The Arabesque from Kant to Comics (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) [1 ed.] 0815383584, 9780815383581

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The Arabesque from Kant to Comics

The Arabesque from Kant to Comics tracks the life and afterlife of the arabesque in its surprising transformation from an iconoclastic literary theory of early German Romanticism to aesthetic experimentation in both avant-garde art and popular culture. Its explosive growth in popularity was followed by an inevitable taming as arabesques became staples in book illustration, poetry publications, and even the decoration of printed scores. The subversive potential of the arabesque was preserved in one of its most surprising offspring, the comic strip: born at the moment when the cholera pandemic first swept through Europe, the comic translated the arabesque’s rank growth into unnerving lawlessness and sequences of contagious visual slapstick. Focusing roughly on the period between 1780 and 1880, this book illuminates the intersecting histories of avant-garde theories of writing, visual culture, and even the disciplinary origins of art history. In the process, it explores media history and intermediality, social networks and cultural transfer, as well as the rise of new and nontraditional art forms. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of art history, intellectual history, European art, aesthetics, book illustration, material culture, reproduction, comics, and German history. Cordula Grewe is Professor of Art History at Indiana University Bloomington, USA.

Cover: Adolph Schroedter, Humorous Arabesque with Don Quixote Attacking a Flock of Sheep, 1839. Etching (proof before letters); 18.7 × 20.9 cm (plate). From Album deutscher Künstler in Original-Radirungen, vol. 1, part 1 (Düsseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1839). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. © The Muriel and Philip Berman Gift, acquired from the John S. Phillips bequest of 1876 to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1985-52-18975.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship Vered Maimon Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization A Transregional Perspective Edited by Octavian Esanu Art and Merchandise in Keith Haring’s Pop Shop Amy Raffel Art and Nature in the Anthropocene Planetary Aesthetics Susan Ballard Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc Katazyna Murawska-Muthesius Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research Edited by Tiina Seppälä, Melanie Sarantou and Satu Miettinen Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance Edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr A History of Solar Power Art and Design Alex Nathanson The Arabesque from Kant to Comics Cordula Grewe For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

The Arabesque from Kant to Comics

Cordula Grewe

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Cordula Grewe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grewe, Cordula, author. Title: The arabesque from Kant to comics / Cordula Grewe. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021004626 (print) | LCCN 2021004627 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815383581 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032043708 (paperback) | ISBN 9781351187350 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Arabesques. Classification: LCC NK1575 .G74 2021 (print) | LCC NK1575 (ebook) | DDC 745.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004626 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004627 ISBN: 978-0-8153-8358-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04370-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18735-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC  Cover: Adolph Schroedter, Humorous Arabesque with Don Quixote Attacking a Flock of Sheep, 1839. Etching (proof before letters); 18.7 x 20.9 cm (plate). From Album deutscher Künstler in Original-Radirungen, vol. 1, part 1 (Düsseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1839). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. © The Muriel and Philip Berman Gift, acquired from the John S. Phillips bequest of 1876 to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1985–52–18975. 

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

vii x

PART 1

Three Beginnings

1

1 Prologue

3

2 Forays into a Form Grown Wild: Setting the Stage

8

3 An Outline (of Things to Come)

19

PART 2

The Arabesque Revolution: Image, Script, and the Crisis of Representation

27

4 Metaphysics and Media Crisis

29

5 The Ornament of the Gaze: On Albrecht Dürer

39

6 The Divine (as) Parergon

52

7 Ornament, Allegory, Autonomy: Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe, Karl Philipp Moritz

64

8 The Disappearance of a Goddess: On Immanuel Kant’s Parergonality

75

PART 3

The Writing on the Wall 9 Art History Painted: Peter Cornelius’s Murals for Munich’s First Picture Gallery, 1827–1840 10 History as Nationalist Vision: Wilhelm Kaulbach’s Murals for Berlin’s Neue Museum, 1847–1865

85

87 102

vi

Contents

PART 4

Turning the Page

117

11 Philipp Otto Runge’s Flypaper: On Intimacy

119

12 The Poet’s Pencil: On Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim

135

13 Turning the Page: On Eugen Napoleon Neureuther

145

PART 5

Taming the Arabesque

167

14 The Artist as Arabesque: Wilhelm Schadow as the Modern Vasari

169

15 The Humorous Arabesque: From Wilhelm Schadow to Karl Leberecht Immermann and Back, via Johann Baptist Sonderland

180

16 The Arabesque’s Kingdom: Adolph Schroedter and Theodor Mintrop

194

17 Illustration as Intervention and Parody: On Julius Hübner

209

PART 6

A Symphonic Intermezzo

223

18 Beethoven, or the Call for Freedom in Composition: On Moritz von Schwind

225

19 The Laws of Form: On Seriality and Pictures’ Stories

235

PART 7

A Satirical Finale

245

20 Contagious Laughter: On Pandemics, the Comics’ Birth, and Rodolphe Töpffer

247

21 “Ach! Poor Venus Is Perdue”: On Wilhelm Busch

257

22 The Last Act’s Final Flourish

271

Bibliography Index

279 296

Illustrations

1.1 1.2 2.1

3.1 4.1 4.2

5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 8.1 8.2 9.1

9.2 9.3 9.4 10.1 10.2 10.3

Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, The Old Man, 1853 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, title vignette, 1853 Giovanni Ottaviani, after drawings by Pietro Camporesi and Gaetano Savorelli, after Raphael and his circle, Pilaster VII (The Bird Catcher), ca. 1770/1772 Tommaso Piroli, after John Flaxman Jr., Thetis and Eurynome Receiving the Infant Vulcan, 1793–1805 Albrecht Dürer, Marginal Drawings to the Prayer De Sancta Apollonia, 1515 Johann Nepomuk Strixner, after Albrecht Dürer, Sancta Apollonia with Various Arabesques, among Them a Stork and a Large Mask, 1808 Albrecht Dürer, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526 Albrecht Dürer, Marginal Drawings to Psalm 92/93 (“Laudes”), incl. the Sudarium Held by Two Putti, 1515 Johann Nepomuk Strixner, after Albrecht Dürer, Peasant Woman with a Basket of Eggs Standing on a Pomegranate, 1808 Johann Gottlieb Seyfert, after Philipp Otto Runge, Morning, 1803–5 Albrecht Dürer, Marginal Drawings to the Benediction (“Matutin”), 1515 Wilhelm von Kügelgen, God’s Creation, 1831 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Tyrolean Hunter’s Song, 1830 Anonymous, after Sandro Botticelli, Scallop (Variation on the Birth of Venus), 2004 Ferdinand Ruscheweyh, after Peter Cornelius, The High Points of Goethe’s “Faust” Arranged in an Arabesque Design, 1816 (published 1826) Peter Cornelius, Religion’s Union with the Arts, designed in 1827 Peter Cornelius, The Founding of the Campo Santo in Pisa, 1828 Peter Cornelius, The Crusades, 1828 [Hans] Rudolf Rahn and Adrian Schleich, after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, title vignette of The Sixth Canto, 1846 Wilhelm Kaulbach, The Struggle against Pedantry of Artists and Scientists under the Protection of Minerva, ca. 1851 Wilhelm Kaulbach, The Destruction of the Tower of Babel (with an Arabesque of the Indians), 1848

2 4

9 20 34

35 40 44 49 53 56 60 76 78

90 92 96 98 103 104 108

viii Illustrations 10.4

Wilhelm Kaulbach, The Age of Reformation (with an Arabesque of German Culture), 1864 10.5 Albert Teichel, after Wilhelm Kaulbach, Putti Frieze, 1868 10.6 Wilhelm Kaulbach, Children’s Frieze (segment above the Allegory of Painting) 11.1 Erwin Speckter, Arabesques, 1830 11.2a Johann Gottlieb Seyfert, after Philipp Otto Runge, Morning, 1803–5 11.2b Ephraim Gottlieb Krüger and Johann Adolph Darnstedt, after Philipp Otto Runge, Day, 1803–5 11.2c Johann Gottlieb Seyfert, after Philipp Otto Runge, Evening, 1803–5 11.2d Ephraim Gottlieb Krüger and Johann Adolph Darnstedt, after Philipp Otto Runge, Night, 1803–5 11.3 Philipp Otto Runge, Small Morning, 1808 12.1 Ludwig Emil Grimm, after Clemens Brentano, The Magic Horn, 1808 12.2 Ludwig Emil Grimm, after Achim von Arnim, Music-Making Couple, 1808 12.3 Caspar Heinrich Merz, after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, The Madhouse, 1835 13.1 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Self-Portrait, 1825 13.2 Joseph Prestele, after Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Times of Day, 1826 13.3 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, verso, 1829 13.4 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, recto, 1829 13.5 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, 1829 13.6 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, 1829 13.7 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, 28 Juillet 1830: La Marseillaise, 1831 13.8 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Heath Rose, 1829 13.9 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Erlking, 1829 14.1 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, The Old Man, 1853 14.2 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, Asmus [Jacob] Carstens, ca. 1853 15.1 Eduard Kretzschmar, after Johann Baptist Sonderland, Immermann’s Münchhausen in Bildern, ca. 1848 15.2 Johann Baptist Sonderland, Self-Portrait with Arabesques, May 1844 15.3 Johann Baptist Sonderland, The Little Gnomes, ca. 1838 16.1 Adolph Schroedter, The Dream of the Bottle (also The Corkpuller), 1831 16.2 Adolph Schroedter, The New Samson, ca. 1838 16.3 Theodor Mintrop, King Heinzelman’s Love, 1866 16.4 Theodor Mintrop, Roses, Sea, and Sun, February 22, 1856 16.5 Theodor Mintrop, A Modern Dance of Death, April 5, 1857. 17.1 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, “No offense!” Chapter 1, ca. 1853 17.2 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, Chapter 4. “O Connoisseurship! O Connoisseurship!” 17.3 Julius Caesar Thaeter, after Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The Origin of Painting, 1839. 18.1 Moritz von Schwind, A Symphony, 1852 18.2 Moritz von Schwind, Symphony no. 3, before 1852

109 111 113 120 122 123 124 125 132 137 139 140 146 148 150 151 152 153 157 160 164 168 177 185 187 188 195 198 202 204 206 211 214 216 226 233

Illustrations 19.1 19.2 20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 20.5 20.6

21.1 21.2 21.3 21.4 21.5 21.6 21.7 21.8 21.9 22.1

22.2

Julius Ernst, after Moritz von Schwind, A Symphony, 1856 Moritz von Schwind, The Fairy Tale of Cinderella, 1854. Rodolphe Töpffer, Mr. Cryptogame Fleeing and Elvire in Pursuit, 1844 Rodolphe Töpffer, The Abbé, The Moors, and The Domestic Animals in Pursuit, 1844 Rodolphe Töpffer, The Farm Birds, The Rats, and All Objects on Deck in Pursuit, 1844 Rodolphe Töpffer, A Norwegian Whaling Ship Spinning at a Rate of Eight Revolutions per Second, 1844 Rodolphe Töpffer, Mr. Cryptogame’s Confession and Elvire’s Unfortunate End, 1844 Anonymous, after an 1845 drawing by Cham, after Rodolphe Töpffer, Mr. Cryptogame Fleeing with Elvire and the Abbé in Pursuit, 1846. Wilhelm Busch, Carefree, designed in 1892–94 Édouard Manet, Perched upon a Bust of Pallas, 1875 Wilhelm Busch, The Fatal End of Jack Crook, Bird of Evil, designed in 1867 Wilhelm Busch, The Seventh Boyish Prank of Max and Moritz (Into the Mill), designed in 1863/64 Wilhelm Busch, The Seventh Boyish Prank of Max and Moritz (The Fowl’s Fodder), designed in 1863/64 Wilhelm Busch, From “Crystal Cluster” to “Frozen Porcupine,” 1863 Wilhelm Busch, Ice-Peter’s Dissolution into Gruel, 1863 Wilhelm Busch, The Miller’s Bold Daughter, 1868 [Johann Jacob?] Ettling, after Wilhelm, Busch, “Up the Fireplace” and “Venus is perdue,” 1871 Caspar Scheuren, Dedication [frontispiece of album by various Düsseldorf artists in honor of Schadow’s twenty-fifth work anniversary], 1851 Kara Walker, Cut, 1998

ix 237 243 248 249 250 251 253

255 260 261 263 264 265 267 267 268 270

274 277

Acknowledgments

The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I

After all these years of academic endeavors, I hope to have still not a “finished” but a “growing” mind, and I certainly feel much gratitude to the countless people who have nourished this project and helped me in so many ways, small and large, to finish it.1 Once upon a time, I might have expressed myself in poetic form, perhaps even in arabesque rhymes. But I feel too shy to exchange academic prose for poetic flight, and my manuscript’s own wild growth demanded pruning. Thus, poetic wistfulness must yield to alphabetic order. Yet my appreciation is no less heartfelt for being less wordy: I thank Christian Bachmann, Jan Baetens, Ruth Baljöhr, Tim Barringer, Emily Beeny, Kit Belgum, Amelia Berry, Markus Bertsch, Fritz Breithaupt, James Brophy, Alexandra Burlingame, Werner Busch, Frank Büttner (†), Vance Byrd, Fiona Chalom, Keith Christiansen, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Barbara Ciciora, Bettina Baumgärtel, Jay Clarke, Emma Dillon, Erika Dowell, Adam Eaker, David Ehrenpreis, Heinz Eickmans, Lynne Farrington, Mitchell Frank, Boris Gasparov, Lydia Goehr, Margaret Graves, Thierry Groensteen, Bruce Holsinger, Christoph Irmscher, John Ittmann, Henrik Karge, Joseph Leo Koerner, Armin Kunz, David Kunzle, Lorenzo Lattanzi, Anthony Lavopa, Anne Leonard, Kirstyn Leuner, Nina Lübbren, Bernhard Maaz, Catriona MacLeod, Dennis F. Mahoney, Suzanne Marchand, Olivia Mattis, Jerome McGann, Peter Meuer, Ryan Minor, Constance Mood, John Morris, Dorothea von Mücke, Ernst Osterkamp, Peter Parshall, Véronique Plesch, John Pollack, Jutta Reinisch, Cornelia Reiter (†), Margaret Rose, Herbert Rott, Jim Rubin, Barbara Schaefer, F. Carlo Schmid, Andrew Stauffer, Andreas Strobl, Holly Watkins, David Wellberry, Friedrich Weltzien, and Sabine Wölfel. My heartfelt thanks extend to those too numerous to list each by name: my students, my colleagues (past and present), the curators and staff of the various museums that provided me with images and research opportunities, all those amazing librarians across the globe without whom nothing of this would have been possible—in particular the wonderful staff at the Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek (Aarau, Switzerland), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Herman B. Wells Library (Indiana University Bloomington), Houghton Library (Harvard University, Boston), Lilly Library (Indiana University Bloomington), Peter H. Raven Library (Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis), Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf, and the various libraries at the

Acknowledgments

xi

University of Pennsylvania—and, last but not least, the editors of earlier iterations of my ideas in print, whose feedback and queries have helped me to shape, sharpen, and revise my argument and present it to you now in its final form: “November 30, 1826: Art between Muse and Marketplace,” in A New History of German Literature, edited by David E. Wellbery, Judith Ryan, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Anton Kaes, Joseph Leo Koerner, and Dorothea E. von Mücke, 531–35 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and, translated into German, in Eine Neue Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 670–75 (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007); “Portrait of the Artist as an Arabesque: Romantic Form and Social Practice in Wilhelm von Schadow’s The Modern Vasari,” Intellectual History Review 17, no. 2 (2007): 99–134; “The Künstlerroman as Romantic Arabesque: Parody, Collaboration, and the Making of ‘The Modern Vasari’ (1854),” in Elective Affinities, edited by Catriona MacLeod, Charlotte SchoellGlass, and Véronique Plesch, 77–97 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); “The Writing on the Wall: Art History, Theories of Civilization, and the Politics of Museum Murals in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Museum History Journal 5, no. 2 (2012): 207– 44; “Schwind’s Symphony: Beethoven, Biedermeier, and the Cruelty of Romance,” in Rival Sisters: Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism, edited by James H. Rubin and Olivia Mattis, 225–48 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014); “The Arabesque from Kant to Comics,” New Literary History 49, no. 4 (2018): 617–60); and “Museum Murals and Nation Building in Restoration Bavaria,” in A History of the European Restorations, edited by Stephen Bann, Michael Broers, and Ambrogio Caiani, vol. 2, Culture, Society and Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 216–31. And thank you to all those I might have forgotten to mention here for no other reason than my proverbial professorial absentmindedness. Nothing, however, would have become of this book (or, for that matter, of myself) without my loving family who has, even if sometimes exhausted, never failed to support me or to believe in me: my sister, Andrea Grewe, my mother, Christa-Vera Grewe, my brother-in-law, Heinz Eickmans, and my husband, Warren Breckman. Above all, I want to acknowledge my children, Conrad, Clara, and Julian. While they have hardly helped to speed up the completion of this project, they are the joy of my life. I dedicate this arabesque to them.

Note 1. Goethe, Faust I, 17, lines 182–83.

Part 1

Three Beginnings

Figure 1.1 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, The Old Man, 1853. Wood engraving, 15 x 23 cm (page). Frontispiece of Wilhelm von Schadow, Der moderne Vasari (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1854). Collection Cordula Grewe, Philadelphia, PA.

1

Prologue

In the beginning was the word. Or more precisely, in the beginning was a book. Its author was devout but a dilettante in the art of writing, a prince of painters who had exchanged the quill for the brush before, but this time against his will. Forced into blindness by an eye infliction and now impatiently waiting for a cataract operation, he sought refuge in dictating his aesthetic convictions to his faithful wife, the erudite Charlotte (figure 1.1). In this autobiographical account, which is much more than just that, the artist transforms into a kind of early modern emblem, an allegorical illustration of nostalgia, religious morality, and an artistic sensibility marked by a mixture of naturalism and idealist leanings.1 Like a visual foreword, the frontispiece encapsulates the artistic principles expounded in the text while introducing its author, who is both our guide and the narrator of the frame story to follow: der Alte (the Old). Like a modern memento mori, the emblem’s pictura—the painter-poet’s portrait—is a reminder of life’s fugitive nature. Age has transformed the prominent features into a rugged, melancholic landscape with deep crevices. As he exhales a large cloud of smoke, the air of pessimism thickens into a stark warning against the emptiness of earthly life: “Vanitas Vanitatum Vanitas!” the ghostly subscriptio reads, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”2 The inscriptio on the scroll above had already prepared us for this moralistic missive: “Quid mundus ni fumus? Fumans obliscere mundum!” it asks: “What is the world but smoke? While smoking, forget the world!” And with these words, the emblem gives us an unexpected, drug-induced way out, releasing us from the world of illusions into the more mundane but utterly enjoyable daily routines of bourgeois sociability. Yet the novel would not be a Romantic arabesque if the beginning did not return once more and this time as ironic repetition. Indeed, in the opening vignette, Wilhelm Schadow returns as a mask (see figure 17.1). The first impression is dark, full of mourning, as we dwell on the plaster cast’s spine-tingling allusion to the popular tradition of death masks. Yet this brief moment of wistfulness is quickly shooed away by an impish putto peaking from behind the deadly white disguise as the painter’s mischievous ghostwriter. With a twinkle in his eye, his appearance puts a comical spin on the emblem’s serious multifaceted iconography, as he coquettishly pleads, “No offense!”3 We will return to this masquerade (again). But we have jumped ahead. The first arabesque greets us before we even open the book, a dainty idyll embossed in luxurious gold on the thick, velvety linen of the book cover (figure 1.2). The scene itself is as seductive as its sumptuous materiality, a meadow strewn with thick leaves and a wispy oak, its branches, intertwined with sprigs of vine, growing around the oval medallion at the center. Four putti relax in DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-2

4 Three Beginnings

Figure 1.2 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, title vignette, 1853. Cover of Schadow, Der moderne Vasari (1854). Collection Cordula Grewe, Philadelphia, PA.

Prologue

5

this ornamental landscape, one’s chubby face peeking out from the lower right corner. This putto’s posture, head propped up on his left arm, foreshadows the emblematic positioning of Schadow as frontispiece, foreshadows it as inversion, as carefree expression, and thus alerts us to a key operation of the book’s content: the actual text. On the other side of the cover’s center medallion, an amorous couple of cupid-like lovers whisper to each other, one standing straight, the other hovering above, having just climbed up from behind the scriptural field. Indeed, in this magical world, illusionary realism and abstract font share the same reality, as the title plate and its contoured border function like concrete, if flat, objects in a seemingly three-dimensional space, objects on which to lean or hide behind. The last of the putti connects arabesque vegetation and carefully outlined letters as, sitting at the bottom with his back to the viewer, he seems to study the words he just has completed with a poignant flourish: Der moderne Vasari von Wilhelm v Schadow. Below the contours of the arabesque idyll, two inscriptions add in somber functionality the names of illustrator and printmaker to the lineup of creative spirits: Illustrationen von Jul. Hübner and Holzschnitt von H. Bürkner. In the end, the ornate cover is more than a seductive game to capture the reader’s eye and open her purse. The cover’s golden shimmer unveils the core theme that lies beneath (or, more aptly, unfolds on the pages to follow), a theme that, in turn, captures Romanticism’s essence in a belated Biedermeier manner: a musing on the inevitability of serious play, of earnest comedy, of a different way of understanding the chaotic web of knowledge and events, choices and accidents that we like to call life. From the cover’s idyll, the arabesque emerges as the fairy-tale-like ornament that weaves together reality and imagination, metaphysics and stories of artistic rancor, and fights over styles and market shares.

