at FA 23/1: 770–71. 63. Meyer’s interest in Pietro seems not to have been remarked, except by Harnack, ‘Goethe und Heinrich Meyer’, p. 157 n. 1. For a catalogue of Pietro’s works, see Giuliano Briganti, Pietro da Cortona o della pittura barocca (Florence: Sansoni, 1962), pp. 153–272; for a more recent list, see Jörg Martin Merz, Pietro da Cortona. Der Aufstieg zum führenden Maler im barocken Rom (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1991), pp. 412–16. For colour illustrations of many of Pietro’s oil paintings, see Pietro da Cortona, 1597–1669, ed. by Anna Lo Bianco, exhib. cat., Palazzo Venezia, Rome, 1997–98 (Milan: Electa, 1997), pp. 293–387. For analyses, reproductions and details of paintings in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome, see Pietro da Cortona, il meccanismo della forma. Ricerche sulla tecnica pittorica, ed. by Sergio Guarino, exhib. cat., Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome, 1997–98 (Milan: Electa, 1997). 64. Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hecker, i, 321. 65. For Winckelmann’s opinion of Pietro, see Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften und

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Briefe, ed. by Wilhelm Senff (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1960), pp. 68, 140, 158, 173. For Mengs, see Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, p. 65. 66. For Cochin’s comments on Pietro’s work in the Palazzo Pitti, see Cochin, Le Voyage d’Italie, pp. 227–28. For Lanzi’s discussion of the Pitti frescoes, taken from his Storia pittorica della Italia... of 1809, see Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, from the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century, trans. by Thomas Roscoe, 6 vols (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1828), i, 335–38. For further eighteenth-century views of Pietro, see Carole Paul, ‘Pietro da Cortona and the Invention of the macchina’, Storia dell’arte, 89 (1997), 74–99 (pp. 74–78). 67. For Goethe’s appreciation of St Philip Neri, see FA 15/1: 349–52 and 495–508 (‘Philipp Neri, der humoristische Heilige’). Goethe refers to the Chiesa Nuova at FA 15/1: 497, 501, 507, and to a visit there to hear an oratorio at FA 15/2: 791. For Pietro’s links with Neri’s Oratorians, see Anna Lo Bianco, ‘Pietro da Cortona. Carriera e fortuna dell’artista’, in Pietro da Cortona, 1597–1669, ed. by Lo Bianco, pp. 21–23, 29–30, 32. 68. FA 15/2: 769 includes S. Bibiana, a church containing frescoes by Pietro, in a list Goethe made of Roman locations, but it is not clear whether he intended or made a visit there. On the visit to Florence, see Robert Steiger, Goethes Leben von Tag zu Tag. Eine dokumentarische Chronik, ii: 1776–1788 (Zurich: Artemis, 1983), pp. 665–66. 69. A drawing, presumably a copy, of St Margaret of Cortona, and an engraving of Aeneas’ Landing in Latium from the ceiling of the Palazzo Pamphilj in Rome still hang in Goethe’s house in Weimar, see Maul and Oppel, Goethes Wohnhaus, pp. 93–94. The engravings that Goethe owned included St Bibiana Refuses to Sacrifice to Idols from S. Bibiana, Rome, and The Triumph of Religion and Spirituality from one of the long sides of the Barberini ceiling (with the figure of Lasciviousness to the left, and Silenus to the right): see Christian Schuchardt, Goethe’s Kunstsammlungen ( Jena: Frommann, 1848–49, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1976), part 1, pp. xv, 13, 234. 70. Letter of 8 January 1996, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hecker, i, 175. See also i, 88–89 (on a painting presumed to be by Pietro, seen by Meyer in Leipzig in May 1794), 159–60, 321–22, 353; ii, 539. 71. In ‘Reiseaufzeichnungen aus Italien’ (GSA 64/89), Meyer made notes on the following works of Pietro, all in Rome: Adoration of the Shepherds (S. Salvatore in Lauro); Ananias Restores St Paul’s Sight (S. Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini); The Madonna Adoring the Child and The Victory of Alexander over Darius (both in the Pinacoteca Capitolina). In ‘Kirchen in Rom’ (GSA 64/92), he noted Pietro’s work in the following churches: S. Bibiana, S. Carlo ai Catinari, S. Lorenzo in Miranda, S. Ivo alla Sapienza, S. Maria della Concezione, S. Maria in Valicella, S. Nicola da Tolentino, S. Pietro (Cappella del Sacramento). In ‘Gemälde und Antiken in den Palästen Roms’ (GSA 64/94), he described the ceiling fresco in the Gran Salone of the Barberini Palace and noticed, among other paintings, The Rape of the Sabine Women, The Guardian Angel, and Aurora, which he took, probably rightly, to be a Venus: his view is supported by Erich Schleier, ‘Pietro da Cortona e la nascita del Barocco a Roma’, in Pietro da Cortona, 1597–1669, ed. by Lo Bianco, p. 46. In ‘Gallerien zu Florenz’ (GSA 64/91) Meyer made notes on the ceiling frescoes of the Planetary Rooms in the Pitti Palace and, brief ly, on the Sala della Stufa. 72. Goethe, ‘Tag- und Jahres-Hefte 1820’, FA 17: 315. See also Meyer to Goethe, 29 July 1820, Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hecker, ii, 539. 73. FA 19: 28–29; Meyer, Geschichte der Kunst, pp. 8, 276–78. Geschichte der Kunst was prepared for publication by Meyer with help from Goethe (see FA 20: 908) but did not go to press in Meyer’s lifetime. 74. John Gage, ‘Color in Western Art: An Issue?’, The Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), 518–41 (p. 528), says that this essay ‘appears to be the first historical outline of color in painting’. 75. In Geschichte der Kunst, ed. by Holzhauer and Schlichting, p. 276, Meyer stated that Pietro gave his paintings ‘den Reiz harmonisch abwechselnder und mit Kunst über das Ganze ausgeteilter Farben’. 76. The only works of Pietro that Meyer mentioned by name in this essay were the Barberini ceiling and Ananias Restores St Paul’s Sight (FA 23/1: 774). In Geschichte der Kunst, Meyer ranked the Barberini ceiling first among Pietro’s works, followed by the Chiesa Nuova frescoes, the St Bibiana series, and the ceilings in the Palazzo Pitti (276).

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77. Cf. Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, p. 389. 78. Meyer’s notes on the Barberini ceiling are taken from the bundle ‘Gemälde und Antiken in den Palästen Roms’. For colour reproductions of the Barberini ceiling, see Giuseppina Magnanimi, Palazzo Barberini (Rome: Editalia, 1983), plates III–IX. The recent small guidebook, Anna Lo Bianco, Pietro da Cortona’s Ceiling (Rome: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini, 2004), also contains many colour illustrations. 79. [Pietro] ‘hat ihr weißes Untergewand beschattet wo der Purpur Mantel auf dasselbe stößt, und an andern Stellen demselben Gelb entgegen gesetzt.’ 80. Meyer’s detailed notes on the frescoes come from the bundle ‘Gallerien zu Florenz’ (GSA 64/91), which contains twenty-five pages of manuscript material on Pietro’s work at the Pitti. For colour reproductions of some of the frescoes, see Palazzo Pitti. L’arte e la storia, ed. by Marco Chiarini (Florence: Nardini, 2000–03), pp. 105–21. See also Malcolm Campbell, Pietro da Cortona at the Pitti Palace: A Study of the Planetary Rooms and Related Projects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), which contains black and white illustrations of the lunettes in the Sala d’Apollo (Figs. 66–69). 81. The letter to Goethe of 20 August 1796, in Briefwechsel Goethes mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hecker, i, 321–22, stated that Pietro did excellent work in one room at the Pitti Palace, then in another went ‘ganz aus der Bahn und scheint bloß einem dunkeln Gefühl von Farbenspiel nach zu gehen’. Compare also Meyer’s letter to Goethe of 12 December 1795 (Briefwechsel, i, 159–60), likewise describing Pietro’s colouring as variable in quality. 82. Letter to Goethe of 20 August 1796, in Briefwechsel Goethes mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hecker, i, 321–22. Meyer’s notes show that he knew the Apollo Room frescoes had been completed by Pietro’s pupil Ciro Ferri. On the lunettes and the part played by Ferri, who was ‘closely supervised by Cortona’, see Campbell, Pietro da Cortona at the Pitti Palace, pp. 113–20. 83. For the restoration of the Barberini ceiling in 1981, see Bruno Zanardi, ‘Il restauro e le tecniche di esecuzione originali’, in Il voltone di Pietro da Cortona in Palazzo Barberini, Quaderni di Palazzo Venezia, 2 (1983), 11–52. Work seems to have been done at the Pitti Palace on frescoes by Pietro in 1804–05 and in the 1990s: see Chiarini, Palazzo Pitti, pp. 113, 194. 84. On Pietro as draughtsman, see Campbell, Pietro da Cortona at the Pitti Palace, p. 7; Maurice Poirier, ‘Pietro da Cortona e il dibattito disegno-colore’, Prospettiva, 16 (1979), 23–30 (p. 28). On his copy of the Aldobrandini Wedding and his use of motifs from it in his own work, see Giulia Fusconi, La Fortuna delle ‘Nozze Aldobrandini’. Dall’Esquilino alla Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1994), p. 41; Lorenza Mochi Onori, ‘Pietro da Cortona per i Barberini’, in Pietro da Cortona, 1597–1669, ed. by Lo Bianco, p. 74; Merz, Pietro da Cortona, pp. 109, 133. 85. For the copy of Galatea, see Briganti, Pietro da Cortona, pp. 137, 155–59, 341. For seven copies from Correggio and three from Veronese in the inventory of Pietro’s effects at his death (but not necessarily all by his own hand) see Merz, Pietro da Cortona, p. 194. For the inf luence of Veronese’s Triumph of Venice in the Palazzo Ducale on the Barberini ceiling, see Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600 to 1750, 5th edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 252; and for that of his Villa Maser frescoes on the Planetary Rooms at the Pitti Palace, see Campbell, Pietro da Cortona at the Pitti Palace, p. 66. Pietro also left eight copies of works by Titian, and greatly admired Bacchus and Ariadne and its companion pieces (Merz, Pietro da Cortona, pp. 193–94). 86. Pietro is generally thought to have adopted a lighter and more colourful palette around 1630, and because of this has sometimes been reckoned as part of a neo-Venetian movement in Roman painting; see Merz, Pietro da Cortona, pp. 193–95. The distinction between plain and f lorid colours (‘austeri aut f loridi’) is Pliny’s, see Natural History, XXXV, 30. For the colours used in the Barberini ceiling, see Zanardi, ‘Il restauro’, p. 29; and compare those found during the recent restoration of the Assumption of the Virgin (begun in 1655) in S. Maria in Vallicella: see Rita Bassotti, ‘Osservazioni sulle tecniche esecutive’, appendix to Paolo Montorsi, ‘Barocco romano. Il restauro dell’Assunzione e Gloria della Vergine di Pietro da Cortona in Santa Maria in Vallicella’, Bollettino d’Arte, 64 (1990), 105–06 (p. 106). 87. Bell, ‘Color and Chiaroscuro’, pp. 92–94. 88. Lanzi, in The History of Painting in Italy, already commented: ‘he avoids strong shadows, is fond

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of middle tints, prefers the less brilliant grounds, colours without affectation’ (pp. 337–38). 89. ‘Sono incredibili i cangiantismi e i trapassi di colore dall’azzuro al rosa al violetto, dal verde acqua al giallo nella veste della figura a sinistra dello stemma’: Lorenza Mochi Onori, ‘La piccola galleria e il grande salone di Pietro da Cortona in Palazzo Barberini. Alcuni risultati dei restauri’, in Pietro da Cortona. Atti del convegno internazionale Roma-Firenze 12–15 novembre 1997, ed. by Christoph Luitpold Frommel and Sebastian Schütze (Milan: Electa, 1998), p. 49. 90. Easily visible at eye-level is, for example, the half-reclining female figure at the left of The Age of Silver in the Sala della Stufa at the Pitti Palace; the red of her cloak is ref lected on to the white of her dress. 91. This effect is discussed by Briganti, Pietro da Cortona, p. 97; Montorsi, ‘Barocco romano’, pp. 100–02, and Bassotti in Montorsi, ‘Barocco romano’, p. 106; Onori, ‘La piccola galleria’, pp. 48–49. Zanardi, ‘Il restauro’, pp. 22–23, 25–26 provides clear illustrations of puntinato. 92. For Pietro’s involvement with the tapestry works, see Magnanimi, Palazzo Barberini, pp. 155–84 and plate 16; Pascal-François Bertrand, Les Tapisseries des Barberini et la décoration d’intérieur dans la Rome baroque (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 112–18 and figs. 32–39. 93. On a ‘harsh’ or ‘stiff ’ manner of colouring in Bolognese classicism, often blamed on the inf luence of Raphael, see Bell, ‘Re-visioning Raphael’, pp. 95–96. 94. See for example The Sacrifice of Pomona at Castelfusano, illustrated in Tullia Carratù and Michela Ulivi, Itinerari cortoneschi a Roma (Milan: Electa, 1997), p. 67. 95. Winckelmann saw this as a weakness of draughtsmanship rather than a successful compositional device, describing Pietro’s figures as often seeming to have been designed as clothes-horses: ‘eine Figur scheint öfters nur zum Tragen gemacht zu sein’, see Kleine Schriften, p. 140. Interestingly, a neoclassical copy of the ceiling by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon makes the draperies seem less voluminous: see Sylvain Laveissière, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, exhib. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1998 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1998), p. 61. 96. Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Hecker, i, 160. 97. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. by Emily McVarish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 138–68. 98. Winckelmann, Schriften und Nachlaß, iv/1, 248–49; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902–), v, 224–25. Schiller’s comment was reported by Tieck, see Das alte Dresden. Bilder und Dokumente aus zwei Jahrhunderten, ed. by Erich Haenel and Eugen Kalkschmidt, 3rd edn (Leipzig: Schmidt & Günther, 1941), p. 233. 99. Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, pp. 16, 22, 25, 38, 44, 69, 71–73, 83–84. 100. See in particular the Seventh Elegy, FA 1: 409. FA 23/1: 196 has ‘Alles Lebendige strebt zur Farbe, zum Besondern, zur Spezifikation, zum Effekt, zur Undurchsichtigkeit bis ins Unendlichfeine. Alles Abgelebte zieht sich nach dem Weißen, zur Abstraktion, zur Allgemeinheit, zur Verklärung, zur Durchsichtigkeit.’ 101. For Goethe’s experience of colour in Italy, see Jacques Le Rider, Les Couleurs et les Mots (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 97–100. 102. On Meyer’s commendation of the Aldobrandini Wedding to Goethe, see Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, pp. 144–46. 103. According to Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, p. 49, Aloys Hirt had argued in 1802 that the Greeks used blue and green. 104. Wölff lin, Renaissance and Baroque, pp. 29–35. Other writers who in various contexts note a con­ nection between disegno and colourfulness include Thompson, The Practice of Tempera Painting, p. 5; Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour’, pp. 38–39; Caron, ‘Choices Concerning Modes of Model­ ing’, p. 479; Barasch, Light and Color, p. 103. 105. On this aspect of Veronese, see E. v. d. Bercken, ‘Über einige Grundprobleme der Geschichte des Kolorismus in der Malerei’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, N.F., 5 (1928), 311–26 (pp. 315–16). 106. Janis Bell, ‘Bellori’s Analysis of Colore in Domenichino’s Last Communion of St. Jerome’, in Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome, ed. by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 260, 270, 273, 263.

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107. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 67–74; Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 128–33. 108. For similar statements about the nature of art, see FA 15/1: 424; 18: 227, 491; 20: 86, 533. 109. For a discussion of the relationship of Goethe’s classical aesthetic to the experimental use of colour by Thomas Jones and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, see Werner Busch, ‘Die “große, simple Linie” und die “allgemeine Harmonie” der Farben. Zum Konf likt zwischen Goethes Kunstbegriff, seiner Naturerfahrung und seiner künstlerischen Praxis auf der italienischen Reise’, Goethe-Jahrbuch, 105 (1988), 144–64. 110. For Pietro’s inf luence on Tiepolo, see Onori, ‘La piccola galleria’, p. 49. Meyer’s comment on Tiepolo in Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert was dismissive: FA 19: 71. For Goethe’s ignorance of southern German baroque fresco painting, see Helmut Börsch-Supan, ‘Goethes Kenntnis von der Kunst der Goethezeit’, in Goethe und die Kunst, ed. by Sabine Schulze (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1994), pp. 269–77 (p. 272). 111. For the dating of Meyer’s conclusion to his essay, see Goethe’s diary entries for 23 and 24 January, and 14, 21, 25 and 26 March 1809 in Goethes Werke (Sophienausgabe), part 3, vol. 4 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1891), pp. 6, 16, 18–19. 112. For Schick, see Gottlieb Schick. Ein Maler des Klassizismus, ed. by Ulrike Gauß and Christian von Holst, exhib. cat. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1976 (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1976); Clemens Menze, ‘Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in Rom. Anreger, Auftraggeber, Berichterstatter’, in Schwäbischer Klassizismus zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit, 1770–1830. Aufsätze, ed. by Christian von Holst (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1993), pp. 71–87; Gudrun Körner, ‘Gottlieb Schick: Apoll unter den Hirten’, in Schwäbischer Klassizismus, ed. by von Holst, pp. 311–19. Noahs Dankopfer and Apoll unter den Hirten are in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. 113. For a similar contemporary view on Nazarene colour, see Michael Thimann, ‘Kinder Apolls, Söhne Mariens. Positionen deutscher Malerei zwischen Klassik und Romantik’, in Klassik und Romantik (Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland, Band 6), ed. by Andreas Beyer (Munich: Prestel, 2006), pp. 351–71 (p. 366).

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Chapter 6

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Classical Colour Harmony Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on Jacques Louis David and his Pupil Gottlieb Schick, an ‘emporstrebenden jungen Maler’ in Rome

The Historische Teil of Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, published in 1810, contained two essays by Heinrich Meyer, including ‘Geschichte des Kolorits seit Wiederherstellung der Kunst’, a piece that is probably ‘the first historical outline of color in painting’.1 Drawing on extensive first-hand knowledge of western European art gained from collections in Germany, and galleries, churches, and palaces in Italy, Meyer compressed the history of colour from the thirteenth century to his own time into fewer than twenty pages of text (761–79).2 But so far from allowing his material to collapse into a mere catalogue, he achieved the notable feat of structuring it in a distinctive — and distinctively Goethean — fashion, by subdividing Kolorit into two aspects: Kolorit in the strict sense (‘im strengen und eingeschränkten Sinne’), and Harmonie der Farbe (766). By Kolorit in the strict sense he meant colouring in imitation of nature: ‘die treue Darstellung der Natur’ (766). The objects to be imitated were landscape features, fabrics, minerals and metals, and especially human f lesh. This was a branch of art in which the Venetians excelled, Titian being ‘vielleicht in diesem Stück für vollkommen und unübertreff lich zu halten’ (766). Rubens, van Dyck and Rembrandt likewise belonged to the first order of Koloristen (771). Few of Meyer’s contemporaries would have quarrelled with this part of his argument, but many must have been surprised by his relegation of Kolorit itself to a subordinate position within the art of colouring. For Kolorit, he wrote, ‘bedeutet nur die künstliche Mischung [der Farben] und die treue Darstellung der Natur’ (766, my italics). Thus the more important of the two aspects of colouring was Harmonie der Farbe. In so saying, Meyer adopted Goethe’s view, which he expressed in so many words in ‘Diderots Versuch über die Malerei’, where harmony is ‘der wichtigste Teil des Kolorits’ (18: 590), and which inspired his colour research as a whole. Meyer’s pioneering essay was thus an attempt not merely to assess the old masters’ achievements in colour, but to chart the development of two sorts of excellence, in imitation of nature on the one hand, and colour harmony on the other. Strangely enough, including the question of harmony under the broad general heading of colour in painting was already a departure from normal eighteenth-

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century practice. In the prevailing tradition of chiaroscuro painting that had originated with Leonardo da Vinci, colour harmony was regarded merely as an aspect of chiaroscuro. For light and shade were seen as the means by which colours might be brought into a harmonious relationship.3 Bright light or deep shadow might assimilate disparate hues to one another, or else the suggestion of a colour, most often a golden yellow, in the light itself might tinge all the objectcolours equally and thus overcome any dissonance between them. But Goethe, who believed that colour harmony rested on its own laws — laws that he himself had discovered — argued for its independence of chiaroscuro, and in his essay on Diderot criticized many painters’ habit of ‘harmonizing’ colours by bleaching, greying, blackening or yellowing them (18: 595–96). As he explained fully in Zur Farbenlehre, he wanted painters to achieve a harmony of all the colours of the circle, by arranging them according to their natural affinities and complementary contrasts (257–62, 275–76). Though Goethe implied that his concept of harmony was compatible with Kolorit as imitation of nature (18: 589), many of his and Meyer’s judgments suggest otherwise. While their chosen masters of Kolorit such as Titian belong to the chiaroscuro tradition of painting in oils, they appear to have found most of their representatives of colour harmony elsewhere, among artists who used the ‘blond’ palette of clear object-colours characteristic of fresco. Evidently searching for an exemplar of harmony worthy to stand alongside the eighteenth-century triumvirate of Raphael for line, Correggio for chiaroscuro, and Titian for natural colour, Meyer lighted in his essay on the unlikely — because by then deeply unfashionable — figure of the great Roman Baroque painter Pietro Berrettini da Cortona, creator of the sumptuous ceiling fresco in the Gran Salone of the Barberini Palace. Whenever he wanted, Meyer claimed, Pietro could produce ‘ein fröhliches mannigfaltiges Farbenspiel’; but he also knew how to moderate and tone down his colour: ‘das Ganze gehörig zu mäßigen, niederzuhalten und gleichsam [...] herabzustimmen’. Whatever the mood, he always combined colours that accorded well together, without any hint of harshness: ‘Immer sind indessen verwandte, befreundete Farben, die sich wechselseitig heben, nebeneinander gesetzt und widerwärtige Kontraste finden sich niemals in seinen Werken’ (773–75).4 Having made the figure of Pietro, who died in 1669, into the climax of his essay, Meyer rapidly characterized the ensuing period of almost one hundred and fifty years as one of decline in colour harmony. His final paragraph, bringing the account up to date, was however so compressed that it has sometimes been misread. It begins with a subordinate clause dismissing Boucher’s saccharine eroticism and Greuze’s sentimentality, before passing on to J.-L. David, who had survived his involvement in the Revolution to become the most prominent painter in the service of Napoleon. Meyer praised David for banishing rococo taste through the greater seriousness of his subject matter, and the nobler figures he used to embody it. As to colouring, David favoured contrasts of very strong hues: ‘Gegensätze der gewaltigsten Farben’. And David’s taste, which apparently had no use for what Meyer called ‘stille Übereinstimmung fröhlicher, verwandter und zum Teil gemäßigter Farben’, had become dominant in France and among the better painters

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in Italy, as well as finding followers even in Germany. Yet Meyer suggested that work recently done in Rome ‘durch einen emporstrebenden jungen Maler’ might lead to a change of course. This young man’s growing reputation was likely to bring him imitators, who might revert to a mode of painting that did not try to assail the emotions through strong colour contrasts: ‘durch Gegensätze gewaltsam zu rühren’, but sought instead to enhance beauty of form by subtlety of colouring. Then, it might be hoped, artists would soon feel the need for colour harmony, and strive to achieve it (779). With these last few sentences, Meyer set his readers more than one puzzle. Though the phrase about contrasts says what David did as a colourist, Meyer otherwise defined David’s colour negatively, by mentioning the kind of harmony he did not aim for. And by way of a clue to what this might look like in contemporary terms, Meyer offered only the reference to the painter working in Rome. So the conclusion to the essay raises more problems than it solves. It comments so brief ly on David as to leave some uncertainty about Goethe’s and Meyer’s view of him and his school. And because Meyer has entangled David with another — unnamed — artist, that uncertainty cannot be fully dispelled without identification of this unknown. Meyer’s words on David have generally been understood as approbatory. Hermann Mildenberger, taking his title, ‘Die neue Energie unter David’, from a list of headings made by Goethe for an essay to be published in Die Propyläen, explored the relationship between German painters, particularly J. H. W. Tischbein, and their French counterparts in the Rome of the 1780s. Mildenberger noted that comments on David’s colouring published by Tischbein in 1786 resembled remarks on the same subject in the essay on colour in Zur Farbenlehre. Though Mildenberger quoted the essay on David’s preference for strong colour contrasts over gentle harmonies, he did not pursue the implications of the comment, or discuss the young painter in Rome, thus leaving the impression that Goethe, to whom he attributed the essay, approved of David’s approach to colour.5 Andreas Beyer, writing on cultural politics in Weimar around 1800, argued that Goethe was strongly inf luenced in his judgments of art and architecture by developments in France. He had come to know contemporary French painting, especially that of David, during his time in Rome, and ‘must’ have been impressed by David’s representations of classical moral heroism. In the essay in Zur Farbenlehre, Beyer alleged, Goethe noted that David’s serious subject matter called not only for nobler figures, but for strong colour contrasts instead of gentle harmonies, which were not compatible with ‘dem avancierten Kunstgeschmack’. This comment, also made without any reference to the young painter in Rome, suggests that Beyer associated gentle colour harmonies not so much with him as with the outdated Rococo painters dismissed by Meyer at the start of the paragraph.6 In his more recent introductory essay to the Klassik und Romantik volume of the new eight-part Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland, Beyer noted that David’s Jacobinism had alienated Goethe, but still insisted that the French painter’s ‘koloristische Eigentümlichkeiten’ remained ‘von bleibender Vorbildhaftigkeit’ for him.7 Meyer’s few words on David in the essay on colouring hardly seem to support this interpretation: ‘Gegensätze der gewaltigsten Farben’ are unlikely to have appealed to someone who admired Pietro da Cortona for