Rank Growth The artist as frontispiece will return again, not merely as mask but as the emblematic entrance to the arena where painters and poets would attempt to tame the arabesque, if only with short-lived success.4 This return, this looping back, is not coincidental. It is the nature of the beast, and thus of this book, which, like our opening example, Der moderne Vasari, abounds in returns, recurrences, repetitions: for these are the hallmarks of the Romantic arabesque. Thus, Schadow’s novel is not only the bookend of the story told in this book; with its bricolage quality—a “potpourri of history, criticism, and poetry”—it is also this book’s model.5 Setting out to map the meandering path taken by the arabesque roughly between 1750 and 1900 through literature and literary criticism, aesthetics and art criticism, fresco and painting, book illustration, and the early comic strip, this book is thus not a clear-cut diagram of genealogical pedigree. It is more like the diary of an associative journey inspired by its various manifestations. In short, The Arabesque from Kant to Comics is not a straightforward academic affair but an example of itself.6 Of course, the story of the Romantic ornament I pursue is neither absolute end nor absolute beginning. The arabesque had already sprouted among the ancients and flourished in the Islamic world and non-Western cultures long before the philosopher in my title, Immanuel Kant, gave it a philosophical inflection. Nor would it end at the turn of the century; it would thrive again in modern art, a life I briefly hint at with my epilogue on Kara Walker’s silhouettes.7 Indeed, every arabesque is, by necessity,

6 Three Beginnings but a clipping, a cutting, a segment of an ever-expanding wild growth. But something new and distinct emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution, nourished by the explosion of reproduction techniques, just as something shifted dramatically, at least in the German states, after the failed revolution of 1848. As chance has it, Wilhelm Schadow’s life spans roughly the epoch of our subject, the Romantic arabesque. He was born into one of Prussia’s foremost artist families in 1788 and died in Düsseldorf in 1862 as one of Europe’s most influential academy directors. The anecdotal detail of his dates carries weight and so does the nature of his oeuvre: the man and his art add up to a fascinating case study for Romanticism’s rise, evolution, and ultimate dispersal. This also reminds us of the challenges that its longevity poses to anybody willing to look beyond the celebrated few years of its avant-garde beginnings. An added bonus is Schadow’s large network, which forges, in the spirit of the arabesque’s quest for order within chaos, a personal link of friendships (and animosities) between many beacons of my narrative, from Romantic authors like Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel to the graphic novel’s progenitors Rodolphe Töpffer and Wilhelm Busch, who will have the last word in this book.

A Few Words on Methodology In the spirit of Schadow’s mischievous ghostwriter, this book loves what it presents, but not without insight into its occasional absurdities and ironic twists. It happily toys with the canon, poking at the works hallowed by art history with the production of those who had to live in the historiographical shadows ever since their era’s artistic Samsons brought down the mildewed, cracking columns of the once-venerated temple called the Art Academy. It is worthwhile to rummage through the rubble. Even in an age when visual studies have cut deep into the fabric of traditional art history, when the global turn has unearthed a plethora of new objects and modernism’s status has undergone a metamorphosis from monolithic truth to multifaceted phenomenon, the wasteland of subjects deemed unworthy of study still stretches as far as the eye can reach. Caught in these badlands is often precisely the once-revered, and thus not only curiosity but historical importance justifies scholarly resurrection. The goal is not a new canon but a colorful picture of the unexpected connections between avant-garde and mainstream, high and low, the monuments built for posterity and the ephemeral paper works that, affirming history’s irony, have often outlasted them. Fortunately, the arabesque allows for a rather entertaining respite from the proselytizing sincerity of the Nazarenes, that group of German Romantic artists that has occupied me for almost a quarter of a century after I stumbled, as a Ph.D. student in search of a topic, across one of them, Wilhelm Schadow. I like to think of this book as the final installment of my English German-Romantic trilogy: the first, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (2009), dedicated to theology; the second, The Nazarenes: Romantic Avant-Garde and the Art of the Concept (2015), to aesthetics; and now the third to the ornamental as a correlate and corrective to the concept—so vital to Romanticism studies—of the organic. It also is the final blossoming of my long-term relationship with Wilhelm Schadow, which finally in 2017, after a twodecade gestation period, bloomed into a full-fledged catalogue raisonné. A key concern of this book, as of the four-hundred-pagers that preceded it, is a desire not to get lost in translation. Its engagement with philosophy, aesthetics, and art as intellectual history is representative of the scholarship on the arabesque in Germany,

Prologue

7

where it has enjoyed constant popularity ever since Werner Busch’s 1985 study Die notwendige Arabeske (The essential arabesque). The same does not hold true for other countries, whose scholarship on the subject is less copious and tends to follow a different trajectory, from the philological interest in France to the more outspoken focus on the grotesque (not least from a postcolonial perspective) in the English-speaking world.8 On the other hand, work on the graphic novel, so central to my argument, has largely developed in a parallel universe to art history, despite obvious overlaps.9 Thus, conscious about the “Germanic” nature (as the Romantics would have had it) of topic and approach, I aim in this book to build intercontinental bridges which might not least serve the student of contemporary art and help to expand the fabric of surprise affiliations spun by this arabesque. After all, Romanticism has enjoyed a persistent presence in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, and its capacity to raise questions not merely of (art) historical but systematic (and theoretical) character remains intriguing to scholars as well.

Notes 1. Considered one of the primary vehicles of cultural knowledge during the early modern period (ca. 1500–1750), the canonical emblem is an allegorical, usually tripartite composition consisting of a brief motto in Latin or a European vernacular language (inscriptio), an enigmatic picture (pictura), and an epigram (subscriptio). Wade, “What Is an Emblem?” (2010–15), Emblematica Online, http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu/help/what-emblem (accessed July 15, 2015). 2. Ecclesiastes 1:2 (KJV). 3. “Nichts für ungut!” 4. See chapter 14. 5. For the quote, see chapter 15. 6. For a kind of summary or exposé of the argument presented in this book, see Grewe, “The Arabesque from Kant to Comics.” 7. See the book’s “Final Flourish” (chapter 22) and fig. 22.2. 8. Muzelle, L’arabesque (2006); Connelly, The Sleep of Reason (1995) and The Grotesque (2012). 9. Smolderen, The Origins of Comics (2014).

2

Forays into a Form Grown Wild Setting the Stage

German Romanticism began as a literary movement driven by the desire to rethink the nature of the text, a desire fueled by the historical experience of constant change and a profound metaphysical crisis. The Enlightenment belief in Reason’s omnipotence had failed to deliver the promised new world and left the Romantic generation with a burning sensation of homelessness. Governments, modes of production, and the rise of commodity culture had accelerated time in the age of revolutions, political and otherwise, yet the haunting question of life’s deeper meaning seemed left unanswered. As mistrust in the Enlightenment’s claims, their absoluteness, and underlying notions of the self’s sovereignty settled in, it shattered the trust in the text as self-referential, self-sufficient, and autonomous. Rethinking the nature of the text meant rethinking the nature of representation. New strategies of narrating were needed. Turning to the visual arts for inspiration, the Romantics found what they were looking for at the margins of the established order (both spatially and temporally): in the arabesque and grotesque decorations of ancient Rome and its Renaissance revival. Around 1800, a generation of writers, collectors, and art aficionados became fascinated with the ornamental decorations that once had enlivened Nero’s half-buried Domus Aurea, structured Pompeian wall painting, embellished Islamic artifacts, and adorned Raphael’s Vatican loggia. Leaving behind the grand narratives of ancient heroes and Christian martyrs with their laws of plot, one-point perspective, and pantomime expressivity, the poets extracted from this rich and intricate tradition of a borderland a key principle of Romantic writing: the arabesque.

The Grotesquarabesque: A “New Figurative Language” At this juncture, we should take a moment to admire this fantastic creature of the decorative arts and gather, as the avid consumers of our Romantic novels and artworks would have, around a print. For all roads may lead to Rome, but not everybody could travel, and even those who had gone on a Grand Tour loved to refresh their memories of the splendors they had admired. Our encounter with Raphael’s fantastic décor thus does not occur in situ, on the second-floor arcades surrounding the Cortile di San Damaso of the Vatican Palace, but between the covers of a late eighteenth-century portfolio (figure 2.1).1 Monumental in scale, exquisite in execution, and bewitching in its hand-colored iridescence, the forty-six prints by Giovanni Ottaviani and Giovanni Volpato conjure up such a vibrant and pristine image of Raphael’s grotesques that not even the opulent DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-3

Forays into a Form Grown Wild

Figure 2.1 Giovanni Ottaviani, after drawings by Pietro Camporesi and Gaetano Savorelli, after Raphael and his circle, Pilaster VII (The Bird Catcher), ca. 1770/1772. Engraving and etching, hand colored, 108.5  x 42.5 cm. From Loggie di Rafaele nel Vaticano, vol. 1 (1772), sheet 7. Collection Fiona Chalom, Los Angeles, CA.

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10 Three Beginnings price of this equally opulent reproduction project could hamper its financial success or diminish the wave of enthusiasm for the Renaissance’s decorative side it unleashed. The printmakers’ brilliance even papered over the historical inaccuracies of the third volume, which, as only recently noted, shows the borders of Raphael’s famous tapestries for Pope Leo X, instead of the loggia’s ornamentation, which weather and age had reduced to unrecognizable rubble.2 In 1782, a second edition appeared, and so an expanded culture of prints opened the door to unknown treasures. The modern imagination happily accepted the invitation, and generations to come would enthusiastically embark, gathered in the homey warmth of the drawing room, on the imaginary discovery of legendary art and architectural wonders, foreign countries, and exotic landscapes.3 How could the contemporaries of Ottaviani and Volpato not be mesmerized? Nicknamed The Bird Catcher for the kneeling young man at the bottom of the tall, unnaturally thin and straight tree with its sundry flock of fowl, the print of the loggia’s seventh pilaster appealed to mind and senses alike (see figure 2.1). The varied iconography and technical tour-de-force of the hand-colored engraving, worked up with etched details, inevitably entice our intellectual curiosity while the abundance of color and trompe l’oeil surfaces pleases even the greediest eye. At the same time, the overabundance of patterns, fields, and motifs is channeled into a pleasing sense of harmony through an underlying symmetry and a careful balance between abstract and organic ornamentation, grotesque geometries and playful realism, which highlights the unsurpassed talent of its designer, Giovanni da Undine, at rendering animals.4 The same holds true for the overarching layout in the shape of a candelabra, an ancient, basically symmetrical motif animated by irregularly placed objects and variations in the shapes of its medallions. It was precisely this sense of a rationally organized maze that fueled the eighteenthcentury enthusiasm for the loggia’s “new figurative language,” which, as AntoineChrysostome Quatremère de Quincy enthused in 1788, had laid the foundation for “a modern school of the arabesque.”5 Thirty years later, the French architectural theorist identified with unbroken gusto “two great merits .  .  . , merits attributable to him alone” as key to the greatness of Raphael’s design: “that moral influence of taste, which co-ordinates all the parts, selects the happiest details, corrects the abuse of an arbitrary vanity, by the unity of a general system” and “an entirely new kind of originality” which imbued this class of decorative art with “an order of conceptions and ideas . . . [nowhere] found in the works of antiquity.”6 It is by the happy employment of allegory that he often found means to render interesting to the mind decorations which would seem only destined to appeal to the eyes. Nothing can be more ingenious than the manner in which he gave life to a sort of dead language, composed of signs, unmeaning, both in themselves and in their relations, when chance alone decides the subject which brings them together. The apparent fantasticalness of their forms, Raffaello corrected by the introduction of a moral idea, which served as a palliative or commentary; we experience, in the meaning we there discover, a new kind of pleasure, that of encountering and recognising reason under the mask of frivolity.7 In the eyes of the Frenchman and his contemporaries, the symbolic heft of Raphael’s playful fancies elevated them to the status of history painting.

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The Grotesquarabesque: On Terminology A word on terminology is in order here, for the modern arabesque grew out of two competing traditions originally separated as distinct, individually named categories. Quatremère de Quincy had already said as much in passing when talking about the Vatican’s “new kind of embellishment”: “We say new, only with reference to modern times; for this method of decoration, to which the name of grotesque or arabesque has been given, was in fact a revival from antiquity.”8 Indeed, what sprawls across the walls of the papal palace is, technically speaking, not an arabesque but a grotesque: Arabesque Distinctive kind of vegetal ornament that flourished in Islamic art from the 10th to the 15th century. The term “arabesque” is a European, not an Arabic, word dating perhaps to the 15th or 16th century, when Renaissance artists used Islamic designs for book ornament and decorative bookbindings.9 Grotesque French term derived from the Italian grottesco, describing a type of European ornament composed of small, loosely connected motifs, including scrollwork, architectural elements, whimsical human figures and fantastic beasts, often organized vertically around a central axis.10 The Romantics did not share the categorical clarity attempted by the Oxford Dictionary of Art. They simply fused both traditions, vegetal abstraction and the fantasy of animate–inanimate chimeras, Oriental ornamentation and the Western tradition of hybrid patterns of decoration, patterns half-human, half-plant. Reacting to this terminological mishmash, German literary scholar Günter Oesterle introduced the term Groteskarabeske (grotesquarabesque) to describe the specific nature of the Romantic literary arabesque.11 The Romantics themselves, however, did not care for such descriptive precision and simply subsumed their new hybrid creature under the term “arabesque.” Shying away from the unwieldiness of Oesterle’s compound, I have followed suit and adopted the Romantics’ broad definition of the arabesque. Thus, if we speak here of the arabesque, we speak of the arabesque in an expanded field. This conflation of aesthetic and thematic differences was itself part and parcel of the Romantic quest for a textual fabric that could self-consciously express upon the fragmentary quality of its own construction. Stripped of its physical thingness through the absorption into the literary, the Romantic arabesque, reflecting upon the existential media shift at play in much of the era’s creative experimentation, could assume the kind of hybridity needed, in 1800, to kindle a new language and a new way of writing.

“Chaotic Form—Arabesque, Fairy-Tale” One of the masterminds of the new arabesque textuality was Friedrich Schlegel, who will serve as our guide, too, through the Romantic jungle of ornamentation. Admittedly, for all his originality he was not the first to evoke the “arabesque” as a literary category. As early as 1790 the Weimar publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch had already

12 Three Beginnings applied the term, with direct reference to Raphael, to the fairy tales of Count Antoine Hamilton, a French writer of Scottish descent whose fables, first translated into German in 1777 and 1790, captured the imagination of the young German Romantics.12 Schlegel was nonetheless the first to elevate the arabesque from a genre denomination (the fairy tale or, by extension, the collections of such fantastic folktales as the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights) to a central mechanism of poetic production. Indeed, the arabesque formed the center of his theory of the novel, a new genre that, as Schlegel declared programmatically in 1800, incarnated the Romantic text: “Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch.—The novel is a Romantic book.”13 For Schlegel, the literary arabesque denotes an “artfully ordered confusion” and “charming symmetry of contradictions,” full of imagination, playfulness, and caprice, which suspends all practical ends and purposeful story lines.14 As such, it embodies the principles of chance and contingency, noncoherence and nonsense. Proliferating like the organic webs, rampant meanderings, and unbridled serpentine lines sprouting as arabesque–grotesque decorations across objects of all kind, the text transforms itself into a dynamic open-ended capriccio of different voices, perspectives, and modes of representation, embracing a fragmented character that seemed unavoidable and a reflection of the basic conditions of the times. “Chaotic form—arabesque, fairy tale.”15 This new and highly flexible kind of poetic prose quickly became a dominant mode of narration in early Romantic writing. Bringing together literary, critical, and philosophical strands of argumentation, it also fashioned a new, more deeply involved reader, one with a heightened aesthetic sensibility who would from now on carry much of the critical and hermeneutical process. The twentieth century was struck by the modernist quality it detected in this refashioned reader and the theory of the novel from which it generated. However, this was hardly a new idea. Already Schlegel had linked Romanticism and modernity, although without any of the twentieth-century fondness for the shock of the new. The Romantics simply experienced the novel as a necessity, an irreplaceable means to transform (and, ideally, overcome) precisely the modernity that had produced it, a modernity they perceived, after all, as a prosaic prison house and disenchanted wasteland. Hopefully, the new genre, Schlegel fantasized in 1815 with Miguel de Cervantes in mind, could even bring about “a transfiguration of all things in a magic mirror,” a magic mirror reaching “into the future.”16 Schlegel did not dream alone. The outcome of this collective reverie was a series of highly poetic novels filled with theoretical self-reflections—from Friedrich Hölderlin’s 1797 Hyperion, or, The Hermit in Greece (with its explicit ruminations about the nature of poetic discourse) and Friedrich Schlegel’s erotic autobiographical fragment Lucinde (which in 1799 scandalized the heroine’s native Berlin) to Novalis’s medievalist dream of the blue flower in his ode to medieval Minne and the power of poetry, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (written in 1800 but published only posthumously and in a fragmentary state two years later). Clemens Brentano succinctly captured the character of the new narrative structures with the subtitle to his 1801 novel Godwi: Ein verwilderter Roman—A Novel Grown Wild.

A Novel Grown Wild Brentano’s Godwi is symptomatic of the epidemic crisis of representation that rushed in the arabesque’s modern reappearance. Partly epistolary, partly expository, the novel embodies a subversive counterstatement to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1776 Wilhelm

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Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), a coming-of-age story that follows the psychological and moral growth of its eponym from Wilhelm’s entanglement in the frivolous world of the theater to his entry into the secret, ultrarationalist Society of the Tower. As the Bildungsroman (novel of formation and self-education) par excellence, Goethe’s novel was itself a quintessentially modern and, in many ways, Romantic product.17 Taking on the Olympian of German literature, Brentano proceeded to push the latter’s compositional experiments to unprecedented extremes. Even Friedrich Schlegel was stunned. In vain does the reader look for any coherent narrative thread, for the slightest trace of linear development. He finds nothing but a jigsaw puzzle of epistolary parentheses, bouts of dialogue, pieces of poetry, comic interludes, diary entries, geometric diagrams, songs, footnotes, and illustrations.18 We cannot even turn to the novel’s main protagonist for guidance, as the I-narrator, the poet Maria, dies prematurely before the novel has ended so that somebody else has to tell us the rest. This unexpected twist and ultimate reminder of the hero’s inability to control fate (his own and that of others) testifies loudly to the “death of the hero” that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the grandmaster of German Idealist philosophy, had proclaimed with such vehemence in his lectures on aesthetics and fine art.19 In the modern, fully formed state, Hegel insisted, universal individual action is impossible. The constitutional state reduces the hero to an executive organ, and as such he is exchangeable. The hero and his deed are no longer one; he either breaks or becomes incapacitated. What is left is a merely individual heroism, maintains German art historian Werner Busch, seconding Hegel’s observation, which “consists in stoically bearing or suffering public demands.”20 Around 1800, this dreadful yet inescapable condition of modern man made the arabesque an absolute necessity.21 As the hero disappeared for good in the arabesque’s dense undergrowth, the decentered Romantic self sought refuge in its fantastic scrollwork. In a situation like this, form could but grow wild.

Repetitions One of the arabesque’s hallmarks is its infinity, an infinity nurtured by the possibility of an endless repetition of geometric patterns or by a continuous growth of organic forms into ever new branches, sprouts, and tendrils. Romantic writings abound in metaphors for this state of being that marks existence as ordered chaos. Conjuring up dreams of exotic magic, one such metaphor was the oriental rug as a perfect example of an object that, made up of patterns equally colorful at every point, could be expanded indefinitely into all directions and to all sides.22 In short, living off reproduction, repetition, and seriality, the Romantic arabesque functions as a system of potential replication ad infinitum. A pleasingly spine-tingling example of such a textual fabric, one as magical as Schlegel’s poetic carpet, is Ludwig Tieck’s fairy tale Die sieben Weiber des Blaubart: Eine wahre Familiengeschichte (The seven wives of Bluebeard: A true family saga), a topsy-turvy recapitulation of the Gothic story about a bloodthirsty nobleman in which curiosity does not merely kill cats.23 As wife number seven, overcome by what centuries of men have portrayed as a quintessentially feminine vice, opens the door of the forbidden chamber, she finds a horror cabinet of slain corpses neatly lined up on meat hooks along the walls. Of course, she is discovered, and soon faces the same fate as her unhappy predecessors. Yet somebody must live to tell the tale, and in her case, she is the lucky one. The monster is just about to behead his next victim when

14 Three Beginnings her brothers arrive at the last minute, save her from the murderous blow, and kill the predator instead.24 With its gore and blood-dripping eroticism, this fairy tale of a mass murderer and his brides seems a picture-perfect script for the next blockbuster slasher movie—but only in its medieval incarnation. Tieck’s Seven Wives, in contrast, would hardly give Hollywood producers what they need: the key protagonist, indeed, the key to it all, who, to our all astonishment, has gone missing. With amazement, the reader of Tieck’s Bluebeard soon realizes that the sole survivor of the serial killer’s routine, the seventh wife, remains absent from the story. What we are left with instead are the involutions of a plot that in the end consists merely of secondary figures and protagonists. “The repeat offender and serial killer Bluebeard thus becomes the ideal subject of a form that is essentially defined through serial proliferation and through repetitions of a recurrent pattern.”25 Without the main heroine present, the entire tale is but an arabesque supplement to the actual drama. Tieck had indeed published the originally French folktale only shortly beforehand and now felt confident that “I am not obligated to add anything here, because I assume that each of my readers has read the Bluebeard, and therefore it is very easy for me to write this last chapter in which I do not need to present anything.”26 From the outset the seven wives of Bluebeard renounce the possibility that their story could be an ergon, an autonomous work, in the sense of a text that achieves identity with itself. The writer is less an author than a wordsmith, who begins with a reconstruction. Renouncing the written text as self-identical, Tieck, like his fellow Romantics, insists that any text demands a supplement of reading. The analogies to postmodern theories of writing, especially deconstruction, are striking. Yet the theorists’ Romantic ancestry is too complex to be discussed here. Instead, this seems an opportune moment to shed light on another often overlooked aspect of the Romantics’ fervent disavowal of The Work as ideal totality: the fact that “authorship” and “author” had become such contested concepts around 1800 not only for creative reasons but for legal and economic ones as well.

Author and Authorship For all its philosophical ramifications, the demotion of “the author” from genius to copyrighted entity responded first and foremost to mercantile necessities: the shift from the writer at the mercy of patronage to the writer in the free market, who lives by the pen (or at least, tries to).27 The “author” as we understand it was born under the monetary star of a rapidly developing book market, which dangled the promise of emancipation in front of the writer’s hungry mind. Yet the sweet taste of freedom soon turned sour, as inspiration became tied to marketability and creativity to rapid production. In the ruins of traditional patronage, a new tyrant, even more fickle, raised its ugly head: fashion. In its shadow lurked yet another threat, a monstrous thief ready to snatch whatever valuable had been born from fashion’s fickle grace: copyright infringement. On this new battlefield, “the author” fought not for some long-lost ideal of the ivory tower but for sheer survival. Behind the free play of the imagination, basic human needs asked for their share. Notions of selfhood might be debated, the parameters of creativity challenged, but the living organism still needs to eat and drink, be clothed and sheltered. As poetic production turned into intellectual labor, the contents of the material object generated by it (a book, an article, a piece of music) needed to be protected. The economic

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imperative thus gave birth to the concept of intellectual property. As a result, the question of form again gained center stage, although this time not in esoteric, philosophical but the most practical terms: to be recognized and recognizable, The Work needed to become a precisely demarcated unit, which, through clear measurements, could be labeled as uniquely belonging to one particular producer, copyright’s offspring: the “author.” For the writer to lay claim to the ownership of a text (here again referring to a certain composition of thoughts, not the text in its material printed thingness), he had to prove that the ideas he was uttering were not simply common property, but uniquely his own. In light of a general assumption about the genealogical nature of all knowledge, such proof of originality could hardly be made for the ideas per se. In his essay The Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting: A Rationale and Parable, Johann Gottlieb Fichte thus argued that originality resides not only in the ideas themselves but also in the specific form they are presented in.28 Subsequently, it would indeed be the particular form that became the protected object of copyright law or Urheberrecht—the right of the initial originator.29 As we lose ourselves, quite pleasurably, in the aesthetic debates over the arabesque, we should not forget that “the author” (as a legal authority of his product) saw the light of day at exactly the same moment, when the literati ceased to see a text as a self-identical creation. Ironically, then, the same writers who wanted to be authors (in the legal sense) were the midwives of this change.

Recuperative Reading(s) Depending on the temperament of the writer, s/he transformed the insight into the text’s incomplete nature either into a negative or a positive operation. A negative hermeneutics supplies something absent from—and in contradiction to—the textual surface. Skeptical toward the possibilities of grounding meaning through interpretation, negative hermeuticians lead us toward a heuristic theory of the text as a stimulus for the production of meanings that cannot entirely be fixed. The more optimistic of the deconstructionist Romantics held on to the notion of recuperative reading and thus the belief that hermeneutics could synthesize the text by arranging and expanding elements it provided. “The pressures of derealization in romantic texts often coexist with a strongly affirmative conception and execution, and to supply a unity not present in the text,” Tilottama Rajan observes. “As if to insure our cooperation, the romantic text often makes the appropriate reader a part of its rhetoric.”30 In light of the historicity of perception, this undertaking seems, however, rather hopeless. In any case, Schlegel belonged to the first, hermeneutical tenet, Jean Paul to the second, deconstructionist one. In the novel as Romantic book, sense yields to nonsense, nonsense meandering around and along the borderline between inside and outside, delineating, tracing, altering the hermeneutic field, being both work and border work, a hybrid of a non(or still-to-be) hermeneutics, which constitutes itself in subtly differentiated shades of extremism. The Work becomes a utopia. Paralysis looms persistently at the horizon, paralysis of the creator, and ultimately, of the reader as well. And it was this threat that more than anything else necessitated a redefinition of the parameters of aesthetic production. The Romantics perform this pirouette by retreating from the main stage into the prologue. Presence and writing in the present appear now as prolegomena

16 Three Beginnings to another time zone when the self-identical text—or the perfect artwork, as Wilhelm Schadow had it—and with it a perfect, ideal, and just society will (again) be realized. Positioning themselves as the warm-up band to a much-awaited concert, the Romantic writers freed their performance, at least in theory, from the burden to achieve a totality of meaning. In that sense, Romantic writing is a topsy-turvy rendition of Neoclassicist aesthetics, enacted in the temporal space of “once upon a time,” a fairy-tale land in which the utopia of producing a self-referential text can be realized in the surreal space of dream and imagination, fantasy and nightmare. Soon the arabesque overtook the rules of the Romantics’ predecessors, swallowed, absorbed, reconfigured, and, finally, reproduced them as a grotesque subversion, an open-ended yet entwined reconfiguration of the ideal of totality.

The Arabesque as Litmus Test The prevalence of literary theory and emphasis on concepts of writing hitherto dominant in my account might evoke the impression that this is a book about literature. It is not. This is a book about the convoluted knots that the arabesque tied together in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Yet this preamble, this close look at the literary arabesque, was needed to set the stage for a deeper understanding of the Romantic arabesque in art, in particular the arts’ considerable struggle to make it their own (again). It is this struggle I am mainly interested in, not the arabesque per se, which, after all, is everywhere and has been everywhere before. One could wonder, for example, why the Romantic arabesque is such a big deal when none of my examples even come close to the exuberant nature of its Rococo variant. Take, for example, Amalienburg, a small pleasure palace and hunting lodge near Munich that François Cuvilliés the Elder made into one of Europe’s most exquisite Rococo creations and a Gesamtkunstwerk of rare beauty. Stepping into the silvery interior patterned by organic grotesqueries, we quickly lose a firm sense of inside and outside. The walls seem to liquefy into a soft, airy thicket of overgrowth, which at night, in the flickering glow of candlelight, sparkles like a magical forest or enchanted garden. For all its artistry and glorious sensuality, however, this exoticizing GesamtOrnament lacks one thing: a critical edge. The Romantics sensed as much and condemned Rococo decoration as frivolous, decadent, and immoral.31 While we might not share the Romantics’ negative judgment, they had a point. Rococo ornament does not produce a theory of itself; self-reflexivity, metaphysics, or moral imperatives are foreign to it. As such, it is Romanticism’s antithesis. Of course, we have already gained a glimpse into the constant border crossing between literature and art, art and literature. The lines between the two were remarkably porous in the Romantic age, more porous than one might think. Hence, this study sets out from textual beginnings: poetry and prose and the philosophical treatise. Only then does it turn to the monumental attempt at a second Raphael loggia, from where it moves swiftly to the arabesque’s subsequent escape into the world of printmaking and book illustration. Along these shifting perspectives and object studies, the novel, the actual novel, never loses its central role for my narrative. After all, one thing is certain (and the current forays into a form grown wild pay tribute to this fact): to understand the visual side of the arabesque’s meanderings, as they loop along frescoed walls and decorative paper borders, encroach upon pages of neat little

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volumes and monumental canvases, in short, to understand the Romantic arabesque as artistic principle and overarching expression, we must have a thorough grasp of its textual structure, its function as a form of avant-garde writing and theoretically charged principle of composition. Only a sufficient engagement with the arabesque’s literary heritage provides the Romantic scholar with that sensitive analytic equipment necessary to grasp the arabesque’s visual mutations. It certainly promises a rich reward, not least because this minute category, the arabesque, was widely cherished by the end of the eighteenth century as a fine apparatus of cultural observation. “One could,” Clemens Brentano concluded in January 1810, “draw very apposite conclusions about the aesthetic opinions of every epoch from the arabesques and their inner correlation.”32 Brentano’s affirmation of the arabesque’s critical potential and analytic potency points to the deep-seated Romantic belief in the superiority of an artwork that criticizes itself in an act of self-reflection.33 Such self-reflection could take many aesthetic directions, including, as I have shown in the case of the Nazarenes, a radically historicist one.34 This fact reminds us that form as material expression is only one criterion by which to identify the arabesque as technique. This insight runs against ingrained disciplinary borders and aesthetic expectations. Yet, as both visible expression and conceptual program, the arabesque exceeds the specificity of certain pictorial solutions. Even an artwork that does not cohere at all to either the Oxford Dictionary’s arabesque or grotesque can be a Romantic “grotesquarabesque” in its nature and, by extension, critically.35 We have to keep this in mind as we move forward and perform Brentano’s aesthetic-cultural litmus test.

Notes 1. The project totals three volumes first published between 1772 and 1777; see Büttner, “Die Loggiendekorationen.” 2. Ibid., 61–62. 3. For the reception of the Vatican loggia and the significance for it of reproductive prints, see Lebeurre, “Les loges.” 4. Büttner, “Die Loggiendekorationen,” 60–61. 5. See, for example, Claude-Henri Watelet’s 1757 article on the arabesque in the Encyclopédie; Lebeurre, “Les loges,” 427; the citations are from Quatremère de Quincy, “Arabesques,” in the Encyclopédie méthodique: Architecture, in Lebeurre, “Les loges,” 428. 6. Quatremère de Quincy, The Lives, 265. 7. Ibid.; spelling Americanized. 8. Ibid. 9. Anonymous,“Arabesque” (2003, with updates in 2008, 2010). In Grove Art Online: Oxford Art Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T003513 (accessed February 13, 2012). 10. Monique Riccardi-Cubitt, “Grotesque,” in Grove Art Online: Oxford Art Online, https:// doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T035099(accessed February 13, 2012). 11. Oesterle, “Arabeske,” 279; see also idem, “Arabeske und Roman.” 12. Menninghaus, In Praise, 88. 13. Friedrich Schlegel, “Brief über den Roman” (1800), in idem, Kritische, 2:335. 14. F. Schlegel, “Dialogue,” 86. 15. Friedrich Schlegel, “Zur Poesie (1799),” in idem, Kritische, 16:276, fragment no. 274. 16. Brown, “Theory,” esp. 257–58; quote on 258. 17. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. 18. MacLeod, “Sculptural Blockages.” 19. See, in particular, Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, chap. 3, section B. I. a, 179–93.

18 Three Beginnings 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Werner Busch, “Über Helden,” 57–76. See the title of Busch’s pathbreaking 1985 book Die notwendige Arabeske. F. Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, 1690. Tieck, Die sieben Weiber. The most famous version of this French literary folktale, Charles Perrault’s “La Barbe bleue,” was published in the poet’s 1697 Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. Menninghaus, In Praise, 91. Tieck, Ritter Blaubart; see also Menninghaus, In Praise, 90. Woodmansee, The Author. Fichte, “Beweis der Unrechtmäßigkeit.” For an interesting discussion of Fichte’s relevance for today’s copyright debates, see, for example, Borghi, “Owning Form,” or Biagioli, “Genius against Copyright.” Rajan, The Supplement, 2. For the Neoclassicist taming of Rococo exuberance within the workshop of the Feuchtmayr school, see Klingen, Von Birnau nach Salem. Brentano to Philipp Otto Runge, Berlin, January 21, 1810, in Brentano, Briefe, 203. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 46–47. Grewe, The Nazarenes. Quoted in Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 46–47.

3

An Outline (of Things to Come)

This book is about the unexpected but fertile interaction between early Romantic avant-garde practices and their Biedermeier taming, between high art and its deconstruction. It is about the dialogue between literature and the visual arts as it evolves around the debates over what constitutes modern narrativity. And it is about the essential dualism and doubledness of the arabesque as an actual material form (a concrete design decorative by origin and ornamental in nature) and a structural principle (a system of ordering relations and producing meaning through associations, which is, at least to a large degree, conceptual and not bound to one specific kind of material manifestation). As such, it begins with an avant-garde arabesque that, around 1800, arose from the lucky constellation of two guiding stars, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schlegel, and then had to reinvent itself upon its return to the visual arts. Its path thus leads us from German Idealist philosophy to the origins of the graphic novel. Somewhere in the swirls and surging movements, which propel us from stern systematic thinking to sardonic grotesquery, an autobiographical novella, Der moderne Vasari, provides a foothold as the pivotal turning point between serious modernism and its satirical dissolution. The story told in this book would have unfolded in very different ways were it not for the fierce reaction of the later eighteenth century against the Rococo paradigm. This is neither the time nor the place to revisit the dramatic political events that peaked in regicide and terror, although the French Revolution is the cataclysmic event ever-present in the background. Here, Jacques Louis David’s 1784 life-size Oath of the Horatii reminds us of the powerful marriage of politics and taste backing Neoclassicism’s onslaught on the intimate, color-filled world of boudoir interiors and dreamy landscapes, of queens as milkmaids and the court’s desire to reach the shores of Watteau’s Cythera.1 But the revered genre of history painting, with its monumentality and weightiness of pretense, was not the only arena in which the battle for aesthetic reform was fought. The world of the ornamental was neither less besieged nor less central than the academy’s favorite genre despite its status as a border phenomenon, literally marginal and confined to a liminal space where adornment and decoration waited to rise from mere application to critical category, from accidental accessory to core principle. As revolution arose at the horizon and soon colored the earth red, a more Spartan taste replaced the taste for a totalizing rocaille that proliferated as frenzied, irregular forms across spaces, media, and bodies of all kinds, whether built environment or fashionable dress. The new obsession was the pure and purified outline as embodied, DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-4

20 Three Beginnings

Figure 3.1 Tommaso Piroli, after John Flaxman Jr., Thetis and Eurynome Receiving the Infant Vulcan, 1793–1805. Etching (early proof state), 18.4 x 25.2 cm (plate); 28.3 x 43.8 cm (page). From The Iliad of Homer (1805), plate 29. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, W1893-5-3.

with finesse and international acclaim, by John Flaxman’s elemental minimalism (figure 3.1). Content and artistic means are condensed to their essence, a radical reduction that elevates the bold black contour to one of the artwork’s main protagonists. In the process, the line assumes a twofold quality (subservient yet autonomous) and double function. It serves, insofar as it is descriptive and charged with delineating (through the imitation of nature or a preexisting artistic model) a concrete, individual, specific object and with it a precise subject matter. But it is autonomous, insofar as it claims, via its particular modulation and formal qualities, an emotional, psychological, and aesthetic effect fully its own and entirely visual. The work’s material qualities—its form, visual relations, materiality, and, where applicable, color— assume a status through their particular madeness, a status independent of content. Meaning derives from the intrinsic values of the actual mark. Without yet defecting entirely from the mimetic dimension of tracing shapes on a flat surface, the Neoclassicist outline and its Romantic offspring remake themselves in their own image, as linear abstraction.2 The double encoding of the line in the eighteenth century is example and metaphor alike of the seismic shift engendered by the fundamental crisis in the era’s intellectual life and, as a result, its visual arts. It gestures toward the tension between Neoclassicism’s classic emphasis on the object and the new orientation toward the conditions of forming

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an aesthetic judgment in the encounter with nature (or art). The former centers on normative content and an equally normative conception of beauty, together charged with materializing the sum of the time’s moral, ethical, and, implicitly, political ideals. The latter is equally concerned with the condition of humanity, society, and the state but shifts attention from the conditions of the material object to the recipient’s mental activities. In short, it shifts from manifest thingness to the mind’s operation. As a consequence, the specific, morally uplifting subject matter (or specific rule of the beautiful) lost its privileged position, as the function and success of aesthetic activity no longer relied on either of these traditional academic norms. What now mattered was process as such, the mental (namely, aesthetic) activity that supposedly enables us to experience (in our self) the kind of freedom and harmony of drives necessary to create communal structures and generally valid laws. Immanuel Kant’s 1790 Critik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment) looms large over this new thinking, as does Friedrich Schiller’s treatise Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), first published, as the subtitle remarks, “in a series of letters” four years later.3 As landmarks of modern aesthetics, both of these treatises are highly complex, as are their political agenda and cultural import. However, neither their specifics and subtleties nor their substantial differences can concern us here. What is at stake for the arabesque is their overarching role in rethinking the position, purpose, and function of ornament and ornamentation in modern art. What we are interested in is the groundbreaking erosion of traditional hierarchies of artistic genres and notions of beauty fostered by these Promethean thinkers, an upheaval that made possible the remarkable rise of the arabesque to an avant-garde mode of creativity and, as Clemens Brentano so perceptively put it, an aesthetic-cultural litmus test.4 Indeed, without understanding the philosophical debates of the second half of the eighteenth century, we cannot understand the far-reaching aesthetic, theoretical, and cultural claims made in the name of the arabesque. Nor can we understand its remarkably multimedia nature, which reaches from literary to musical modes of composition, from ballet postures to avant-garde painting, from museum decoration to the fanciful prints of late nineteenth-century advertisements, bonds, and stocks. As it turns out, the arabesque’s frequently whimsical flourish occupied a central role in the period’s reconceptualization of the nature and function of art, its ontological status, epistemological implications, and capacities of meaning production. In a quintessentially modernist vein, content became increasingly separated from form, as form assumed an ever-higher status as an independent locus of personal experience. “For it is through the form alone that the whole of man is reached, while subject matter only affects exceptional powers of the faculties.” Friedrich Schiller would state succinctly in 1794, “It is only of the form that that true aesthetic freedom can be expected.”5 This maceration and inversion of traditional aesthetic categories fostered an increasing approximation of art and ornament, accompanied by a sweeping emancipation of the latter. Previously relegated to a subservient status as rhetorical trope and strictly decorative element, the ornament broadly conceived now ascended to a critical category, a thing to be taken seriously and to be taken seriously in and by itself. Although most of the era’s Promethean thinkers agreed on the ornament’s general revaluation, discontent was prevalent over the concrete shape of its emancipation. These disagreements were fueled by the entanglement of the ornament debate in the extensive and even more heated debates over the nature and (re)definition of

22 Three Beginnings a modern symbol system, an entanglement that would bind the ornament forever to the fate of allegory and allegorese. In the Romantic arabesque, various strands of these eighteenth-century debates would come together, and the following four chapters trace the move back and forth between the various, often conflicting, interpretative schema which made up the fertile, if motley, soil of the arabesque’s rank growth. With often dizzying speed the ornament debate passed from an aesthetics of effect and content to an aesthetics of reception and production, from the focus on art’s intrinsic characteristics to the investigation of the nature of aesthetic judgment, from an insistence on subject matter to a formalism oriented toward the effects of a particular artistic configuration and its operational principles. The particular qualities of the ornament debate that gave birth to the modern arabesque determined my choice to begin with six chapters of a rather theoretical nature (“The Arabesque Revolution”). In the post-Rococo revaluation of ornamentation, aesthetics came before art, theory before technique. Ironically, the critical overthrow of the specific form and principle of decoration was intimately linked to the moment when the criticized and philosophically supplanted phenomenon celebrated its greatest popularity.6 This was as true for the Rococo ornament as it would be for the Romantic arabesque. Hence, our narrative begins in the twilight years of the Rococo, when the critics of the ancien régime began to wield their pens against the political and aesthetic status quo. Before we settle into our seats to watch the drama of the arabesque’s advent in the aesthetic discourse of late eighteenth-century Germany, however, we might be well advised to look out for (or, more aptly, to look at) its overarching structure. While not very arabesque, a basic outline might help us not to get lost in the ornament’s wild growth.