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avoiding ‘widerwärtige Kontraste’. But a proper understanding of Meyer’s position presupposes some knowledge of David’s use of colour, of Goethe’s and Meyer’s acquaintance with his painting, and of their other responses to his work. David’s entries for the Prix de Rome in the early 1770s were elaborate, theatrical paintings in the French rococo manner, with luxurious object colours much modified by overarching patterns of light and shade. Once in Rome he encountered Caravaggio’s darker palette and Poussin’s more measured, sculptural compositions. Under these inf luences, he moved towards the style, exemplified in The Oath of the Horatii, for which he became famous.8 Whereas chiaroscuro painters allowed figures and surroundings to merge into a visual unity, David separated his figures from their surroundings, giving them a statuesque independence. As a contemporary critic commented, ‘it is by the opposition of objects one to another that he seeks to produce an effect rather than by what painters call the magic of chiaroscuro’.9 To emphasize this opposition, he employed contrasting, clearly circumscribed surfaces of bold object colour. The effect, in The Oath, matched the austerity of the composition and its high moral tone. As Rosenblum writes, ‘Fully rejecting the pastel softness and warmth of the eighteenth century, these primary hues, tinged with a metallic chill, have an astringent quality that supports the expression of moral alertness rather than sensual relaxation.’10 David thus reinforced the ‘opposition of objects’ in his painting by the strong colour contrasts that Meyer evidently regarded as his most salient characteristic. Meyer’s first-hand knowledge of David’s work dated from the summer of 1785, when he saw The Oath of the Horatii on exhibition at David’s studio in Rome.11 The painting aroused so much interest that, as Meyer noted later, French art immediately became fashionable in Italy. Bénigne Gagneraux was already making his name, and now David’s favourite pupil J.-G. Drouais as well as various other students at the French Academy in Rome such as J. B. F. Desmarais, Louis Gauffier and J. P. Saint-Ours became well known through exhibits at the annual summer show of the Academy as well as through commissions for paintings and decorations in Roman palaces.12 Meyer, who apart from one extended trip to Naples in 1788–89 was in Rome from June 1784 to April 1790, had the opportunity to see many of their paintings.13 Goethe, who arrived in Rome after David himself had left, visited the French Academy’s summer exhibition in August 1787, and included in his correspondence at the time a brief commendation of Desmarais’s Death of Pindar in the Arms of Theoxenus (15/1: 415). The only piece from David’s school that Goethe knew at first hand seems to have been Drouais’s Philoctetes at Lemnos, which he saw in the artist’s studio in February 1788, after his early death. Goethe described the Philoctetes as: ‘Ein schön gedachtes Bild, das in der Ausführung viel Verdienste hat, aber nicht fertig geworden’ (15/1: 556).14 In 1795–97, during his second visit to Italy, Meyer was again able to see work by French artists, including those forced by anti-revolutionary unrest to f lee from Rome to Florence. Letters he sent to Goethe reveal misgivings about the course they were taking. The French, Meyer wrote, ‘werden in der Kunst eher zurück als vorwärts gehen, ihr eher schaden als nutzen, und dieses aus Ursache nicht ihrer Unfähigkeit [...] sondern weil sie auf falschem Wege sind’.15 He repeated this negative judgment

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three months later, this time adding an anecdote that gave a clue to the thinking behind it. Meyer had made a copy of Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola, which hung in the Pitti Palace, and had received praise for it from various well-known French painters. He was however disconcerted to find that they valued in it something that he himself considered a fault: ‘Zufällig und gegen meine Absicht waren bey dem f leißigen Ausarbeiten die Farben etwas zu stark geworden, und dieses war es, was bewundert wurde und mich bald zum berühmten Manne gemacht hätte.’ Here is a suggestion that Meyer’s reservations about French neoclassical painting mainly concerned its palette. Meyer clearly felt that strong colour did not suit ‘das Zärtliche, Herzliche, die schöne Menschlichkeit’ of Raphael’s subject matter in the particular painting he had copied.16 But his dismissive tone suggests that he disliked strong colour in general, and the French aesthetic that relied on it. If Meyer believed that French artists were going backwards rather than forwards, this was perhaps because he saw them as turning from traditional chiaroscuro towards the clearly delineated object colour characteristic of painting before Leonardo, rather than progressing towards the ideal of colour harmony that Goethe himself was working out. When Meyer met with Goethe in Switzerland on his return from Italy, they began planning one of the projects that was to occupy them during the next few years, the journal Die Propyläen. Conceived as a means of propagating their classical aesthetic based on Greek and Roman models, this ranged over contemporary cultural developments, including recent events in France such as Napoleon’s seizure of Italian masterpieces for his new gallery at the Louvre. For news of French art and artists, Goethe and Meyer now turned not only to art journalism but to private communications from Wilhelm von Humboldt and his wife Caroline, who had moved to Paris late in 1797 and were to spend most of their time there until the summer of 1801.17 In August 1798 Goethe completed work on the ‘Einleitung’ for Die Propyläen, where he ref lected on uneducated public taste that could leave the art of whole nations ‘auf dem Rückwege’ without their even knowing it (18: 467). This has been taken to refer to France, which, given the verbal echo of Meyer’s letter from Florence, seems highly likely.18 The projected article ‘Über römisches Künstlerleben’ which included the heading ‘Die neue Energie unter David’ (18: 487) was to have considered David’s innovations and his effect on the French Academy, but only as one part of a broad general survey of Roman artistic life also discussing Batoni and Mengs and the English and German communities of painters. Given Meyer’s and Goethe’s reservations about recent French art and artists, it seems likely that the article would have approved David’s rejection of rococo style and artistic techniques, but not his colour. When in 1799 Goethe enquired of Humboldt, whose wife’s salon David attended, whether the artist might be persuaded to take on a commission, the task envisaged was that of illustrating an edition of Homer in F. A. Wolf ’s translation, and did not, therefore, involve colour (31: 680–81). In 1800 Die Propyläen published Caroline von Humboldt’s review of The Intervention of the Sabine Women, with an introduction by Meyer commenting on David’s preference for ‘historisch-pathetische Gegenstände’ over ‘stille, innige, welche das Gemüth sanft bewegen’. ‘Seine Farbe ist kräftig’, Meyer wrote in his usual vein, ‘mit starken Gegensätzen von Licht und Schatten.’19

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While still in Paris, Humboldt sent Goethe a sketch by Friedrich Tieck after P.-N. Guérin’s painting The Return of Marcus Sextus, exhibited in 1799.20 The Guérin thus became one of very few copies of French neoclassical works in Goethe’s huge collection of drawings and engravings. Though he eventually owned hundreds of reproductions of French paintings, including for example twenty-two engravings after Poussin and thirty-eight after Claude Lorrain, Femmel’s catalogue lists practically nothing of David or his pupils: one sketch, probably not by David’s own hand, of a variant version of The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons; another drawing probably from his school; and two copies each after Gérard, A.-L. Girodet-Trioson, and J.-B. Isabey.21 This relative lack of enthusiasm for David and his followers also speaks through the fullest statement that Meyer made about them, in his ‘Entwurf einer Kunstgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts’, published by Goethe in 1805 as part of Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert (19: 17–175). Here Meyer, drawing on his own experience of French art in Rome, described the sensation made in 1785 by David’s Oath of the Horatii, not least because of its ‘äußerst kräftigen Kolorit und hochschimmernden Farben in Gewändern und Waffen’ (19: 123). The Roman public had also acclaimed Drouais’s Marius at Minturnae, a painting that made an even greater effect ‘durch Farbenglanz und Schimmer und heftige Gegensätze von Licht und Schatten’ (19: 124). Other contemporary French artists handled colour in a similar fashion. ‘Brillante Farben durch kräftige Schattenpartien gehoben’ characterized the work of Gagneraux (19: 122), Desmarais’s Pindar was ‘ein sehr kräftig gemaltes Bild’, and St. Ours’s paintings were likewise ‘sehr kräftig ausgeführt’ (19: 125). But the new French artists showed little talent for ‘schöne zarte Gestalten’ unsuited to the ‘grellen Kontrast von übertriebenen Licht- und Schatten-Partien’ that most painters of the school had borrowed from Guercino and Valentin de Boulogne (19: 124). Meyer’s repeated use of the terms kräftig, heftig, and grell suggests an unease that sheds light on his distinction, in the essay on colour in Zur Farbenlehre, between the strong colour contrasts liked by the French neoclassicists and the ‘stille Übereinstimmung’ of colours for which they had no time. So far from preferring David’s strong contrasts to ‘stille Übereinstimmung’, Meyer was actually making clear to all who really understood his and Goethe’s stance on colour the deep reservations he had about David. For ‘stille Übereinstimmung fröhlicher, verwandter und zum Teil gemäßigter Farben’ is in fact a good description of Goethe’s and Meyer’s own fresco ideal of harmony. Meyer used the same vocabulary in connection with Pietro da Cortona (773–75), and with the ancient Roman and Campanian paintings that he admired: the Aldobrandini Wedding was characterized by a ‘fröhlichen und doch sanften Farbenspiel’ (592); and a fresco from Herculaneum combined violet with green and brown, ‘in schöner Mäßigung und Übereinstimmung’ (22: 378).22 To reject this ideal of moderation in favour of strong contrasts of saturated hues was to fail in one of the principal tasks of painting: Meyer’s remark about David’s colouring was not an endorsement, but a criticism. Thus the young painter in Rome mentioned in the essay emerges unequivocally as a positive counter-example to David in the field of colour. But Meyer did not name him, and appears never to have referred to him again. Editors of Zur

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Farbenlehre have not hazarded any guesses as to who he might be. However, the timing of Meyer’s comment provides an initial clue. Goethe’s Tagebuch records discussions with Meyer about the conclusion to the essay in late January and late March 1809.23 So the young painter must have been someone who achieved fame in Rome shortly before this date. One possibility might be David’s most famous pupil, J. A. D. Ingres, who had exhibited both his portraits of the Rivière family and the strikingly archaizing Napoleon on the Imperial Throne at the Salon of 1806, and had gone to Rome as a student of the Academy in the same year. However, his Valpinçon Bather and Oedipus and the Sphinx did not please the Academicians in Paris, he failed to make a real name for himself until the 1820s, and there is no suggestion that Goethe or Meyer had heard of him by the beginning of 1809.24 In fact by far the best candidate for Meyer’s young painter in Rome is not a Frenchman, nor yet an Italian (for Italians were no longer setting the standard in Rome after the death of Pompeo Batoni),25 but a German, Gottlieb Schick from Stuttgart, who was thirty-two in early 1809.26 In 1787 Schick had entered the Hohe Karlsschule where he studied painting under P. F. Hetsch, who had been a pupil of Joseph Vien and later also of David. After Hetsch left for Rome in 1795, Schick took modelling lessons from J. H. Dannecker, who was a personal friend of Schiller and made one of the most famous portrait busts of him. Dannecker strongly inf luenced Schick’s work, as well as winning his lasting affection, ref lected in the engaging portrait of Dannecker painted by Schick in 1798.27 In the autumn of that year Schick went to Paris to continue his training, as was the custom for art students in Württemberg. There he joined the atelier of David, who by this time was working on The Intervention of the Sabine Women and followed it in 1800 by his first version of Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Schick also saw and sketched The Oath of the Horatii, and made an outline drawing after Drouais’s Marius at Minturnae.28 However, his own Eva, exhibited at the Salon of 1800, showed the inf luence of Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche rather than that of David.29 During his time in Paris, Schick frequented the house of Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt, who valued him not only as an artist but as a friend. In the autumn of 1802, after spending a few months in Stuttgart during which he painted memorable portraits of Dannecker’s wife, Heinricke, and of Wil­ helmine von Cotta, Schick journeyed to Rome, where he remained until 1811. When Wilhelm von Humboldt arrived in Rome shortly afterwards, as Prussian representative and later envoy to the Holy See, Schick was able to resume his friendship with the Humboldt family, and meet with the many nobles, writers and artists who frequented their salon.30 Commissions from the Humboldts led to the portraits of Caroline and her children, painted from 1803 to 1805, that helped to make Schick’s reputation in Rome. He also produced several ambitious narrative pictures, beginning in 1803 with David spielt vor Saul. In 1805 he completed Noahs Dankopfer, which drew large crowds when it was exhibited in the Pantheon. His next major project was Apoll unter den Hirten, based on the episode of Apollo’s sojourn as a herdsman in the service of Admetus, king of Thessaly.31 The painting was already arousing interest among Schick’s fellow artists as it neared completion in the summer of 1808 and, when he showed it (together with two Humboldt

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portraits and several other pieces) at the Rondanini Palace in November, so many people visited the exhibition that it remained open for two months instead of the two weeks originally envisaged. Schick was thus a highly prominent figure in the Roman art world just at the time when Meyer completed his essay for Zur Farbenlehre. But this historical coincidence does not of itself suffice to prove that Meyer’s young painter was Schick. A clear convergence of Schick’s artistic aims and accomplishments with the programme of the Weimarer Kunstfreunde would strengthen the case, and such a convergence did in fact occur when Schick exchanged Paris for Rome. By temperament he had probably been unsuited to David’s austerely heroic ‘ancient Roman’ manner, tending while in Paris rather towards the so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘Greek’ style best exemplified by some of Schick’s fellow pupils.32 Once in Rome he departed even more decisively from the David of The Oath of the Horatii. Schick’s David spielt vor Saul marked a break with France because of its very subject matter: biblical themes had fallen out of favour, and had not been set for the Prix de Rome since the beginning of the Revolution.33 Similarly Noahs Dankopfer took its inspiration from ‘Raphael’s Bible’, the sequence of mainly Old Testament ceiling frescoes in the Vatican Logge. Humboldt’s ideas gave Schick further encouragement to distance himself from French taste. For during his Roman years Humboldt, who was a political opponent of Napoleonic France, developed a cultural critique that opposed Greeks to Romans as soul to body, while identifying Germany as heir to Greece, and France as heir to Rome. German art was to continue the Greek tradition of personal development on republican foundations.34 The similarity of Humboldt’s thought to Schiller’s idea of aesthetic education is clear. In David spielt vor Saul, a painting in which art becomes its own subject matter, Schick associated himself for the first time with their programme: the young David fearlessly plays his harp before the irate king, whose spear hand appears to be stayed by the assuaging power of music.35 However, it was Apoll unter den Hirten that, by common consent of recent critics, exemplified the formative power of art more clearly than any other German work of its time.36 This ambitious canvas, with no fewer than eighteen principal figures, represents Apollo, his right hand resting on his lyre, performing to a rustic audience of shepherds and shepherdesses, young and old, gathered around him in rapt attention, as Admetus the king joins them, pointing a small boy with a set of Pan pipes in the direction of the divine mentor. If Schick’s high concept of the function of art could expect to meet with approval in Weimar, so too could his approach to colour in painting. A criticism he made in 1807 of painters who tried to stun (‘betäuben’) their viewers ‘durch blendende grelle Farben’ could have come from the pen of Meyer.37 Schick himself took a different path. While the Cotta portrait, done in Stuttgart in 1802, had something of a French feel with its hard, clear colour, the large narrative paintings done in Rome departed from this aesthetic. The background of David spielt vor Saul is a screen of pale stone-coloured Doric columns, beyond which is visible a light blue sky with white cloud, and a landscape of dusty green hills under a low horizon. In the foreground David stands on the right opposite a seated Saul, who has Jonathan on his left and three courtiers around them. David, Saul and two of the courtiers

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have some unsaturated red in their draperies, otherwise the clothing, furniture, and hangings are mainly neutral with only a hint of blue, green or violet in their greys or browns.38 Schick explained to Dannecker, who had probably expressed some reservations about the colouring, that while in Rome he had been impressed by the ‘Leichtigkeit und Klarheit im Ton der Fresco-Malereien’, which made oils seem heavy and dark. He had wanted to give his painting something of the tone of fresco, but had made the foreground figures in particular too pallid: ‘zu matt’. In future he would attempt to give his work in oils ‘den Local-Ton eines Frescobildes’, while still using the oil techniques that made for richness of colour.39 Noahs Dankopfer seems to have been executed in accordance with this pro­ gramme. The scene of Noah and his family sacrificing to a God who appears to them on high with his angel host is set against a light landscape background. The draperies of both heavenly and earthly figures show a greater variety of colours than in the David: blues and yellows feature alongside the reds that dominated the earlier work.40 And Schick increased his use of cangiante colouring, a fresco technique that he may have learned from Raphael’s Old Testament scenes in the Logge. In this type of modelling, relief is suggested not by the addition of white to a saturated hue, but by shifting to a different hue of intrinsically higher value: thus a piece of drapery might be red in the darks, lighter and less saturated red in the mid-tones, and yellow in the lights.41 In David spielt vor Saul, David’s violet-grey tunic rises to a subtle pinkish colour in the lights on the folds, and Jonathan’s dull green rises to pale yellow. In Noahs Dankopfer, the cangianti are more pronounced. As was often the case in Renaissance frescoes, angels are given hue-shifted draperies, with blues rising to yellow or pink, and orange to light blue. God the Father has a red tunic with yellow lights, and a blue cloak with green lights. But mortal figures are also given similarly striking raiment, for Noah’s orange tunic shifts to yellow, as does the red cloak of his son in the foreground. In Apoll unter den Hirten, Schick again set his scene against a landscape background with white cloud in a blue sky and patches of sunlight picking out f locks of sheep in the middle distance.42 The principal figures in the foreground, composed into overlapping triangular groups to either side of a centre occupied only by an infant seated on the ground, make an impression of lightness and harmony. Apollo is naked save for his laurel wreath and sandals, and the goatskin over his shoulder. Two young boys are also naked and several other figures only partially draped, so that light, carefully graded f lesh tones predominate. Drapery colours at the centre of the group are chief ly muted pinks, beiges, and browns, with stronger but still relatively unsaturated colour appearing to the left and right. Again Schick has used the device of hue-shifting to model his draperies, and ensure that no large areas of f lat colour obtrude themselves unpleasantly on the eye. The old man standing behind Apollo wears a brown cloak that rises through subtle orange to yellow with even a suggestion of pink on one shoulder. The girl seated next to the god has a skirt that is deep pink in shadow and pale pink in the light, but has a touch of greyblue in the mid-tones. Elsewhere, green is modelled up to yellow, and red up to yellowish red. In this painting, Schick has done as he said in his letter to Dannecker, and used the glazing techniques of the oil-painter to try to create depth of colour

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while at the same time achieving something of the lightness and freshness typical of the fresco medium.43 Schick’s aims and achievements were such as to commend him to Meyer as he completed his essay on colour in painting. But Meyer and Goethe were in Weimar, and Schick in Rome, so it remains to be seen whether they could have known enough about him for Meyer to pin on him his hopes for a revival of colour harmony. Neither Goethe nor Meyer is generally assumed ever to have met Schick, but Goethe did in fact have the opportunity to do so. He spent a week from 29 August to 7 September 1797 in Stuttgart, paying daily visits to Dannecker, whose teaching methods inspired his short note ‘Vorteile, die ein junger Maler haben könnte, der sich zuerst bei einem Bildhauer in die Lehre gäbe’ (18: 435–36). At this time Dannecker had taken over from Hetsch as tutor to Schick, so it may well have been Schick whose somewhat unusual position as a painter in a sculptor’s studio prompted the thoughts that Goethe expressed in this note. Goethe certainly knew of Schick by 1802, when he enquired on behalf of Karl August about the cost of a three-figure portrait.44 Nothing came of this possible commission, but early in 1803 Goethe’s interest in Schick was still sufficient for him to ask Caroline von Humboldt to enquire ‘nach einem Stuttgarder [...] der sich auszeichnen muß, dessen Namen ich aber vergessen habe’ (32: 319).45 In reply Caroline described Schick as ‘noch sehr jung’, and devoted to his art: ‘er glüht in sich vor inniger Liebe zur Kunst’. His only failing, she felt, was the perfectionism that prevented him from producing as much as he otherwise might.46 On 25 February 1804, Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote to Goethe confirming Schick’s importance: ‘Thorwaldsen als Bildhauer, Schick als Geschichtsmaler und Reinhard als Landschaftsmaler bleiben hier unstreitig die ersten unter den Nordländern.’47 In October 1808, after Schick’s Apoll had already become known in artistic circles, but before it went on public display, Humboldt left Rome for Germany where in the next few months he paid several visits to Weimar, sometimes staying with Goethe. Wilhelm’s letters to Caroline suggest that he and Goethe discussed painters in Rome: for instance he reported Goethe as saying that ‘die Deutschen im Auslande in einem größeren lustre sind als in Deutschland selbst’.48 By early in 1809 Goethe and Meyer therefore undoubtedly knew, through correspondence and by word of mouth, of the high reputation acquired by Schick. But Meyer cited his young painter in Rome as an example of excellence in colouring, so the question remains as to how Meyer could have known enough about this crucial aspect of Schick’s work to be sure of his ground. Colour is after all an elusive and often neglected aspect of painting, and one about which Wilhelm von Humboldt especially, with his overriding interest in the intellectual qualities of art, would have had relatively little to say.49 However, two other German connoisseurs published on Schick before Meyer completed his essay, and in a periodical produced under Goethe’s own supervision. When Goethe learned that the prestigious Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung was about to desert Jena for Halle, he arranged for it to be replaced as an organ for the local university by the Jenaische Allgemeine LiteraturZeitung, which began publication in early 1804 together with an Intelligenzblatt including news of recent work in the visual arts. Goethe took a keen interest in the

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new journal during its early years, often altering and improving submitted work, while Meyer was one of the principal contributors, publishing around a hundred pieces from 1804 to 1808.50 One of the articles that passed through Goethe’s hands into the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung during this period was A. W. Schlegel’s ‘Artistische und literarische Nachrichten aus Rom. Im Frühjahr 1805. An Hn. Geh. Rath von Goethe’, which appeared in the Intelligenzblatt in October of that year.51 In February of 1809, just as Meyer was completing his essay for Zur Farbenlehre, the Intelligenzblatt included a lengthy anonymous review, almost certainly by E. Z. Platner, of Schick’s exhibition at the Rondanini Palace.52 Schlegel had spent some months in Rome in 1805 and had become friendly with Schick; Platner is said to have lodged in the same house with him from 1807. Both Schlegel and Platner were sensitive to colour values in painting, and discussed Schick’s colouring in their articles for the Jena journal. What they said was such as to commend Schick to Meyer. Schlegel’s subject was Noahs Dankopfer, in which he registered the inf luence on Schick of Raphael’s biblical scenes and the cangiante colours used in them. Schlegel thought of cangianti as a means by which a painter might avoid using obtrusive masses of primary colour: Raphael’s ‘Annahme schillernder Stoffe’ had relieved him of the need ‘durch starre Massen der Hauptfarben das Auge störend auf einzelne Theile zu ziehen’. Hueshifting broke up solid colour planes, creating subtler colour relationships between the different parts of a painting. Accordingly, Schlegel found Schick’s colour strong and cheerful, but at the same time harmonious: ‘sein Kolorit blendet nicht durch starken Auftrag und blendende Gegensätze, sondern es ist zwar heiter und kräftig, aber in sanfter Harmonie’. The comment about dazzling contrasts, avoided by Schick, recalls the Gegensätze that Meyer so disliked in David, while heiter was one of the epithets that Goethe and Meyer constantly used to describe their ideal of colour harmony. Platner praised Apoll unter den Hirten for its general colourfulness: Schick, he found, had avoided dark shadows and preserved the natural hues even of distant objects. As to draperies, Platner also noted Schick’s cangiante colours and defended them against those contemporary critics who dismissed them as unnatural.53 The absence of exact precedents in textile manufacture was not relevant to painting, Platner argued, because the laws of nature allowed of different colours in shadows and lights, as seen in iridescent bird feathers and insect wings. Moreover cangianti had been used in the best periods of art beginning with the ancient Greeks, as Winckelmann had noted. In a later article for the Deutsches Museum published after Meyer wrote his essay, Platner supplied Schick’s own reasons for using cangianti, reasons that recalled what Schlegel had written earlier. Schick found this type of colouring ‘die schönste und am meisten idealische’; it created ‘mannigfaltiges Farbenspiel’; and it avoided the use of ‘blos eintönigen Localfarben’, which left ‘dunkle Flecken’ and thus destroyed the harmony of a painting.54 With the Schlegel and Platner reviews for the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung to hand, Meyer was certainly well enough informed about Schick’s colouring to think of him as the potential inaugurator of a new era in the history of colour harmony. Meyer no doubt withheld the name of his young painter in Rome because he could

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not speak of him from personal knowledge; but he must have expected his informed readers to lift the veil of anonymity with ease, such was Schick’s fame in Italy and Germany after the Rondanini Palace exhibition. Through his endorsement of Schick, Meyer unequivocally positioned himself among the various contemporary approaches to colour in art. He rejected the chiaroscuro painting which merged individual objects into patterns of light and shade. He equally rejected its opposite, the neoclassicism of Schick’s teacher, David, which gave objects clear contours, and distinctive, often strongly contrasting, colours that coincided with those contours. But he also rejected the later neoclassicism of artists such as A. J. Carstens and John Flaxman who used little or no colour in their work. What Meyer wanted, in accordance with Goethe’s ideas in Zur Farbenlehre, was a colourful form of painting, but one in which the primary and secondary hues were so positioned and so finely adjusted to one another as to work together in a perfect ‘Harmoniespiel der Farben’. For Goethe and Meyer this was a truly classical ideal since they found it exemplified in ancient wall paintings and in the work of Raphael. In espousing it they were not however merely looking backwards, because their championship of colour against chiaroscuro as well as achromatism helped to suggest new directions for nineteenthand twentieth-century painting. Sadly, Schick was not to fulfil the hopes that they placed in him in 1809. His health was already poor; in 1811 he fell seriously ill, and by May 1812 he was dead. Goethe and Meyer never discovered a new German champion for their ideal of harmony, and were left lamenting that the Romantic painters’ colours were as harsh as their ideology was uncongenial (20: 122–23). Notes to Chapter 6 1. This article first appeared in Oxford German Studies, 39 (2010), 16–29. See John Gage, ‘Color in Western Art: An Issue?’, The Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), 518–41 (p. 528). 2. References to Goethe’s works are to volume and page number in the Frankfurt edition (= FA): Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 40 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–). References in the text to Zur Farbenlehre, in volume 23/1 of this edition, are given by page number only. Where possible, references to Heinrich Meyer’s essays are also to the Frankfurt edition of Goethe’s works, which includes many of them. 3. See for example Birgit Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung und Farbenlehre in der deutschen Malerei um 1800 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1982), pp. 27–28, 31; Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Le Voyage d’Italie (1758), ed. by Christian Michel (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1991), p. 33; Carl Ludwig Fernow, ‘Über den Begriff des Kolorits’, in Fernow, Römische Studien, 3 vols (Zürich: Gessner, 1806–09), ii, 171–252, pp. 201, 224, 227, 229, 250. 4. For a detailed discussion of Goethe’s idea of colour harmony, the fresco palette, and Pietro da Cortona, see above, Chapter 5. 5. Hermann Mildenberger, ‘Die neue Energie unter David’, in Goethe und die Kunst, ed. by Sabine Schulze, exhib. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt a. M. and Kunstsammlungen, Weimar, 1994 (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1994), pp. 280–91 (pp. 289–90). 6. Andreas Beyer, ‘ “Die Kunst ist deshalb da, daß man sie sehe, nicht davon spreche, als höchstens in ihrer Gegenwart” ’, in Wiederholte Spiegelungen. Weimarer Klassik, 1759–1832. Ständige Ausstellung des Goethe-Nationalmuseums, ed. by Gerhard Schuster and Caroline Gille (Munich: Hanser, 1999), pp. 405–12 (p. 408). Beyer suggests that Goethe saw work by David in Rome, but this was not the case. 7. Andreas Beyer, ‘Klassik und Romantik. Zwei Enden einer Epoche’, in Klassik und Romantik, ed. by Andreas Beyer, Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland, 8 vols (Munich: Prestel and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006–09), vi (2006), 9–37 (p. 26).