An Outline (of Things to Come) At the heart of the rise of the arabesque to a critical, self-reflexive form was a profound media crisis. Part 2, “The Arabesque Revolution: Image, Script, and the Crisis of Representation,” sets out to explore the intellectual reactions to this crisis, while investigating the flurry of pathbreaking innovations in print techniques around 1800 that revolutionized the field of reproduction and, by injecting major examples of artistic production both past and present into mass circulation, shaped period taste. These new technological possibilities, fired up by rapid economic changes across Europe, played into the game-changing emergence of an autonomous system of art. As a precise demarcation between inside and outside became an urgent desideratum (in philosophy and practice alike) and a theory of aesthetic judgment challenged academic norms of beauty, the arabesque assumed a vital role as an art of demarcation, as eine Grenzziehungskunst.7 In this context, our arabesque also takes an unexpected detour into the territory of the German Renaissance. In 1808, the newly invented technique of lithography brought to light and public attention a set of enchanting marginal drawings by Albrecht Dürer, which not only changed the era’s thinking about the most revered of the old German masters but also ignited a true craze for a new form of ornamental book illustration. Not least for that reason, Dürer takes a central place in my crossexamination of the relationship between Renaissance and Romanticism and, most importantly, the theorization of that relationship in twentieth-century scholarship. The medievalizing component of the media crisis under investigation draws attention

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to its spiritual and metaphysical dimension, which forms an important counterweight to the more philosophical orientation of the ornament debate in the works of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Karl Philipp Moritz and Immanuel Kant, or the Romantics. Not surprisingly, the breathtaking advances in Romantic literature and literary criticism spurred artists to follow suit, and part 3, “The Writing on the Wall,” looks at a particularly ambitious artistic attempt to reappropriate the arabesque as a critical selfreflexive mode in monumental art: Peter Cornelius’s murals for the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, designed and executed from 1827 to 1840 and dedicated to the collection of old masters amassed by Bavaria’s royal house, the Wittelsbacher.8 In our own age, when star architects seem all too eager to see their designs trump the collections they will house, these frescoes present a productive challenge to trends in museum architecture and pedagogy. Breaking new ground in large-scale public decoration, the murals were, with their artificiality, conception as ordered chaos, and emulation of Raphael’s Vatican grotesques, a quintessentially Romantic experiment. Although they would only come to material fruition after the Romantic age had already passed its zenith, their significance persevered. Cornelius’s innovative approach to the arabesque would be a benchmark for subsequent projects, even if launched, like Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s cycles for the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and the Neue Museum in Berlin, in a spirit of critique. To argue this point, I explore the permutations of the arabesque from the principles set down in Cornelius’s first design to the response by Kaulbach, a trajectory that allows us to trace the persistence of philosophical impulses and pedagogic ambitions as well as crucial shifts in ideology from the early to the mid-nineteenth century. As monumental as they were ambitious, the flourishes by Cornelius and Kaulbach revealed the struggle of high art to reincorporate the literary arabesque in its full theoretical capacity and metaphorical potentiation. When the visual arts finally sallied forth to become Romantic, they found themselves in front of a theoretical edifice, erected by theology, philosophy, poetry, and literary criticism, that they could only enter, if at all, with considerable pain and effort. Notably, history painting, which had reigned at the apex of the academy’s genre hierarchy, proved ill-equipped to materialize the complex implications of the literary arabesque, especially when it came to putting into paint the Romantics’ musing on observing and reading as two different yet related modes of looking. As a consequence, not the surfaces of high art but the more ephemeral sheets of the printed image and, soon, the pages of the book became the locus of the most inventive, most productive visual applications of the Romantic arabesque in its theoretical dimension. Part 4 thus sweeps us away from the colossal to the comfortably petite, and its title, “Turning the Page,” is at once metaphor and reference to the concrete physical gesture. It encapsulates my thesis that it was ultimately in the intimacy of the page that the arabesque, emancipated from illustrative subordination as marginal drawing, could restructure the text on a physical level and, in turn, the reader’s access and habits as well. No longer neatly embroidering the free space along a text’s border, the Romantic Randzeichnung now encroached upon the written word, literally embracing, engulfing, overgrowing the text. Propelled by a careful stylistic adjustment of font and drawing style, it engendered an assimilation of image and script, line, and font that successfully radicalized (on a visual level) the dynamic reformation of the text first initiated in Romantic writing.

24 Three Beginnings If book illustration was the most inventive and potent mode of reclaiming the literary arabesque as an artistic medium, it also ushered in the arabesque’s taming (discussed in part 5). Geared toward a Biedermeier audience and governed by the laws of marketing and sales numbers, book illustration largely had to avoid shock value— whether in terms of radical politics, overt eroticism, or serial killing. This did not mean that the arabesque completely shed its revolutionary spirit, which would live on in caricature, cartoon, and political satire.9 Yet mainstream publications mainly wrested the arabesque from its originally avant-garde place of exclusivity and provocation. This renunciation of what lay at the fringes went hand in hand with an emphatic turn toward the contemporary and the familiar. Here, Wilhelm Schadow’s autobiographical novel Der moderne Vasari provides a keen lens through which to explore this shift from medievalist fantasy and timeless allegory to a genre picture of modern society. Key to its shape as a “humorous arabesque” is the project’s collaborative nature. Moving beyond decorative embellishment, the pictorial interventions by the author’s former student and close friend Julius Hübner are integral to the novel’s arabesque makeup. As a kind of metadiscourse, the illustrations add an element of arabesque self-referentiality where the written text fails to reflect upon itself (in a Romantic manner, that is, generically). Shifting from theory to practice, from the examination of the text’s arabesque qualities to an inspection of the physical object itself, the discussion of Schadow’s Moderne Vasari leads us to Düsseldorf’s rich culture of arabesque production, headed by Adolph Schroedter, the widely acknowledged “king of the arabesque” and one of the era’s highest-paid artists. His complete omission from textbooks and the canon of nineteenth-century art is a glaring example of the strong hold of traditional value systems in art history and the blind spots of visual studies. As it is, these three strikes against Schroedter—being German, being in Düsseldorf, being first and foremost (although not exclusively) a printmaker—have relegated one of the century’s most prolific, most successful, and perhaps funniest artists to the margins. In a book obsessed with borderlands, however, that is a good place from where to enter center stage. Another talented draftsman, Moritz von Schwind, wearing his other hat as a major painter, brings us back to high art, the flat surface of painting and the Romantic dream of fresco. Traveling from the Rhine to the Isar in part 6, we remain fascinated bystanders to the sufferings of our Biedermeier protagonists as they try to negotiate the tensions between Romantic ideals and the realities of daily life. Schwind’s “Symphonic Intermezzo” corresponds strikingly with Schadow’s Moderne Vasari, from its taming of the arabesque and outspoken commentary on contemporary society to the date of its completion, 1852. It differs, however, in its emphatic dialogue with music, which makes it more a counterpoint to the early Romantic experiment of Philipp Otto Runge’s Times of Day. Modeled on Beethoven’s Fantasy for Piano, Orchestra, and Choir in C Minor, op. 80, the design (planned as fresco but executed merely in oil) provocatively intervenes in the era’s fervent debates about the sublimity of music, the (in)capacity of the visual arts to adapt music’s nonmimetic possibilities, and the border work of historical genre painting. As Romanticism’s elated aspirations yield to sentimental grandeur and the beauty of nostalgia, we get a glimpse of the innovative power of failure. Schwind’s painted storyboard prepares us for the “Satirical Finale” of my arabesque chronicle, a last ironic, surprising, and, hopefully, subversive flourish in the form of the graphic novel. Focusing on two of its fathers, Rodolphe Töpffer and Wilhelm Busch, part 7 returns to the printed image, but this time bypasses high-end poetry and lauded

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ballads in favor of the kind of picture stories serialized in the era’s increasingly popular humorist magazines. In this context, Busch makes a surprise appearance. While the Genevan educator Töpffer is well known as an heir to the Romantic tradition, at least to comic aficionados, his North German counterpart is not.10 Yet Busch’s introduction to the Romantic theater of the arabesque is long overdue, not least because works like his Max and Moritz, reprinted in a nigh unmanageable quantity and variety to this day, have enjoyed an enduring international influence that Töpffer’s histories of Messieurs in distress could only dream of.11 The overarching argument of this part, then, is this: the visual arts only produced an arabesque equal in pervasive irony, subversive power, and self-reflexive discursivity to its literary sibling when new genres (such as cartoon and comic strip) subjected the Romantic arabesque itself to arabesque strategies of narration. Busch was a perfect performer in this scenario. Trained, albeit only briefly, under Schadow at the Düsseldorf Academy and disappointed in his aspirations to succeed as a Courbet-like realist painter, Busch brought to his cartoons the weighty tradition of high art, a proclivity for a child’s unbridled imagination, undomesticated cruelty, and parody of adult behavior, and a deeply philosophical yet equally deep-rooted pessimism. Not surprisingly, this was a potent elixir, and caustic commentaries about the nature of art infect his comics, all too fittingly in times of repeated pandemics, like a virus. With Töpffer and Busch’s picture stories as the satirical finale, the book’s last arabesque presents yet another paradox. It proposes that the ultimate Romantic arabesque was born from an acid criticism of its own origins, quasi an antidote to the Romantic symbolism and metaphysical discourse that had nourished it. With glee and bitterness, Töpffer makes the Romantic beliefs a laughingstock while Busch discards the last remnants of the ivory tower in the brackish waters of backyard gullies. Leaving behind the rarefied fields of high art and aesthetic philosophy, he rejects the entire venerable discourse of the academies in favor of small-town living, homely settings, and trivial circumstances. There, the symbols at stake rot slowly among society’s unwanted garbage and carefully discarded dark secrets. Busch’s cartoons ruthlessly destroy the myth of art, as they bring metaphysics down to the marketplace. The ultimate arabesque thus arises from its own dissolution, which seems a rather apt ending for the book I am writing.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

For Marie-Antoinette as milkmaid, see Martin, Dairy Queens. Rosenblum, The International Style. Kant, Critique; Schiller, “On the Aesthetic.” See the second beginning of this book, “Forays into a Form Grown Wild.” Schiller, “On the Aesthetic,” 530; translation modified by author. See also Schneider, “Zwischen Klassizismus,” esp. 339–44. Werner Busch, “Die Arabeske,” 16. Menninghaus, In Praise, 76. The cycle was executed between 1834 and 1840. Private conversation with James M. Brophy, November 2013. The analysis of the “political arabesque” has been, as Brophy pointed out, to a large degree the preserve of historians and thus focused mainly on content (iconography), with little attention paid to the arabesque’s critical potential or inherent aesthetic politics. See, for example, the omission of Busch in the discussion of the nineteenth-century graphic novel as parodying Romantic ideals in Rings, “Von Rodolphe Töpffer.” Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske.

Part 2

The Arabesque Revolution Image, Script, and the Crisis of Representation

4

Metaphysics and Media Crisis

Romanticism still seems to speak to contemporary issues with stunning immediacy.1 Its programmatic subjectivity and tendency to introspection elicit as much a sense of familiar closeness as its longing for a vanished union of man and nature, a longing heightened by an acute feeling of alienation from a present based on an economy of value and exchange. Equally notable is Romanticism’s powerful hold on popular culture. Its emphatic emotionality has made it susceptible, for better or worse, to being morphed into a vague if potent form of sentimentality, one stripped of the movement’s historical context, content, and, most notably, more challenging aspects. In this diluted popularized version, Romantic has become equated with a state of being romantic (romantic with a small “r,” as in romantic comedy, heartshaped boxes of chocolate for Valentine’s Day, or kissing on a park bench under the full moon). This schmaltzy reincarnation, however, is by no means a modern phenomenon. Romantic became romantic even before it had reached its apex. Jean Paul, born on March 21, 1763, under the more pedestrian name Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, already mocked the sentimentality of cheap poetry and its tawdry use as a means of meaningless seduction. With the balloonist Giannozzo, Jean Paul’s Italian namesake, we look down upon the world beneath, assuming, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, a perspective on life both sublime and satirical.2 Another of the poet’s wild humorists, this fearless captain of the air roams Europe in his aeronautic vehicle until he meets his premature death in a thunderstorm over the waterfalls at Schaffhausen. Yet not all is lost in the roaring maelstrom of the mighty river Rhine. Giannozzo’s logbook is found, and the book’s actual author now claims to have recovered the unhappy buccaneer’s record by chance. Adopting a pretense already at work in Clemens Brentano’s arabesque novel Godwi, Jean Paul poses as the editor and narrator of another man’s text, a man of his own invention. On his fourth journey, Giannozzo nears the city of Mülanz. Night has almost fallen, and Giannozzo is disgruntled. The day had already been unworthy of being lived through, and the evening has nothing better to do than to anger the panoptic observer. The object of his fury is the city’s censor of aesthetics, an H. von Fahland (Sir H. of the Sallow Land, “already a fatal name!”). Captive to his elevated position, the balloonist must watch helplessly as this despicable creature, who already has eight brides in four cities but wants to marry a ninth in the fifth, rushes off for another conquest, equipped with (what else?) a novel, maybe even “one by Jean Paul.”3 In Fahland’s dirty hands, the novel becomes a strictly utilitarian tool, a devilish weapon for bringing his victims to sentimental tears, for this Lothario without honor has well understood that “girls DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-6

30 The Arabesque Revolution are like chalk, which the fresco painter can work and paint on as long as it is wet.”4 The banal seduction scene reads like a spoof of the famous episode in Goethe’s heartfelt account of ill-fated love, where just the whisper of one name (as the briefest of allusions to one of the era’s most celebrated poets) unleashes a wave of true inmost feelings and rapturous tears. “Klopstock!” Such an emotional tempest is worth a visit. We arrive shortly after a wild storm has frightened the merry party, which, however, speedily restores its spirits with a wild game of counting. Now the exhausted guests have begun to break into little separate knots. The novel’s eponym, Werther, follows his beloved yet unavailable Charlotte, and so do we. We went to the window, and still heard the thunder at a distance; a soft rain watered the fields, and filled the air with the most delightful and refreshing smells. Leaning upon her arm, Charlotte fixed her eyes on the country before us, then raised them to heaven, and then turned them upon me; they were wet: she put her hands upon mine and said, “Klopstock!” I was oppressed with the sensations I then felt; I sunk under the weight of them; I bent down upon her hand, and wetted it with my tears; as I raised myself, I looked steadfastly in her face. Divine Klopstock! why didst thou not see thy apotheosis in those eyes? And thy name, so often profaned, why is it ever pronounced by any voice but Charlotte’s?5 What a contrast to the fake, faked, and wholly instrumentalized sentimentality of Jean Paul’s desiccated Romeo, who turns tragedy into farce! At least the scoundrel Fahland seems safe from the premature death that follows on the heels of true emotion in Goethe’s Werther. Here, as in so much good literature, catastrophes are never far where sentiment runs deep, and the young hero takes his life over a broken heart and unrequited love. The result of Goethe’s sorrows was a piece of world literature which has invited the interpretive powers of scholars ever since its publication in the late eighteenth century. Roland Barthes would be one of them. In the eyes of the French literary theorist and semiotician, the propensity of Goethe’s ill-starred sentimentalist to dissolve in tears at the slightest emotion is a patently sexual act, a surrender to “the order of an amorous body, which is in liquid extension, a bathed body: to weep together, to flow together.”6 But how patent in fact is this sexual act? After all, Werther never transgresses the borders of sentimentality, however liquid his body, in sharp contrast to his distant soap opera cousin in Mülanz, who, himself quite dry inside, softens his maiden with clear if ignoble intentions: to move from sentiment to sensuality to sex. Not only does tragedy turn into farce, but farce turns into treachery. Reading together no longer evokes sincere feeling, as for Dante’s doomed lovers Paola and Francesca. Reading together has deteriorated to an overused and shopworn platitude, only good for raising prefabricated expectations. Giannozzo’s outrage has good reasons. Fahland mines the poetic for the prosaic, an incarnation of Romanticism’s archenemy, the philistine, whose false sense of life and art prevents a new golden age from breaking, breaking right then, at the advent of the new millennium, which has produced no savior, only hardened technocrats and heartless bean-counters. The last we hear that night of our livid balloonist are his desperate obloquies as the wind blows him away, his heartfelt outpouring producing no effect.7 For all his dismay, Jean Paul is ridiculously funny, in a topsy-turvy and rather challenging way: a word acrobat, whose prose glistens and glitters with pictorial wit, or what Friedrich Schlegel once hailed as the poet’s Bilderwitz, which means as much

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8

pictorial wit as “image-pun.” The pleasure we obtain from Jean Paul’s follies relates quite closely, as Schlegel tells us in his Athenäum fragment no. 421, “to what we often experience while viewing the witty paintings called arabesque,” and thus springs from “those grotesque porcelain figures that his pictorial wit drums together like imperial soldiers.”9 The grotesque is the arabesque, and the arabesque is the incarnation of Bilderwitz, a form of earnest wit articulated in writing, drawing, or painting, a wit that is pictorial but also sickly, part high philosophy, part pictured joke, and in this amalgam available for grand projects and mural sublimity as much as decorative prints and cheap pocketbooks.10 At the end of the grotesque interlude provided by Jean Paul’s balloonist, we finally reach the fork where the author (namely, me) steps back and posits, with arabesque belatedness, her thesis, that the episode thus discussed fulfills two interpretive functions: For one, it exemplifies a core theme of my arabesque study, the close connection between text and design and thus between acts of reading and looking. On the other hand, it draws attention to the act of appropriation, of adaptation, that applies the Romantic model to contemporary use. While we can only hope not to be among the Fahlands of this world, Jean Paul’s satire reminds us that academic discourse, too, follows contemporary impulses and produces an image of the past tailored to the needs of the present. After 1945, this meant first and foremost to mine Romanticism for those elements associated with the project of modernity: art’s positioning as a conveyor of truth and higher knowledge, the striving for radical autonomy, the reevaluation of dreams, the unconscious and childhood experience as sources of creativity and meaning production. This obsession led to a rather selective appreciation of the Romantic legacy. It privileged what seemed in step with the replacement of an objective worldview (based on culturally codified and religiously grounded rules) with a belief in the all-pervasive role of subjectivity in the individual’s relationship, scientific, artistic, or otherwise, to the visible world and what lies beyond. In philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s equation “I = I” paradigmatically expressed this shift. It embodied a new subjective worldview, which, based on individual experience, foregrounded the role of the mind in perception, in all perception, and gave rise to disciplines oriented toward the exploration of such subjective conditions (think psychology and physiology). What followed was a move away from the notion of a fixed transcendental order toward the deduction of general laws from the particular example. On a formal level, the pursuit of synesthesia and intermediality, the development of deconstructionist aesthetic strategies, and the freeing of art from normativity and formal rules were particularly appealing to the twentieth-century reader, and this appeal only increased when art, criticism, and scholarship entered into their postmodern phase.