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8. On David’s early manner and his development in Rome, see Edgar Peters Bowron, ‘Painters and Painting in Settecento Rome’, in Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Peters Bowron and Joseph J. Rishel (London: Merrell, 2000), pp. 295–459 (pp. 357–61); Simon Lee, David (London: Phaidon, 1999), pp. 42–43. 9. Lettre d’un amateur de Paris à un amateur de province sur le Salon de peinture de l’année 1787 (Paris, 1787), cited by Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 240. 10. Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 72. 11. Gerhard Femmel, Goethes Grafiksammlung. Die Franzosen. Katalog und Zeugnisse (Leipzig: Seemann, 1980), p. 214. 12. On Drouais and Gagneraux, see Peters Bowron, pp. 362–63, 365–67; French Painting, 1774–1830: The Age of Revolution, exhib. cat., Grand Palais, Paris 1974–75; The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1975; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975 (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts/Wayne State University Press, 1975), pp. 400–03, 422–25. 13. On the dates of Meyer’s visit to Italy, see Jochen Klauss, Der ‘Kunschtmeyer’. Johann Heinrich Meyer. Freund und Orakel Goethes (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2001), pp. 301–02. 14. Goethe’s only other brief comment on the state of French art in Rome at the time of his first Italian journey (Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt, FA 15/1: 419) was formulated many years later, and relied on Meyer’s ‘Entwurf einer Kunstgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts’ (FA 19: 122–25); see Femmel, p. 214. 15. Meyer to Goethe, 18 September 1796, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Max Hecker, 4 vols, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 32, 34, 35 and 35/2 (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1917–1932), i (1917), 344. 16. Meyer to Goethe, 21 December 1796, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 404. 17. On the Humboldts in Paris, see Wolfgang von Löhneysen, ‘Goethe und die französische Kunst’, in Goethe et l’esprit français, Actes du Colloque International de Strasbourg 23–27 Avril 1957, Publi­ cations de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg, 137 (Paris: Société d’Éditions — Les Belles Lettres, 1958), pp. 237–89 (pp. 266–72); Clemens Menze, ‘Wilhelm und Caroline von Hum­boldt in Rom. Anreger, Auftraggeber, Berichterstatter’, in Schwäbischer Klassizismus zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit, 1770–1830. Aufsätze, ed. by Christian von Holst (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stutt­g art, 1993), pp. 71–87 (pp. 72–73). 18. See Reinhold H. Grimm, ‘Die Weimarer Preisaufgaben für bildende Künstler im europäischen Kontext’, in Die schöne Verwirrung der Phantasie. Antike Mythologie in Literatur und Kunst um 1800, ed. by Dieter Burdorf and Wolfgang Schweickard (Tübingen: Francke, 1998), pp. 207–34 (p. 210). 19. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift, ed. by Wolfgang von Löhneysen (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1965), pp. 829–30. 20. Femmel, pp. 95–96 and Fig. K 30 (1). 21. Femmel, pp. 152–67 (Poussin), 72–89 (Claude), 55–56 (David), 89 (Gérard), 92–93 (Girodet), 97–98 (Isabey). See also Grimm, pp. 214–16. 22. Meyer’s letter to Goethe of 5 April 1789, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 32–33, notes that Campanian painters avoided strong contrasts of saturated colour, preferring ‘die heiteren, schwachen Tinten’. 23. See Goethe’s Tagebuch entries for 23 and 24 January, and 14, 21, 25 and 26 March 1809 in Goethes Werke (Sophienausgabe), section III: Tagebücher, 15 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), iv (1891), 6, 16, 18–19. 24. On the Salon of 1806 and Ingres’s early years in Rome, see Andrew Carrington Shelton, Ingres (London: Phaidon, 2008), pp. 34–56. 25. Matthew Craske, Art in Europe, 1700–1830: A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 251. 26. On the details of Schick’s life, see especially Karl Simon, Gottlieb Schick. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Malerei um 1800 (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1914), and Gauß and von Holst (ed.), Gottlieb Schick. Ein Maler des Klassizismus (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1976). 27. Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 10, 21, 54. On Schiller and Dannecker, see Christian von Holst, ‘Einführung’, in Schwäbischer Klassizismus zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit,

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1770–1830. Katalog, ed. by Christian von Holst, exhib. cat., Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1993 (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1993), pp. 13–79 (p. 35). 28. Simon, pp. 21, 25; 220 (text of the letter of 25 June 1799 from Schick to Moses Benedikt containing the sketch of The Oath). 29. Wolfgang Becker, Paris und die deutsche Malerei, 1750–1840 (Munich: Prestel, 1971), p. 53; Schwäbischer Klassizismus. Katalog, ed. by von Holst, p. 300. 30. On the Humboldts in Rome, see Ursula Peters, ‘Das Ideal der Gemeinschaft’, in Künstlerleben in Rom. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844). Der dänische Bildhauer und seine deutschen Freunde, ed. by Gerhard Bott and Heinz Spielmann, exhib. cat., Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 1992 (Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 1991), pp. 157–87 (pp. 161–63); Clemens Menze, ‘Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in Rom’; Ernst Osterkamp, ‘Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt und die deutschen Künstler in Rom’, in Zeichnen in Rom, 1790– 1830, ed. by Margret Stuffmann and Werner Busch (Cologne: König, 2001), pp. 247–74. 31. All three paintings are in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. I am grateful to Dr Christofer Conrad of the Staatsgalerie for showing me paintings by Schick which were in store during the refurbishment of the gallery. 32. Simon, pp. 32, 39; Becker, p. 53. 33. Simon, p. 56. 34. Osterkamp, pp. 250–53. 35. Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, p. 84; Schwäbischer Klassizismus. Katalog, ed. by von Holst, p. 324. 36. Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 140–43; Osterkamp, pp. 263–66; Frank Büttner, ‘Bildungsideen und bildende Kunst in Deutschland um 1800’, in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert — Teil II: Bildungsgüter und Bildungswissen, ed. by Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), pp. 259–84 (p. 278); Herbert Eichhorn, ‘ “Gestärkt am reinen Atem des Homer ...”: Die Themen der Historienmalerei des Schwäbischen Klassizismus’, in Schwäbischer Klassizismus. Aufsätze, ed. by von Holst, pp. 195–207 (p. 206); Gudrun Körner, ‘Gottlieb Schick. Apoll unter den Hirten’, pp. 318–19. 37. Schick to Karl Friedrich Emich Freiherr v. Uexküll-Gyllenband, 31 March 1807, see Christian von Holst, Dante Vergil Geryon. Der 17. Höllengesang der Göttlichen Komödie in der bildenden Kunst, exhib. cat. (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1980), p. 132. 38. See Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, p. 87; Schwäbischer Klassizismus. Katalog, ed. by von Holst, pp. 324–25. Each of these volumes contains a colour reproduction of the painting. 39. Schick to Dannecker, 7 April 1804, see Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, p. 85. 40. See Schwäbischer Klassizismus. Katalog, ed. by von Holst, pp. 332–33 (colour reproduction). 41. Marcia B. Hall, ‘From Modeling Techniques to Color Modes’, in Hall, Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting: Italy and the North (Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1987), pp. 1–29 (p. 15); Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1992), p. 95; Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 80–82. 42. For a colour reproduction of the painting, see Schwäbischer Klassizismus. Katalog, ed. by von Holst, p. 359. 43. On Schick’s glazes, see Simon, pp. 139–40; Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, p. 12. 44. Simon, p. 48. 45. In the note to this passage (FA 32: 839), the Stuttgart painter is identified as Hetsch. 46. Caroline von Humboldt to Goethe, 20 April 1803, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Wilhelm und Alexander von Humboldt, ed. by Ludwig Geiger (Berlin: Bondy, 1909), p. 167. See also Simon, pp. 53–54; Osterkamp, p. 256. 47. Goethes Briefwechsel mit Wilhelm und Alexander von Humboldt, p. 174. See also Simon, p. 54; Osterkamp, p. 258. 48. Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, ed. by Anna von Sydow, 7 vols (Berlin: Mittler, 1907–1916), iii (1909), 22, 41–42. 49. Osterkamp, pp. 248–49. 50. Karl Bulling, Die Rezensenten der Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literaturzeitung im ersten Jahrzehnt ihres Bestehens, 1804–1813 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1962), pp. 10, 12, 17–18, 21, 25, 33, 40, 340, 402–03;

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Goethes Briefe an Eichstädt, ed. by Woldemar von Biedermann (Berlin: Hempel, 1872), pp. viii–xx. 51. Intelligenzblatt der Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, nos 120 and 121, 23 and 28 October 1805, cols 1001–1024. The passage on Schick is reprinted in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 178–79. 52. Intelligenzblatt der Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, nos 9 and 10, 1 and 4 February 1809, cols 65–76. Parts of this review and of Platner’s obituary article in Friedrich Schlegel’s Deutsches Museum are reprinted in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 190–93, 201–11. 53. See for example the anonymous review of Noahs Dankopfer in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 176 (24 July 1807), reprinted in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 183–84. 54. E. Z. Platner, ‘Über Schicks Lauf bahn und Charakter als Künstler’, in Deutsches Museum, 4 (1813), 56–57; reprinted in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, p. 208.

C\ Taylor & Francis ~Taylor & Francis Group http://tayl ora ndfra nci s.com

Chapter 7

v

‘Mannigfaltigkeit des Farbenspiels’: Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on Harmony through Colour Variation When Goethe published Zur Farbenlehre in 1810, he appended a ‘Konfession des Verfassers’ in which he explained that he had begun to experiment with colour because he wanted to discover rules for harmony in painting (970–74).1 In the course of twenty years, he ranged so widely over the physiology, physics, and chemistry of colour, and became so preoccupied with Newton and the whole history of colour theory, that his vast treatise finally included only one short section — ‘Sinnlichsittliche Wirkung der Farbe’ — specifically devoted to colour in art. This section contains Goethe’s two principal rules of harmony: complementarity and totality. His prismatic and physiological experiments had enabled him to construct a wheel of six colours, arranged in three pairs of after-image complementaries, that is, yellow and violet; blue and orange; magenta (Goethe’s Purpur) and green (258). Complementary pairs were harmonious, Goethe argued, because the eye confronted with one of the pair automatically generated the other, in the form of an after-image, in order to escape from domination by the first (259). But this physiological response showed Goethe that we desire not merely the completeness represented by pairing any colour with its complement, but the totality of all the colours together. True harmony in painting could be achieved, he claimed, ‘nur alsdann, wenn alle Farben neben einander im Gleichgewicht angebracht sind’ (275). Goethe’s two rules seem to point forward to a mode of colour harmony that was not actually practised in painting for another three quarters of a century, when van Gogh, for example, consciously abandoned naturalistic colouring in order to exploit the vividness of complementary contrasts.2 Goethe himself was not insensible to the beauty of abstract colour relationships: he found the colour wheel aesthetically pleasing in itself (259). But his thoughts on colour theory did not lead him beyond the conventions of contemporary art. On the contrary, he wished to suggest that his idea of harmony could enable painters to improve the kind of work that they were already doing. So he needed to carry on his discussion within the framework of representational art, and especially its most prestigious genre, historical (including biblical, mythological, and allegorical) painting, which, with its arrays of figures whose drapery colours obeyed no constraints other than the artist’s will, offered

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the greatest scope for feats of harmonization. Goethe had definite ideas of how the history painter should proceed, but never expounded them exhaustively in any one place. So it is helpful to look brief ly at the most characteristic solutions to the problem of colour harmony attempted by western artists in the modern period, in order to provide a context for his thoughts. The different historical approaches to harmony are all traceable to the preoccu­ pation of western painting with the representation of relief, that is, with modelling. The highest aspiration of the painter, working on a f lat surface, was to make his figures appear as rounded as those of the sculptor. This effect depends not on differences of hue but on differences of value or tone, that is, lightness or darkness, and may therefore be obtained without using hue at all.3 The visible portion of an object may be divided into three parts, with one part light, the second intermediate, and the third dark, as when an artist draws on grey paper which provides the mid-tone, and uses white chalk for the lights, and black ink for the darks. In such a composition, the lights appear to advance and the darks to recede, giving the impression of solid form in space. Since all hues have an intrinsic value — yellow is the lightest, violet the darkest — they can be successfully used instead of black, white and grey in order to create relief, with the lighter hues representing advancing, and the darker hues receding planes. In Western art since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance two main traditions have evolved, one exploiting the full range of pure hues in modelling, the other relying for the most part on tonal gradations among more neutral shades. The two traditions have been variously described and named: they correspond to Heinrich Wölff lin’s linear and painterly styles, Arthur Pope’s mode of relief and Venetian mode, and Moshe Barasch’s functional and expressive approaches to light and colour. For simplicity’s sake, they may be called hue-painting and tonal painting.4 Hue-painting in its pure form, where all the modelling is done in colour without black for shadows, was practised by Giotto and his followers, and described by Cennino Cennini in Il libro dell’arte. Here the painter so far ignores the behaviour of light and colour in nature as to put saturated colour in the darks, and model it up with a quantity of white for the mid-tones, and up again with a further quantity of white for the lights: thus only pure hues and their various tints appear, and the whole picture surface looks colourful. As the use of up-modelling by Gothic painters like Lorenzo di Credi and Fra Angelico suggests, bright colour was itself an aesthetic ideal throughout the Middle Ages, and while artists evolved different schemes for alternating and repeating the various hues across the picture plane, no importance seems to have been attached to contriving subtle similarities between them: on the contrary, Alberti in the mid-fifteenth century expressly liked to see groups of figures dressed in clearly contrasted local colours: one in pure green, the next in pure red, one in pure blue, and so on.5 By the end of the fifteenth century, however, this kind of colouring had begun to seem crude: indeed more appropriate to playing-cards than to painting.6 While continuing to use distinct local colours, artists tried to approach them more closely to one another, by using pigments of similar value and saturation, blending them, and juxtaposing like with like. Strong opposition gave way to milder contrast as

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the basis of a new harmony that soon came to be known as unione. Examples of this new approach to drapery colours may be seen in some of Raphael’s figures in The School of Athens, or Michelangelo’s later work on the Sistine ceiling.7 One possible means of reducing contrast and creating unione was the use of cangiante colouring, a device familiar from the earliest days of up-modelling. Whereas a red drapery would normally be up-modelled by the addition of white and more white to produce less saturated and lighter reds, it is possible to model not by saturation change but by hue change, that is by moving, for example, from red for the darks to orange for the mid-tones and yellow for the lights. The shift from one colour in the darks to others that are intrinsically lighter creates relief in the same way as the addition of white.8 Cangianti diversify the colourfulness of a painting, and often added new and striking contrasts to Gothic altarpieces; but if used in more subtle gradations they can differentiate the local colours of objects, prevent them from leaping obtrusively from the picture plane, and greatly enhance the effect of unione, as in the works of Raphael and Michelangelo already mentioned. Vasari in his ground-breaking chapter on colour harmony recommends cangianti, as does the later theorist Armenini: ‘perciochè con essi più facilmente si accordano più panni insieme.’9 Up-modelled paintings in the unione manner are inevitably less colourful than those of the Gothic era, but being equally free of black or dark admixtures they are still very rich in hue, with the local colours of objects appearing distinctly illuminated as if by the clear light of day. Pure hue-painting was often modified in the fifteenth century by putting the saturated colour in the mid-tones, and modelling it down with black for the darks as well as up with white for the lights. By exploiting the full value range from white to black, up-down modelling enhances the appearance of relief, and has generally been applied to each of the figures in a painting individually, as if it were a piece of sculpture, rather than to groups of figures, so that each one displays its local colour in the mid-tones and the composition as a whole remains relatively colourful despite black or dark admixtures. Where the scene is set in extreme lighting conditions, as under a single light source in a dark room, there will be strong contrast between the differently illuminated planes, but outdoor scenes in diffuse light involve less contrast and therefore lend themselves to an aesthetic of unione like that obtained in up-modelling, with relatively low-value lights and highvalue darks, and the local colours in the mid-tones approximated to one another in saturation and lightness, and sometimes broken by small admixtures of one another to create gentle transitions between them. Here again, cangianti colours can assist the creation of harmony by breaking down what might otherwise be over-obtrusive masses of single hues. So Raphael used cangianti when modelling both up and down, as in the Saint Cecilia, as well as when modelling up.10 While Raphael’s up-down modelling in the unione style remained colourful to the eye, some of his followers who used the technique in later centuries handled colour more cautiously. By the time that Goethe and Meyer were writing, they also had before them those seventeenth-century Italian and French painters and theorists, including Nicolas Poussin and his partisans in the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, who modelled themselves on Raphael as mediated by Annibale

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Carracci. Academic theory required that artists should imitate an idealized nature rather than the empirical world in all its imperfection. Form, light, and colour were to be treated analytically, with each figure separately visible, rather than synthetically, with figures merging to form a general optical impression. Drapery colours could be lightened with white and darkened with black to create the relief that remained a principal objective of painting, but were always to stay the same in the sense of being merely a lighter or darker red or blue: they were not to be changed to different hues by accidental effects of light.11 As Raphael had sought to bring harmony into his drapery colours by approaching them to one another and juxtaposing those of similar value, so French academic painters aimed to avoid strong contrasts and link their colours together. Sometimes they went further than ever Raphael had done in the direction of desaturation: the critic Félibien noted that Charles Le Brun in his celebrated rendering of Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre had sought to harmonize his colours by dulling and weakening them through breaking and mixing.12 So attempts at harmony in the up-down manner sometimes involved the diminution of local colour, though not usually its complete elimination. It was left to the alternative tradition of tonal painting to undermine the local colour that sustains hue-painting. Tonal painting, which relies on differences of value not of hue, had its origins in Leonardo’s attempt to achieve consistency in the rendering of relief. Cennini’s system and its up-down variant modelled draperies in random hues of different intrinsic values, so that a red mantle would appear to have a different degree of relief from a blue dress worn by the same figure. Leonardo overcame the problem by observing the behaviour of light and colour in nature. He placed his saturated pigments in the lights, and consistently modelled them down with black for the mid-tones and still more black for the darks, so that despite differences in intrinsic value, each seemed to recede to the same extent under the same lighting conditions. Leonardo’s technique lends itself to dramatic compositions in which small areas of brightly lit colour contrast strongly with great patches of encircling darkness, a device employed in many works of the painters commonly called tenebrists. But down-modelling need not involve abrupt shifts from light to darkness. Leonardo himself created relief by minute gradations of tone from the brightest to the darkest parts of objects. And in this gradual merging of colour values — Leonardo’s sfumato effect — early tonal painting had its own equivalent of the harmonization or unione attempted in the other modelling methods. But now distinctions of hue disappeared into an atmospheric haze, as if a veil had been drawn over them; while at the same time forms seemed partially to merge with their background. So this Leonardesque form of unione was far removed from the lively colourfulness of up-modelled Gothic painting. Leonardo, who dismissed Gothic bellezza di colore as an effect of raw pigments rather than artistic skill, subordinated colour to tone while deepening tone in general: in fact his work has often been described as dark and uncolourful.13 Tonal painting after Leonardo continued the erosion of local colour. Leonardo was a Florentine and an incomparable draughtsman; one of his principal aims was to create relief in his paintings. But many of the Venetian artists who admired him

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concerned themselves less with the delineation of form than with the evocation of light made possible by Leonardo’s consistent treatment of colour values. Instead of beginning with a drawing, then laying down a monochrome underpainting, as Leonardo had done, Titian created his pictures in paint on the canvas, eventually in his later work suggesting form by free strokes of the brush, or even splotches or f lecks of paint that cohere only at the appropriate viewing distance. In this way he produced works in which, as form dissolves, so also do local colours, until they create a single impression of subtly coloured light: in The Flaying of Marsyas the dappled light is pinkish-blue and grey; in the late Pietà of 1576 it is silvery-bronze.14 So the tradition evolved towards yet another kind of harmony, that of a unified overall tonality in which individual local colours were so far submerged that they became practically indistinguishable. Just as harmony in hue-painting had relied heavily on the device of hue-shifting, so tonal painting now accomplished the subdivision and reconciliation of colours largely by means of ref lected light. Leonardo knew that light itself is coloured, and that it not only imparts its own colour to objects, but ref lects off them, sometimes transferring the colour of one to another. And he saw that this transmission of colour between objects could contribute to harmony in painting. But he also realized that because multiple ref lections lighten shadows, they lessen the effect of relief, and because they distort the natural colours of objects, they interfere with the imitation of nature. So he did not use ref lected light in his paintings as much as might have been expected.15 This did not however prevent Venetian painters from copying the ref lections visible in the natural world or even greatly exaggerating them for aesthetic effect. Harmonizing touches of one colour on the surface of another were defended, if necessary, and with or without scientific justification, as effects of ref lected light.16 By the end of the sixteenth century what might once have been understood as cangianti were being ‘naturalized’ as riflessi, as in the critic Bocchi’s interpretation of Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna del Sacco.17 In the next century, Rubens’s colour effects depended to a considerable extent on the exaggeration of natural ref lections, and his partisans in the French Academy defended his practice as a means to the harmonious overall tonality that they regarded as the essence of colorisme. Eighteenth-century French rococo theory required more respect for the behaviour of light in nature, but still continued to emphasize the importance of ref lections as a means to harmony in painting.18 Diderot for his part mused on the way in which ref lected light could draw together and unify the divers colours of all the objects in the scene before him as he sat at his desk.19 And the submergence of local colour in the overall tonality created by ref lections still remained an inf luential model of colour harmony for western European painters when Goethe’s visit to Italy caused him to begin his own enquiries into the subject. Those enquiries brought him back again and again to the question of how the six colours of the wheel ought to be disposed in a picture in order to create harmony. But despite all the thought he gave to the subject, he never reviewed the theoretical literature or offered a systematic critique of received opinion as he did for the science of light. However, he did know Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura, which Meyer ranked among the very few worthwhile discussions of art, alongside

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the work of Winckelmann and of Raphael Mengs, who had indeed made a far more extensive and insightful contribution to the question of colouring than any other eighteenth-century writer.20 Both Leonardo and Mengs went further in the direction of colourfulness in their theory than in their practice, and the thread that links together Goethe’s many scattered observations on harmony is his conviction that it should be created from colour not tone. He evidently considered himself, with some justification, as an isolated representative of this point of view, knew his enemies, and occasionally took them on with something of the gusto that inspired his polemics against Newton. Diderot’s Essais sur la peinture offered Goethe a handy target, with their support for the principles of harmonization adopted by the majority of French seventeenthand eighteenth-century artists. Where strong colours threatened to clash, they could be reconciled, according to Diderot, by imitation of the mitigating effects observable in nature, where the action of light and shade blended contrasting hues together: ‘l’air et la lumière’ could act as ‘harmonistes universels’.21 So far as Goethe was concerned, this approach amounted to the destruction rather than the harmonization of colour: ‘das Dämpfen, das Mischen, das Töten der Farben’. It was a travesty of colour harmony, not the real thing: ‘der Schein von Harmonie die sich in ein Nichts auf löst, anstatt das Ganze zu umfassen’ (FA 18: 603). Only ignorance of complementarity, ‘den Grund der Farbenharmonie’, had, Goethe claimed, lent such credibility to light and shade as harmonizers: Da man auf den Grund der Farbenharmonie nicht gelangen konnte und doch harmonische und disharmonische Farben eingestehen mußte, zugleich aber bemerkte daß stärkeres oder schwächeres Licht den Farben etwas zu geben oder zu nehmen und dadurch eine gewisse Vermittlung zu machen schien, da man bemerkte daß die Luft, indem sie die Körper umgibt, gewisse mildernde und sogar harmonische Veränderungen hervorbringt, so sah man beide als die allgemeinen Harmonisten an, man vermischte das von dem Kolorit kaum getrennte Helldunkel, auf eine unzulässige Weise, wieder mit demselben, [...] nur um einer Erklärung über die Harmonie der Farben auszuweichen (FA 18: 595).