Romanticism’s Modernity The twentieth-century love affair with early Romanticism was not merely a modernist one. It was a postmodern one as well. Not surprisingly, the vocabulary of Romantic criticism was revived, via Walter Benjamin, when the works by the Pictures Generation—by a Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, or Jack Goldstein—forced their viewers and, more importantly, their reviewers to forge a new critical language.11 With the 1980s and the rise of a postmodern sensibility, “a new approach to the material became the object of discussion,” and this discussion in turn “thematized forms of citation, excerpts, staging, in which art detached itself

32 The Arabesque Revolution from the one image or, rather, brought out more images beneath it. Thus, representation could be conceived in layers; interferences and appropriations noted; intertextuality recognized as a structural principle.” One comparison was suddenly certain, Ulrich Tragatschnig concludes. “No term was traded as highly in the reading of Walter Benjamin, in order to provide these postmodern strategies with a name, as that of ‘allegory.’”12 If the theoreticians of postmodernism had looked only a bit further, they might have encountered the arabesque as an even more productive concept for a postmodern theory of art. Be that as it may, what comes to the fore here is the notable relationship between allegory and ornament (the arabesque being but a subcategory of ornamentation), which will occupy us throughout this book. Whether modernism or postmodernism, different as they are, both looked at the Romantic legacy in response to an intense sense of crisis, not just in the arts but in all areas of life. This sense of crisis, in turn, encouraged the search for parallels between Romanticism and modernity. This mechanism is evident in the introduction to the 1999 essay collection Bild und Schrift in der Romantik (Image and script in Romanticism).13 “German Romanticism is a time of departure, of daring and playful experiments of a beginning; but it is also a time of crisis. Certainly, a consensus has been reached that ‘modernities’ (die ‘Modernen’) occur in repeated episodes,” the editors, Gerhard Neumann and Günter Oesterle, propose. “Yet one could maintain that the crisis, which emerged in German Romanticism, belongs to the most differentiated, and that it had, through the changes it engendered, a lasting and transformative effect on all fields of knowledge, imagination, and representation.”14 Neumann and Oesterle’s remarks reveal some important underpinnings of twentiethcentury scholarship on Romanticism. First of all, the passage positions itself in the tradition of eighteenth-century aesthetics by attributing a special role to the realm of art and its philosophical framing. Aesthetics is privileged as not only the most sensible tool for registering the period’s tremendous political, social, and cultural changes, but a superior synthesizing agent for reviewing and processing these. The aesthetic is hailed as a realm in which those modes of thought developed that would affect and transform “all fields of knowledge, imagination, and representation.” From this perspective, the political or religious components of Romantic thinking yield to its medial and mediumistic qualities. “If one wished to dare a buzzword, one could label German Romanticism as a first-rate media crisis,” Neumann and Oesterle reckon: “as a crisis, which bursts open in the field of the newly developed scientific and artistic media and strongly influenced (as well as restructured) their use in the act of cognition and creation.”15 This outlook inevitably locates the culture’s instituting (Setzung), shaping (Konturierung), and founding (Stiftung) in linguistic experiments and experimentations with pictorial sign systems. As such, this interpretation is as much historical as it is anachronistic, for the focus on new media and a Romantic media crisis reflects, more than anything else, present-day concerns about the condition of late twentiethand early twenty-first-century society and its entrapment in a rapid and global evolution of unheard-of communication systems. The literary origins of the arabesque are perceptible everywhere in the debate we have followed so far. These origins might help to explain the dominance of structuralist approaches to the Romantic arabesque, at least in German studies, which for many decades generated the most comprehensive and copious scholarship on this phenomenon. Take, for example, Gerhart von Graevenitz’s seminal 1994 study Das Ornament des Blicks (The ornament of the gaze), which presents the Romantic arabesque as

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16

exemplary for a binary concept of the sign, a “paradigm it does not shed.” Focusing on the central assimilation of text and image on the printed page as key to the Romantic endeavor and its modernity, Graevenitz’s reading depends, like any ensuing interpretation of the significance of such signification, on a definition of representation as semiotic system. Schlegel’s “arabesque” denotes a broadly defined conception of the materials of language, including script. Sounds, meanings, tropes, cited texts and text fragments become, like the ornament of the script, combinable and constructible as sign images. Such material arrangements of bodies of signs then produce new texts, new meaning. Yet only in the image of the ornamental configuration do the rules of the signifier’s “fantastic forms” shine through. The ornamental compositions of the signifiers, however, remain “hieroglyphs,” representatives of the “one eternal love and holy fullness of life of natura naturans” (Schlegel). They are effigies of a signified removed into the infinite.17 Embedded in a process of materializing the spirit, the significant (or signifier) is reduced to a mere shadow of the signified, Graevenitz argues, on which it therefore depends. Schlegel posits a “double primacy”: the hieroglyph of the signified (Signifikat), on the one hand, and the fantastic form of the signifier (Signifikant), on the other. “And he calls this double primacy ‘arabesque,’ because the symmetry of the double primacy can no longer be denoted in terms of concepts, but only through a model of figurative, ornamental configurations.”18 From this perspective, Romanticism appears as a key moment in the increasing destabilization of signs and mobility of codes unleashed by the invention of linear perspective and the parallel dissolution of a unified interpretative community. In Graevenitz’s account, the crisis of representation in Romanticism is primarily the result of a linguistic turn, of which it is also an agent. It emerges as a challenge to older notions of sign, signifier, and signified, to the interrelation of these three semiotic units, and, finally, to the possibility for constructing stable meaning. We must keep these twentieth-century approaches in mind when we pursue my argument about the analogies between Renaissance and Romanticism, about the inner kinship of these two phenomena as two cultures of a media revolution, which reflects an entirely Romantic perception as much as it presents a quintessentially modernist interpretative model. Our nodal point in that pursuit will be, as it was for the Romantics, Albrecht Dürer. Without the Nuremberg master, the Romantic arabesque and its endless variations in nineteenth-century print would simply not exist in its current shape. And without mechanical reproduction, Dürer’s work could not have unfolded the exceptional influence it quickly acquired in Romanticism’s wake. Indeed, Dürer himself is, one could justifiably argue, a product of mechanical reproduction, as was the entire rise of medievalism in the decades around 1800.19

Romanticism’s Renaissance In Dürer’s case, reproducibility played a vital role in two ways. For one, he was mainly known as a printmaker until the early nineteenth century and was thus seen, on the basis of the style of his woodcuts and engravings, as a man of a stiff and angular artistic sensibility.20 This only changed when Dürer’s lively and fluid drawing style

34 The Arabesque Revolution

Figure 4.1 Albrecht Dürer, Marginal Drawings to the Prayer De Sancta Apollonia with the Virgin Saint Holding a Palm Branch and Tongs with Her Tooth, and Various Arabesques, 1515. From The Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I (1513), fol. 24r / fol. e4r (old / new numbering). Two-color printing with drawings in violet ink, 28.1/27.9 x 19.5 cm. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, 2 L.impr.membr. 64.

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Figure 4.2 Johann Nepomuk Strixner, after Albrecht Dürer, Sancta Apollonia with Various Arabesques, among Them a Stork and a Large Mask, 1808. Lithograph in violet ink, 28.4 x 20.5 cm (image), 35.1 x 26.4 cm (page). From Strixner, Albrecht Dürers Christlich-Mythologische Handzeichnungen (1808), plate 15. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

36 The Arabesque Revolution was made public by Johann Nepomuk Strixner’s lithographic reproductions of his 1515 marginalia for the prayer book of Emperor Maximilian I (figures 4.1 and 4.2). Originally, this precious spiritual manual, printed in movable type in 1513, existed in ten copies; but only one of these was outfitted with illustrative drawings, maybe as a model for further reproduction. Among the artists selected by the royal patron, Dürer stood out. With unprecedented energy and imagination, he took the opportunity to create an unsurpassed feast of fantasy-born pen craftsmanship. The marginal drawings create a delirious fusion of single figures and animals, divine apparitions and devilish excrescences, calligraphic ornaments and highly realistic details, in an entrancing incantation of the fantastic grotesque (see also figures 5.2 and 6.2). At the same time, drawing enters into a loving dialogue with the new readable type, the so-called Fraktura, initiating a playful relationship between image and script, script and Scripture, sometimes touching, sometimes teasing, sometimes caressing the font, which had been designed specifically for this commission and adorned with movable flourishes.21 Today considered one of Dürer’s great achievements and “a pivotal moment in the history of the production of art,” the adorned copy of Maximilian’s prayer book had, however, slumbered in the archives of Munich and Besançon (divvied up and forgotten), until Strixner discovered the Bavarian half in the local Hof- und Staatsbibliothek.22 Smitten, he reproduced Dürer’s embellishments in 1808 (see figures 4.2 and 5.3). Remarkably, the lithographer paid no heed to the religious text, which simply vanished in the translation of drawing into print, and the album’s evocative title reflects as much: Albrecht Dürers Christlich-Mythologische Handzeichnungen (Albrecht Dürer’s Christian-mythological drawings). His public, entranced at the sight of an entirely new Dürer, did not mind. “Here, the Renaissance artist is freer, as we had thought,” Goethe raved in March 1808, “more graceful, buoyant, humoristic, and beyond all expectations dexterous in the . . . choice of motifs.”23 This unqualified reaction points to the immeasurable effect of Strixner’s lithographic facsimile not only upon the era’s Renaissance scholarship but upon its book culture in general.24 Strixner’s publication is arguably the first modern reprint in art history and to the present day perhaps one of the most influential. Issued in two different color schemes (a simple black-and-white edition and a luxury edition in colored inks, which, reflecting the original’s appearance, emulated the prayer book’s glowing chromaticity), the 1808 lithographs became a true game-changer in the reception of the revered German artist. For one, they granted access to a side of Dürer’s artistic practice essentially unknown until then. On the other, and even more importantly, Strixner’s reproductions clarified Dürer’s marginal decorations, made them more legible, more striking and thus easier to appropriate (see figures 4.1 and 4.2). To understand this effect, we must recall that the original inks had lost so much of their former luminosity and brilliance that the drawings often barely stood out from the vellum. The reproductions restored their faded glory, and the subsequent impact of Dürer’s arabesques had much to do with the facsimile’s own stark aesthetic, which, less subtle than the swelling, pulsating lines of the original, was true to form but not effect.25 Moreover, Strixner’s pen emancipated the Renaissance embellishments from their subservient role as illustrations and, eliminating all text, recreated them as autonomous, selfexplanatory artworks. From now on, hundreds and hundreds of viewers could gush over the technical perfection and astounding inventiveness of Dürer’s genius without bothering to indulge the drawings’ discursive quality or read them within and against the framework of hourly prayer. Upon release, Strixner’s Christian-mythological

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drawings ignited a craze for marginal drawings, a craze I share. In this sense, Dürer is indeed a man of the printing press throughout the ages, whose influence has been, and always will be, closely tied to reproduction.

Dürer as Reproduction The printing press emerges as a potent link—agent, metaphor, and reproductive force alike—between the concerns of Renaissance past and Romantic present. Both eras shared a passionate fascination with the ars typographorum as a vital tool for probing the nature of the image and the epistemological foundation of art. Moreover, the revolution in printing techniques helped the Romantics to remake themselves in the image of the Renaissance and, in turn, to remake the Renaissance in their own image. Of course, the Romantics did not conceptualize that vaunted past as “the Renaissance.” To them, men like Dürer or Raphael still belonged to the Middle Ages, their work being the climax and last gasp of the age of Christianity. Today, such periodization seems rather odd and confusing, yet it was central to the Romantic vision and, more concretely, to the Romantics’ perception of an object like the emperor’s prayer book. It is vital to my argument as well. After all, accounts like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1772 celebration of Strasbourg Cathedral or Jacob Burckhardt’s 1860 seminal essay on the culture of Renaissance Italy remind us that medieval and Renaissance have always doubled as stylistic categories and ideological labels.26 The reasons for the Romantics’ inner affinity with the Renaissance were complex. They encompassed highly personal projection and emotional identification as much as cultural and political causes, but above all the fierce opposition to secularization and industrialization, which took shape as a deeply rooted yearning for reenchantment and nonalienated forms of preindustrial life and labor. Such elective affinities, however, even if nurtured by incontestable analogies, should not lull us into a complacent employment of the past as a matrix for modern media debates. The Dürer revival around 1800 produced a very different man than the one pivotal to the history of the self-aware individual as mapped out in Joseph Leo Koerner’s momentous study The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art.27 The image of Dürer, investigated here as print, historical construct, and historiographical example, truly reiterates Jean Paul’s lesson that the image of the past is more often than not tailored to the needs of the present. Indeed, we inevitably walk a fine line when looking at Dürer through the lens of the modern scholar of Romanticism. Pursuing this path, we must constantly ask ourselves, as Peter Parshall once reminded me, “whether we should be speaking about the ‘truth’ of Dürer in his own time as we now understand it, or about the perception of the Romantics and their particular reading of Dürer’s importance and the importance of his era for their own.”28 More often than not, these various levels of investigation and insight intersect and even melt, quite habitually and usually unnoticed, into one. This is certainly true for the hypothesis that Dürer’s age of perspective and his own countervailing medievalism as expressed in the Prayer Book’s marginal drawings anticipate in quite specific ways the Romantic assertion of the self-aware individual and the meaning of Schein (illusion) and that this affinity may be related to a mutual investment in the importance of printing. This hypothesis rests, however, on a look backward, through the eyes of the Romantics. Dürer only anticipates the debates of 1800 insofar as his art offers itself as an ideal mirror, a perfect surface of reflection, for a generation born three hundred years later.

38 The Arabesque Revolution Historical scrutiny and projection easily mesh and, in the process, leave behind an amalgam of past and present, which is as much a treacherous ground for today’s earnest scholar as it was a fertile soil for the arabesque growth we are concerned with. Hopefully, our search for Albrecht Dürer might nonetheless discover some truths, if not about the Renaissance man then at least about his modern alter ego.

Notes 1. For such an argument, see, e.g., Grave, “Bildtheoretische Grundfragen.” 2. Jean Paul, “Komischer Anhang.” 3. Ibid., 826–28; quote at 827; for a concise description of Jean Paul’s hilarious arabesque The Logbook of the Balloonist Giannozzo, see Koepke, “Johann Paul Friedrich Richter.” 4. Jean Paul, “Komischer Anhang,” 827. 5. Goethe, The Sorrows, 23. 6. Roland Barthes, in Lutz, Crying, 39. 7. Jean Paul, “Komischer Anhang,” 828. 8. I want to thank Christian Irmscher for his suggestion of “image-pun” to translate Bilderwitz. 9. Athenäum fragment no. 421, as translated in F. Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” 85; asserting that Jean Paul’s “novels are not novels but a colorful hodgepodge of sickly wit,” Schlegel compares the German Romantic at length with Laurence Sterne and other British and French writers in his “Dialogue,” 95–97. 10. For a discussion of Bilderwitz and comic strip, see Rachel Churner’s 2003 paper “Abgemalt und Aufgeschrieben: The Grotesque-Arabesque in Wilhelm Busch’s Tales of Max and Moritz,” 15–16, submitted in my lecture class “From Neoclassicism to Romanticism.” 11. Grewe, “Epigonalität als Erfindung”; idem, “Notes From the Field”; idem, The Nazarenes, chaps. 9, “Appropriation,” 175–85, and 11, “Emulation and Epigonality,” 209–25. 12. Tragatschnig, Sinnbild, 11. 13. Neumann and Oesterle, Bild und Schrift. 14. Ibid., 10. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Graevenitz, Das Ornament, 23. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Brunsiek, Auf dem Weg. 20. Bialostocki, Dürer, 163–64. 21. Koerner, Moment, 224–25. 22. Probably around 1600, the embellished copy was divided into two parts; only the sections illustrated by Dürer and Cranach found their way to Bavaria. See Reinisch, “Dürers Randzeichnungen,” 72–73. 23. Goethe, “Albrecht Dürers,” col. 530. 24. Tausch, Entfernung der Antike, 24–5. 25. Peter Parshall, email correspondence, December 29, 2013. 26. Goethe, “On German”; Burckhardt, The Civilization. 27. Koerner, Moment. 28. Peter Parshall, email correspondence, December 29, 2013.

5

The Ornament of the Gaze On Albrecht Dürer

Let’s continue where we left off, with the modern media crisis in the West and its modernist (Romantic) interpretation. To that end we shall return to the thesis of Gerhard Neumann and Günter Oesterle that this crisis evolved primarily around three areas of experimentation: first, advancements in linear perspective; second, innovations in the area of pictorial and linguistic sign systems; and third, the exploration of the five senses (including the search for experiential possibilities beyond the capacities of sense perception such as mesmerism). What these fields of experimentation share is a focus on subjectivity and selfhood as both foundation and object. Following this line of thought, the subject emerges as the overarching principle behind the history of modernity. Self-awareness, self-reflexivity, and independence are the markers, we are told, of the modern mind. Among the three fields discussed, linear perspective has enjoyed a particular privilege in modern thought since the Renaissance. “One has to realize that the history of the subject cannot be divorced from the history of central perspective (its technical conditions through the evolution of optics, its articulation in the natural sciences, for example by Descartes, [or] in art history through Alberti).”1 As the birthplace of modern ways of seeing, the Renaissance thus gave birth to the obsession with vision that would two hundred years later seize its German Romantic heirs.2 In this sense, the Romantic reception of Renaissance art was more than an arbitrary choice of historicist delectation. It was testimony to an inner analogy between the cultural situation of 1500 and the zeitgeist of 1800.

The Ornament of the Gaze: Dürer I This notion of a cultural analogy between the two visual regimes of 1500 and 1800 also forms the foundation of Gerhart von Graevenitz’s 1994 Ornament des Blicks: Über die Grundlagen des neuzeitlichen Sehens, die Poetik der Arabeske und Goethes “West-östlichen Divan” (Ornament of the gaze: On the foundations of modern vision, the poetics of the arabesque, and Goethe’s West-Eastern Diwan).3 The study evolves around the premise that Renaissance perspectivism was rooted in a combinatorial analysis of construction (geometrical-mathematical), simulation (technical-optical), and signification (ontological). As proof, Graevenitz calls upon Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1526 portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam (figure 5.1). Designed as a view through a finestra aperta (following Leon Battista Alberti’s plain but powerful proposition in his 1435 De pictura of the paint’s rectangular DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-7

40 The Arabesque Revolution

Figure 5.1 Albrecht Dürer, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526. Engraving, 25.1 x 19.7 cm (sheet cut within platemark). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1957-117-1.

support as “an open window”), the engraving grants us a commanding position vis-à-vis the world in front of us.4 The optical assertion of the viewer’s sense of self is mirrored in the clear location of the composition’s main subject, Erasmus, whose authority and identity as author are likewise ensured by a firm placement

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in the interior’s spatial expanse, a placement depending, like its representation, on the controlled and controlling mechanism of the print’s one-point perspective. To succeed, this construction of two autonomous yet interconnected selves necessitates communication, a task Dürer masters through the inclusion of text: once as illegible scribbles in the various books, which, opened and placed at the image’s lower edge on what might be a desk or a ledge, guide our gaze into the room; once as two large-letter inscriptions, which take up the entire left-hand corner and thus a good quarter of the print.5 Offset in deepest black against the brilliant white of the support, the two epigrams thus committed to memory—one Latin, one Greek—form a kind of verbal artwork. A stunning example of concrete poetry, its dramatic effect is secured by a trompe l’oeil frame, which, reminiscent of the kind of encasement usually preserved for major oil paintings, demarcates the field of enunciation in clear, emphatic terms. While the Latin inscription emphasizes the maker’s claim for authenticity, “imago erasmi roterodami ab alberto durero ad vivam effigiem delienata” (Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam drawn from life by Albrecht Dürer), the Greek pronounces a programmatic elevation of mind over matter and script over likeness, “ΤΗΝ ΚΡΕΙΤΤΩ ΤΑ ΣΥΤΤΡΑΜΜΑΤΑ ΔΕΙΞΕΙ” (A better image will his writings show). Indebted to a long-standing tradition that, following Plato, questions the ability of a mimetic likeness to reproduce the sitter’s true essence, his spirit, the Greek inscription ultimately undermines the trust in the geometry of vision. As such, it introduces doubts whether Dürer’s prints indeed realize, as Graevenitz argues, its visionary geometry with unqualified directness and perspicuity.6 We will come back to Albrecht Dürer’s skepticism about the material effigy shortly. For now, it suffices to note that he follows up on his Greek inscription by leading the gaze into the picture via an assembly of several impressive tomes. At the very right, three thick volumes of various proportions, all locked with large metal clasps, build a kind of paper architecture, a solid visual closure, while the most prominent book, positioned at the very left, lies open, thus exposing a text that seems something of a mirror image of the tablet on the wall. And like the concrete poetry above, although facing Erasmus and not us, it, too, consists of Greek and Latin.7 Framed by these two Schriftbilder, these two images made of script, the famous scholar stands at his lectern, dressed in a voluminous robe, as he gazes down upon the letter he is composing, quill in one hand, inkpot in the other, with great concentration. We cannot read the words Erasmus is putting down with such care, or peek into the book the sheet rests upon. But the juxtaposition of book and letter entices us to speculate.8 Is Erasmus corresponding about his most recent studies? And if so, might his missive’s physical support be the very object, the material thing, containing the ideas that prompted this epistle in the first place? Such musings are, of course, mere guesswork. The print itself (if we grant it such agency) refuses to clarify the precise relationship between written and printed word. What Erasmus was thinking when his likeness was sketched, or, more aptly, what Dürer intended we should think about Erasmus’s mental occupation as he is placed before us; moreover, what the subject of the letter might be—all of this is and will remain a mystery, a riddle set out to entangle us in infinite readings. Despite such secretiveness, the engraving is extremely outspoken that such a relationship, one central to the endeavors of artist and scholar alike, does per se exist.