The claim here, that the question of light and shade had been disentangled from that of harmony only to be confused with it once more, suggests that Goethe, with considerable sensitivity to historical developments of which he was himself an initiator, clearly understood the later part of the eighteenth century as a time of conf lict between tonalism and the theory of complementaries. He likewise understood the part played in that conf lict by Mengs. If, as Goethe suggested, Diderot had wilfully ignored a distinction between tonalism and true colour harmony that had recently been drawn, Mengs was the only person who could be said to have drawn it by 1766, when Diderot wrote his Essais sur la peinture. Mengs’s Gedanken über die Schönheit und den Geschmack in der Mahlerey was published in 1762, but its substance had already been made available two years earlier through an essay in English by the painter Daniel Webb.22 Goethe eventually signalled his respect for Mengs by citing him, most unusually for a theorist of painting, in Zur Farbenlehre, Historischer Teil, but emphasized that Mengs had not, to Goethe’s mind, followed his own colour theory to its logical conclusion. The terms of Goethe’s

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criticism neatly encapsulate his understanding of the difference between harmony through tonality, which he rejected, and harmony through colour relationships, as practised by the hue-painters. Without understanding the physiological basis of complementarity, Mengs had arrived by good sense and taste at the general principle, quoted after him by Goethe, that each of the three primary colours, if used at full strength, should be balanced by the secondary mixed from the other two. Yet despite this insight, Mengs had still subscribed to the belief that harmony in painting rested on light and shade and general tonality: ‘Den Grund der Harmonie, welche wir bei einem Gemälde empfinden, setzt Mengs in das Helldunkel, so wie er denn auch dem allgemeinen Ton die vorzüglichste Wirkung zuschrieb.’ This meant that he used colours as identifiers for objects, but otherwise subordinated them to the value-system of the painting as a whole, taking account only of their position on the grey scale, rather than of their actual hue: ‘Die Farben waren ihm dagegen nur einzelne Töne, womit man die Oberf lächen der Körper spezifizierte, welche sich dem Helldunkel und dem allgemeinen Ton subordinieren sollten.’ In other words, the colours were used without regard for their relationship to one another as hues, and the completeness of the circle: ‘ohne eben gerade für sich und unter sich einen Anspruch an Übereinstimmung und Ganzheit zu machen’ (943). As these comments on Mengs show, Goethe was very clear in his own mind at the time of publishing Zur Farbenlehre that he was arguing the case for a purely hue-based harmony, against what he regarded as an entrenched tonalism. His mature formulation of the issue casts a clarificatory light on an early colour essay of 1793 entitled ‘Einige allgemeine chromatische Sätze’ (FA 18/2: 109–15). This required the painter to distinguish five aspects of coloration: (1). Licht und Schatten, Hell und Dunkel. (2). Lokal-Farbe, Farbe des Gegenstandes ohne Zusammenhang. (3). Apparente Farbe. Die Lehre von der Mäßigung des Lichts und den farbigen Schatten studiert er aufs genauste. (4). Farbengebung. Harmonische Verbindung der Farben durch Zusammenstellung und Vereinigung der Lokal- und apparenten Farben. (5). Ton. Allgemeine Farbe, die über ein ganzes Bild herrscht (FA 18/2: 113–14)

Point 4 rather surprisingly limits Farbengebung to the business of harmony, although it was usually also taken to include colouring in imitation of nature, and defines harmony itself solely in terms of the two types of colour specified at points 2 and 3. The later comments on Mengs would suggest that the omission of both light and shade and general tonality from the business of harmony is no mere oversight or drafting error, but evidence that Goethe already meant to draw a clear distinction between his own hue-based approach to harmony and tonalism. At this early date he also had important observations to make about the nature of the colours that the artist should use to create his harmonies. Lokal-Farbe at point 2 meant what the English equivalent is commonly used to mean: simply the colour an object is seen to have in clear diffuse daylight. With Apparente Farbe at point 3, Goethe introduced the concept of coloured light, something that he would have encountered in the theoretical work of Leonardo. His own brief essay ‘Physik’, also written in 1793, can serve to explain the two kinds of coloured light that he

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mentions. Light and darkness as such have no colour, he argues, but white light becomes coloured through Mäßigung, that is, as soon as its strength is minimally diminished; and darkness or shadow becomes coloured through Wechselwirkung with light, that is, as soon as any light penetrates it (FA 18/2: 108). Thus between pure white light and complete darkness is a continuum of lesser light, all of which is variously coloured.23 With this coloured light, ‘Einige allgemeine chromatische Sätze’ introduces a resource for the artist that Goethe was eventually to explore at greater length in Zur Farbenlehre. ‘Mäßigung des Lichts’ affects not only the lightness or darkness of an object’s surfaces, but also their hue: under different degrees of illumination local colour itself appears to change. A surface which is yellow looks more yellowish when bathed in strong sunlight, and a surface in shadow appears to shift towards violet or dark blue, which is the complement of yellow. This is explained as one of the contrast effects brought about by the physiology of vision. Contrast strengthens the differences between highlight and shadow, and increases the appearance of relief in natural scenes. So when we look at three-dimensional objects strongly illuminated from one side we see colour gradients between the light side, the partially lit centre, and the shadowed side. The local colour appears in the partially lit centre or the mid-tone, with the illuminated side and the shadowed side taking on a look of the colours adjacent to it in the spectrum. Thus a green vase will appear more yellowish on its illuminated side, and more blueish in shadow.24 Goethe offered examples in Zur Farbenlehre, where he noted that the shadowed sides of objects appear blue (75), and that candle-light at night shifts yellow towards white, blue towards green and magenta towards orange (58). If these effects are imitated in painting, they will of course lead to modelling in colour: instead of green, green plus white and green plus black, there will be blue, green and yellow on the same object, in other words, an instance of cangiante colouring. When Goethe spoke of ‘farbigen Schatten’ he probably had a number of effects in mind. The shift of hue on the shaded side of an object is itself a form of coloured shadow. A more striking phenomenon that has become closely associated with Goethe’s name is the complementary-coloured cast shadow, which he described in ‘Von den farbigen Schatten’ (FA 18/2: 84–102) and later in Zur Farbenlehre (51–57). When sunlight, which is yellowish, falls on all of a scene except the shadows of objects cast on the ground, those shadows do not receive their quota of yellow light and are therefore perceived as having its complementary colour, violet.25 Goethe liked to see the effect represented in painting: he was gratified by a piece of scenery for the Weimar theatre in which the painter had, as he said, even managed the coloured shadows, though rather crudely.26 They were eventually to play a part in many Impressionist paintings, such as Monet’s Haystacks series. Another form of coloured shadow well known to Goethe and valued by him as an artistic resource was that caused by ref lected light. In Zur Farbenlehre, Goethe discussed the action of ref lected light under the heading of ‘scheinbare Mitteilung der Farbe’. Here he suggested an experiment: take a coloured surface, place it in sunlight, and let the light ref lected from it fall on other colourless objects. The ref lected light is, he says, echoing the terminology of ‘Einige allgemeine

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chromatische Sätze’, ‘eine Art gemäßigten Lichts, ein Halblicht, ein Halbschatten, der außer seiner gedämpften Natur die spezifische Farbe der Fläche mit abspiegelt’ (196–97). The result of the experiment is as follows: Wirkt dieser Widerschein auf lichte Flächen, so wird er aufgehoben, und man bemerkt die Farbe wenig, die er mit sich bringt. Wirkt er aber auf Schattenstellen, so zeigt sich eine gleichsam magische Verbindung mit dem skierôi. Der Schatten ist das eigentliche Element der Farbe, und hier tritt zu demselben eine schattige Farbe beleuchtend, färbend und belebend. Und so entsteht eine eben so mächtige als angenehme Erscheinung, welche dem Maler, der sie zu benutzen weiß, die herrlichsten Dienste leistet. (197)27

Ref lected light not only revives local colour in shadows, but modifies it in subtle ways. A brightly lit red curtain, for example, will cast a reddish light on the shaded side of a blue garment nearby, thus tingeing the blue with red so that it appears more violet. Goethe’s preoccupation with Widerschein seems at first sight to conf lict with his rejection of tonalism as a means to colour harmony. For Widerschein is after all a matter of light and shade, and was exploited by practitioners and recommended by theorists of tonal painting from the sixteenth century onwards. But Goethe’s inconsistency is probably more apparent than real. Widerschein was for him a means of intensifying hue in a painting, rather than of varying tonality. If he spoke of Widerschein, he no doubt did so because such was the terminology of contemporary art discourse, based on the tonal tradition and observation of nature. But Widerschein as it was to appear in art probably meant for Goethe much the same as its ‘naive’ ancestor, cangiante colouring: a conjunction of attractive prismatic hues contributing to the completeness of the circle. This is confirmed by a note entitled ‘Zahl der Farben’, probably written in the winter of 1805/06 (FA 18/2: 438). Infinite numbers of hues are conceivable, Goethe notes here, all of which can be lightened or darkened to any level of the grey scale. Then there are all the indeterminate colours brought about by mixtures, and divers organic and chemical processes. And Goethe concludes: Bedenkt man ferner, was die schillernden oder sonst wechselnden Widerscheine für eine unendliche Mannigfaltigkeit in die Oberf lächen bringen [...] so sieht man recht gut, daß hier nicht von Zahl, sondern von einem unendlich lebendigen Spiel die Rede sein könne. (FA 18/2: 272)

Significantly, Widerscheine are qualified here by the epithet schillernd, schillernde Farben being in Goethe’s time the most commonly used German equivalent for the Italian colori cangianti.28 So the imaginative cangianti colours already common in the time of Giotto and the ref lected lights that were their ‘naturalized’ successors in later Western art do seem to have figured in Goethe’s mind as equivalent contributors to colour harmony. For that is what is implied by reference here to ‘einem unendlich lebendigen Spiel’, since Farbenspiel (employing Spiel in Schiller’s sense of free aesthetic play) became Goethe’s and Meyer’s favourite expression for harmonious colouring.29 Since Goethe evidently wished to distance himself from the notion of harmony represented by tonalism, it makes sense to ask whether he was able to find within

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the rival tradition of hue-painting anything that matched his own criteria. Huepainting was more generous with colour, but might not in any given instance seem to have deployed all of the complementaries in balance. And Gothic bellezza di colore, with its f lamboyant displays of cangianti, might seem too extravagant to eighteenth-century taste: Meyer found Michelangelo’s archaizing hue-shifts in the Doni Tondo too highly contrasted to be harmonious.30 But Goethe accepted cangianti that conformed with the aesthetic of unione, as may be seen from his response to Raphael’s Cupid and Psyche ceiling, executed mainly by the latter’s pupils at the Villa Farnesina in Rome. Goethe twice saw the ceiling, commenting on the first occasion that he already knew the frescoes, ‘deren farbige Nachbildungen so lange meine Zimmer erheitern’ (FA 15/1: 147). These striking hand-coloured reproductions, a series of ten large folio plates engraved by Nicolas Dorigny and published in 1693, showed the two panels in the centre of the vault and all the subsidiary scenes in the spandrels, with the original lapis lazuli ground and with surprising fidelity at least to the spirit of the original drapery colours.31 These included many ‘playful’ cangianti, appropriate to the cheerful subject matter of Psyche’s wedding feast and the council of the gods.32 Dorigny’s version gave several of the figures orange draperies heightened with green, to Venus a f loating scarf of pink and yellow, and to Juno a robe of pink, blue, and yellow. All of this detail must have been very well known to Goethe, who had first hung the reproductions in his Gartenhaus by the Ilm, before moving them to the Yellow Room in the house on the Frauenplan.33 His letter to his friends on the occasion of his second visit to the Farnesina recalled: ‘Wie oft und unter wie manchen Situationen hab’ ich die bunten Kopien dieser Bilder in meinen Zimmern mit euch angesehn! Es fiel mir recht auf, da ich sie eben durch jene Kopien fast auswendig weiß.’ The Psyche room was, he wrote, ‘das Schönste, was ich von Dekoration kenne’ (FA 15/1:394). Goethe had stated that the reproductions were able to cheer (erheitern) his living quarters.34 It would be strange if he had not appreciated the contribution made by cangiante colouring to the pleasure the frescoes gave, in Italy and in Weimar during years of daily familiarity with the engravings. However the best evidence for Goethe’s having found an artist who anticipated his own notion of colour harmony is his response to the work of Paolo Veronese. When Goethe saw Veronese’s The Family of Darius before Alexander at the Palazzo Pisani Moretta in Venice in 1786, he wrote in his diary: Es ist frisch, als wenn es gestern gemahlt wäre und seine große Kunst, ohne einen allgemeinen Ton, der durchs ganze Stück durchginge, blos mit den abwechselnden Lokalfarben, eine köstliche Harmonie hervorzubringen, ist hier recht sichtbar. (FA 15/1: 707)35

His first impression was of a creation from local colour, without benefit of general tonality: in other words he set Veronese down as a hue-painter, not a tonalist. The text of the Italienische Reise, prepared many years later, referred to Veronese having created an exquisite harmony ‘ohne einen allgemeinen Ton der über das ganze Stück gezogen wäre, durch kunstreich verteiltes Licht und Schatten, und eben so weislich abwechselnde Lokalfarben’ (FA 15/1: 92). But if this comment now seems to carry a conventional suggestion of tonalism in its reference to light and shade,

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it should be read in conjunction with the circumstantial explanation of Veronese’s colouring that Goethe also supplied in the later account. A painter in Venice must, he suggested, see everything more clearly and more vividly than we northern Europeans do, in our gloomy surroundings that subdue all ref lected light: ‘Wir, die wir auf einem bald schmutzkotigen, bald staubigen, farblosen, die Widerscheine verdüsterndem Boden [...] leben’ (FA 15/1: 93). Ref lected light, reviving and nuancing local colour in shadows, was essential to Veronese’s art, as Goethe realized on the lagoon. Watching colourfully dressed gondoliers working in the sunshine on green waters with a blue sky behind, he had felt as though he were looking at a Venetian painting: Der Sonnenschein hob die Lokalfarben blendend hervor, und die Schattenseiten waren so licht, daß sie verhältnißmäßig wieder zu Lichtern hätten dienen können. Ein Gleiches galt von den Widerscheinen des meergrünen Wassers. (FA 15/1: 93)

Everything in this landscape was bathed in light, so that if in a different painting you were to use the shadow colours and the ref lections as lights, you could still model right down from them without becoming immersed in gloom. So far as Goethe was concerned, ref lected light in Veronese brought colour, not gradations of tone among neutral shades. Goethe professed to having admired Veronese before he set out for Italy (FA 15/1: 51, 651), and after seeing more of his paintings during the first and second journeys, including the Feast in the House of Levi and the Wedding Feast at Cana (FA 18: 276, 1171), continued to praise his artistry until late in life.36 Goethe’s admiration is understandable, for Veronese, though he made his name in Venice, trained in Verona in a tradition that had more in common with hue-painting than with Venetian tonalism.37 He arranged pictures like The Family of Darius according to the fifteenth-century tableau model, in which the figures appeared, parallel to the picture plane and close to it, on a shallow stage with a low viewpoint. Palladian architecture acted like a screen behind, so that the scenes had no depth, and colour did not fade into the distance. At the same time the lighting in the foreground was contrived so as to maximize colourfulness. The scenes were set in daylight, in the open air, but with the main light in the sky behind the figures, so that they were seen contre jour.38 As Sir Joshua Reynolds said of The Wedding Feast at Cana, ‘the figures are for the most part in half shadow; the great light is in the sky.’39 This means that they were lit by indirect light coming from surfaces all around them, so that ref lections penetrated to the deepest recesses, and no dark shadows blurred or blackened the scene. In fact, Veronese usually put his most saturated colour in the mid-tones or even in the shadows, as did the Gothic fresco artists of the fifteenth century.40 John Ruskin perceptively pointed out that Veronese achieved his effect of intense colourfulness by using three quarters of the tonal range possible in painting on the darker half of the tonal range in nature. Thus the darks in his pictures appear brightly lit because they have more than their fair share of tonal steps, while the lights seem to dissolve into whiteness because they are crowded into fewer than their fair share of steps.41 Veronese’s approach was therefore far from naturalistic: he greatly exaggerated the effect of ref lected light so as to ensure that all his figures

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were completely visible as separate entities, and all their parts appeared coloured.42 To this extent he had far more in common with the traditions of fresco — of which he was a highly-skilled exponent — and of Florence than with the Venetian artists. He adopted the ‘clear divisions between highlight and middle tone and middle tone and shadow’ that are characteristic of fresco, rather than allowing colours to merge imperceptibly into one another.43 Not surprisingly therefore, in oil as in fresco he favoured the cangiante technique where hue separation is particularly evident, and Goethe was entirely right to perceive in him an outstanding exponent of modelling in colour. Of course Goethe also thought of Veronese as a colour harmonist par excellence, again with justification. Veronese employed the whole range of pigments available in Venice, some of which might well war with one another at full strength, but he has always enjoyed a high reputation for marrying them successfully together.44 He often made use of strong complementary contrasts which presumably appealed to Goethe: the principal group in The Family of Darius has at its centre figures dressed respectively in magenta and green, f lanked by others in orange and blue. But for all their strength of colour, the draperies do not have the gaudy, uncoordinated look that made Vasari compare some Gothic paintings with playing cards. Instead Veronese contrived his own form of unione, partly by well-judged desaturation, but very largely by subdividing his fields of colour in various ingenious ways, beginning with the complicated cut and decoration of the garments, which result in small, intricately shaped patches, often further broken by patterning and embroidery. Then there are many subtle effects of light, one of the most characteristic being the bright white highlights that often criss-cross Veronese’s paintings, linking together patches of different drapery colours. Goethe probably had them in mind when he remarked of the lagoon scenery that he took for the inspiration of Veronese: ‘Alles war hell in Hell gemalt, so daß die schäumende Welle und die Blitzlichter darauf nötig waren, um die Tüpfchen auf ’s i zu setzen’ (FA 15/1: 93). Veronese’s cangianti also diversified, and so helped to harmonize, his colours. He often modelled green or orange up to yellow, as in The Family of Darius, and also made striking shifts between strongly contrasting colours, as with the pink and yellow sleeve of the steward with the goblet of wine in The Wedding Feast at Cana.45 Other subtle modifications of object hue could be attributed to the effect of the ref lected light that provided most of Veronese’s illumination, and transferred the colour of one object to others adjacent to it in shadow. Judged by his preference for Veronese, the harmony that Goethe liked was therefore one of unashamed local colours: in fact all the colours of the wheel, but not simply the six representative colours alone. What Veronese exemplified was the limitless range of possible hues that Goethe evoked in ‘Zahl der Farben’: the tints, the shades, the mixtures, the cangianti, and the ref lected lights. This is confirmed by a comment Goethe made about a sketch by Veronese in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt: ‘Die Färbung scheint am ersten Blick konfus, bis man sich der ausgeführten Bilder dieses Meisters erinnert, da denn so wohl in den Farben überhaupt als in ihren Abstufungen und Abschattierungen einer mit den andern, eine große Mannigfaltigkeit erscheint’ (FA 18: 420).46

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This grading and nuancing of colour, and the variety of hue that it produced were central to Goethe’s and Meyer’s thinking about harmony in the years immediately before the publication of Zur Farbenlehre. Shortly before Goethe’s visit to the Städel, Meyer had made his last visit to Italy and while in Florence had copied Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola. Though he praised its human warmth, he judged its colouring to be ‘fehlerhaft’: Das gelbe Jäckchen des Christkindes und der rothe Ärmel der Madonne, auch ihr blaues Gewand zum großen Theil, sind bloß aus einer reinen, unvermischten Farbe gemahlt, das heißt aus Hellgelb und Dunkelgelb, Hellroth und Dunkel­ roth, Hellblau und Dunkelblau.

Several months later Meyer returned to the subject, saying that what Raphael’s colours lacked was ‘Mittheilung oder sachte Annäherung der einen an die andere’, and he went so far as to say that a copy of the Raphael done ‘nach unserer Theorie’ ought to decide the question of colour harmony once and for all.47 Clearly then, Goethe’s criteria for colour harmony would never be met by academic painters following the maxim that ‘local colour stays the same’, even if they were to introduce all six colours of the wheel into their pictures. What ‘our theory’ evidently required was the widest possible array of hues, clearly distinguishable as hues rather than tones, but delicately adjusted to one another as by the operation of coloured light. And it seems that the transitions between the hues were, for all their delicacy, to remain just perceptible to the eye, in the manner of fresco technique, rather than to be completely effaced as might happen in oils. For if the boundaries of modelling planes became indistinct, the painter would fall into the error that Goethe called ‘nebulism’ (268–69).48 This interpretation of Goethe’s and Meyer’s theory is confirmed by their public pronouncements, authored by Meyer and edited by Goethe, during the whole period of their collaboration on colour in painting. Quite controversially, but consistently with their classical convictions, Goethe and Meyer professed to find true colour harmony in ancient painting. Relatively few examples were known to the eighteenth century, although the excavation of Herculaneum and Pompeii and the removal of frescoes to the Bourbon museum at Portici had begun in 1738. Goethe had visited the museum, and recorded in his essay ‘Von Arabesken’, published in Der Teutsche Merkur in 1789, that the Campanian frescoes had impressed him with the freshness of their colour (FA 15/2: 877–80). Otherwise the best-known work was the so-called Aldobrandini Wedding, a Second Style fresco discovered on the Esquiline hill in Rome in 1605 and preserved until 1818 in the garden of the Villa Aldobrandini.49 In 1796 Meyer made a copy which was installed in a place of honour in the Juno Room of Goethe’s house on the Frauenplan.50 Meyer had noted when visiting Portici that the Campanian frescoists had avoided strong, clashing colours in their draperies, never using pigments at full strength, but always desaturating them for a more harmonious effect. ‘Grelle und stechende Farben’, Meyer wrote, ‘haben sie nie zu Gewändern gebraucht, nie sieht man ein rothes oder grünes oder blaues p. in dem höchsten, vollesten Ton der Farbe’; instead the colours were ‘immer gemildert und sanfter gemacht’. Rather than diluting their colours with darks, the painters generally preferred the higher value range: ‘die

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heiteren, schwachen Tinten’.51 Meyer found the same approach in the Aldobrandini Wedding, which he made the centrepiece of the essay on colour in ancient art that he contributed to the historical section of Zur Farbenlehre. The colours of the fresco, which he described as hell, fröhlich, heiter, and munter, never clashed unpleasantly, but were harmonized through the delicate tingeing of one with another (589–90, 592).52 In the 1820s, Goethe and Meyer were confirmed in their high opinion of ancient harmony by various coloured reproductions. ‘Das chromatische Zartgefühl der Alten’ was, Goethe noted in connection with painted copies by K. J. Raabe, equal to all their other merits (FA 17: 314). Meyer found in F. W. Ternite’s work ‘eine deutliche Anschauung der merkwürdigen Farbenharmonie der antiken Gemälde’. Thus in one fresco from Herculaneum, violet predominated, and green and brown accompanied it ‘in schöner Mäßigung und Übereinstimmung’ (FA 17: 378). Cangiante colouring was a means to the delicate harmony of ancient painting, according to Meyer. The Portici letter, having noted the frescoists’ preference for subtly moderated colours, had added the comment: ‘daher die häufigen Cangianten’.53 In the Aldobrandini Wedding, harmony likewise depended on cangianti. Meyer noted the ‘hohe Purpur- oder Lackfarbe’ which, he said, ‘die Schatten bricht und erwärmt, oder auch Changeant bewirkt, und so auf verschiedene Weise zur allgemeinen Harmonie des Ganzen sehr wesentlich beiträgt’ (592). At the same time Meyer was convinced that the use of cangianti in ancient frescoes involved a precocious understanding of ref lected colour. In his first letter to Goethe about the Aldobrandini Wedding, he claimed to have found ‘eine Harmonie und Verständniß der Farben [...] wie noch in keinem andern Bild’. ‘Ich glaube sogar’, he continued, ‘daß Widerscheine und Mitteilung der Farben darinne sey, welches bey den besten Neuern so rare Dinge sind.’54 This claim, which boldly asserted the superiority of the ancients on ground that was often claimed by the moderns, was repeated by Goethe, who himself noted in Zur Farbenlehre that both the frescoes from Herculaneum and the Aldobrandini Wedding showed ref lected light playing into shadows (269). One example was the white gown of the central female figure in the latter, described by Meyer as ‘das weiße, mit zarten Widerscheinen spielende Gewand der Braut’: here the white is tinged with the subtlest of yellows, violets, and greenish-blues. Equally, the ‘ungemein künstliches Farbenspiel’ of the bed coverings showed how colours ‘theilen sich durch Widerscheine mit’: das Gelbe ist überall der grünen Drapperie dergestalt mitgetheilt, daß wo Halbschatten entstehen, diese entweder gelb überlassirt sind, oder durch Einmischung etwas in’s Gelbe ziehen: dem gelben Tuch und Polster ist hingegen Grün ungefähr in gleichem Maße mitgetheilt.55

Here Meyer is evoking a highly delicate, suggestive, almost impressionistic technique. Thus through his essay on ancient painting in Zur Farbenlehre (570–96), and through the one that he contributed to Böttiger’s book on the Aldobrandini Wedding, Meyer sustained the thesis that Roman and Campanian frescoists had achieved a harmony of colouring unmatched by later artists, a harmony involving not only cangianti but cangianti created by ref lected light. Here Meyer’s partisanship might seem perhaps to have clouded his judgment: so anxious was he, as a committed