42 The Arabesque Revolution Reading, writing, printing—captured in a variety of forms and formats—saturate Dürer’s study and the studiolo of Erasmus with an atmosphere of erudition. On the most obvious level, this serves to characterize the sitter and his work. Yet the print’s potent learnedness serves another purpose as well; it gestures beyond the confines of this particular slice of life. Beyond this one instant, this one locale, this one sitter, the book-filled ambiance refers to the tradition of the saint’s studiolo, concretely to that of St. Jerome, whom both men greatly admired. Once again, the allusions embedded in this reference spin a complex web across time and actors. The interior of Dürer’s Erasmus portrait recalls at once the church father’s labor of translating the Scriptures from their original Hebrew and Greek into Latin, Erasmus’s editorial ambitions as translator and editor of Jerome’s work in print, and, finally, Dürer’s own mesmerizing master print of 1514, St. Jerome in His Study. At the same time (as if yet another prompting would be needed), the evocation of the saintly model announces the portrait’s reach beyond its claims as a likeness drawn from life. The print reveals itself as a testimony to the connection between the origins of mechanical reproduction, a renewed interest in translation, and new forms of representation as advanced by the learned humanist artist. Underlying this constellation is a call for transparency, a call that, in turn, rests on the unspoken confidence that such transparency can be achieved in print. Accordingly, the juxtaposition of open book and lettered tablet suggests a universal intelligibility imparted to writing through its transformation into a typographic medium.9 The 1526 engraving proposes an objectivity for the printed text absent from either Erasmus’s handwritten note or the mimetic retracing of his features, celebrated for its authenticity by the Latin inscription. After all, the representation of a man’s face, however well done, can only capture a moment in time, its veracity immediately betrayed by time and the body’s ever-changing transformation. Nature is always in the process of bloom and decay, as the writing on the wall proclaims in stark letters; only the printed text is timeless. Albrecht Dürer added to this wisdom the permanence of his line, of the engraved line. The printed medium turns into the ultimate means to probe and establish art’s epistemological parameters.10 A subtle discourse about the nature of change and the transparencies of signs emerges from beneath Dürer’s attempt at portraiture. Although physical appearance is subject to constant transformation and thus unstable, physiognomy still allows us conclusions about the sitter’s invisible animus, the print suggests; thus, like the line (in contrast to accidental color), it can capture the immaterial essence of what it represents.11 As a fine example of Dürer’s unsurpassed skill in representing things in monochrome without the aid of color, that is, by black lines only (a skill much admired by Erasmus), the 1526 portrait proclaims a transparency beyond the truth of mimetic similitude.12 Erasmus did not see this side of Dürer’s attempt at capturing his immaterial essence. The cryptic remark with which he greeted the print speaks to the volatility of outer appearance conjured up in its Greek inscription. Dissatisfied by a lack of resemblance, the humanist blamed time’s passing for the work’s shortcomings. “It is not surprising that this picture does not correspond exactly to my appearance. I am no longer the person I was five years ago.”13 Erasmus’s irritation has caused much speculation about the concrete reasons for this critique or its precise meaning. Such soul-searching (of the scholar and his interpreters) is not relevant for this context, as we might simply ask and answer: How could it be otherwise? Dürer certainly included a device, which

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promises to escape this logic of change. The carefully measured lettering and precisely placed text claim impermeability to the ravages of time. It is the printed, not the pictorial work that is charged with providing an image of the invisible (the sitter’s soul, spirit, and animus) and, beyond a particular likeness, a lasting impression of reality, of the world itself. Of course, we moderns, disciples of structuralism, deconstruction, and book history, might strenuously object to such a belief in the stability of the printed word, and rightfully so. But Dürer’s effigie still puts its trust there, calls forth our trust in the new medium of the printing press as an antidote to life’s transience. Significantly, and this cannot be stressed enough, it was not the individual product that carried this promise of everlasting life but the image as an endlessly reproducible species. Eternity presupposed reproducibility. Only repetition could ensure a longevity the support’s ephemerality could not, not even if the choice of material was, as in the case of Maximilian’s prayer book, not fragile paper but durable parchment. We might best think of this as a seriality of unique experiences. After all, except for rare occasions when we compare impressions for purposes of research or connoisseurship, we usually contemplate only one specimen of a multiple at a time, one impression of an engraving, one copy of a book. The association of printed matter per se with universal legibility and timeless durability relies precisely, Dürer’s engraving implies, on the existence of multiple and, even more importantly, multiplying objects that take on a life of their own, apart from each other. The purpose of the entire species of identical beings is then to guarantee (hopefully) the survival of the image and the consistency of its physical characteristics, while the occurrence of each individual manifestation secures its expressive uniqueness. The dedication to God’s word implied in the endeavors of both Erasmus and Dürer could only boost this confidence in the printing press’s dark outlines. In the engraving of 1526, the body’s material existence surrenders its privilege and power to the monument of the published work. These deliberations tie into the somewhat ironic role of reproducibility in forging a modern notion of the artist’s authentic singularity (figure 5.2). And here, too, Albrecht Dürer is our witness. His 1515 Prayer Book marginalia, as Joseph Koerner has shown, advocate a mythical analogy between the acheiropoietic image, the vera icon “not made by human hands,” and the printed image as fully consubstantial to its maker. Marking a shift in the object’s authority from cult to aesthetic value, the Prayer Book is the culmination of an aesthetic that links the artist to his works through the medium of the graphic mark.14 “Dürer’s physical being has become the measure of his art,” Koerner explains. “That is why there is no need for signature or monogram: the whole ensemble of images, from flourish and tendril through to the sacred relic of Christ itself [the en-face sudarium decorating the bas-de-page of fol. 56], constitutes a sustained paraph, a testimonium to the hand of the author.” Taken as a whole, Koerner concludes, the Prayer Book was to commemorate Germany’s leading painters, canonized according to their personal, inimitable style. “The conceit, planned but never carried out, that all these signatures be cut in wood and printed in multiple copies would only intensify the miracle of self-presence in the work of art. For like the acheiropoetos that undersigns Albrecht Dürer’s exemplary labor, mechanical reproduction will ensure that, though made without human hands, the artist’s individual testimonies, imprinted, will remain ‘very sure.’”15 This is a triumphant narrative. But was Dürer really as self-assured as Koerner suggests? And could this attempt at consubstantiality of the made and the maker hold up throughout the ages? The rise of a veritable German Dürer cult in the decades after

44 The Arabesque Revolution

Figure 5.2 Albrecht Dürer, Marginal Drawings to Psalm 92/93 (“Laudes”), incl. the Sudarium Held by Two Putti, 1515. From The Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I (1513), fol. 56r / fol. k6r (old / new numbering). Two-color printing with drawings in green ink, 28.1/27.9 A 19.5 cm. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, 2 L.impr.membr. 64.

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the 1808 remake of his Christian-mythological drawings speaks to such continuity, manifest in the profound fetishization of a unique genius and his inimitable style. The reception of the Prayer Book’s marginalia nonetheless suggests otherwise. In 1800, no mastery could annihilate the supplementary nature of all modern production, and in the moment of their resurrection, Dürer’s borders no longer presented a confident expression of self-portraiture. Respectively despite, against, and with the cult of the artist, the Romantic arabesque undermined the dream of self-presence so skillfully inscribed into Dürer’s vera icon. Unmistakably, the Romantics sensed an element of doubt, of repression and unresolved struggle in the grotesque inventions by their Renaissance idol. This doubt prompts me to ask: What lies beneath the triumphant assertion of self-presence in Dürer’s experiments of 1515, which are, after all, almost unique in his oeuvre?

Fantasia’s Dark Recesses: Dürer II Asking the same question, Peter Parshall detects in the astounding pen improvisations which make up the Prayer Book’s grotesque faces and Schreibmeisterschnörkel (scrivener’s scrolls) signs of a far-reaching internal struggle between rational and intuitive approaches to artistic creation. Dürer’s evolution in the decades after 1500 is marked, Parshall maintains, by a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward sense perception and the possibility of being deceived by vision.16 The crucial question which emerges here as the driving force of much of Dürer’s artistic and theoretical investigations is simple, essential, and decidedly apprehensive: Can vision be trusted? Dürer’s line of reasoning when it came to vision’s trustworthiness betrays a deeply ingrained skepticism toward free creativity, spontaneous creation, and, on the most basic level, imagination itself. Dürer’s penmanship exercises wrestle with this uncertainty, as they try to come to terms with an unsettling and threating set of questions of both artistic and metaphysical nature. This skepticism marks a decisive distance to the adventures of his Romantic admirers. Indeed, as delirious as Dürer’s 1515 fits of invention might be, they still remain a far cry from the plunge into the farthest regions of the fantastical and phantasmagorical, of the unconscious and uncanny, taken by the likes of a Clemens Brentano or a Jean Paul, of an E. T. A. Hoffmann or a Philipp Otto Runge (see figures 6.1 and 11.2a–d). Dürer’s inventive marginalia leave no doubt about an irrepressible urge to explore the dark recesses of fantasia in a sophisticated form of pen warm-up, which presented a new tactic of invention, a novel means of releasing an image from the intangible ether of the mind. We cannot but admire the cloud of swift swirls suddenly materializing as faces, a lion’s head, two rabbits, or, as in the case of Saint Apollonia’s arabesque surroundings, the bisymmetrical outlines of a mask.17 Yet these feasts of improvisation still occur against the backdrop of a profound suspicion about the mind’s operation. As such, the drawings are not so much a mere leadup to the affirmation of perspectival transparency, as Graevenitz has argued, as a dialectic move responding to the orthodoxy of Dürer’s so-called Meisterstiche (master prints). This triad of famous engravings, created within a short time span between 1513 and 1514, has shaped the artist’s reputation for centuries: first Knight, Death, and the Devil, then Saint Jerome in His Study, and, finally Melencolia I. It is “as if a last swing of the dialectical pendulum was required to fix a firm conclusion,” Peter Parshall muses.18 Only this explains why Dürer simply expunged this wonderfully capricious

46 The Arabesque Revolution manner of invention—the exploratory arabesques and hybrid images he so frequently indulged in—from his repertoire after 1516. “Here we are faced with a paradox. Once Dürer finally concluded that nature was his only guide, he reverted to classical order and the security of the mean, both of them doctrines he regarded as largely internalized and inherent.”19 In this sense, the mechanism governing the pattern of legibility and transparency in the Erasmus portrait is not simply a logical conclusion (or unambiguous embrace) of a systematic development toward the rational. Although the latter, whether in the form of geometry or perspective, looms large in his oeuvre as a scheme he attempted to apply universally, Dürer ultimately gave up on it as insufficient or even hopeless. In response, he indulged in the fantastical, most prominently embodied by the Prayer Book exercises, only to find that avenue eventually unsuitable as well. The result of these various experiments was a retreat from both the radical scientific (perspectival) and the unbridled imaginative (fantastical) in favor of a kind of middle-of-the-road conservatism. It may well be that it was precisely Dürer’s attempt to avoid the opposing extremes of rigidity and bizarrerie that, intuitively, attracted the Romantics; that they saw in Dürer’s late work a kind of anticipation of their own pre-Raphaelitism.20 In any event, the element of doubt was certainly one they reacted strongly to, if only to project their own sense of fragmentation onto a past still experienced as whole, at least mostly, but already marred by those fissures of modernity, which would soon break open and leave of the entire artifice of self-presence and fulfilled selfhood a pile of glittering shards behind.

Redrawing the Ornament of the Gaze: Dürer III Here we will move from Dürer’s Renaissance to Dürer revival. Although the arabesques of the Prayer Book explore a risky mode of freethinking and thus reflect Dürer’s struggle with the period’s attitude toward fantasia, they do so in such essentially Renaissance terms that the sense of self-presence is never fully eroded.21 The 1800s, however, saw in these marginalia more a detour into the medieval. Hence, the Janus-headed quality of Dürer’s experiments opened up an entirely different path of interpretation. Their characteristic as distinct modes of the rational and the intuitive now became available for fashioning the categories of the modern-medieval. To pursue this argument, we need to turn again to the potent issue of Romantic subjectivity and add further nuance to our definition of it. Undoubtedly, a new understanding of the self was, and still is, at the core of the modern experience. However, this redefinition of the I entailed more than the struggle for autonomy privileged in the account of Gerhard Neumann, Günter Oesterle, or Gerhart von Graevenitz. Ever since Kant’s Copernican revolution, the desire for selfassertion had been dialectically tied to an equally strong pull in the opposite direction, toward a redefinition of the self through self-surrender.22 Thus, the striving for autonomy found a correlate in the quest to become one with a higher entity, to lose one’s self in the communal experience of a transcendental authority. One could easily map these two drives of self-assertion and self-surrender onto Dürer’s oeuvre, and I contend that this is precisely what happened. Accordingly, the 1526 portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam could be read as fulfilling the requirements of self-assertion, while the Prayer Book seemed to embody self-surrender. From this perspective, Dürer’s marginalia occupied the other side of the media crisis around 1800 and the struggle to

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constitute a self thus unleashed. This is not surprising. After all, the marginalia’s web of signs counters the fortified system of a rational order laid out so neatly in the philosopher’s study. Robbed of the assuring illusion of three-dimensional space, we balance, somewhat precariously, on this branch here or that scroll there, always in danger of getting lost in the arabesques’ wild entanglements or falling off into nothingness. Even the page itself begins to liquefy, as the linear perspective onto the here and now yields to an ornamental allusion to the divine (and thus a realm outside of mathematical precision). The individual figure is still intact, but no longer in control. What constitutes in Dürer’s Christian-mythological drawings the presence and identity of mankind as viewer and effigy alike is an intricate cosmos of references, many of them fantastic, others topsy-turvy, but none logically organized. Given over to a dizzying world of non-gravity, we cannot find a firm footing. As we stumble along, we realize that the dream to govern this world (or the creative force behind it, the imagination) is but a delusion. Admittedly, wherever the lineament thickens into bodily configurations, a sense of self emerges, of selfhood. But the moment this subject tries to step forward, it faces an insurmountable abyss. There is no there there. The body can move into physical and mental self-awareness, yet this emancipatory movement is never enough to free the subject fully from the fetters of the arabesque’s lineament. The umbilical cord, and not only the one made of gold, is never cut.23 The figuration remains always part of the ylem created by the artist’s mark. The Prayer Book’s fantastic improvisations undermine the triumphal procession of one-point perspective. They command, forgoing any linear reading, a contemplative and associative form of reception, one that answers with its own combinatorial logic to the constant interruptions, ruptures, and rapid shifts from mimetic contour to abstract line. At least, this is how the Romantic age entered into the structural play of Dürer’s margins. Its enthusiasm for their fantastic qualities reflected not least a sense of familiarity: the Prayer Book seemed like a prefiguration of the era’s own self-reflexive nature, a rebuttal of the belief in the hegemony of a rationally structured space so firmly held up in Gerhart von Graevenitz’s interpretation of the 1500s. In this sense, a different kind of blindness marked this revivalist view of Dürer as it rushed toward his fantasia without taking note of the skepticism still lingering on in the Renaissance master’s exploration of the recesses of artistic consciousness and in his retreat from science’s promise in an absolute mastery of God’s creation. For all its madness, this rush makes sense for an age that had lost faith in rationality’s hegemony. Accordingly, the Romantic descendant of the Renaissance arabesque was not so much a bold annotation to a new visual regime as the expression of that regime’s crisis. This was one reason, if not the pivotal one, why the ornament could rise to a leading function in nineteenth-century art, theory, and aesthetics, why the arabesque became, as Werner Busch has put it so aptly, notwendig, inevitable and essential.24 The notion of an inner necessity of the peripheral brings us back to the overall representational crisis in the decades around 1800 and reminds us that a perspective often lies in the eye of the beholder. In Graevenitz’s case, it is Goethean rather than Romantic, which explains the urge behind his Ornament of the Gaze to solve the tensions charging through Dürer’s lineaments between mathematically constructed illusion, abstract calligraphic flourish, and semi-mimetic doodle. The ensuing interpretation of the Renaissance arabesque as a move toward Reason’s hegemony is thus, with Goethe, inherently anti-Romantic. As such, it cannot divine the marginalia of 1515 as an intuitive, improvised, emotionally charged challenge to a scientific model

48 The Arabesque Revolution of Renaissance rationality. While acknowledging the arabesque’s semiotic dimensions, the exclusivity of Graevenitz’s linear perspective and emphasis on linguistic models ultimately replaces cause and effect. As a result, his reading of Dürer perpetuates the very hegemony of text and script that the Romantics tried so hard to fight, subvert, and, where and whenever possible, overcome. In this context, we must recall that Strixner’s 1808 reproductions of Dürer’s marginal drawings omitted the original’s Gothic lettering (figure 5.3). By thus stripping them of the part that had been, in 1515, printed and reproducible, the reproductions unhinged the close interaction between written word and drawn world, a fact that shakes the entire foundation of Graevenitz’s reading. Later artists would, as we will see, reunite word and image, but the intermediary step of purifying the line from the script’s specifications is an important one. In a kind of Romantic doubling of perspective, Graevenitz focuses on the symptom rather than the source of the malaise that haunted 1800: looming large behind the media crisis of the Romantic age was an earth-shattering metaphysical crisis.

Überphantasieren: On Dürer’s Romantic Imagination Clemens Brentano was among the privileged few who had the opportunity to consult the original copy of the emperor’s prayer book early on, and he was impressed.25 The encounter propelled him to draw far-reaching conclusions about the creative potential of the arabesque to write forth what it decorates. On January 21, 1810, he elaborated on his ideas in a detailed letter to Philipp Otto Runge, hoping to convince the painter to collaborate on a cycle of poems, Die Romanzen vom Rosenkranz (The romances of the rosary), then still a work in progress. The poet’s expectations were high. The painter had to complete visually what the poet felt incapable to express verbally, at least to express to full satisfaction. Advocating a visual and visionary supplement, Brentano assigned the text a subordinate role. “Your annotating marginalia,” Brentano implored Runge, “will seem the main point and my text a meager commentary.”26 To dispel any lingering doubts, he conjured up the breathtaking artistic ancestry that such a scheme could live off. “It was now my wish . . . that You would surround each romance with a marginal drawing, like those by Dürer, at hand in lithography, of the Munich prayer book, abbildend und in die Verzierung überphantasirend (copying it and transcending it into fantastical ornamentation),” at once highly realistic and maddeningly delirious.27 It is difficult to capture the power of Brentano’s overheated language in translation. But the last phrase, abbildend und .  .  . überphantasirend, is key. It itself expresses a notion of translation (the prefix über- equaling both beyond and trans-), which charges the image with a complex act of transference. The first act is abbildend, an act of copying, picturing, reproducing, representing, and illustrating the provided verbal source. The term überphantasirend, on the other hand, signals a rapid progression from a subservient visualization of a given text to an associative and creative fabrication of something beyond, something impregnated by the artistic imagination. The second act, then, is generative. Encasing the text in a visual tapestry of lines and images, the ornamentation gives a material body to the unsayable. In this context, the prefix über- signals a spatial dimension, in the sense of beyond or over, but also above, across, and atop. The text’s concrete figuration is translated into something ornamental and abstract, which, implying a smooth transition of the written word into

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Figure 5.3 Johann Nepomuk Strixner, after Albrecht Dürer, Peasant Woman with a Basket of Eggs Standing on a Pomegranate, 1808. Lithograph in gray-green ink, 28.4 x 20.5 cm (image), 35.1 x 26.4 cm (page). From Strixner, Albrecht Dürers Christlich-Mythologische Handzeichnungen, plate 37. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1952-66-2.

50 The Arabesque Revolution ornamentation, happens in Brentano’s eyes on two levels, the first denoting a change of media (converting narrative content into picture), the second an emphatically material interaction (the expansion of script into drawing). The poet had the material object and a process of generative moments in mind when he defined the anticipated visual border by Runge in these terms. The printed page articulates the text as material presence, after which the text, thus incarnated, begets the drawn gesture so that, in a work’s last stage, word and image, letter and line coexist as and in black ink on the same page. Runge did not fully comprehend Brentano’s urgency. One reason for the miscommunication between poet and painter was Runge’s resistance to the most challenging implication of überphantasieren, the radicalization of the imaginative process. Beside its suggestions of translation and spatial reshaping, the über- in überphantasieren has yet another resonance, one denoting an interpretive role and thus tied to meaning. It marks a moment of excess, of surplus. Überphantasieren expresses a desire to go beyond the text not only in spatial terms but also in terms of content. It gives the ornament license to go beyond the original, to elevate what is said onto a higher level, to derail and reconstitute meaning, to create a richer set of metaphors, a thicker web of allegorical references, a more associative kind of reading than the textual source alone could and will provide. In short, the prefix über- in überphantasieren signals an excessive use of the imagination, an excess of invention, a fantasizing beyond and above the given, a proliferation of ideas and associations at the margins of rules, norms, and the binding laws of aesthetic decorum. Nothing could be further from Raphael’s structured decorations, the poet and painter’s mutual model, which regulate the grotesque’s wild growth through symmetry and geometry. Like his eighteenth-century predecessors, Runge favored this kind of mythmaking, and thus, by necessity, misunderstood Brentano. Alas, the two Romantics embodied two distinct models of arabesque thinking, and their differences reflected not least upon the primordial dichotomy between Dürer and Raphael’s designs. As Brentano conceived of the arabesque in a state of wild metamorphosis, he transplanted Runge’s organic metaphors into a realm of untamed and uncontained nature. Sanctioning the “abundantly fantastic in ornamentation,” Brentano endorsed a radical and radicalized usurpation of the text by the drawn line. Indeed, in his letter to Runge he envisioned a delivery of the finely wrought poem—set onto the page in neat columns—into the vortex of a superior, explosive, and exploding imagination. Rational order and the belief in a higher principle (in God, as Runge would have had it) yielded to a plunge into the abyss of fantasia. This leap entailed testing borders and boundaries, a leap propelled by a deep spiritual crisis and an innate skepticism about human agency and man’s creative power. Brentano’s arabesque evolves from a painful feeling for the limits, if not the complete impossibility, of creation as an act born entirely and exclusively from human subjectivity.28

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Neumann and Oesterle, Bild und Schrift, 10. Ibid. For the collection of the lyrical poems themselves, see Goethe, West-Östlicher Divan. Grave, “Reframing the ‘Finestra Aperta.’” For a more in-depth discussion of Dürer’s Erasmus print as a model for a dedifferentiated line in Romantic print culture and its musical associations, see Grewe, “The Lithographer’s Mark.”