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classicist, to establish the excellence of ancient painting that he overlooked the mediocrity of most surviving examples, not least in the matter of colour. Indeed his detractors complain that he succeeded all too well in indoctrinating Goethe with what they perceive as a narrow, unimaginative classical orthodoxy. It is true that other eighteenth-century connoisseurs were often disappointed by the frescoes from Herculaneum and Pompeii. Winckelmann, who had gone to great lengths to see and record the newly discovered exhibits in the museum at Portici, thought of the frescoes as products of a Verfallszeit. He registered the cangianti colours and accepted them because they formed part of the ancient painters’ practice, but felt bound to explain them naturalistically as attempts to represent silk or shot-silk fabrics.56 Some eighteenth-century writers dismissed ancient colouring out of hand, because it seemed to lag far behind the achievements of modern painters in oils. C.-N. Cochin, who denied that the greatest masters of antiquity had understood chiaroscuro, described the Portici frescoes as being ‘d’une couleur très-foible’.57 In Germany J. H. Merck, writing in 1782, criticized the ancient frescoists for ‘die wenigen und nur blendenden Farben ihrer Werke’ and the open-air aesthetic which precluded ‘Dämpfungen und Erhöhungen der eigentlichen Farben’, leaving only ‘ein ungebrochenes abstraktes Roth, Blau oder Gelb’.58 Here Merck took exactly the opposite view to Meyer, who was soon to deny that the frescoists used any unbroken colours, except when working on a black background.59 However Meyer was not a lone voice in his own time: others fully shared his high opinion of the ancient painters, though some were more inclined to credit them with a subtle tonalism than anything that Meyer would have approved. Thus the Antichità di Ercolano, the official catalogue of the exhibits at Portici, pointed to the ‘mezze tinte’ and ‘degradazioni’ accomplished by the painters: their mid-tones and gradual transitions of landscape colours to blue in the distance. The catalogue also registered the use of cangiante effects in individual frescoes.60 Paillot de Montabert, who travelled in Italy in the early 1790s and developed an enthusiasm for ancient techniques before entering David’s studio in 1796, compared the Aldobrandini Wedding with the work of Veronese for ‘la rupture des couleurs ou l‘harmogé’ to be seen in it. ‘Une gaîté douce dans les teintes’, he commented elsewhere, ‘une grâce charmante résultant de la variété et de l’accord de toutes les nuances, font de ce reste précieux du pinceau des anciens un exemple sensible du mode ionien appliqué au coloris.’ Paillot approved the ancient painters’ choice of cangiante draperies as ‘extraordinaire et propre à un art poétique et relevé’.61 In fact it is the positive assessment of ancient colouring that has survived into modern times, but with the emphasis placed on the range and clarity of its hues, rather than its tonal qualities. Erwin Panofsky, for example, noted changes of colour according to the laws of complementarity, ref lections, refractions, and coloured cast shadows, but argued that what he called ‘Graeco-Roman illusionism’ differed in its effect from the work of a Titian or a Rubens because the ancient painters had no unified lighting, but applied their effects piecemeal to individual figures, hence the ‘unreal, spectral quality’ of their scenes.62 The cangianti that resulted from the ancient painters’ approach to colouring have been widely acknowledged: Wolfgang Helbig in his check-list of Campanian frescoes published in 1868 recorded many

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individual instances.63 Ernst Pfuhl suggested that the term versicolor, used in ancient art theory, may have signified delicate cangiante colouring: ‘das freie Farbenspiel der Spätzeit mit seiner malerischen Zerlegung der einzelnen Farben’.64 Various writers have attempted to evoke this painterly approach, not least Mabel Gabriel whose descriptions of colour effects in Campanian painting are unrivalled. On a piece of f loating drapery in a Pompeiian scene of Dionysus and Ariadne she commented: ‘It is first bluish grey, then mauve, light blue, pink, and an exquisite pale green becoming white at the turned-over edge.’65 This was the kind of effect that had caught Meyer’s eye when he wrote from Naples of colours that were ‘immer gemildert und sanfter gemacht, daher die häufigen Cangianten’.66 He was no doubt determined for polemical purposes to emphasize the beauties of Campanian colouring, but these were genuine; furthermore they realized Goethe’s ideal of a subtle harmony based on all the colours of the wheel. The essay on colour in ancient painting that Meyer contributed to Zur Farbenlehre had as its companion piece a pioneering survey of both mimetic colouring and colour harmony in modern painting from Cimabue onwards (761–79). Here Meyer indicated, as Goethe himself did elsewhere, that he rated harmony above colouring in imitation of nature (766).67 And despite his championship of the ancients as supreme harmonists, he was able to identify a modern painter who had come near to equalling their achievements. This was not Veronese, probably because Meyer himself seems to have had relatively little personal knowledge of his work, but Pietro Berrettini da Cortona, the leading Roman painter of the high Baroque period, who aroused little enthusiasm among most of Meyer’s contemporaries. Although skilful with oils, Pietro, who had visited Venice to study Veronese, was above all a fresco artist and one who carried on the tradition of sophisticated cangiante colouring.68 Meyer had no room in his essay for detailed discussion of the means by which Pietro achieved his ‘fröhliches mannigfaltiges Farbenspiel’ (774), but the lengthy notes he made on the ceilings of the Gran Salone in the Barberini Palace in Rome and the Planetary Rooms in the Pitti Palace in Florence leave no doubt that Pietro’s skill in this aspect of hue painting impressed him deeply.69 Some of the major allegorical figures in the central portion of the Barberini ceiling owed their beauty in large part to cangiante colouring.70 Charity, ‘die hellste & anziehendste’, was clothed ‘mit purpurnem Mantel & gelb & viol: changeantem Untergewand’. Similarly Hope had ‘ein röthlicht & blaulicht changeantes Untergewand / welches von ferne wie hell violet aussieht / und einen Mantel oder großen Schleyer [...] der hell gelb & schön grün changeant ist.’ At the Pitti Palace, Meyer found the colouring in the Age of Gold and its companion pieces in the Sala della Stufa ‘zwar fröhlich aber eher bunt als harmonisch’. But in the Planetary Rooms, where he registered many cangianti, he was especially impressed by some of the small historical lunettes such as that in the Venus Room showing Massinissa accompanied by a page with a ‘Gewand welches aus dem Rothen ins grüne changeant ist’. The four lunettes in the Apollo Room seemed, as Meyer wrote to Goethe, ‘von solcher Harmonie in ihren Farben [...] daß wir mit unserer besten Kunst und Theorie es nicht anders machen könnten oder doch nur wenig zu ändern fänden’.71 Again, cangianti played an important part in their colouring.

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The prominent figure carrying a stack of law books in the scene of Justinian wore a cloak ‘mit gelben Lichtern grünen Mitteltinten & Schatten’, and an orange tunic with yellow lights. The scene of Alexander included a tunic of ‘gelb in Violett changeant’, a bed covering of the same, and a robe ‘mit steinblauen Lichtern & schmuziggrünen Schatten’. These examples were typical of Pietro, in that he frequently shifted from yellow to violet in his draperies, but otherwise tended to avoid complementary pairs, using adjacent colours instead. As Meyer’s notes show, he was sensitive to nuances of Pietro’s softly-coloured cangianti, much more so in fact than some modern scholars. The most observant of these share Meyer’s high opinion of Pietro as colourist: Lorenza Mochi Onori, who has reported on the recent restoration of the Barberini ceiling, singles out the exquisite hue-shifts from blue to rose to violet and from green to yellow in the figure of Hope.72 One ingredient that Meyer failed to find in Pietro was ref lected light: ‘unser Peter Cortona selbst weiß hievon nichts.’73 In fact, Pietro did sometimes use ref lections of one colour on another: the Age of Gold at the Pitti Palace contains some examples. Here perhaps Meyer did allow his predisposition in favour of the ancient frescoists to cloud his judgment. Had he admitted that Pietro had mastered ref lected colour, he would have been hard put to it not to grant him equal status with them. Meyer’s choice of Pietro as the greatest harmonist among modern painters attests to his relative lack of esteem for those who followed. In fact, Goethe and Meyer found no notable practitioners between the Baroque and their own times, except for one of whom they had heard only at second hand. This young painter, to whom Meyer referred at the very end of his essay (779), was Gottlieb Schick from Stuttgart, who began to earn himself a reputation in Rome in 1803, and had exhibited his latest work, Apoll unter den Hirten, to great acclaim in the closing weeks of 1808.74 And as with Pietro, the choice of Schick as an example of true harmony in painting was based on his command of the ‘Mannigfaltigkeit des Farbenspiels’ characteristic of fresco and the cangiante tradition. Schick claimed that in Rome he had been impressed by the ‘Leichtigkeit und Klarheit im Ton der Fresco-Malereien’, which made the oils in which he worked seem heavy and dark. While continuing to use oils for their richness of colour, he wanted to give his paintings ‘den Local-Ton eines Frescobildes’.75 The harmonies of Raphael and his pupils in the biblical scenes of the Vatican Logge had relied to a high degree on cangiante colours, which were duly adopted by Schick in Noahs Dankopfer, where angels are arrayed in blues rising to yellow or pink, or orange to light blue; God the Father wears a red tunic with yellow lights, and a blue cloak with green lights; and Noah’s orange tunic shifts to yellow, as does the red cloak of his son in the foreground. In Apoll unter den Hirten, the old man standing behind Apollo has a brown cloak which rises through subtle orange to yellow with a tinge of pink on one shoulder. The girl seated next to the god has a skirt which moves from deep pink in shadow to pale pink in the light, with a touch of grey-blue in the mid-tones. Elsewhere, green is modelled up to yellow, and red up to yellowish red.76 Goethe and Meyer knew of Schick’s approach to colouring from two pieces published in the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung: a survey by A. W. Schlegel

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of German artists in Rome, which appeared in October 1805; and a lengthy anonymous review, almost certainly by E. Z. Platner and published in February 1809, of the exhibition staged by Schick at the Rondanini Palace in 1808. Schlegel noted the inf luence on Noahs Dankopfer of Raphael’s work in the Logge, ‘wo die Annahme schillernder Stoffe von der Verbindlichkeit entledigt, durch starre Massen der Hauptfarben das Auge störend auf einzelne Theile zu ziehen.’ Cangianti broke down solid planes, creating subtler colour relationships between the different parts of objects.77 Commenting on Apoll unter den Hirten, Platner also noted Schick’s cangiante colours and defended them against critics who found them unnatural.78 The absence of exact precedents in textile manufacture was irrelevant to painting, Platner argued, because the laws of nature permitted changes of colour from shadows and lights, as seen in iridescent bird feathers and insect wings. And cangianti had been used in all the best periods of art beginning with the Greeks, as Winckelmann had noted.79 When Meyer made his veiled allusion to Schick as someone who might inaugurate a new age when painters would once again feel the need of ‘harmonischer Nebeneinanderstellung der Farben’ (779), he must therefore have been fully aware that Schick’s idea of colour harmony relied to a considerable extent on the use of cangianti. But Platner’s defence shows that they were controversial at this time. In fact, neoclassical painters remained loyal to the academic maxim that local colour stays the same. Even when they purported to be imitating Pompeiian models, the great majority of French and German artists of the later eighteenth century usually ignored the cangianti and substituted clearly differentiated drapery colours unaffected by ref lections or other accidents of the light.80 Ingres, who was a contemporary of Schick in David’s studio, is said to have believed that ‘le ref let est indigne de la majesté de la peinture d’histoire.’81 By the end of the century, leading classical theorists such as Kant, Schiller, and Fernow, as well as painters including John Flaxman and A. J. Carstens, were hostile not merely to the accidents of colour, but to colour itself as an accident of form.82 As A. W. Schlegel’s response to Schick suggests, it was Romantic rather than classical thinkers of the period who argued for colour, and specifically for variegated colour, in painting.83 Platner’s apologias for Schick might seem to align him with the neoclassical approach to art, but in his last years Schick himself was seen as gravitating in the direction of the Romanticism represented by some of his expatriate painter associates like J. A. Koch.84 After Schick’s death, Platner became closely associated with the Lukasbund, whose most prominent figures by this time were the Nazarene painters J. F. Overbeck and Peter von Cornelius.85 In Platner’s version of art history, cangiante colouring was an ‘ideale Färbung’, which made for ‘ein weit mannigfaltigeres Spiel als die ganz ungebrochenen Farben, die weit schwerer zu verbinden sind’. Hence all the best Renaissance masters including Raphael had usually represented drapery as ‘wenn auch nicht entschieden schillernd, doch nicht ganz ungebrochen’. But, he argued, cangianti had been outlawed at the end of the sixteenth century by the classicizing Carracci family, which set the tone for academic painting for the next two centuries. During this period, work in oils employed crude local colours, modified solely with black for shadows.

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Only in Italian fresco painting had cangiante harmony managed to survive into the eighteenth century.86 Romantic painters in Platner’s own circle strove to revive it: Overbeck and Cornelius became famous for the bold cangiante combinations in their fresco cycle The Story of Joseph at the Casa Bartholdy in Rome. Goethe and Meyer, as advocates of colour and especially cangiante colour in painting, might therefore seem to have far less in common with neoclassicism than with the Romantic movement which they so strongly disliked for broader ideological reasons, in particular its Christian religiosity. But their position was nevertheless distinct from that of the Romantics. Meyer had found his prime examples of Goethean harmony in classical art: the Roman and Campanian frescoes of the first century. When it came to modern painting, he looked not to Raphael, much of whose work was admired by the Romantics, but to Pietro da Cortona, whose high Baroque manner was thoroughly uncongenial to them.87 When Romantic artists presented their own work, Meyer expressed reservations consistent with those he felt about their medieval models: he found that Overbeck’s and Cornelius’s drapery colours contrasted too strongly with one another, that ‘die Farben der Gewänder nicht auf erforderliche Weise gebrochen sind’ (FA 20: 123),88 and suggested that C. D. Friedrich’s use of colours showed too little care for their ‘Milderung und Uebereinstimmung’ (FA 20: 123). Thus Goethe and Meyer steered a course which separated them not only from their fellow classicists who restricted colour, but also from the Romantics who valued it highly but often sought their inspiration in an alien, medieval aesthetic. Goethe and Meyer certainly understood themselves as classicists rather than Romantics, and such they could legitimately claim to be, even as theorists of colour harmony. For they remained faithful, in their own understanding, to the classical doctrine of art as an idealization of nature: local effects like ref lected colour seemed to them part of the lawful behaviour of light rather than aberrations or anomalies. And although rejected for generations by academic theory, the subtle colour gradations and delicate cangianti that they liked did have an ancient pedigree, and did exemplify a certain classical restraint. Within German classicism then, Goethe and Meyer were remarkable for their sensitivity to the subtle, swirling shifts of hue achieved by some of the most decorative artists in the modern western tradition. Notes to Chapter 7 1. This article first appeared in Oxford German Studies, 40 (2011), 153–75. References in the text to Zur Farbenlehre, in volume 23/1 of the Frankfurt edition, are given by page number only. Where possible, references to Heinrich Meyer’s essays are also to the Frankfurt edition of Goethe’s works (= FA), which includes many of them. For the title quotation, see FA 23/1: 584. Meyer’s manuscript notes on works of art in Italy are held in the Bestand Heinrich Meyer at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Stiftung Weimarer Klassik und Kunstsammlungen, Weimar. I am grateful to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv for permission to quote from the following bundles: ‘Reiseaufzeichnungen aus Italien und von der Reise nach Italien’ (GSA 64/89), ‘Gallerien zu Florenz’ (GSA 64/91), and ‘Gemälde und Antiken in den Palästen Roms’ (GSA 64/94). 2. See a letter of October 1885 from van Gogh to his brother Theo, in which he says, inter alia: ‘That saying, “Ne pas peindre le ton local,” has a broad meaning, and it leaves the painter free to seek the colors which form a whole and harmonize’: The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh

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with reproductions of all the drawings in the correspondence, trans. by J. van Goch-Bonger and C. de Dood, rev. by C. de Dood, 3 vols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958), ii, 428. 3. See Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York: Abrams, 2002), pp. 10, 109, 114, 137. 4. Heinrich Wölff lin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. by M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1932), pp. 18–23, 50–53, 164–65; Arthur Pope, An Introduction to the Language of Drawing and Painting, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), ii, 71–93; Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1978), pp. ix–xiv and passim. On hue-painting, tonal painting, and their variants see also John Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro’; Linda Caron, ‘Choices Concerning Modes of Modeling During the High Renaissance and After’; Marcia B. Hall, ‘From Modeling Techniques to Color Modes’, in Hall, Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting: Italy and the North (Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1987); Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 14–23, 92–116, 199–217. 5. On the medieval love of colour, see Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. by Hugh Bredin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 25, 43–46. On Alberti, see Barasch, Light and Color, p. 32. 6. See Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour’, pp. 30, 40–41; Barasch, Light and Color, pp. 105–07. 7. Hall, Color and Meaning, pp. 94, 101–02; Janis C. Bell, ‘Light and Color in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus’, artibus et historiae, 31 (1995), 139–70 (pp. 87–89, 94–98). 8. On cangianti, see Hall, Color and Technique, pp. 15–20; Hall, Color and Meaning, pp. 20–22, 95–97, 106–09, 123–29; Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘Cangianti e cambiamenti nei colori di Michelangelo sulla volta della Cappella Sistina’, in Michelangelo. La Cappella Sistina. Docu­ mentazione e Interpretazioni, III. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Roma, marzo 1990, ed. by Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt (Novara: Istituto Geografico de Agostini, 1994), pp. 167–88. 9. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence: Sansoni, 1966–), i, 126; cf. Vasari on Technique, being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by Louisa S. Maclehose, ed. by G. Baldwin Brown (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), p. 219. For Armenini’s comment, ‘because with them it is easier to harmonize more draperies’, see Giovan Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura, ed. by Marina Gorreri (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), p. 162, and Giovanni Battista Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, ed. and trans. by Edward J. Olszewski (New York: B. Franklin, 1977), p. 210. 10. On up-down modelling, see Hall, Color and Technique, pp. 4–9. 11. On the approach to modelling that passed from Raphael via Annibale Carracci to the French Academy, see Barasch, Light and Color, pp. 30–31, 68, 165; Bell, ‘Color and Chiaroscuro’, pp. 89–90, 100–02; Janis Bell, ‘Bellori’s Analysis of Colore in Domenichino’s Last Communion of St. Jerome’, in Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome, ed. by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 257–77 (pp. 257–61, 269–71); Bernard Teyssèdre, Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1957), pp. 81–82, 128–29, 209, 267, 300, 303, 503; Jutta Held, Französische Kunsttheorie des 17. Jahrhunderts und der absolutistische Staat. Le Brun und die ersten acht Vorlesungen an der königlichen Akademie (Berlin: Reimer, 2001), pp. 83–84, 107–09, 180–81. 12. Quoted by Bernard Teyssèdre, ‘Peinture et musique. La Notion d’harmonie des couleurs au XVIIe siècle français’, in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes, Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte in Bonn 1964, 3 vols (Berlin: Mann, 1967), iii: Theorien und Probleme, pp. 206–14 (p. 210, notes 19 and 20). 13. On Leonardo’s colour harmony, see Shearman, ‘Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro’, pp. 18, 30–34, 38, 41; Barasch, Light and Color, pp. 73–76. 14. On Venetian painting, see Barasch, Light and Color, pp. 101–11; Hall, Color and Meaning, pp. 199–206. 15. Barasch, Light and Color, pp. 62–70.

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16. Philip Sohm, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, his Critics, and their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 8, 13–15, 38–43, 82–87. 17. Francesco Bocchi, Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza: Florence 1591, with a new introduction by John Shearman (Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), p. 230. Elsewhere Shearman notes ‘the logical transition from colour changes to broken colour’, which ‘can appear to be the description of the fall of light on a lively and uniformly coloured material’, see John Shearman, Andrea del Sarto, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), i, 135. 18. On ref lections in eighteenth-century theory, see Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 77, 79, 81, 97, 106–07, 110–11, 158, 166, 174, 178. 19. ‘Ce sont ces ref lets infinis des ombres et des corps qui engendrent l’harmonie sur votre bureau, où le travail et le génie ont jeté la brochure à côté du livre, le livre à côté du cornet, le cornet au milieu de cinquante objets disparates de nature, de forme et de couleur’: Denis Diderot, ‘Essais sur la peinture’, in Diderot, Œuvres esthétiques, ed. by Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1959), pp. 657–740 (p. 689). 20. For Goethe and Leonardo, see FA 15/1: 554 and 15/2: 1431–32; FA 25: 781–82, 1374. Letter of Meyer to Goethe, 21 December 1796, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Max Hecker, 4 vols (Weimar: Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1917–32), i, 402. 21. Diderot, ‘Essais sur la peinture’, p. 678. 22. Steffi Roettgen, Anton Raphael Mengs 1728–1779 and his British Patrons, exhib. cat., Kenwood House, London, 1993 (London: Zwemmer/English Heritage, 1993), p. 150. 23. Goethe was Aristotelian in his belief that colours formed a continuum between light and darkness, but saw the key to colour harmony in complementarity rather than the value relations that were central to tonalism. 24. See Ralph M. Evans, An Introduction to Color (New York: Wiley; London: Chapman & Hall, 1948), pp. 304–06. 25. John Mollon, ‘The Tricks of Colour’, in Images and Understanding: Thoughts about Images, Ideas about Understanding, ed. by Horace Barlow, Colin Blakemore and Miranda Weston-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 61–78 (pp. 72–74). 26. Letter of Goethe to Meyer, 8 February 1796: ‘Die Absonderung und Entgegenstellung der Farben ist ihm recht gut geraten, sogar die farbigen Schatten hat er, wiewohl etwas outriert, angebracht’ (FA 31: 168). 27. skierôi: ‘dem Dunklen, Schattenhaften’ (cf. FA 23/1: 1123). 28. Meyer usually preferred to Germanize the French expression couleurs changeantes, using phrases such as ‘Changeant bewirkt’ (592) or ‘changeante Gewänder’ (767). 29. For examples of this usage, see FA 23/1: 584, 592, 767, 768, 774. 30. Meyer wrote of the Tondo: ‘die Farben sind nicht harmonisch[,] von Widerscheinen ist keine Spur’ (‘Reiseaufzeichnungen aus Italien’, GSA 64/98). 31. See Nicolas Dorigny, Psyches et Amoris nuptiae fabula a Raphaele Sanctio Urbinate Romae in Farnesianis hortis Transtyberim ad veterum aemulationem ac laudem colorum luminibus expressa (Rome: de’ Rossi, 1693). The Farnesina frescoes themselves are excellently reproduced in La Villa Farnesina a Roma / The Villa Farnesina in Rome, ed. by Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Mirabilia Italiae, 12, 2 vols (Modena: Panini, 2003), ii: Atlante / Atlas, pp. 62–99. On the lapis lazuli ground, removed by the 1930 restoration of the Farnesina frescoes, see Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel, 1999), p. 190. 32. Hall, Color and Meaning, p. 105. 33. Jörg Traeger, ‘Goethes Vergötterung. Von der Kunstsammlung zum Dichterkult’, in Räume der Kunst. Blicke auf Goethes Sammlungen, ed. by Markus Bertsch and Johannes Grave (Göttingen: Van­den­hoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), pp. 172–215 (p. 185 and Fig. 11, p. 187); Gisela Maul and Mar­garete Oppel, Goethes Wohnhaus (Munich: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik bei Hanser, 1996), pp. 36–37. 34. FA 15/1: 147. The adjective heiter was frequently used by Meyer to describe chromatic harmony, see FA 23/1: 588, 593, 767, 768, 769, 779. 35. The painting had recently been cleaned when Goethe saw it. Some of the draperies, including the green dress of the servant at the left edge of the painting and the blue cloak of the queen

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mother have darkened over the centuries. See Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, ii: Venice, 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Co., 2008), pp. 383, 354. 36. The Dresden Gallery, first visited by Goethe in 1768 (FA 14: 350–51), contained ten major paintings by Veronese, including the version of The Wedding Feast at Cana painted for the Cuccina family. Works seen by Goethe during the first Italian journey included portraits in Verona (FA 15/1: 51, 651) and The Adoration of the Shepherds in Vicenza (FA 15/1: 668). He saw the Feasts in 1790. For The Wedding Feast at Cana, see Veneziansche Epigramme 36 (FA 1: 451) and FA 18: 606; for The Feast in the House of Levi, see Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrag der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, VI parts, 136 vols (in 146) (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1991), 3/2, pp. 11–12. For favourable comments on Veronese in later life, see FA 18: 420, 518, 606; Carl Ruland, ‘Mittheilungen aus dem Goethe-National-Museum: 2. Goethe und die Dresdener Gallerie’, in Goethe-Jahrbuch, 18 (1897), 104–07 (p. 107); conversation with Sulpiz Boisserée, 15 September 1815, in Goethes Gespräche, ed. by Flodoard Freiherr von Biedermann, 2nd edn, 5 vols (Leipzig: von Biedermann, 1909–11), ii, 338. 37. For a useful outline of Veronese’s life and work, see Diana Gisolfi, ‘Veronese [Caliari], Paolo’ in The Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner, 34 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xxxii, 346–58. 38. See David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 109–12. 39. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. by Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 157. 40. Joy Allen Thornton, ‘Renaissance Color Theory and Some Paintings by Veronese’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1979), pp. xviii, xx, xxiv–xxv, 150–51, 160–61, 211–12; Joy Thornton, ‘Paolo Veronese and the Choice of Colors for a Painting’, in Nuovi Studi su Paolo Veronese, ed. by Massimo Gemin (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1990), pp. 150, 152, 160: note 8, 162: note 37; Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Glückstadt: Augustin, 1977), pp. 21–25. 41. Ruskin’s observations are to be found in Modern Painters, Part 5: ‘Of Mountain Beauty’, Chapter III: ‘Of Turnerian Light’, first published in 1856. See John Ruskin, Modern Painters, ed. by David Barrie (London: Pilkington, 2000), pp. 440–48. 42. Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, p. 111. 43. See Thornton, ‘Paolo Veronese and the Choice of Colors’, p. 158. 44. The cleaning in 1989–92 by the Louvre of The Wedding Feast at Cana was much criticized for having distorted the colour relationships of the painting. See for example Étienne Trouvers, ‘Opinions et traces de la mémoire’ in Nuances. Bulletin d’information de l’Association pour le Respect de l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique, 3/4 (1994), 3–8 (pp. 6–7). 45. For a detail of this figure, see Jean Habert, ‘La Commande et la Réalisation’, in Les Noces de Cana de Veronèse: Une œuvre et sa restauration, ed. by Jean Habert and Nathalie Volle, exhib. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1992–93 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992), pp. 33–78 (p. 65). On Veronese’s cangiante effects, see Thornton, ‘Renaissance Color Theory’, pp. 150–51, 227, 230–34, 261; Hans Dieter Huber, Paolo Veronese. Kunst als soziales System (Munich: Fink, 2005), pp. 255–56. 46. The sketch was sold in 1834 to an anonymous buyer (FA 18: 1222). Its present whereabouts are uncertain. 47. Letters of Meyer to Goethe, 29 July and 7 October 1796: Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 303, 352. 48. See also Meyer’s essay, ‘Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit von Seiten der Kunst betrachtet’, in C. A. Böttiger, ‘Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit’. Eine archäologische Ausdeutung (Dresden: Walther, 1810), pp. 173–206 (p. 187–89). Here Meyer contrasts modern painters’ ‘Rundung, mit breit angelegten Halbschatten und allmähligen Übergängen’ with the ancients, who ‘ließen [...] lieber Flächen erscheinen’ (p. 189). Meyer’s essay is reprinted in Heinrich Meyer, Kleine Schriften zur Kunst, ed. by Paul Weizsäcker (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1886), pp. 145–66. 49. The Aldobrandini Wedding is well reproduced in Leonard von Matt, Die Kunstsammlungen der Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rom (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1969), pp. 19–28, and also in