The Ornament of the Gaze 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

51

See Robert, “Evidenz.” Hayum, “Dürer’s Portrait,” 680–81n49. For a notion of Dürer’s epistolary mode of address, see Brisman, Albrecht Dürer. Hayum, “Dürer’s Portrait,” esp. 678–81; see further Graevenitz, Das Ornament, 1–24. Parshall, “Graphic Knowledge,” esp. 406. Robert, “Evidenz,” 212–16. Panofsky, “‘Nebulae,’” 36; see further idem, “Erasmus” (1969), 225. Erasmus to Willibald Pirckheimer, July 30, 1526, in Hayum, “Dürer’s Portrait,” 654 and n. 7. Koerner, Moment, 228; see further Belting, Likeness. Koerner, Moment, 236. My discussion here is indebted to Parshall, “Albrecht Dürer,” and idem, “Graphic Knowledge.” Parshall, “Graphic Knowledge,” 400. Ibid., 407. Ibid., 407–8. Peter Parshall, email correspondence, December 29, 2013. This ambivalence explains the two strands of argumentation mapped out by Koerner’s Moment of Self-Portraiture and Peter Parshall’s “Graphic Knowledge.” Grewe, “Reenchantment.” Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske. Pravida, Erfindung, 41. Brentano to Runge, January 21, 1810, in Brentano, Briefe, 205. Ibid. I thank Fritz Breithaupt and Christian Irmscher for their help in translating Brentano’s evocative yet idiosyncratic phrasing into English. Mazza, “Die umgekehrte Arabeske,” 183.

6

The Divine (as) Parergon

As the arabesque transformed, in the shadow of shifting semiotics, into an effigy of a signified removed into the infinite, it became an essential expression not only of the media crisis that haunted the period but of its powerful metaphysical subtext as well. In this situation, the ornament of the gaze assumed yet another function as defense mechanism and apotropaic pattern. Called upon by those who held onto the Christian faith as the foundation of all life, creative and otherwise, ornamentation was summoned to negotiate, alleviate, and, where possible, defeat the consequences of faith’s imperiled position in the modern age. Responding ever flexibly to the new task, the arabesque composed itself into orderly bands around the images of nature, whether scientific or mystic, which had usurped the pictorial center once preserved for the biblical stories and the history of God’s workings on earth (see figures 6.1 and 6.3).

Displacement(s) In its first phase, this parergonal displacement of the divine economy still promised a cure to the era’s spiritual malaise (figure 6.1). Hence, the incunabula of early Romantic print culture, Philipp Otto Runge’s innovative 1805 series Times of Day, charged the arabesque with giving the cosmic biological cycle at its center a precise artistic, interpretive, and metaphysical direction (see also figure 11.2a–d). Embodying the Romantic dream of an entirely new, emphatically contemporary and thus modern art reborn from a reawakened religiosity, the print cycle replaced hieratic structure with syncretic plasticity, yearning for a perpetual dialogue between inside and outside in which center and border share the same visual vocabulary. Runge hoped for a new world to rise from the ashes of dying artistic conventions and petrified religious traditions, a world no less devout than the old but open to the most personal mystic experience. Runge’s utopia proved an illusion. Even those who longed for a Christian paradise on Earth often felt a deep-seated, if not always admitted, skepticism whether this loving embrace of ergon and parergon could last or deliver on its promise. The pendulum began to swing back to clearly marked hierarchies and the teachings of the church, as vividly manifested in another print cycle, this time by a lesser-known painter, Wilhelm von Kügelgen, the oldest son of the eminent Dresden portraitist Gerhard von Kügelgen and best known for his posthumously published memoirs (see figure 6.3).1 Already the title of his project, Die Geschichte des Reichs Gottes, nach der heiligen Schrift in Bildern von Wilhelm von Kügelgen (The history of God’s kingdom, after the Scriptures in pictures by Wilhelm von Kügelgen), signaled a drastic departure DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-8

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Figure 6.1 Johann Gottlieb Seyfert, after Philipp Otto Runge, Morning, 1803–5. From Runge, Times of Day, 1803–5, plate 1. Etching and engraving, 71.1 x 47.9 cm (plate); 72.4 x 48.9 cm (sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2001-94-1.

54 The Arabesque Revolution from the syncretism of Runge’s mystic vision. Not coincidentally, Kügelgen enlisted a Pietist theologian and prolific poet of parables, his father-in-law, Friedrich Adolf Krummacher, to compose a series of brief commentaries, which even then appealed more to a taste for edifying literature than to the discriminating sensitivity of the print connoisseur.2

(Re)Placements When the first installment of fourteen engravings appeared in 1831, inside and outside no longer intonated a fluid conversation. The final designs arrest the constant back and forth so powerfully renegotiated in the Times of Day (see figures 6.1 and 6.3). Their arabesque frames have hardened into conventional borders, which annotate the history pictures at the center with a conventional, mostly abstract iconography. Yet even at their most eloquent, Kügelgen’s arabesques no longer speak the same language as the center, nor do they breathe the same spirit. The carefully delineated ornamental margins now demarcate, quite involuntarily it seems, a steep gulf between the framed and the frame, an unbridgeable rupture that pries apart interior and exterior. In the process, the border reveals itself for what it has become, a refuge rather than a resource. Kügelgen’s contemporaries were quite attuned to this resurfaced divide, although they often remained blissfully unaware of the problematic implications of this fact. Enthused that “every picture will have a frame of meaningful . . . arabesques,” the 1833 reviewer for a literary journal aimed at Catholic clergy thus had no objections that these were “meant to be the primary reference points for the explanatory text.”3 Karl Schnaase, in contrast, was more critical. The distinguished art historian held the theologian’s regime responsible for a regrettable lack of creative freedom on part of the artists and the ensuing absence of expressive singularity. The arabesque is not just tamed but incarcerated, Schnaase complained, denouncing the broad rectangular frame as a tool of aesthetic repression that “has put stifling shackles on the arabesques’ free momentum.”4 Under Kügelgen’s pen, the frame becomes the last bastion of “those old symbols . . . handed down to us, hallowed by tradition,” that Friedrich Schlegel had summoned in 1823 as a protective shield against the dangers of illegibility and hermeticism he detected in Runge’s idiosyncratic inventions.5 Maybe the mastermind of the Romantic arabesque was right when he claimed that those symbols, “if rightly understood,” would “always prove sufficiently expressive and effective.”6 Yet even then they were in constant danger, as in Kügelgen’s prints, of surviving only in striking isolation. Certainly, this late Romantic arabesque is still able to weave together “those old symbols,” but it no longer blooms into an organic, ever-sprawling system. And while the ergon has now performed a parergonal transformation and returned as ornament, it nonetheless has lost its vitality and fallen back, drained of subversive energy and the force of idiosyncratic invention, into a state of confinement. In 1830, the border had once again become boarded up, as spatial limits configured new limitations. The perpetually regenerating play of imagination and fantasy, of multiplying meanings and relational interplay yielded to a debilitating stasis, as the arabesque’s existence at the margins reverted back to marginalization. In this situation, the arabesque solidified as the material shape of the crisis it was mobilized to control. To many of the Kügelgen’s contemporaries the Christian tradition and its signs seemed rather hollowed than hallowed. In this situation, a belief in the arabesque as a

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means to suture the era’s metaphysical fragmentation seemed a dangerous reserve for dreamers. The rest simply felt lost in its labyrinthine meanders.

Directions The anxious quality of Kügelgen’s solution looms even larger in front of our eyes if, like Clemens Brentano, we return to a rapport between artistic imagination and divine word in the Emperor Maximilian’s prayer book itself (figure 6.2). Lovingly, the figments of Dürer’s fantasy huddle up against the Holy Writ, only to bounce back and seek independence. Yet the moment they have realized their own inward power, they seek out closeness again to script and Scripture. Believing in the Holy Ghost as their odem, their breath of life, Dürer’s arabesques usurp whatever biblical wisdom has been excerpted and gathered on the pages of the precious vellum; and yet, for all of the marks’ untamed swiftness, they remain subservient to the Lord’s command. Raising his pen to conduct a pulsating syncopated rhythm of capricious inventions and fantasia’s carefully drawn eruptions, Dürer orchestrates a host of charming genre figures and weighty Christian images as they break into some unknown mysterious dance. As enigmatic visitors in this topsy-turvy world, they hover—some forlorn and lost in thought, some boldly inspired, with the promise of salvation on their lips— at the edge of the arabesque’s mysterious undergrowth, which is shelter and prison at once. In all this mayhem, however, we do not stumble across those bone-chilling doubts about the belatedness of form or faith’s shadow existence that rage beneath the sentimental surface of nineteenth-century practices. No wonder, then, that Brentano, filled with pious ardor, threw himself into this Renaissance jungle of pen warm-ups and masterful mimesis, hoping that a similar wild growth could lift his own religious poetry out of the morass of insufficient expression into a symbolic materialization of the unsayable. The poet’s unrestrained enthusiasm met, as we have seen, with a guarded response by his chosen collaborator. Although the arabesque was a centerpiece of his own practice and visionary project of art’s rebirth, Runge simply did not share Brentano’s excessive, absorptive, intermedial vision.7 The reasons behind his resistance were as much personal as didactic and strikingly similar to Dürer’s own misgivings.8 Acknowledging the arabesque’s descent from fantasy and fancy, the Hamburg painter saw a clear and present danger embedded in the beloved form, a persistent threat of madness, of getting lost in an endless vortex of ideas, of being swallowed by something which could pull us down, with the force of an avalanche, into a dizzying swirl of ever-accumulating pictures and expanding thoughts. Such überphantasierende Verzierung (ornamentation transcending into the fantastic, indeed going overboard in its phantasmargoric delirium) had to be avoided, for it could only generate a cataclysmic cycle, which never ends or reaches its conclusion—except, as Runge’s own fate seemed to suggest, in death. Runge always felt himself close to the edge of this destructive power, and he took careful steps to remain on firm land. He wanted meaning to multiply, but not to get out of hand; he wanted a pictorial burst of associative connections, but not an eruption into radical arbitrariness. In this sense, the nature of his arabesque was more akin to the artificial wilderness of the English landscape garden than to the hazardous ruggedness of sublime mountainscapes. Openness required control, Runge believed; signification needed direction (on the part of both artist and recipient). In this, he

56 The Arabesque Revolution

Fig. 6.2 Albrecht Dürer, Marginal Drawings to the Benediction (“Matutin”), 1515. From The Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I (1513), fol. 51r / fol. k1r (old / new numbering). Two-color printing with drawings in two shades of green ink, 28.1/27.9 x 19.5 cm. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, 2 L.impr.membr. 64.

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9

was a  kindred spirit of the Nazarenes, if not in means then in conviction. Yet he was ahead of his time; his contemporaries often overlooked this judiciously measured side of his arabesques. Famously, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe found them still sufficiently hieroglyphic to experience them as “devil’s stuff,” enough “to drive you crazy, beautiful and mad at the same time.”10 The Olympian of German literature was not at all surprised by their maker’s premature death, for “whatever stands on a cliff like this, must die or go insane, there is no mercy.”11 Perhaps Runge would not have been surprised either if asked postmortem about his own sudden demise. He never fully shook off a certain unease about the project’s potential for insanity, and even felt it necessary to fortify himself against engrossing and losing himself “in these ideas and fantasies to such a degree that they never come to an end.”12 Beside a set of formal strategies to ban this lurking menace, Runge also called upon his Christian God as shield and weapon. “We need at the occasion of this procedure out of ourselves”—in particular when inventing such fantastic artworks— “something firm, solid and permanent, otherwise we perish or have to begin lying . . . ; this unyielding pillar, however, is the Christian religion.”13

Redirections Runge’s architectural metaphor seems strangely at odds with the fluidity of his border work. Yet his assertion of Christianity’s significance (for life and art) reminds us that being at the margins means anything but being marginal, and this is even true for Kügelgen’s reenactment. For Runge, the Christian religion nurtures the design’s spiritual-symbolic borders, which, in turn, channel the centerpieces’ whirling energy into upward-surging movement (see figure 6.1, as well as figure 11.2a– d).14 The cycle’s marginalia thus provide direction, in visual as much as iconographic terms, although never in a straightforward way. At the same time, they are charged with absorbing the potentially ever-expanding centrifugal power of the panels’ nature mysticism—that cosmic sensibility and cyclical rhythm, biological matter and hieroglyphic hermeticism, so irreconcilable with Christian orthodoxy—into the geometry of a Christian sign system: Morning moving from the ring-shaped Ouroboros serpent to the gloriole with God’s name; Day from the angel with flaming sword to the divine triangle encircled by a rainbow; Evening from the chalice and cross to the Lamb of God; and finally, Night from the bonfire of olive branches to the dove of the Holy Spirit. The purpose of the arabesques, then, is, both as ornamental form and overarching organizing principle, the creation of a higher unity that leads the viewer to God.15 In short, Runge set out, as Ludwig Tieck remarked so aptly in the summer of 1803, “to educate the fantastic and fantastically playful arabesque to a philosophical, religious artistic expression.”16 A wild child by nature, the arabesque defied, however, such civilizing education. The main point of resistance was its innate arbitrariness, which kept engulfing signs and significations, objects and figures—and the entire interaction between them—in a net of arcane, impenetrable formations. Tieck thus sighed that Runge’s arabesque inexorably moved from symbol to allegory and from allegory to hieroglyph and thus a fully arbitrary form of signification. The bitter sap, which drips from the aloe, the Knight’s Spur [Rittersporn or larkspur] . . . could not in itself express . . . suffering, repentance, or bravery and valor.

58 The Arabesque Revolution Hence there is much in these pictures what only Runge might understand, and it is to fear that he might, given his associational rich fantasy, get even deeper into the realm of capriciousness and that he might neglect too much the appearance itself as such.17 If legibility was a thorny issue, an even bigger one was the inability of Runge’s arabesque to translate its maker’s profound piety into a flexible yet affirmative practice. Nothing illustrates this failure more poignantly than the sweltering suspicions about his hidden atheism. The high society of Hamburg, the sternly Protestant city of the Hanseatic league where Runge had lived since 1804, even suspected him—quite “tastelessly,” as the shipbuilder’s son himself bristled—of being a crypto-Catholic, a suspicion basically tantamount to an accusation of heresy.18 The Times of Day turned out to be too hermetic—and in confessional terms too disconcertingly enigmatic—to convey their deeply spiritual nature to Runge’s contemporaries, his beloved fiancée, Pauline Susanna Bassenge, included. The high-flying aspirations for a visual vocabulary at once legible and highly personal, in short, for an art equally objective and subjective, quickly burst like soap bubbles. However, this disappointment did not simply reflect personal failure; rather, it signaled the bankruptcy of the entire visual economy Runge had built up and built upon. Modernists have not felt this bankruptcy with the same acuteness as Runge’s fellow Romantics. As twentieth-century art history drifted away from iconographical and confessional concerns, the decoding of symbol systems yielded to a sustained focus on the relational associations between the individual design elements, their inner logic, and the semiotics thus construed. Already by 1900, as Christian Scholl has so convincingly argued in his sweeping analysis of two hundred years of Runge historiography, the artist had been systematically assimilated to the modernist cause—with long-lasting effect. Take, for example, Thomas Lange, who, in 2010, would flippantly dismiss the objections of Runge’s contemporary Ludwig Tieck to the Times’ symbolic ambiguities as the vestige of a traditional, now obsolete attitude toward figuration as essentially discursive.19 Lange counters Tieck’s position with a nod to the “bildimmanente Bedeutungserzeugungen”—meaning produced entirely from within (thus immanent to) the image—as the core of Runge’s work. The Times of Day, Lange argues, operates as Bildzeichen, as pictograms that inhabit and generate a symbolic logic entirely deduced from the image’s visual qualities. Consequently, the collapse of the employed sign system does not by default entail a collapse of its content.20 Runge’s own experience contradicts this modernist reconstituting. He clearly was pained that his personal piety counted for nothing, as long as the arabesque quality of his art failed to convert the image’s religious foundation into the guiding star of a pious reception. Lange’s mediumistic approach relies on a substantial decontextualization, which strips Runge precisely of the visual economy that, as noted above, suffered bankruptcy. When it came to matters of faith, the parergonal move, which had bestowed upon the arabesque such productive flexibility and evocative poeticism, fell short of the voiced expectations. It failed to become the connecting tissue between the increasingly fragmented and strained facts of modern life, which—like faith and science or art and nature—seemed to drift apart at an ever-increasing speed. If the Romantic ornament had struggled to free itself from the marginalization as mere supplement and surplus, as a decorative addendum with no meaningful autonomy, the former

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avant-garde medium found itself suddenly pressed into the role of a bastion off limits, the last resort of the embittered rearguard action of a formerly hegemonic worldview. Parergon turned into periphery.

The Divine (as) Parergon A representation of the origins of life, of God’s creation of the world on the first day, seems an intrinsically potent motif to illustrate the period’s metaphysical dilemma (figure 6.3). The object of choice, the opening plate of Kügelgen’s history of God’s kingdom, is a textbook example for the all-encompassing clash between modern science and the forefather’s religiosity, between the quest for a contemporary sacred art and the nostalgic revival of the old masters. Sensitive to the unresolved tensions in the plate’s makeup, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a former brother of St. Luke and leading Nazarene, praised its arabesque as a superb example of that genus while dismissing the main picture as “completely inartistic.”21 Indeed, embedded in a symmetrical cloud formation (one clearly blown in from Runge’s Times), the blue planet lacks heft and visibility. In contrast to the substantial blackness of the arabesque’s absorptive frame, the outline is strangely thin, its hue frustratingly faint. The effect is utterly antipictorial. Earth materializes as schematic shape rather than narrative element, while the circle’s unmodulated perfection foregrounds a desire for objective descriptiveness. Placed stiffly in the plate’s central axis, a short distance below the finial of the arabesque’s tracery, the perfect sphere looks almost like a lantern waiting to be illuminated at night to astound and amuse. Schnorr would not be the only reviewer dissatisfied by Kügelgen’s pictorial solution.22 Yet the insecurities of a budding young artist were not alone to blame for the noted imbalance in style. Rather, the jarring collision of the planet’s scientific mapping with its expressive silence and the arabesque’s rich iconography geared toward discursive exposition reflects an ontology of vision that undermines the claims of science and religion in equal measure. To make this point, let’s first turn toward the plate’s picture: Earth. The laconic, strictly geological title is programmatic. The embodied presence of the divine is cast aside, to the arabesque border work, to make room for a simple, scientific (if not entirely correct) map of the four continents in the main field: Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Nothing is particularly attractive about this image, which seems more appropriate for a children’s science book than the first chapter in a grand narrative. Even more noteworthy is its insubstantiality! Perplexingly pale, the outline signals an unexpected tentativeness at odds with the needs of mapping and the illusion of scientific objectivity. It suggests that artistic fancy has no role to play in an objective conception of the world’s outer appearance while immediately undermining our confidence that it indeed has not. In this sense, Earth’s faint presence points out that this particular view, so familiar to us children of the twenty-first century, was mere projection in 1830, a product of scientific imaging and human imagination. Ultimately, the diminished aesthetic gratification of Kügelgen’s Earth mirrors a deeply conflicted attitude toward modernity’s scientific revolution, one that feels compelled and repelled by a worldview based on observation, not belief. At first, the assertiveness of the arabesque’s saturated black ink seems to offer an affirmative alternative to the soft vision of science. It suggests solidity, and its

60 The Arabesque Revolution

Figure 6.3 Wilhelm von Kügelgen, God’s Creation, 1831. Engraving, 38 x 32 cm. From Kügelgen, Die Geschichte des Reichs Gottes, vol. 1 (1831), n.p. Collection Fiona Chalom, Los Angeles, CA.

resurrection of Christianity’s verbal code of image-making, iconography, breaks through the silence of the main image. Not surprisingly, the arabesque of creation’s first day builds upon the hermeneutics of figural thinking and the established pictorial strategies to render typology in art: placed on opposite sides, two angels, one outfitted with the Tablets of the Law, the other with a cross-staff, symbolize the Old and the New Covenant. Keeping in line with the value system of Christian exegesis, this juxtaposition is not a neutral one; nor does it merely signify a temporal sequence. Instead, the pair effectively denotes what a devout Christian like Kügelgen would have seen as the Testaments’ qualitative difference, the Old being a mere shadow of the New and thus inferior to it. Two small figures in the upper