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Gigetta Dalli Regoli et al., Great Museums of the World: Vatican Museums, Rome, ed. by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (London: Hamlyn, 1969), pp. 40–43. 50. Maul and Oppel, Goethes Wohnhaus, p. 101. 51. Letter of 5 April 1789, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 32–33. 52. See also Meyer, ‘Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit von Seiten der Kunst betrachtet’, in Böttiger, ‘Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit’, pp. 183–84, 192–97, 200–01. 53. Letter of 5 April 1789, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 32. 54. Letter of 8 January 1796, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 175. 55. Meyer, ‘Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit von Seiten der Kunst betrachtet’, in Böttiger, ‘Die Aldo­ brandinische Hochzeit’, pp. 186, 183, 200–01. 56. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Schriften und Nachlaß, iv/1. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, Text, ed. by Adolf H. Borbein et al. (Mainz: von Zabern, 2002), pp. 370–73. 57. Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Le Voyage d’Italie (1758), ed. by Christian Michel (Rome: École Fran­ çaise de Rome, 1991), pp. 34, 182. 58. Johann Heinrich Merck, ‘Über die Mahlerey der Alten’, in Der Teutsche Merkur, February 1782, pp. 138–44 (p. 144). 59. Meyer’s letter to Goethe of 5 April 1789, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 33. 60. Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte, Tomo Primo, ed. by Ottavio Antonio Bayardi and Pasquale Carcani (Naples: Regia Stamperia, 1757), p. 275. For a reference to cangiante colouring, see for example pp. 152–53: ‘Il panno, che cuopre la spalliera della sedia, e gli appogiatoi, è di color verde cangiante.’ 61. Paillot de Montabert, Traité complet de la peinture, 9 vols (Paris: Bossange, 1829), ii, 247; vii, 494; vi, 538. The term harmogê was used by the elder Pliny in the context of Greek painting. It was understood by Winckelmann and Meyer to signify gentle — that is, harmonious — transitions in modelling between local colour in the mid-tones and neighbouring darks and lights, see above, Chapter 5. 62. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (London: Paladin, 1970), pp. 121–22. 63. Wolfgang Helbig, Wandgemälde der vom Vesuv verschütteten Städte Campaniens (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1868). See for example Helbig’s descriptions of cat. nos 7, 102, 114, 137, 206, 263, 358, 487, 501, 795, 875, 877b, 890, 926, 941, 955, 988. 64. Ernst Pfuhl, Malerei und Zeichnung der Griechen, 3 vols (Munich: Bruckmann, 1923), ii, 623. For versicolor, see Brandt, ‘Cangianti e cambiamenti’, p. 167. 65. Mabel M. Gabriel, Masters of Campanian Painting (New York: Bittner, 1952), p. 52. (Gabriel’s attributions of paintings to different ‘masters’ have not been accepted.) 66. Letter of 5 April 1789, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 32. 67. For Goethe on harmony as the most important aspect of Kolorit, see FA 18: 590. 68. On Pietro da Cortona, see Giuliano Briganti, Pietro da Cortona o della Pittura Barocca (Florence: Sansoni, 1962); Jörg Martin Merz, Pietro da Cortona. Der Aufstieg zum führenden Maler im barocken Rom (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1991). For a fuller discussion of Goethe’s and Meyer’s interest in Pietro, see above, Chapter 5. 69. Meyer’s detailed comments on the Barberini ceiling are taken from the bundle Gemälde und Antiken in den Palästen Roms (GSA 64/94), and on the Pitti Palace frescoes from the bundle ‘Gallerien zu Florenz’ (GSA 64/91), which contains twenty-five pages of notes on them. For colour reproductions of the Barberini ceiling, see Giuseppina Magnanimi, Palazzo Barberini, plates III–IX; Steffi Roettgen, Italian Frescoes: The Baroque Era, 1600–1800 (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 2007), pp. 148–55. For colour reproductions of some of the frescoes at the Pitti Palace, see Palazzo Pitti. L’arte e la storia, ed. by Marco Chiarini (Florence: Nardini, 2003), pp. 105–21. Malcolm Campbell, Pietro da Cortona at the Pitti Palace: A Study of the Planetary Rooms and Related Projects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), contains black and white illustrations of the lunettes in the Sala d’Apollo (Figs. 66–69). 70. A letter of Meyer to Goethe of 12 December 1795, says that Pietro ‘gibt sich viel mit changeanten Gewändern ab’ (see Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 159–60), but Meyer seems rapidly to have revised this somewhat disparaging view. 71. Letter to Goethe of 20 August, 1796, in Briefwechsel Goethes mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 321–22. Meyer knew that the Apollo Room frescoes had been completed by Pietro’s pupil Ciro Ferri. On the

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lunettes and the part played by Ferri, who was ‘closely supervised by Cortona’, see Campbell, Pietro da Cortona at the Pitti Palace, pp. 113–20. 72. ‘Sono incredibili i cangiantismi e i trapassi di colore dall’azzuro al rosa al violetto, dal verde acqua al giallo nella veste della figura a sinistra dello stemma’: Lorenza Mochi Onori, ‘La piccola galleria e il grande salone di Pietro da Cortona in Palazzo Barberini’, in Pietro da Cortona, 1597–1669, ed. Anna Lo Bianco (Milan: Electa, 1997), p. 49. 73. Letter of Meyer to Goethe, 8 January, 1796, in Briefwechsel Goethes mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 175. 74. See above, Chapter 6. On the details of Schick’s life, see especially Karl Simon, Gottlieb Schick. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Malerei um 1800 (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1914), and Gottlieb Schick: Ein Maler des Klassizismus, ed. by Gauß and von Holst. 75. Letter to J. H. Dannecker, 7 April 1804, cited in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, p. 85. 76. For colour reproductions of the two paintings, in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, see Schwäbischer Klassizismus zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit, 1770–1830. Katalog (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1993), ed. by von Holst, pp. 333 (Noahs Dankopfer) and 359 (Apoll unter den Hirten). 77. August Wilhelm-Schlegel, ‘Artistische und literarische Nachrichten aus Rom. Im Frühjahr 1805. An Hn. Geh. Rath von Goethe’, in Intelligenzblatt der Jenaischen Allgemeinen LiteraturZeitung, 120 and 121, 23 and 28 October 1805, col. 1001–24 (col. 1015). The passage on Schick is reprinted in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 178–79. 78. For an attack on Schick’s cangianti, see the review of Noahs Dankopfer in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, no. 176, 24 July 1807, reprinted in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 183–84. 79. [Ernst Zacharias Platner], ‘Kunst-Nachricht aus Rom’, in Intelligenzblatt der Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, 9 and 10, 1 and 4 February 1809, cols 65–76 (col. 73). Parts of this review and of Platner’s obituary article in Friedrich Schlegel’s Deutsches Museum are reprinted in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 190–93, 201–11. 80. Cf. Birgit Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung und Farbenlehre in der deutschen Malerei um 1800 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1982), p. 22. 81. Henri Focillon, La Peinture au XIXe siècle. Le retour à l’Antique, le Romantisme (Paris: Renouard, 1927), p. 228. 82. Rehfus-Dechêne, Farbengebung, pp. 23–24, 26, 44, 48–49, 72–73, 83–85, 96, 99, 100–01; Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 185–87; Michael Thimann, ‘Kinder Apolls, Söhne Mariens. Positionen deutscher Malerei zwischen Klassik und Romantik’, in Klassik und Romantik, Geschichte der Kunst in Deutschland, 6, ed. by Andreas Beyer (Munich: Prestel and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag: 2006), pp. 351–71 (p. 363). 83. On colour in Romantic painting, see Thimann, ‘Kinder Apolls’, pp. 364–66. 84. See the remarks on Schick’s painting Christus erblickt im Traum das Kreuz (1810), in Gottlieb Schick, ed. by Gauß and von Holst, pp. 164–68. 85. Robert E. McVaugh, ‘Nazarenes’, in The Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xxii, 703–04 (p. 704). On Platner, see also F. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, ‘Ernst Zacharias Platner’, in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, ed. by the Historische Kommission bei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, München, 56 vols (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1875–1912), xxvi (1888), p. 260. 86. Ernst Platner et al., Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, 2 vols (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta, 1830–32), i, 496, 538–39. 87. See for example Platner et al., Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, i, 550–51, where Pietro is condemned for inaugurating an era of superficial appeal to the senses, with work akin to theatre décor. 88. For a similar contemporary view on Nazarene colour, see Thimann, ‘Kinder Apolls’, p. 366.

Chapter 8

v

An Alternative Antiquity? Ornament in Goethe, Meyer and Giulio Romano Both Goethe and his artistic mentor, Johann Heinrich Meyer, were introduced as students to the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann by their respective drawing masters, and Goethe’s hoped-for meeting with the great art historian was only thwarted by the latter’s violent death in 1768. As late as 1805 Goethe acknowledged his intellectual and cultural debt to this by now somewhat outdated authority in the memorial essay Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert,1 and around the same time, Meyer paid his own tribute in the form of a copiously annotated, three-volume edition of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums.2 Despite the wide range of his inf luence as a passionate advocate of classical Greek art, Winckelmann was particularly significant for his erotically charged descriptions of four of the Belvedere sculptures — the Apollo, the Torso, the Antinous and the Laocoön — with which he initiated the cult of the solo work of art. Thanks to Winckelmann, great art became identified with the concept of the single statue capable of displaying the perfection of the highest phenomenon in nature, the undraped human form, and thus exercising the civilizing function of inspiring the viewer to realize the whole of his or her human potential.3 Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert paid its respects to this doctrine, which also greatly affected many leading figures of Goethe’s time, including Mendelssohn, Herder, Sulzer and Schiller.4 Indeed its inf luence was still to be seen in twentieth-century modernism, with its continuing belief in the isolated object as the highest form of art. As Clement Greenberg wrote, in Kantian vein, ‘solo works of art are meant to be looked at for their own sake and with full attention, and not as the adjuncts, incidental aspects, or settings of things other than themselves. These abstract pictures and pieces of sculpture challenge our capacity for disinterested contemplation in a way that is more concentrated and, I dare say, more conscious than anything else I know of in art.’5 Meyer’s ‘Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst’ spelled out the theory of the single figure, for example, that of the god in human form: ‘In symbolischen Figuren der Gottheiten oder ihrer Eigenschaften, bearbeitet die bildende Kunst ihre höchsten Gegenstände, gebietet selbst Ideen oder Begriffen uns sinnlich zu erscheinen’.6 And Goethe expressed his Winckelmannian convictions in the Italienische Reise:

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An Alternative Antiquity? Umgeben von antiken Statuen empfindet man sich in einem bewegten Naturleben, man wird die Mannichfaltigkeit der Menschengestaltung gewahr und durchaus auf den Menschen in seinem reinsten Zustande zurückgeführt, wodurch denn der Beschauer selbt lebendig und rein menschlich wird. [...] Wenn man des Morgens die Augen aufschlägt, fühlt man sich von dem Vortreff lichsten gerührt; alles unser Denken und Sinnen ist von solchen Gestalten begleitet, und es wird dadurch unmöglich in Barbarei zurückzufallen. (FA 15/1: 586)

Throughout his life, Goethe continued to assert the supreme importance of sculpture as representing ideal human beauty. In a draft written in 1817 for Über Kunst und Altertum he maintains: Der Hauptzweck aller Plastik, welches Wortes wir uns künftighin zu Ehren der Griechen bedienen, ist, daß die Würde des Menschen innerhalb der mensch­ lichen Gestalt dargestellt werde. Daher ist alles außer dem Menschen zwar nicht fremd, aber doch nur ein Nebenwerk, welches erst der Würde des Menschen angenähert werden muß, damit sie derselbigen diene, ihr nicht etwa in den Weg trete. (FA 20: 566)7

However Goethe was very broadly receptive to art and ideas about art, as was the allegedly narrow-minded Meyer,8 and during their Italian journeys both men took a strong interest in art as decoration, which has often been considered an opposite impulse to the fidelity to nature embodied in the single statue. Following a hint from Goethe himself (FA 20: 76), Ernst Gombrich argues that medieval achievements in decoration had been undermined by ‘the very progress of naturalism’: ‘it becomes more difficult, if not impossible, to preserve the balance of a perfect pattern when you concentrate on the imitation of three-dimensional space, on naturalistic light and lively movement.’9 Hellmut Wohl, discussing ornateness as a principle of style, defines it as ‘grace, refinement, sophistication, opulence, polish, and idealization away from the natural or the imitation of nature’. ‘It was at the beginning of the fifteenth century’, he suggests, ‘that the principle of ornateness in painting encountered the rise of the potentially incompatible phenomenon of realism and of the quest for visual truth to nature.’10 Decoration or ornateness raises the issue of what Nagel and Wood call the ‘total context of the built space’. The single, figurative statue is a precious movable object for which the built space’s four walls act as a mere container. Decorative artwork, such as fresco or mosaic, acts by contrast as ornamentation for the container itself.11 But there is a sense in which the very statue forms part of the decoration of the space in which it stands. As Gadamer writes, ‘Noch das freie Standbild auf dem Podest ist dem dekorativen Zusammenhang nicht wahrhaft entzogen, sondern dient der repräsentativen Erhöhung eines Lebenszusammenhanges, dem es sich schmückend einordnet.’12 For all their Winckelmannian reverence for the single statue, Goethe and Meyer were responsive to the ‘total context of the built space’, and their sense of antiquity in particular was strongly inf luenced by their awareness of decoration. What might be thought of as mere decoration was as significant for their understanding of art in antiquity as was the Apollo Belvedere. Recent developments in art history emphasize the importance of this point. Sabine Schneider identifies a late eighteenth-century crisis of iconography caused

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by the loss of art’s representative functions in church and state, a crisis which left practitioners uncertain as to their choice of subject matter, and even threatened with the dissolution of their concrete world of objects, eventualities which, as she points out, Goethe and Meyer addressed in the Einleitung in die Propyläen, Der Sammler und die Seinigen and Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst.13 Decoration offered to fill this artistic and even existential void, especially after the rediscovery of ancient ornament in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Helmut Pfotenhauer describes the way in which these examples of actual classical ornament challenged eighteenth-century German classicism: ‘Schrittweise erfolgt [...] die Infragestellung klassizistischer Normen: der des Ideals der vergöttlichten Menschengestalt als Zentrum der Kunst, der der Nachahmung der Natur und der stilisierenden Auswahl in ihr, der des Höheren und Bedeutenden der Kunst’. Ornament takes classicism beyond itself, ‘hin zum Nicht-Mimetischen und Nicht-Bedeutenden, zum Idealisierungsverzicht, zur Preisgabe der Gegenstandshierarchie und zu einem Begriff autonomer Kunst’. The text that Pfotenhauer identifies as the key to this development is K. P. Moritz’s ‘Vorbegriffe zu einer Theorie der Ornamente’, published in 1793.14 A short piece entitled ‘Von Arabesken’ that Goethe published in Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur in 1789 (FA 18: 230–34) is often cited as evidence of his lack of enthusiasm for ornament, at least by comparison with Moritz.15 But ‘Von Arabesken’ is not hostile to its subject matter, which Goethe defines as ‘eine willkürliche und geschmackvolle malerische Zusammenstellung der mannigfaltigsten Gegenstände, um die innern Wände eines Gebäudes zu verzieren’. He draws a clear distinction between high art and arabesque, but finds a rightful place for the latter: ‘Wenn wir diese Art Malerei, mit der Kunst im höhern Sinne vergleichen, so mag sie wohl tadelnswert sein und uns geringschätzig vorkommen, allein wenn wir billig sind, so werden wir derselben gern ihren Platz anweisen und gönnen’. He then enters engagingly into the mind of the average Pompeian householder, working to a budget, who buys a small mythological painting, the only ‘high’ art he can afford, for the centre of each wall, which he covers with a wash of a single colour, and then decorates with an arabesque border of ‘Stäbgen, Schnirkel, Bänder, aus denen hie und da eine Blume oder sonst ein lebendiges Wesen hervorblickt’ (FA 18: 230). The epithets Goethe chooses to describe such arabesques are all indicative of the brightness and cheerfulness he valued so much in the art of antiquity: ‘gefällig’, ‘unterhaltend’, ‘angenehm’, ‘freundlich’, ‘fröhlich’, ‘leicht’, ‘bunt’. For the unfavourable comparison that Goethe makes between the arabesques of Raphael’s school in the Vatican Logge and those of the ancients does not imply any general hostility to arabesque. The Logge examples are indeed as he says ‘schon in einem andern Sinne’ (FA 18: 233): often far more formal, elaborate and cumbersome compositions of fruit and f lower. What ‘Von Arabesken’ shows is Goethe’s long admiration for the lighter, more open style of scrollwork in Pompeii or the Domus Aurea of Nero in Rome (FA 18: 233). Given his liking for this, it is hardly surprising that arabesques played their part when he came to imagine a fictional setting that was to express ‘die reinste Heiterkeit’. The ‘Saal der Vergangenheit’ in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is, we are told, decorated with ‘heitere und bedeutende Gestalten, in Feldern von verschiedener Größe’, set between ‘heitern und mannigfaltigen

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Einfassungen, Kränzen und Zierraten’ (FA 9: 920). Perhaps there is a hint of Pompeii here, beyond the forbidding sphinxes at the door. But Goethe’s early interest in ornament was not confined to painted arabesques. In Verona on 16 September 1786 he visited the Museo Maffeiano, where he had his first sight of actual Greek workmanship, albeit late examples, and could contrast Greek with Christian funerary monuments.16 But he also noted: ‘Ein sehr reich verzierter marmorner Pfeiler, gab mir auch neue Begriffe’ (FA 15/1: 47). In addition, he singled out ‘Ein ganz treff licher Dreifuß von weißem Marmor, worauf Genien die sich mit den Attributen der Götter beschäftigen. Raphael hat dergleichen in den Zwickeln der Farnesine nachgeahmt und verklärt’ (FA 15/1: 46). This piece, which is no longer in the Maffeiano, having been plundered by the French,17 is typical of early imperial Roman work. It is the triangular base or part of the base of a candelabrum similar to some of those represented by G. B. Piranesi in his Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi, Sarcofagi, Tripodi, Lucerne, ed Ornamenti Antichi (1778), or reconstructed by him from antique fragments for sale.18 The putti on the three faces are robust little creatures with swirling cloaks hanging from their shoulders, and the remaining decoration is correspondingly lavish in the Roman manner defended so strongly by Piranesi against Winckelmann’s assertions of Greek superiority. The three corners at the base rest on sphinxes linked by bands of plant scroll punctuated with roses and topped by stylized honeysuckle; the corners at the top are finished with rams’ heads linked by bands of alternating lotus and honeysuckle. This heavily Roman object met not only with Goethe’s approval but that of Meyer, who took a professional interest in such things. As professor at the Freies Zeichen-Institut in Weimar from late 1795, he needed engravings that his pupils could copy for drawing practice, and turned to the publications of Piranesi, noting that ‘Diese Werke umfassen beinahe alles, was der gute Geschmack, im Fache der Zierrathen, hervorgebracht hat’,19 an unexpected judgment from a supposed Winckelmannian and orthodox classicist. Yet by far the best evidence for Goethe’s and Meyer’s early approval of ornament is their interest in Giulio Romano’s work at Federico Gonzaga’s summer retreat, the Palazzo Tè in Mantua, built between 1525 and 1533. Meyer’s essay ‘Mantua im Jahre 1795’, published in Die Propyläen in 1800, is a remarkable production for so close an associate of Goethe’s, especially during the latter’s classicizing decade of 1795 to 1805. Amedeo Belluzzi, in his definitive and exhaustively illustrated account of the Palazzo, registers his surprise that a follower of Winckelmann and Mengs such as Meyer should pen this ‘appassionata esegesi’ of the Tè.20 For there is practically nothing about the Palazzo that corresponds with the Winckelmannian equation of antiquity with classical Greek sculpture. Giulio was a decorator par excellence, and the Te is a prime example of the ornateness which Wohl has called ‘the first principle of Italian Renaissance style’.21 Where there is painted decoration, it extends over the whole area of walls and ceilings, sometimes taking the form of large-scale frescoes, sometimes divided into smaller, intricately shaped fields filled with individual small motifs, and always unified by more or less elaborate arabesque borders. As Battisti has said, this is ‘antico come fasto, pompà, festosità’.22 The arabesques are obviously products of pure fantasia, but the

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mythologies are all of a piece, obeying the logic of the imagination rather than the more naturalistic aesthetic of contemporary religious or historical painting.23 The figures owe little of their inspiration to canonical Greek fifth- and fourthcentury statuary, and little even to later sarcophagus reliefs. Instead Giulio turned in particular to the minor arts of the Hellenic and imperial Roman periods for objects such as terracotta plaques, Arretine bowls, gems and cameos that could provide him with novel and startling motifs on which he could work out his own variations.24 Much in this Late Antique aesthetic is, as Leonard Barkan has said, ‘decadent, exotic, playful, self-parodic, antiheroic, fin de siècle, hermetic’.25 In a decorative programme chief ly inspired by Ovid, we see not only the perfect human physique, but many a changed and warped body.26 Here are beautiful adult humans, but also children as well as myriad satyrs, centaurs and other hybrids besides all manner of land animals and sea creatures. To add to the decorative effect of all this variety, the figures’ poses are frequently contrived to achieve visual patterning: narrative and referentiality give way to art and artifice.27 The origins of the ideas expressed in ‘Mantua im Jahre 1795’ can probably be traced back to 1788, when Goethe visited the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan and saw a drawing, which he took to be by Giulio Romano, of a family eating at a table.28 It was probably a studio copy of an original by Giulio, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, prepared for a fresco in the Loggia della Grotta at the Te. The drawing depicts a strange scene.29 A subdued-looking family sits eating from bowls while on the right a child is nursed at its mother’s breast while she turns towards and is gazed at by a winged genius with its arms around a tall candlestick. The Budapest Museum suggests that this semi-allegorical drawing represents the story of Alcestis, but Goethe took it as a scene from life, and it, along with com­ panion pieces in the Loggia, may possibly have eventually inspired sequences like the stations of life in the ‘Saal der Vergangenheit’, or those that Meyer painted in the refurbished Schloss in Weimar. In May 1790, Goethe visited the Palazzo Te with Anna Amalia who had joined him in Venice before proceeding via Verona to Mantua. Meyer, who had been accompanying her homeward journey, fell ill and departed for Switzerland before the trip to Mantua, so that he and Goethe never saw the palace together.30 Goethe spent two days in the town, and noted: ‘Interessante Bekanntschaft mit den Man­ tuanischen Kunstwerken’ (FA 14: 895).31 In the absence of Meyer, he relied for artistic advice and assistance on Friedrich Bury, a painter he had met in Rome. While the two were in Mantua, Goethe commissioned Bury to make copies of various of the paintings in the Tè, and eight such copies are now preserved in Weimar: (1) ‘Schlafender Pan mit Putto’, a copy of ‘Polifemo’, from the Camera delle Aquile, west lunette;32 (2) ‘Hera auf ihrem Pfauenwagen’, a copy of ‘Giunone’, from the ceiling of the Camera dei Venti;33 (3) ‘Ganymed auf dem Thron des Zeus sitzend’, a copy of ‘Amorino sul trono di Giove’, from the Camera delle Aquile, south lunette;34 (4) ‘Ruhende Feldarbeiter’, a copy of ‘Il riposo dei contadini’, from the Appartamento del Giardino Segreto, Loggia, west wall;35

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(5) ‘Amphitrite auf einem Muschelwagen fahrend’, a copy of ‘Il carro marino di Venere’, from the Camera delle Aquile, ceiling, east lunette;36 (6) ‘Satyr und Nymphe’, a copy of ‘Satiro e ninfa’, from the Appartamento del Giardino Segreto, Loggia, south wall;37 (7) ‘Bacchus und Ariadne’, a copy of ‘Bacco e Arianna sul carro’, from the Appartamento del Giardino Segreto, Loggia, west wall;38 (8) ‘Satyr und Nymphe, Juni 1790’, a copy of ‘Psiche addormentata’, from the vault of the Camera di Psiche.39 About a week after Goethe had left Mantua, Bury was able to report that he had already made good progress with Bacchus and Ariadne.40 These eight items comprise a miniature conspectus of the decorative motifs that best characterize Giulio’s distinctive approach to antiquity. Not one of the pieces represents a single, undraped human figure in a canonical pose; it would in fact be difficult to find such in the Tè. Apart from ‘Ruhende Feldarbeiter’, all the subjects are mythological, and all the pieces without exception offer some combination of human, hybrid and animal figures. Juno has her peacocks and Amphitrite her dolphins, Bacchus and Ariadne’s chariot is drawn by panthers, even the sleeping peasants lie down with their cattle. The cyclops Polyphemus with his Pan pipes and club is accompanied by one winged putto, while a second bestrides one of Amphitrite’s dolphins, and a third stands on Jupiter’s empty throne holding his thunderbolt and accompanied by his eagle. The nymph wards off a cloven-hoofed satyr, while Psyche sleeps oblivious of another. The putto on Zeus’s throne is not Ganymede: he is far too much of a child for that. He does however strikingly illustrate the Late Antique aesthetic on which Giulio so often drew. Children were uncanonical figures, but boys especially — sometimes called amorini, amoretti, cherubs or erotes, although they belong to no specific mythological categories, and probably suggest nothing more specific than the universal power of love — came to be represented in innumerable instances in all of the arts, usually ‘sleeping, cavorting, in an amorous situation, or in the company of small animals’. According to Barkan, these Late Antique works ‘hover between narrative and decoration, between mock-heroic and domestic naturalism’, while the putti disporting themselves on and around the empty thrones of the Olympians provide ‘Hellenistic parodies of the gods’ awful majesty’.41 Still more typical of Giulio’s aesthetic is the Bacchus and Ariadne that Goethe chose to have copied. For the figure of Ariadne, in a pose so common in Giulio’s work as to amount almost to a signature, derives from the so-called Bed of Polyclitus, a Roman marble relief after Hellenistic figure types, preserved in the Palazzo Maffei in Rome.42 The relief shows a male figure reclining on a bed with head, torso and arms uncovered while a female figure, naked and with her back to the viewer, leans across him to lift the cover further. The traditional attribution of the piece is laughable, for the fifth-century Polyclitus was responsible for the Doryphoros statue, which established itself as the canon for the proportions of the human body in art. It is unthinkable that he should have produced anything as uncanonical as the Bed, where the female figure sits with her slightly spread legs and feet pointing leftwards, while her upper body turns so that her face looks and her arms and hands

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point towards the right. The pose may not be anatomically impossible, but is at the least highly contrived. Here, Barkan suggests, ‘the body is becoming an abstract form [...] its position is being directed by the demands of geometric pattern’.43 With his liking for such extreme sinuosity, Giulio was moving away from narrative and referentiality in the direction of pure artifice. In any event Bury’s copies will have given Meyer some idea of what to expect when he eventually visited the Palazzo Tè himself at the beginning of November, 1795. The visit was well timed. When the Gonzaga line died out in 1707, the duchy of Mantua was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire and the ducal buildings became crown property used for a variety of purposes. When the Accademia Virgiliana acquired the Tè in 1775, it began a project of restoration which lasted until 1796 and was therefore practically complete when Meyer arrived.44 A guide to the paintings had been issued in 1783 under the name of Giovanni Bottani, and incorporating a plan: Descrizione storica delle pitture del Regio-Ducale Palazzo del Te.45 Immediately attracted to Giulio’s eclectic approach to antiquity, Meyer wrote to Goethe: ‘Die Zierlichkeit und die Eleganz des Alterthums herrscht so durchgängig in allem, daß es nicht genug zu loben ist.’ The paintings were, he said, ‘mit solcher Freyheit und echt poetischem Geist gedacht, der mich in die größte Verwunderung gesetzt und unendliches Vergnügen verursacht hat’. Unimpressed by Bottani’s guide, he proposed to write a comprehensive account of Giulio’s work: Weil keine ordentliche Beschreibung davon zu finden ist, so habe ich mir hingegen die Mühe gegeben, alles genau aufzuschreiben, und kann nun vollständigere Nachricht davon geben als irgend einer. Der gute Julius Roman hat sich verschiedene Mahl recht sauer werden lassen, einen Sinn und Folge in seine Sachen zu legen, und wird bisher nicht oder doch unrecht verstanden. Bey meiner Ankunft in Rom will ich es mir zum ersten Geschäft machen, diese Noten ins Reine zu bringen und Ihnen zuzusenden.46

From the time of his visit, therefore, Meyer left no doubt of his enthusiasm for Giulio’s version of antiquity. Indeed a letter he wrote to Goethe on 25 February 1796 provides an almost comic sidelight on how far removed he was from the purist Graecism of some of his contemporaries: he had had to bite back praise for Giulio so as not to seem unfashionable among proponents of the latest Egyptian and doric tastes.47 Meyer published his revision of Bottani in 1800. The work displayed what Gombrich, in his introduction to the catalogue of the Giulio Romano exhibition in Mantua in 1989, calls Meyer’s ‘esteso saggio sulle opere d’arte di Mantova’, which ‘meriterebbe maggiore attenzione’: ‘l’autore discute dettagliatamente l’architettura del palazzo del Tè, coi suoi giochi e capricci, ed esamina da critico tutte le sale, dando buoni e cattivi voti alle singole opere’.48 Belluzzi is as positive about Meyer’s ‘appassionata esegesi’: ‘Il maggiore contributo conoscitivo di Meyer’, he writes, ‘consiste in una sapiente lettura iconografica, estesa a camere e scene fino a quel momento trascurate. Ne risulta un vero e proprio catalogo ragionato’.49 But in fact Meyer attempted an assessment of Giulio’s characteristic form of artistry as well as a room-by-room account of the Te. At the outset he pictures the Te as a magic circle presided over by Giulio’s benevolent spirit: ‘Selbst das sonderbare, die

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genialischen Freyheiten, welche er sich hier und da kühn genug herausgenommen, stechen nie grell ab, sondern verschmelzen wieder in dem allgemeinen Ton, der, alles mildernd und verbindend, über dem Ganzen schwebt’.50 In the Camera di Psiche Meyer likewise comments on Giulio’s inventiveness, his ‘unerschöpf lichen Reichthum kühner Gedanken’.51 In the palace as a whole ‘begleitet ihn überall sein Hang zum Auffallenden, poetisch Glänzenden’, so much so that he is carried away by the force of his own imagination: ‘hinüber und herüber reißt ihn der gewaltige Strom seiner glühenden Fantasie, welchen er nicht zu dämmen, nicht in Schranken zu halten vermag’.52 Such considerations lead Meyer to his final analysis, in which he suggests that Giulio is an ideal example of the ‘Skizzist’, a category Goethe had introduced in Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1799) as part of an attempt to differentiate modern artists. As formulated in Der Sammler, ‘Skizzist’ seems a fairly negative category: ‘Skizzisten nennt man aber diejenigen mit Recht, welche ihr Talent nicht weiter als zu Entwürfen ausbilden und also nie das Ende der Kunst, die Ausführung, erreichen’ (FA 18: 698). But a letter of Goethe’s to Schiller better explains how an admired figure like Giulio can belong to it: Alle neuern Künstler gehören in die Klasse des Unvollkommenen, und fallen also mehr oder weniger in die getrennten Rubriken. So hat Meyer erst gestern, zu seiner größten Zufriedenheit, entdeckt daß Julius Roman zu den Skizzisten gehört. Meyer konnte mit dem Charakter dieses Künstlers, bei großen Studien über denselben, nicht fertig werden, nunmehr glaubt er aber daß durch diese Enunziation das ganze Rätsel gelöst sei; wenn man nun den Michel Angelo zum Phantasmisten, den Correggio zum Undulisten, den Raphael zum Charakteristiker macht; so erhalten diese Rubriken eine ungeheure Tiefe, indem man diese außerordentlichen Menschen in ihrer Beschränktheit betrachtet und sie doch als Könige, oder hohe Repräsentanten ganzer Gattungen, aufstellet. (FA 31: 690)

What Meyer wanted to emphasize above all was Giulio’s abundant imagination, which sometimes outran his powers of execution. Vasari had meant much the same when he said Giulio expressed his ideas better in drawings than paintings because he would make a spirited drawing in an hour but spend months or years on the painting.53 But, as the categories from Der Sammler show, Goethe and Meyer also wanted to identify Giulio as a virtuoso modern exponent of the resources of Late Antiquity, not a mere imitator of his master Raphael. And it is antiquity that is uppermost in Meyer’s mind on his tour of the Te. He finds the Camera dei Giganti, Giulio’s controversial illusionistic representation of the terror of the Olympians, to be one of the best things produced by modern art.54 In the Camera di Psiche, however, he barely mentions the paintings in the vault, which are done in oils, a medium not used by ancient artists, but concentrates on the frescoes, singling out the figures he considers the most successful.55 These include several that have been shown to derive, with modifications, from antique models of various sorts: Bacchus from a statue, Silenus from a carving on a sarcophagus, a seated muse from the Gemma Augustea, and Cupid and Psyche themselves from vase paintings.56 Silenus was the best-executed figure in the whole fresco, Meyer said, but then claimed, somewhat surprisingly at first sight, that ‘die reizendste’ was ‘ein Weib im Mittelgrunde, welches einen Korb mit jungen Tauben am Arm

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und über die Schulter einen Stock trägt, daran ein Haase, eine Gans, ein Reh und ein Stachelschweinchen hängen; neben ihr her läuft ein Hund’. This woman was, Meyer wrote, ‘ganz im Sinn der Antike gezeichnet, ein Muster von freyer Bewegung, Geschmack und Zierlichkeit in Gestalt und Anzug’.57 The modern art historian Konrad Oberhuber shares Meyer’s enthusiasm for the understated figure: ‘la donna che porta la selvaggina, creata con poche macchie di colore’ is, he says, undoubtedly the work of Giulio himself, not one of his pupils.58 Giulio’s source for her seems to have been a pair of architectural terracotta plaques showing figures of the Seasons: he has rotated the figure of Winter and blended her dress and attributes with those of Autumn.59 Elsewhere in the Te, Meyer found himself drawn to the same things that Goethe and Bury had admired. Three of Bury’s copies were made from the small mythological motifs in the niches of the Camera delle Aquile, with which, as Oberhuber says, we find ourselves ‘nell’ambito della gioiosa libertà: nella fantasia delle grottesche che non richiedono una compiutezza iconografica’.60 Meyer comments: ‘die Manier ist kräftig, fast in allen reizt der schöne Gedanke, das scherzhaft poetische’. Unlike Bottani, who merely mentions ‘alcune graziose favolette ed allusioni cavate dai pensieri di Giulio,61 Meyer listed several of them, including ‘Amor auf Jupiters Thron mit dem Donnerkeil in der Hand’,62 a selection noticed by Belluzzi, who writes: ‘Le lunette affascinano Meyer, che elenca le storie preferite’.63 Meyer also particularly admired the decoration of the Loggia del Giardino Segreto. The little Bacchic medallions, two of which, the Bacchus and Ariadne on their panther chariot and the Nymph and Satyr, were copied by Bury, are ‘scherzhaft gedacht, leicht und munter, überdem vortreff lich angeordnet’.64 The scenes from human life on the ceiling of the Loggia, including the Family Meal that formed Goethe’s first introduction to the Palazzo Tè, and the sleeping peasants copied by Bury, have received exceptional acclaim from modern Giulio scholars. Hartt calls the Loggia ‘one of Giulio’s most rewarding ventures into Lilliput’, and the nine rectangular scenes from life ‘decoration of almost Empire chastity and elegance’.65 Oberhuber draws attention to the ‘stoische Darstellung von Szenen aus dem menschlichen Leben, in denen sich Realismus und Allegorik in eigentümlicher Weise mischen. Sie gehören zu Giulios eindrucksvollsten Werken. Eigentümlich ist etwa die Geburtsszene [...] in der Kybele das neugeborene Kind einem Amor hinhält, oder das Mahl, bei dem ein Genius eine Fackel hält’.66 Elsewhere Oberhuber suggests that the decoration of the Loggia is ‘leggiadro e svagato’, displaying a ‘nuova eleganza’.67 This did not escape Meyer, who wrote: ‘Es verdient noch angemerkt zu werden, daß die Bilder der Decke alle nur leicht und beynahe skitzenhaft behandelt sind; doch schadet diese Leichtigkeit ihrem innern Gehalt nicht, vielmehr haben sie, durch den f lüchtigen, keckgeführten Pinsel mehr Bewegung, Geist und Leben bekommen’.68 ‘Leichtigkeit’ seems also to have been the criterion by which Meyer judged the ornamental borders that he saw in the Te. It is true that he liked some dense friezes in the high Renaissance manner such as those, in the Camera delle Imprese and the Sala dei Cavalli, displaying dark backgrounds and putti surrounded by

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tightly packed leaf-scrolls. But he also praised simpler designs of plant scrolls against light backgrounds, even taking the trouble to mention the ‘niedlichen Arabesken’ in little-regarded, small, informal rooms like the Camerino a Crociera, the Camerino delle Grottesche and the Camerino di Venere.69 But it is again the Appartamento del Giardino Segreto that excels. The small vestibule is decorated ‘mit ungemein zierlichen Arabesken’, while the Loggia, ‘an welche unser Künstler sein ganzes Vermögen gewendet, um sie zum behaglichen, frohen Aufenthalt zu machen’, is remarkable for ‘die Zierlichkeit der Ausführung in den gemahlten Arabesken’.70 Some excellent examples on light backgrounds of simple plant-stem arabesques with leaves, buds and small f lower shapes may be seen in the panels that contain the medallions, copied by Bury, of Bacchus and Ariadne, and Nymph and Satyr.71 All in all, what Meyer seems most to have liked in the Tè was an antiquity that resembled real ancient painting. He himself was a traditionally trained, academic draftsman and artist, who tended to produce rather stiff, linear figures. Lightness of touch, sketchiness, the ability to evoke with few lines or patches of colour were not part of his natural repertoire. Yet contrary to the stereotypical view of his taste, he admired these things, insisting on their presence and decorative effect in Pompeiian work and especially in the so-called Aldobrandini Wedding. This Second Style fresco, found on the Esquiline Hill in Rome in 1605, achieved colour harmony, he argues, through an impressionistic technique involving the use of cangiante colouring, or the creation of relief not by lightening or darkening a single colour, but by juxtapositions of one colour and another.72 In the Tè, he found the same lightness of touch in the woman with the game, and in the frescoes of the Loggia del Giardino Segreto. Perhaps Meyer would himself have loved above all to be able to fresco like an ancient. He did eventually try his hand at it. For while Meyer was in Italy various decorating projects were in progress in Weimar for which he contributed ideas. In October 1796 he wrote to Goethe from Florence: Sollte ich aber jemand rathen müssen, seine Zimmer schön auszuzieren, so wäre der Knoten sogleich gelöst: man lasse im Pallast Tè zu Mantua oder in der Villa Lanti zu Rom oder das kleine, allerzierlichste, im Vatican verborgene Zimmerchen, in welches man von den obern Logen hinein geht, copieren — das sind die schönsten Muster. Besser wird es wohl jetzt doch niemand machen, und es kostet mich wenig zu glauben, daß selbst das große Buch der Geschmäcke eine Coglionerie dagegen ist.73

The ‘verborgene Zimmerchen’ is presumably the Stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, in which Raphael was assisted by Giulio, and as Giulio also decorated the Villa Lante al Gianicolo, this is a powerful endorsement of his work.74 While in Florence, Meyer came across what he took to be yet another example of Giulio’s art, the ‘Apollo and the Muses’ in the Pitti Palace, now attributed to another of Raphael’s pupils, Baldassare Peruzzi. Meyer made a copy of this ‘liebliches Bildchen’, in oils on panel,75 which he used in 1798 to fresco the west wall of the Lower Passage in the Römisches Haus, built as a retreat by Carl August in the Park an der Ilm in Weimar. The original painting shows the figures dancing in swirling draperies,

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some with slightly cangiante colouring, but it is unfortunately impossible to tell whether Meyer attempted to reproduce this because damp in the lower parts of the Römisches Haus has almost entirely destroyed his original work.76 The largest undertaking in Weimar at the end of the century was the rebuilding and redecoration of the Schloss. Here Meyer provided the Fries vom menschlichen Leben, finished in 1801, for Das runde Zimmer. It must be assumed that, for all the differences of concept and execution, Meyer’s work owed something to Giulio’s scenes from life in the Loggia at the Te. As Rolf Bothe points out, Meyer’s scenes, which are set in his own time, are nevertheless exclusively agrarian, and incorporate (perhaps Giulian) allegorical elements like putti and a winged torchbearing genius who lights the young couple to their nuptial bed.77 And Giulio’s inf luence is surely also apparent in Meyer’s treatment of arabesque decoration, in the Schloß and elsewhere. A comparison has been made between the work in Weimar and that at the Schloß in Wörlitz, built between 1766 and 1783 by F. W. Freiherr von Erdmannsdorff for Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of AnhaltDessau.78 Wörlitz featured elaborate grotesque friezes and panels in imitation of those in Raphael’s Logge that Goethe had criticized in ‘Von Arabesken’.79 But in Weimar, Goethe’s architect N. F. Thouret shunned such things in favour of simpler designs, and Meyer painted a number of graceful ornamental borders against plain, light backgrounds. The Speisezimmer of 1799 has vertical panels and a frieze of which Thouret wrote to Goethe: ‘Die Kränze von Früchten, die Tyrsusstäbe mit Wein- und Hopfenranken umwunden, die Vasen, Figuren und Masken, von Herrn Professor Meyer geleitet, dürften dem Zimmer seiner Bestimmung gemäß ein heiteres Aussehen geben’.80 Das erste Wohnzimmer of 1802 has a ceiling decorated with plant scrolls framing medallions, and the Vorzimmer in the Appartement der Fremden, also of 1802, a frieze with maenads carrying garlands of vines, not entirely unlike Giulio’s work in the Camera con Fregio di Amorini at the Villa Madama.81 But Meyer’s freest decorative work is in the Festsaal of Anna Amalia’s Wittumspalais, where in 1804–05 he painted a simple wall frieze of Greek palmettes, lotus husks and honeysuckle and, above it, a ceiling border of alternating vases and ears of corn, joined by gracefully looping leaf and f lower motifs.82 Whatever the weight to be put upon such practical results of the encounter with Giulio Romano, the presence of the ‘Mantua’ essay in the Propyläen, the programmatic journal of Goethe’s classicism, bears striking witness to Goethe’s and Meyer’s awareness of an alternative antiquity to that propounded by Winckelmann. Giulio’s work in the Palazzo Te had shown both men the possibilities of his own highly personalized artistic world filled, as it was, with fantastical forms which legitimate themselves in pictorial and associational rather than semantic or ideological terms. This Dionysian world of arabesque and mythology was far removed from the exemplary classicizing art of the single human figure. Yet the ‘Mantua’ essay appeared without a word of comment in the Propyläen alongside, for example, Meyer’s far more conventionally Winckelmannian discussion of Raphael’s work in the Vatican. Did Goethe and Meyer therefore simply fail to draw the obvious conclusions from their liking for the Palazzo Te, which ought, it would seem, to have aligned them closely with contemporaries like Moritz or the early

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Romantics who were beginning to teach the autonomy of art from the constraints of representation? Or had they reasons for avoiding those conclusions? In one context at least, the latter is almost certainly true. At the same time as they launched the Propyläen, Goethe and Meyer, together with Schiller and Fernow, began offering annual prizes for artists, in the hope of encouraging the younger generation to adopt the classical aesthetic. The subjects that they set for the competitions were heroic episodes from the work of Homer. Dönike has suggested that this approach ref lects the contemporary French fashion for the heroic mode in painting, and this is probably true enough.83 But other circumstances were probably as significant in dictating the choice of subjects. By the time the competitions began, Goethe was already attempting to combat what he saw as the pernicious fashion, fostered by the first generation of the Romantics, for Christian and patriotic subject matter.84 Against this threat, Homer provided the only plausible classical counterweight. He had after all been hailed by Winckelmann as the inspirer of Greek art, and provided numerous instances of archetypally human behaviour and not least of exemplary valour. Above all, Homer offered suitable material for public art, which was what the ‘Weimarische Kunstfreunde’ sought to promote. Homer, writes Kirk, paid little attention to Dionysus: ‘not at all a god fit for heroes’.85 And Giulio’s Dionysian aesthetic of arabesque and mythology belonged less to the public than to the private sphere. Giulio himself painted heroic scenes from the Trojan War in the Palazzo Ducale in the centre of Mantua, and reserved his Ovidian loves of the gods for the more intimate setting of the dukes’ summer retreat. His frescoes at the Te could hardly be held up as a model for work submitted to a public competition. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the alternative antiquity that Goethe and Meyer saw with the help of Giulio Romano did not inf luence the prize competitions. But did that alternative change the subsequent course of their thinking about art, or is the ‘Mantua’ essay to be seen as a largely unassimilated outpouring of enthusiasm for Raphael’s wayward pupil? Goethe is generally thought to have become more sympathetic to the decorative impulse in art as he grew older and lost confidence in the concept of the representative symbol: critics cite for example his liking for Runge’s paintings, or Dürer’s borders for the Emperor Maximilian’s prayer book.86 But there is other striking evidence of the importance he attached to decoration, an importance which, however, seems to have made him more receptive not to anything ancient but to the early medieval work that he disparaged during his classical decade. Writing about the Boisserées’s collection, he made the startlingly categorical statement that the principal purpose of art is to decorate space: ‘Die höchste Aufgabe der bildenden Kunst ist, einen bestimmten Raum zu verzieren, oder eine Zierde in einen unbestimmten Raum zu setzen; aus dieser Forderung entspringt alles was wir kunstgerechte Composition heißen’ (FA 20: 76). This task had been successfully accomplished by the ‘Byzantine’ school of painting, whose figures were stiff, but capable of filling wall spaces in a satisfyingly symmetrical manner. By contrast, the early Netherlandish painters had purchased their increased naturalism at the cost of a loss in decorative effectiveness (FA 20: 87). At this period Goethe, who prizes decoration and questions representation, seems scarcely to differ from contemporary proponents of non-figurative, ‘autonomous’ art. Perhaps it was

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appreciation of the alternative antiquity presented by Giulio that helped to set him so firmly on this road. Notes to Chapter 8 1. For Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 40 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–), 19: 10–233. Unless otherwise specified, references to Goethe’s works are to volume and page number in this edition (= FA). On Goethe’s view of Winckelmann, see Friedmar Apel, ‘Die Ästhetik des Selbstseins. Goethes Kunstanschauung 1805–1816’, in FA 19: 727–57 (pp. 730–37); Ernst Osterkamp, ‘ “Aus dem Gesichtspunkt reiner Menschlichkeit”. Goethes Preisaufgaben für bildende Künstler, 1799– 1805’, in Goethe und die Kunst, ed. by Sabine Schulze, exhib. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt a. M. and Kunstsammlungen, Weimar, 1994 (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1994), pp. 310–22 (p. 322). 2. Winckelmann’s Werke, ed. by C. L. Fernow, Johann Heinrich Meyer and Johann Schulze, 8 vols (Dresden: Walther, 1808–20), iii–vi (1809–1815): Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, ed. by Johann Heinrich Meyer and Johann Schulze. 3. See Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, i: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 97–105. 4. Sabine M. Schneider, ‘Kunstautonomie als Semiotik des Todes? Digressionen im klassizist­ischen Diskurs der schönen Menschengestalt bei Karl Philipp Moritz’, German Life and Letters, 52 (1999), 166–83 (pp. 178–79). 5. ‘The Case for Abstract Art’, originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, 1 August 1959. See Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. by John O’Brian, 4 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986–93), iv: Modernism with a Vengeance, pp. 75–84 (p. 77). 6. Meyer, ‘Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst’, in Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift, herausgegeben von Goethe. Bd I, 1. Stück (Tübingen: Cotta, 1798), pp. 20–54 (p. 49). For a reprinted edition, see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift, ed. by Wolfgang von Löhneysen (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1965), pp. 72–106 (p. 101). 7. On Goethe’s enduring classicism, see Wilhelm Voßkamp, ‘Goethes Klassizismus im Zeichen der Diskussion des Verhältnisses von Poesie und bildender Kunst um 1800’, in Goethes Rückblick auf die Antike. Beiträge des deutsch-italienischen Kolloquiums, Rom, 1998, ed. by Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (Berlin: Schmidt, 1999), pp. 113–21 (pp. 115–16). 8. On Meyer’s dogmatism, see FA 20: 1162f. For more accurate assessments of Meyer’s talents, see Ernst Gombrich, ‘Goethe and the History of Art: The Contribution of Johann Heinrich Meyer’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s., 60 (Papers Read Before the Society 1989–90) (1991), 1–19; Martin Dönike, Pathos, Ausdruck und Bewegung. Zur Ästhetik des Weimarer Klassizismus, 1796–1806 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 259–61. 9. Ernst Gombrich, ‘The Primitive and its Value in Art’, III: ‘The Priority of Pattern’, The Listener, 1 March 1979, pp. 311–14 (p. 311). 10. Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art, pp. 5–6. 11. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronistic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), pp. 355, 343. 12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Der ontologische Grund des Okkasionellen und des Dekorativen’ in Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1960–95), i; Hermeneutik i: Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 7th rev. edn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), pp. 149–65 (p. 162). 13. Sabine M. Schneider, ‘Klassizismus und Romantik — zwei Konfigurationen der einen ästhe­ tischen Moderne. Konzeptuelle Überlegungen und neuere Forschungsperspektiven’, Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft, 37 (2002), 86–128 (p. 111). 14. Helmut Pfotenhauer, ‘Klassizismus als Anfang der Moderne? Überlegungen zu Karl Philipp Moritz und seiner Ornamenttheorie’, in Ars naturam adiuvans. Festschrift für Matthias Winner, ed. by Victoria v. Flemming and Sebastian Schütze (Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern, 1996), pp. 583–97 (p. 583). 15. See e.g. Pfotenhauer, p. 593.

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16. The Maffei sculptures were ‘an exceptional group in eighteenth-century Europe’, where so little original Greek work could be seen outside Greece itself: see Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 177. 17. See Bernhard Neutsch, ‘Goethe e il Museo Maffeiano’, in Nuovi Studi Maffeiani. Atti del Convegno Scipione Maffei e il Museo Maffeiano. Verona 18–19 Novembre 1983, ed. by Denise Modonesi (Verona: Direzione Musei, 1985), pp. 97–109 (pp. 99; 107, note 16; 112, fig. 4 (line drawing)). 18. See Piranesi, exhib. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1978, ed. by John Wilton-Ely (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), nos. 308 and 309, pp. 117–18. 19. Meyer, ‘Über Lehranstalten zu Gunsten der bildenden Künste’ in Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift, herausgegeben von Goethe. Bd III, 1. Stück (Tübingen: Cotta, 1800), pp. 53–65 (p. 62). Or see Goethe, Propyläen, ed. by von Löhneysen, pp. 765–77 (p. 774). 20. Amedeo Belluzzi, Palazzo Te a Mantova / The Palazzo Te in Mantua, Mirabilia Italianae, 8, 2 vols (Modena: Panini, 1998), ii, 244. 21. Wohl, Aesthetics, p. 2. 22. Eugenio Battisti, ‘Conformismo ed eccentricità in Giulio Romano come artista di corte’, in Giulio Romano. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi su ‘Giulio Romano e l’espansione europea del Rinascimento’. Mantova — Palazzo Ducale — 1–5 ottobre 1989 (Mantua: Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana, 1989), pp. 21–43 (p. 30). 23. Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art (London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 384–91. 24. Toby Yuen, ‘Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine and Raphael: Some Inf luences from the Minor Arts of Antiquity’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 42 (1979), 263–72 (pp. 263–64, 272 and passim). 25. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 137. 26. Barkan, p. 264. 27. Barkan, p. 262. 28. Biblioteca Ambrosiana Shelfmark: F 273 inf. n. 1. 29. Treasures from Budapest: European Masters from Leonardo to Schiele, exhib. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 25 September–12 December 2010, ed. by David Ekserdjian (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2010), pp. 73 (no. 40), 236. 30. See Goethe’s letter of 16 Nov 1795 to Meyer wishing that they might (FA 31: 132). 31. For the two-day visit, see Goethe’s letter of 31 May 1790 to Knebel from Verona: Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrag der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, VI parts, 136 vols (in 146) (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1991), 4/9, p. 208. 32. Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Inventar-Nr.: KK 400, cf. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te, illustration no. 674, I, 361. 33. Weimar Inventar-Nr.: KK 401, cf. Belluzzi no. 514, I, 287; II, 394. 34. Weimar Inventar-Nr.: KK 402, cf. Belluzzi no. 662, I, 357. 35. Weimar Inventar-Nr.: KK 403, cf. Belluzzi no. 1199, I, 667. 36. Weimar Inventar-Nr.: KK 404, cf. Belluzzi no. 650, I, 352. 37. Weimar Inventar-Nr.: KK 2445, cf. Belluzzi no. 1182, I, 659; II, 480. 38. Weimar Inventar-Nr.: KK 2446, cf. Belluzzi no. 1186, I, 661; II, 480–81. 39. Weimar Inventar-Nr.: GHz/Sch.I.248,0161, cf. Belluzzi no. 404, I, 212–13; II, 375. 40. Bury to Goethe from Mantua, 7 June 1790: ‘Arriatene, und Baccus sind sehr vorgerükt’. See Friedrich Bury, Briefe aus Italien an Goethe und Anna Amalia, ed. by Martin Dönike (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), p. 56. 41. Barkan, pp. 137–39. 42. See Barkan, p. 248, fig. 4.13. 43. Barkan, p. 263. 44. Kurt W. Forster and Richard J. Tuttle, ‘The Palazzo del Te’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 30.4 (1971), 267–93 (p. 282). 45. See Belluzzi, Palazzo Te, ii, 244. 46. Letter of Meyer to Goethe, 3 November 1795, Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, ed. by Max

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Hecker, 4 vols, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft vols 32, 34, 35 and 35/2 (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1917–32), i, 143–44. 47. Letter of Meyer to Goethe, 25 February 1796, Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 203– 04. 48. Ernst H. Gombrich, ‘ “Anticamente moderni e modernamente antichi”. Note sulla fortuna critica di Giulio Romano pittore’, in Giulio Romano, ed. by Sergio Polano, exhib. cat., Mantua, 1989 (Milan: Electa, 1989), pp. 11–13 (pp. 11–12). 49. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te, ii, 244, 246. 50. Meyer, ‘Mantua im Jahr 1795’ in Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift, herausgegeben von Goethe. Bd III, 2. Stück (Tübingen: Cotta, 1800), pp. 3–66 (p. 10). Or see Goethe, Propyläen, ed. by von Löhneysen, pp. 901–64 (p. 908). In the following references, the page number in the original edition of Propyläen is given, followed by that in the von Löhneysen reprint. 51. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, p. 18 / 916. 52. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, p. 43 / 941. 53. ‘[...] perchè un disegno lo faceva in un’ ora tutto fiero ed acceso nell’opera, dove nelle pitture consumava i mesi e gli anni’: Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori. Con nuove annotazione e commenti, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1878–85), v, 528. 54. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, p. 34 / 932. 55. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, pp. 22–23 / 920–21, 24 / 922. 56. Yuen, ‘Giulio Romano’, pp. 264, 265, 267. 57. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, pp. 22–23 / 920–21. 58. Konrad Oberhuber, ‘Giulio Romano pittore e disegnatore a Mantova’, in Giulio Romano, ed. by Sergio Polano, exhib. cat., Mantua, 1989, pp. 135–75 (p. 156, and see reproduction, p. 155). 59. Yuen, ‘Giulio Romano’, p. 267 and fig. 59f. 60. Konrad Oberhuber, ‘L’apparato decorativo’, in Giulio Romano, ed. by Sergio Polano, exhib. cat., Mantua, 1989, pp. 336–79 (p. 354). 61. Giovanni Bottani, Descrizione storica delle pitture del Regio-Ducale Palazzo del Te fuori della porta di Mantova detta Pusterla con alcune tavole in rame (Mantua: Braglia, 1783), p. 41. 62. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, p. 28 / 926. 63. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te, ii, 413. 64. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, p. 42 / 940. 65. Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano, 2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958), i, 143. 66. Konrad Oberhuber, ‘Giulio und die figürlichen Künste’, in Fürstenhöfe der Renaissance. Giulio Romano und die klassische Tradition, exhib. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1989–90 (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1989), pp. 132–92 (p. 146). 67. Oberhuber, ‘L’apparato decorativo’, in Giulio Romano, exhib. cat., Mantua, 1989, p. 361. 68. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, p. 42 / 940; cf. p. 44 / 942, where the sketchiness of these paintings is said to make them ‘die geistreichsten’, so supporting the argument that Giulio is a ‘Skizzist’. 69. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, p. 37 / 935. 70. Meyer, ‘Mantua’, pp. 39–40 / 937–38. 71. Belluzzi, Palazzo Te, i, 661, illustration nos. 1184–87. 72. See above, Chapter 7. 73. Letter of Meyer to Goethe, mid-October 1796, Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 373–74. 74. For Giulio’s involvement in the Stufetta, see Nicole Dacos, ‘La Loggetta du Cardinal Bibbiena. Décor à l’antique et rôle de l’atelier’, in Raffaello a Roma. Il Convegno del 1983. Bibliotheca Hertziana, Musei Vaticani (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1986), pp. 225–36 (p. 228). 75. Letter of Meyer to Goethe, mid-October 1796, Goethes Briefwechsel mit Heinrich Meyer, i, 376. 76. Ines Boettcher, ‘Johann Heinrich Meyer und die künstlerische Ausgestaltung im Römischen Haus’, in Das Römische Haus in Weimar, ed. by Andreas Beyer (Munich: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik bei Hanser, 2001), pp. 63–74 (pp. 70–71). 77. Rolf Bothe, Dichter, Fürst und Architekten. Das Weimarer Residenzschloß vom Mittelalter bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), pp. 59–60; 133–35 (cat. nos. 135–38).

148

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78. Michael Rüffer, Das Schloß in Wörlitz. Ein fürstliches Landhaus im Spannungsfeld zwischen Abso­ lutismus und Aufklärung (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005), pp. 15, 139. 79. Volker Michael Strocka, ‘Kopie, Invention und höhere Absicht: Bildquellen und Bildsinn der Wörlitzer Raumdekorationen’, in Weltbild Wörlitz. Entwurf einer Kulturlandschaft, ed. by FrankAndreas Bechtoldt and Thomas Weiss, exhib. cat. Deutsches Architektur-Museum Frankfurt a. M., 1996 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1996), pp. 163–93 (pp. 164, 168, 173). 80. Bothe, Dichter, Fürst, pp. 53, 131 (cat. no. 111). 81. Bothe, Dichter, Fürst, pp. 60–61, 89, 141 (cat. no. 215). 82. Illustration available at Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (), filed under Johann Heinrich Meyer, ‘Velum verziert mit f loralen Motiven’ [accessed 25 June 2012]. 83. Dönike, Pathos, pp. 269, 274. 84. See the essay by Goethe and Meyer, ‘Neudeutsch-religios-patriotische Kunst’, Weimarer Ausgabe, 49/1, pp. 29–59 (p. 30). 85. G. S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 128. 86. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske. Wirklichkeitsaneignung und Stilisierung in der deutschen Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Mann, 1985), pp. 56–57.

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INDEX ❖ abstract 133, 139 achromatism 61, 62, 81, 82, 83, 104 Ackerman, James S. 61, 62 Alberti, Leon Battista 86 n. 26, 110 Aldobrandini Wedding 67–68, 68, 73, 74, 79, 81, 98, 121, 122, 123, 142 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung see Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-zeitung ambiguous figures 13, 19–29 Boring (My Wife and My Mother-in-Law) 19, 20 Jestrow (Duck-Rabbit) 19, 20, 21 Necker Cube 19, 20, 21 in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 19, 21–27, 28–29 anaclitic object choice 39 analogical thinking 13, 14, 15 Angelico, Fra 110 ’Antizipation’ 27, 28 arabesques 135–36, 136–37, 142, 143, 144 Armenini, Giovan Battista 111 artificial intelligence 7 Augustine 40, 43 n. 44 Barasch, Moshe 110 Barberini ceiling see Cortona, Pietro Berrettini da Barkan, Leonard 137, 138, 139 Barocci, Frederico 72, 73 Batoni, Pompeo 97, 99 Battisti, Eugenio 136 Bed of Polyclitus 138–39 Bell, Janis 70, 82 bellezza di colore 112, 118 Bellori, Gian Pietro 82 Belluzzi, Amedeo 136, 139, 141 Belucci, Antonio 22, 29 n. 13 Belvedere sculptures 133, 134 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 73 Beyer, Andreas 95, 104 n. 6 Bezold-Brücke effect 48 Bjerke, André 53–54 ’blond’ 66, 94 Bocchi, Francesco 113 Boisserée, Melchior and Sulpice 69, 144 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 36 Boring, Edwin (My Wife and My Mother-in-Law) 19, 20 Borromini, Francesco 73 Bothe, Rolf 143 Botticelli, Sandro 79 Böttiger, Carl August 67, 122 Boucher, François 94 Boulogne, Valentin de 98

Bouma, Pieter Johannes 49, 50–53, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58 n. 22, 59 n. 33 boundary colours see fringe colours Bury, Friedrich 137–38, 139, 141, 142 Büttner, Hofrat 27, 48 Byron, Lord 27 Campanian frescoes see frescoes cangianti mode 67, 69, 72, 79, 101, 103, 111, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123–24, 124–25, 126, 127, 142–43 Caravaggio 82, 96 Carracci, Annibale 72, 82, 111–12, 126 Carstens, Asmus Jacob 81, 83, 104, 126 castration anxiety 33, 34, 36, 39 Cennini, Cennino d’ Andrea 61, 69, 110, 112 chiaroscuro 61–62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 72, 74, 80, 82, 83, 94, 96, 104, 123 see also tenebrists chromatic harmony see colour harmony Churchland, Paul M. 11–12, 12–13, 13–14, 15 Cimabue 124 classicism 80–81, 82, 83, 135, 143 see also neoclassicism Cochin, Charles-Nicolas 73, 123 cognitive science 7, 9, 11–13, 14, 15 colour harmony 61–84, 85 n. 11 & 13 & 17, 93–104, 109–27, 129 n. 23 colour symbolism 26 colour theories see also colour harmony Bezold-Brücke effect 48 Bjerke 53–54 Bouma 49, 50–53, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58 n. 22, 59 n. 33 Duck 48 Goethe 13, 14–15, 45–50, 52, 54–55, 56, 57 n. 6, 58 n. 18, 109–10 Helmholtz 15, 48, 50, 55, 57 n. 12 Hering 15 Holtsmark 54 Kirschmann 50, 52, 58 n. 21 Newton 3, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54–55, 56 Ostwald 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57 n. 10 Pfaff 48, 52, 58 n. 16 coloured light 66, 113, 115–16, 121 Cornelius, Peter von 83, 126, 127 Correggio, Antonio da 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79, 94 Cortona, Pietro Berrettini da 73–74, 78–80, 83, 84, 88 n. 76, 89 n. 81 & 86, 94, 95–96, 98, 127, 131 n. 70, 132 n. 87 Scene from the Life of Justinian 78, 78 The Triumph of Divine Providence 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 90 n. 95, 124–25 creativity 13–14, 19, 37, 38

164

Index

Credi, Lorenzo di 110 Damasio, Antonio 7 Dannecker, Johann Heinrich von 99, 101, 102 David, Jacques Louis 80, 83, 94–96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 123, 126 Davis, William Stephen 38 decoration, art as 134–37, 138, 141–42, 143, 144–45 Deleuze, Gilles 7 Dempsey, Charles 71, 72, 82 Desmarais, Jean-Baptiste Frédéric 96, 98 Diderot, Denis 62, 93, 94, 113, 114 Domenichino 72, 80 Dönike, Martin 144 Doorn, Andrea J. van 56 Dorigny, Nicolas 118 Drouais, Jean Germain 96, 98, 99 dualism 6, 11, 15, 40, 45 Duck, Michael 48 ’Duck-Rabbit’ 19, 20, 21 Dürer, Albrecht 144 Eckermann, Johann Peter 27 Ellis, Ralph D. 19, 21 father/child relationship 37, 38 Félibien, André 112 Fernow, Carl Ludwig 126, 144 Ferri, Ciro 78, 89 n. 82 Scene from the Life of Justinian 78 Flaxman, John 81, 104, 126 French Academy in Rome 96–97, 105 n. 14, 113 frescoes: Aldobrandini Wedding 67–68, 68, 73, 74, 79, 81, 98, 121, 122, 123, 142 and colour harmony 67–70, 72, 73–80, 81–82, 83, 86 n. 34, 94, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105 n. 22, 118, 120, 121–25, 127 as decorative art 134, 136, 140–41, 142–43, 144 Scene from the Life of Justinian 78, 78 The Triumph of Divine Providence 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 90 n. 95, 124–25 Freud, Sigmund 2, 6, 8, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 Friedrich, Caspar David 3–4, 83, 127 fringe colours 3, 45–56, 46, 47, 49, 57 n. 2, 58 n. 16, 63, 64 green 47–49, 50–53, 51, 54–56 magenta 45, 47–48, 49, 50, 51, 53–54, 55, 56, 59 n. 33 Gabriel, Mabel M. 68, 124, 131 n. 65 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 134 Gagneraux, Bénigne 96, 98 Gauffier, Louis 96 genius 27, 33–34, 37, 42 n. 10 Gérard, François 98, 99 Geßner, Salomon 31 Gestalt shift (perception reversal) 19, 21–22, 23–24, 25, 26 Giordano, Luca 83

Giotto 61, 110, 117 Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis 98 Giulio Romano 136–38, 139–42, 143, 144, 145 Goethe (works of): ‘Der Adler und die Taube’ 41 n. 8 ‘Auf Cristianen R. ’ 33 Beiträge zur Optik 45, 46, 48 Dichtung und Wahrheit 5 Die Wahlverwandtschaften 5–6, 8 Egmont 27 ’Einige allgemeine chromatische Sätze’ 65–66, 115, 116–17 ‘Harzreise im Winter’ 34, 37 Italienische Reise 5, 67, 71, 73, 118, 133–34 ‘Künstlers Morgenlied’ 34 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 5, 6, 7–8, 9, 17 n. 26, 21–22, 28, 36, 38–39, 39–40, 81 ‘Mahomets Gesang’ 34, 37, 41 n. 8 ’Maifest’ 32 ’Mir schlug das Herz’ 32 ’Physik’ 115–16 ‘Pilgers Morgenlied’ 33 ‘Prometheus’ 34 Die Propyläen 21, 62, 95, 97, 135, 136, 143, 144 Der Sammler und die Seinigen 27–28, 135, 140 Tagebuch 99 Über Kunst und Altertum 134 ’Von Arabesken’ 67, 121, 135, 143 ‘Wanderers Sturmlied’ 34 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 1, 5, 8, 19, 21–27, 28–29, 30 n. 25, 135–36 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 6, 29, 30 n. 20 ’Willkommen und Abschied’ 1–2 Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, 27, 72, 73, 98, 133 Zur Farbenlehre 10, 11, 13, 27, 46, 47, 47, 48–49, 53, 54, 56, 62–63, 63–64, 67, 73, 81–82, 82–83, 93, 94, 95, 98–99, 100, 104, 109, 114, 115, 116–17, 122, 124 Gogh, Vincent van 109, 127 n. 2 Gombrich, Ernst 134, 139 Greek art 4, 40, 65, 82, 100, 131 n. 61, 133, 136, 144, 146 n. 16 Green, André 41 Greenberg, Clement 133 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 94 Guattari, Félix 7 Guercino 98 Guérin, Pierre-Narcisse 98 Hall, Marcia B. 70, 72, 82 harmogê 65, 131 n. 61 Hartt, Frederick 141 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6, 8–9, 15, 83 Helbig, Wolfgang 123–24 Helmholtz, Hermann von 15, 48, 50, 55, 57 n. 12 Herder, Johann Gottfried 38, 133 Hering, Ewald 15 Hetsch, Philipp Friedrich von 99, 102 Heuzé, Philippe 68–69 historical painting 109–10

Index Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm 32 Der goldene Topf 33, 37 Hollander, Anne 8 Holtsmark, Tørger 54 Homer 81, 97, 144 Houlgate, Stephen 15 hue-painting 110–12, 113, 115, 118–21, 123, 124 Humboldt, Wilhelm and Caroline 83, 97, 98, 99–100, 102 iconography 134–35 identity formation 32–35, 37–38, 40 images see mental images imagination (Einbildungskraft) 1, 6–11, 12–13, 15, 17 n. 26, 19–20 Impressionism 116 infantile sexuality 37–38, 40, 41 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 83, 99, 126 Isabey, Jean-Baptiste 98 Jastrow, Joseph (Duck-Rabbit) 19, 20, 21 Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-zeitung 102–03, 125–26 Kant, Immanuel 2, 6, 10, 14, 80, 126 Kirk, G. S. 144 Kirschmann, August 50, 52, 58 n. 21 Kittler, Friedrich A. 38 Kittler, Wolf 40 Koch, Joseph Anton 126 Koenderink, Jan J. 56 ’Kolorit’ 62, 74, 85 n. 11, 93, 94 Kosslyn, Stephen Michael 7 Kristeva, Julia 38 Lacan, Jacques 6–7, 8, 9, 13, 15, 17 n. 26, 35–36, 37, 38–39, 39–40, 42 n. 17 language and cognitive function 15 Lanzi, Luigi 73 Le Brun, Charles 112 Le Valentin 98 Leonardo da Vinci 61–62, 70, 94, 112–13, 114, 115 light and darkness 13, 15, 26, 45, 55, 61, 65, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118–19, 129 n. 23 Linnaeus, Carl 4 Livingston, Paisley 40 logocentrism 7, 9 Lorraine, Claude 98 love at first sight (Verliebtheit) 8–9, 17 n. 26, 38, 39 see also narcissism love, look of (specular moment) see Wellbery, David E. MacLeod, Donald I. A. 56 Maffei sculptures 136, 138, 146 n. 16 Matthaei, Rupprecht 45, 48, 49, 55–56, 63 medieval art 61, 69–70, 83, 127, 134, 144 Mendelssohn, Felix 133 Mengs, Anthony Raphael 63, 64, 73, 74, 97, 114–15 mental images 5–15, 19, 24, 26–27, 28 Merck, Johann Heinrich 3, 123 Meyer, Johann Heinrich:

165

and ancient frescoes 121–23, 124, 127 and art as decoration 134, 135, 136, 139–43, 144 and colour harmony 62, 64, 65, 66, 67–68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73–74, 78–79, 80, 81–82, 83, 84, 86 n. 37, 93, 94–97, 98–99, 102–03, 104, 113– 14, 117, 118, 121–23, 124–25, 126, 127, 131 n. 61 on Cortona 73–74, 78, 79, 80, 88 n. 76, 94, 124–25, 131 n. 70 on David and the French neoclassicists 94–95, 95–96, 97, 98 fresco of Iris 47 on Giulio Romano 136, 139–42, 143–44 and Goethe 3, 9, 84 n. 10 and the Romantic movement 127 on Schick 83, 98–99, 100, 102, 103–04, 125, 126 theory of the single figure 133 and Winckelmann 133 Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart 39 Michelangelo 69, 79, 111, 118 Mildenberger, Hermann 95 mirror stage 6–7, 8, 35–36, 38 mirroring 32, 33, 34, 35–36, 37, 38, 42 n. 10, 43 n. 44 Mitchell, William J. Thomas 21 Mochi Onori, Lorenza 79, 125 Monet, Claude 116 Moritz, Karl Philipp 135, 143 mother/child relationship 2, 31, 32–34, 35–38, 39–40, 42 n. 9, 42 n. 17 see also father/child relationship; Oedipus complex Mücke, Dorothea E. von 38 ’My Wife and My Mother-in-Law’ 19, 20 mythological subjects 138, 143, 144 Nagel, Alexander 134 Napoleon Bonaparte 94, 97, 99 narcissism 7, 8, 17 n. 26, 22, 23, 28, 32–33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 n. 10, 43 n. 34 Nazarenes 73, 83, 126 Necker Cube 19, 20, 21 neoclassicism 63, 73, 81, 82, 83, 97, 98, 104, 126, 127 see also David, Jacques Louis neuroscience see cognitive science Newton, Isaac 3, 11, 14, 27, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54–55, 56, 114 Novalis 7, 9, 32 Oberhuber, Konrad 69, 141 objective imagination 10 ocularcentric subjectivism 6, 15 Oedipus complex 36, 37, 38, 39 Oeser, Adam Friedrich 2 Øhrgaard, Per 22, 25–26 ornateness see decoration, art as Ostwald, Wilhelm 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57 n. 10 Overbeck, Johann Friedrich 83, 126, 127 Ovid 137 Paillot de Montabert, Jacques-Nicolas 123 Palazzo Tè see Giulio Romano Panofsky, Erwin 123

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Index

perception reversal (Gestalt shift) 19, 21–22, 23–24, 25, 26 Peruzzi, Baldassare 142–43 perversion 38 Pfaff, Christoph Heinrich 48, 52, 58 n. 16 Pfotenhauer, Helmut 135 Pfuhl, Ernst 124 phallic phase 33–34, 35, 36, 37–38 Pietists 40 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 136 Platner, Ernst Zacharias 103, 126, 127 Plato 40 Pliny the Elder 65, 131 n. 61 Polyclitus 138 Pompeii 135 Pope, Arthur 110 Potts, Alex 40 Poussin, Nicolas 96, 98, 111 prototypes 7, 12, 13–14, 23 psychoanalysis see Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; Wellbery, David E. Purkinje, Johannes Evangelist 5, 10, 14 Raabe, K. J. 73, 122 Raphael: and art as decoration 135, 140, 142, 143 and colour harmony 69–70, 72, 74, 79, 80, 82, 83, 97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 111, 112, 118, 121, 125, 126 reflected light (Widerscheine) 65–66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 79, 85 n. 22, 90 n. 90, 113, 116–17, 119–20, 122, 125, 127 Rembrandt 93 Reni, Guido 72, 80 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 119 rococo 94, 95, 96, 97, 113 Roman frescoes see frescoes Romantic movement 6, 40, 82, 104, 126, 127, 144 Rosenblum, Robert 96 Rubens, Peter Paul 72, 73, 93, 113, 123 Runge, Philipp Otto 3–4, 36, 144 Ruskin, John 119 Saint-Ours, Jean-Pierre 96, 98 Sarto, Andrea del 113 Schick, Gottlieb 83, 98–102, 103–04, 125–26 Schiller, Friedrich 3, 11, 27, 40, 64, 80, 99, 100, 117, 126, 133, 144 Schings, Hans-Jürgen 19, 27, 28 Agathon 38 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich and August Wilhelm 83, 103, 125–26 Schneider, Sabine 134–35 Schopenhauer, Arthur 56 Scruton, Roger 21 sculpture 133, 134, 138 Sepper, Dennis L. 14 sfumato mode 61–62, 69, 70, 112 Shearman, John 61, 129 n. 17 single statue 133, 134 ’Skizzist’ 140, 147 n. 68

Sørensen, Sven Oluf 53 specularity see Wellbery, David E. subjective imagination 9–10 Sulzer, Johann Georg 62, 133 tapestries 79, 80 Tasso, Torquato 22, 23 tenebrists 112 Ternite, F. W. 67, 122 Thornton, Joy 71–72, 82 Tieck, Friedrich 98 Tiepolo, Giambattista 83 Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm 2, 95 Titian 70, 74, 93, 94, 113, 123 tonal painting 61, 110, 112–15, 117, 118–19, 123 tonos 65 Turner, J. M. W. 3 unione mode 70, 72, 79, 80, 82, 111, 112, 118, 120 Urphänomen 11, 12, 13 Valentin de Boulogne 98 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony 93 Van Gogh, Vincent 109, 127 n. 2 Vasari, Giorgio 111, 120, 140 Verliebtheit see love at first sight Vermeer, Johannes (Man and Women at the Virginal) 21 Veronese, Paolo 71–72, 79, 81, 82, 84, 118–20, 123, 124, 129 n. 35 & 36, 130 n. 44 & 46 versicolor 124 Vien, Joseph 99 visual arts 2–4 visual imagination 1, 12–13 visual intuition 15 Webb, Daniel 114 Weimar Friends of Art (Weimarer Kunstfreunde) 3, 100, 144 Weimar Schloss 137, 143 Wellbery, David E. 7, 31–35, 36–38, 39, 40, 41 n. 3 & 4 & 8, 42 n. 10 & 27 Wenzel, Manfred 48–49, 55 Whittle, Paul 56 Widerscheine see reflected light Wieland, Christoph Martin 33, 135 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim see also Goethe (works of), Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert and colour harmony 65, 73, 80, 81, 90 n. 95, 103, 114, 123, 126, 131 n. 61 and Greek art 133, 136, 144 Wohl, Hellmut 134, 136 Wölfflin, Heinrich 61, 82, 110 Wood, Christopher S. 134 Wörlitz Schloss 143 Young-Hemholtz theory of trichromatic color vision see Helmholtz, Hermann von Zehe, Horst 49, 53 Zeki, Semir 21