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corners, there to allegorize the distinct nature of each Scripture, reiterate this reading with their vicious rhetoric that the Jewish people are condemned to despair, while their Christian counterpart is, in prayer, uplifted to hope and God’s unveiled glory. Kügelgen’s History of God’s Kingdom thus reinforces the Protestant schema of law and gospel. With a few strokes, the opening image demotes the Jewish faith to a religion of the letter superseded by the Christian creed as that of the spirit.23 The print’s imbalance is thus one of effect and temporality. As the arabesque’s darker hue and busier composition draw the eye’s attention toward the outside, its greater iconographic density also demands a substantially greater investment in terms of viewing time, as looking here implies decoding, and decoding, in turn, exegesis. This observation suggests that Earth’s arabesque frame was put in place as generative principle to produce a simple and straightforward (at least unproblematic) representation of God’s existence and the material reality of the Bible’s spiritual truth. Yet this is not what happens. In an unexpected, decidedly ironic twist, the solidity of the bodies, further firmed up by the arabesque’s stark outlines, produces a materialism, a visual factuality, that relegates the divine to a realm beyond the visible. What we are left with instead is a representation of Christian visual culture, a musing on art’s task to give material shape to belief and to shape faith in its imaginary concretization. In the end, Kügelgen’s work, in an utterly Romantic gesture, reflects back upon itself and, sidelining content after all, represents representation itself. The print doubles as metaphor and material object of a beginning, of the beginning, indeed, of three beginnings: the first moment of creation, the first chapter in the story told, the first plate in a series of engravings. As such, the print marks the originary entry, the access point where faith gains form and the visual turns into lived experience. The arabesque becomes, quite literally, a portal. Marking the entry, Kügelgen designed the portico of a Gothic church. The contrast to Runge’s surreal space and recreation of a fauna and flora so magically out of scale and proportions, where humans nestle intoxicated in the petals and foliage of giant plants and oversized flowers, could not be starker. In 1831, this dreamy otherness of the biblical world and its heavenly creatures now yielded to the utterly familiar, an evocation of religious practice as built environment. As the print becomes a view through the open entry to the Lord’s house, art circles back to ritual, replacing divine presence with religious practice. For all its charm, Kügelgen’s artistic solution is thus vulnerable to yet another displacement. As the architectural metaphor bestows solidity upon the artist’s belief system, it erodes the image’s otherworldly aura. Renouncing any lingering sense of Runge’s mysticism, Kügelgen’s Gothic portal places us firmly on earth. The architectural nature of the creation’s arabesque signals a profound media shift that reduces vision from apparition to sight. The angels stand in front of us no longer as divine beings but as solid sculptures. This new weightiness illuminates, on the other hand, the metaphorical underpinnings of Kügelgen’s stylistic choices. The globe’s schematic, pale quality asserts a status as a mere speculation, a mathematical proposition not yet verified by experiential proof. Framing modern man’s scientific vision, Kügelgen’s arabesque, in turn, delivers only a man-made effigy of the Christian God. In the end, the artist could only resort to the Christian doctrine that “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29, KJV).24 His angels have no eyes, and as they stare from cold empty stone sockets, as the window of the soul turns into

62 The Arabesque Revolution white blankness, the invisible nature of the invisible is reified. We stand dangerously close to the precipice of Nietzsche’s dead God. Of course, nothing would have been further from Kügelgen’s mind than such modernist deicide. Yet doubt seems to rage under the quiet surface of symbols hallowed by tradition, like a glacial brook gushing beneath the glittering surface of a snow-covered crust. Indeed, the print itself assumes a supplemental role, as the narrative’s main protagonist remains strangely absent. Like the heroine of Tieck’s Bluebeard, God never enters the stage. The creation unfolds without the creator. “The remaining pictures avoid any anthropomorphic rendering of the Godhead as well,” Christine Riegelmann has observed. “In Genesis, only the figures’ upward gaze, filled with devotion, or their frightened posture indicate God’s presence while the arabesque borders concurrently feature traditional and new emblems of the divine. Some images moreover represent, in places where the biblical text speaks of God’s apparition and appearance, the preexistent Christ.”25 Kügelgen was not alone in his aversion to portraying the Creator God, and I have discussed the theological reasons for this reluctance elsewhere.26 Yet this absence, while not indicating the waning of the artist’s personal faith, soon surrenders us to the striking silence at the heart of the image. We almost feel the cold, life-quenching atmosphere of space. Mapping the earth into the sky, the print provides a distant glance of our home planet, reminding us that its fate depends so little on our hopes and sorrows, beliefs and fears. Earth is our world, the ground on which we stand, but as the blue planet inaudibly follows its celestial path, we sense our irrelevance. God, the God of the moderns, is no longer able to create a world.

Arabesque Metaphysics The engravings in Kügelgen’s History of God’s Kingdom illuminate the arabesque’s powerful draw, its promise to provide the devout with the thread that might stitch together an increasingly fragmented, prosaic world haunted by mechanization, industrialization, and the destabilizing effects of a scientific revolution. The margins become a sanctuary, where, hidden at the periphery and structured by the arabesque’s unregulated regime, we still find permission to visualize what seems impermissible at the center: a spiritual imagery in which the divine assumes bodily presence. To do so, the late Romantic print invokes the church as built environment, as a Bible in stone and manifest ritual, as symbolic structure and spiritual space. Most importantly, the arabesque portico appears as the arbiter of a physical place where faith is actualized through a congregation. Yet materialism of this earthly avowal of faith and its displacement into the margins ultimately cast a long dark shadow upon the intended message. As the essential object of God’s creation, mankind’s home, disappears into oblivion, the story’s primary message—the divine promise of salvation—begins to reside in what is liminal. At the same time, Kügelgen’s solution still testifies to Romanticism’s persistent power. His flight into the outer zones of the pictorial field follows in the footsteps of those who broke with Enlightened poetics and Neoclassicist aesthetics, as they uplifted ornamentation again from devalued decoration to symbolic signification. It is thus worth having another look at the fiery debates unleashed in the last decades of the eighteenth century over allegory and ornament.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Kügelgen, Jugenderinnerungen. Kügelgen, Die Geschichte. Sch., “Die Geschichte des Reiches Gottes,” 130. [Schnaase], “Neue Umrisse,” 127. Schlegel, Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works, 147; for a more expansive analysis see Grewe, The Nazarenes, chap. 7, 129–49. Schlegel, Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works, 147. Pravida, Erfindung, 41. See the analysis of Dürer’s struggle with fantasia in the previous chapter. For the concept of “controlled openness,” see Grewe, Painting the Sacred, 311–15. Sulpiz Boisserée to his brother Melchior Boisserée, May 6, 1811, in Traeger, Philipp Otto Runge, 171, Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 56–57, and Reinisch, Poesie, 120; see furthermore Allert, “Goethe, Runge, Friedrich,” 82. Allert, “Goethe, Runge, Friedrich,” 82. Runge to his brother Daniel Runge, February 13, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1:34. Ibid., 35. Grewe, The Nazarenes, 140. See Reinisch, Poesie, 116–19. Tieck 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:472. Reinisch, Poesie, 129–30. Pütz, “Philipp Otto Runge,” 230. Lange, Das bildnerische, 189. Ibid., 182–83. Schnaase, “Neue Umrisse,” 127. See, for a twentieth-century voice, Riegelmann, “Die Schöpfungsdarstellungen.” For the importance and ideological underpinnings of Romantic typological thinking, see Grewe, Painting the Sacred. For the aesthetic implications of this blessing, see Grewe, The Nazarenes, 172–73. Riegelmann, “Die Schöpfungsdarstellungen.” Grewe, Painting the Sacred, chap. 5, 203–51.

7

Ornament, Allegory, Autonomy Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe, Karl Philipp Moritz

Apparently, the ornament means nothing.1 In its nonrepresentational form it is but a decorative supplement enhancing the significance of a text, a cultic utensil or a basic commodity. The ornament narrates nothing. And yet it has a mystical capacity of meaning something, of assuming a referential potential of great spiritual import, in and through its outward meaninglessness. This ability to mutate from mere decoration to evocative supplement is not least rooted in the ornament’s drive toward internal organization, toward symmetry, mirroring, and directionality, in short, toward unfolding in a rapport. This internal mechanism of producing an abstract order has traditionally opened up to a deeper understanding of ornamental patterns as possessing the power to gesture, even if only indirectly, toward a mystical essence. Apparently, the ornament is a cryptic language with its own syntax. From an Islamic perspective, this equation of meaning with narration is problematic, to say the least.2 But for German Romanticism, this Orientalist (mis)reading of Islamic ornament proved most productive. It provided an origin myth for the spiritual undercurrent of their own arabesque, which soon ripened to a mystical notion of ordered chaos, an echo of multiple voices, be it Hesiod’s Theogony or Plato’s Timaeus or 1 Moses 1:1–2, which together intonate the idea that chaos births creation. Born from a metamorphosis of configurations—of amorphous matter into form, the unstructured into structure, the nonrepresentational into representation—the arabesque became a symbol of the cosmos itself. The devoted embrace of the ornament as metaphor and mirror image of creativity’s cosmological dimension was, however, only one reaction to its powers. The other was a deep-rooted suspicion of the decorative, an apprehension that it might overgrow, devaluate, debase, even destroy the work itself, erode its essence and earnestness. To those fearing ornamental surplus, the arabesque was the seed of degeneration, a wild growth that needed to be pruned, controlled, even eradicated. In the eighteenth century, apprehension surged as Rococo’s ornamental excess crumbled under the weight of revolutionary overthrow. As the ideal of an essential beauty purged of anything superfluous or gratuitous began to take hold, so did the idea that it might be best to abolish ornamental décor altogether. Seen as little more but rhetorical embellishment, the ornament inevitably fell through the cracks of the Neoclassicist electio.3 This was nonetheless only one side of the coin, the other being an equally emphatic defense of ornament and the arabesque.

Ornatus: A Preamble on Ancient Rhetoric The Latin root of the term “ornament,” ornatus, reveals its origins in ancient rhetoric, from Cicero’s De oratore to Quintilian’s Institutiones oratoriae.4 The same is true DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-9

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for allegory. Within the corpus of rhetorical treatises, however, the notions of “ornament” and “allegory” were not homogeneous in character and belong to different classes. While ornatus, as one of the virtutes elocutionis, was considered capable of making a speech more agreeable and effective, allegory was much more limited and embodied merely a specific figure of speech. Therefore, the theories of ornamentation tended to be much more expansive until the Baroque, when ornament and allegory were increasingly treated as synonyms, insofar as both became associated with eloquence.5 Nonetheless, as long as the two tropes were conceived as rhetorical devices employed to explicate or underline an image’s meaning, their value or success derived exclusively from their respective ability to convince the viewer. Neither could claim inherent worth, significance, or ideological weight. Accordingly, allegory, as an ornamental subcategory, was merely one among many parts of the decorative machinery available to poets, painters, and sculptors. It was not before the eighteenth century that this perception underwent a fundamental shift. While critics of decorative excess still hearkened back to Cicero and Quintilian’s reservations about an immoderate use of ornatus and shared the fear that an uncontrolled and uncontrollable form might overpower the content it was supposed to enhance, the Neoclassicist theoreticians of a modern ornatus often used one to justify the other. One of art history’s founding fathers, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, is an illuminating case in point.

Allegory to the Rescue: On Johann Joachim Winckelmann Among the voices advancing a new attitude toward ornament, allegory, and, in its wake, the arabesque was Johann Joachim Winckelmann.6 As in other fields of his scholarship, he occupied a middle ground. The rhetorical tradition still formed the basis for his notion of imitatio, articulated so influentially in his 1755 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture). Yet, intent on turning around what he considered the arabesque’s decline into mere decadence, Winckelmann reversed the hierarchy and called upon allegory to come to its rescue. An outspoken critic of the era’s craze for grotesque wall decorations à la Pompeii, he counted on allegory to imbue otherwise merely sensuous ornamentation with reason, weight, and meaningfulness. Winckelmann’s obsession with antiquity as a source of renewal sprang from a passionate preoccupation with the state of contemporary art, which the pioneering Hellenist felt to be wanting. Reform was needed, but how? On the quest to solve this riddle, Winckelmann, like the antique rhetoricians before him, was not concerned with nature itself but the study of man-made artifacts. Accordingly, he used the term Nachahmung (imitation) in the sense of aemulatio: not an act of strict copying but a process of emulating a set of preexisting exempla so as to perfect and exceed them. The goal is to appropriate the exemplum’s spirit, not just to repeat its structural principles. Only from this perspective does Winckelmann’s famous dictum “The only way for us to become great, or, if possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients” seem (more) plausible, although no less paradoxical.7 But if Winckelmann was aware of the inherent impossibility of materializing his theory of imitation, he certainly never admitted it—let alone theorized its quintessentially historicist dilemma.8 Be that as it may, the term “emulation” will serve us from now on to signify, in a Winckelmannian sense, a productive, transformative notion of imitatio.9

66 The Arabesque Revolution Opposed to absolutism and appalled by its means of propaganda and selfrepresentation, Winckelmann sought to ground the rhetoric of the beautiful in a value system built upon a priori meaning. He did so by marrying his concept of emulation with Neoplatonic metaphysics. Accordingly, the beautiful appears as a sensory reflection of the True and the Good, with perfectio naturae as the underlying principle of the suggested emulative practice. At the same time, he regarded the work of art— whether in its processual or factual dimension—not as an end in itself but as a vehicle of education. “All the arts,” Winckelmann proclaimed, “have a doubled final aim: they ought to delight and teach.”10 Allegedly a reflex of the idea of the beautiful and, as such, an expression of the true and good in the empirical world, art thus assumed the status of a “philosophical propaedeutics of pure intellectual contemplation.”11 Later in life, once emigrated from Dresden to Rome, Winckelmann would revise this decidedly intellectualist approach and subscribe to a more pedagogical concept of art and focus—more consistent with the main trend in eighteenth-century aesthetics—on the viewer’s aesthetic response.12 However, at this early point in his thinking, allegory occupied an important position as a mediator between the sensible and the supersensible, that is, between the sensuous reality of the beautiful and its idea. While Winckelmann embraced the principle of allegory, he also acknowledged its crisis, with a lack of metaphysical depth being both cause and effect. Examples of such meaningless concoctions were allegories entirely made up of abstract concepts (such as “personified virtues and vices”), which in the past—and here Winckelmann had in particular the Baroque and Rococo in mind—had merely catered to courtly self-representation and the ruler’s exaltation. Infused by democratic republican ideas, the German art historian and archaeologist abhorred such hollow panegyric: allegory and ornament should not be reduced, he demanded, to a “rhetoric of exercising power.”13 Despite its progressive politics, Winckelmann’s conception still revealed its origins in rhetoric in the way it treated allegory as a kind of garment, a shell or cover. Here, the historian distinguished carefully between two kinds of qualitatively opposed usage: an act of dressing up (verkleiden) and a form of clothing in the sense of Cicero’s concept of vestire. Accordingly, higher allegory (höhere Allegorie) ought to clothe the idea of the beautiful in a sensuous garb and, in this elevated state, was charged with fusing outer appearance and metaphysical content. The artist must learn, Winckelmann stated, “not to hide but to clothe his thoughts in allegory.”14 Allegory and ornament no longer function as pure decoration or eloquent rhetorical devices; rather, they embody beautiful appearance and, in turn, foster a feeling of and for beauty itself. Bound by the task to edify the audience, allegory and ornament stopped being empty, and, in an effort to cure the malaise at hand, ornament had indeed become allegorical. “The good taste in our present-day decorations, which since the time, when Vitruvius bitterly bemoaned the debauchery of the same, have become even more depraved of late . . . , could at once be purified through a thorough study of allegory and bestowed with truth and reason.”15 In the end, Winckelmann’s approach was unapologetically instrumentalist and, as such, firmly located within the Enlightenment project. Allegory remained key to Winckelmann’s thinking and, not surprisingly, took center stage again in one of his last writings, the 1766 Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst (An attempt at allegory, especially for Art). Reflecting an increasing awareness of the instability of all signification, the treatise set out to close the gap between word and object, image and meaning, sign and signifier by reconstructing, on the

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basis of antiquity, a new normative sign system. The proposed procedure was sensitive to the ornament’s imminent transformation from dependent ornatus to independent configuration, a procedure that it sought to counteract. However, such an attempt to fight the spirit of the time was, not surprisingly, a losing proposition. Three decades later another major aesthetician, but of a younger generation, Karl Philipp Moritz, would mercilessly dismiss Winckelmann’s instrumentalist approach and “aesthetics of content” (Gehaltsästhetik) while inverting, in search of art’s autonomy, the hierarchy of allegory and arabesque altogether. Little known in the English-speaking world, Karl Philipp Moritz’s brave venture into the aesthetics of autonomy was highly significant.16 It prepared the ground for the Romantic revitalization of allegory and, more generally, its valorization as a means to evoke (in the recipient’s imagination) that which can be neither named nor congealed in a clearly defined sign.17 What was now at stake—and would be for many avant-gardes to come—was the hotly debated question of medium-specificity, soon among the ultimate modernist paradigms but regrettably incommensurate with the arabesque’s quintessentially multi- and intermedial nature.

Toward Purity: On Lessing’s Border Work While Winckelmann strove to salvage allegory, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing set out to expel it from art and poetry altogether. Both believed that art’s foremost duty was to “delight and teach,” but the famous dramatist drew very different conclusions from this maxim. Shifting from an ontological-metaphysical grounding to a strictly secular deduction of norms, Lessing defined the creation of general, universal laws as an interplay between a subjective proposition (genius) and its communal negotiation (communal sense).18 The result was a theory of effect (Wirkungsästhetik) aimed at achieving a consensus between producer and recipient, a consensus freed from any religious dimension and, especially, the need for religious legitimation.19 Instead of representing an inexplicable higher other as final instance, Lessing set the human and its creation as self-referential and hence autonomous. In the process, the artwork lost its Neoplatonic status as a reflection of the idea of the beautiful, as its purpose and strength became instead located in the capacity to move and affect. In this context, a generic appeal to the passions, the arousal of feeling alone regardless of its moral effect was, however, not enough. The goal was moral improvement, and thus the awakening of compassion, which alone, Lessing believed, would better the audience. After all, as the philosopher argued in his correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai about the nature of tragedy, “The most pitying person is the best person.”20 Dedicated to the Enlightenment project, Lessing—like Winckelmann, but even more so—regarded art, literature, and theater from an essentially instrumentalist viewpoint. His reflections about the significance of mimesis and illusion were guided by the desire to affect the viewer as deeply and as lastingly as possible. His radically didactic approach to the arts rested upon an unhampered acceptance of the principal arbitrariness of all linguistic signs, which implied a fundamental arbitrariness of all signs. This conviction, together with his didactic impulse, led Lessing to pledge for the purity of the arts and their delimitation from each other.21 Such border work, he believed, would best profit the higher goal of maximum illusion and thus of affect. This discourse on the purity of the artwork fed on earlier arguments about the relationship

68 The Arabesque Revolution of the arts—or, to paraphrase a German term, about “intermediality”—with Horace’s famous motto ut pictura poesis as the point of entry. Horace was the authority Lessing set out to destroy, and he did so with long-lasting success in 1766.22 His influential treatise Laokoon, oder, Über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry), which expanded far beyond an analysis of the ancient Greek sculpture that gave it its name, aspired, above all, to define the appropriate boundaries of poetry and the visual arts by focusing on their temporal and material limitations.23 Arguing for a strict separation of the media to preserve their intrinsic values, it has since become a keystone for modernism’s claim to mediumistic purity. Not surprisingly, Lessing also concerned himself with another key aspect of European artistic and aesthetic debates, the ideal of beauty. Here, too, his ideas were shaped by a radically antitranscendental stance. With regard to painting, he upheld the confinement of the ideal to physical beauty. In this aspect, his thinking shows a close affinity to Winckelmann’s glorification of the beautiful male nude of Greek antiquity. However, Lessing stripped this ideal of any Platonic idealism and thus of its absolute validity. Whereas Winckelmann demanded that nothing might distort or avert the Greek unity of art and nature or cloud the transparency of this harmony toward the “idea,” Lessing evaluated the beauty of the human body—like the technical means employed by the arts—solely under the aspect of their respective capacity to move the spectator. This more Aristotelian attitude did not, however, imply a demotion of the human body as the most desirable subject matter in art. To the contrary, figuration retained its high artistic rank because we identify more strongly with our own image than, let’s say (with Kant’s reflections on aesthetic judgment in mind), shells on the beach or wallpaper patterns. The emphasis on purity and man’s self-sufficiency had, in turn, a decisive influence on Lessing’s attitude toward allegory and ornament. Lumping them together once more, Lessing mistrusted both. To him, such ornatus was superfluous at best and harmful at worst. Allegory and ornament had no productive role in Lessing’s tight system of signification because of their (alleged) incapability to contribute anything valuable to the relationship between medium and object and thus author and receiver. Even worse, they easily diminished, even fully destroyed, the desired illusionary quality of the artwork by being nonidentical, signs of a sign, something which does not say “what the words seem to suggest, but something else.”24 For that reason, Lessing dismissed allegory and ornament as a hindrance to the desired identification of the observer with the observed. Ironically, this fiercely antiornamental attack would become an important contribution to a more concise categorization of the debate’s subjects, insofar as it released the ornament—beforehand perceived precisely not as ornament but allegory—into the era of history.25 Although Winckelmann had recognized the historicity of art, he had only platonically converted the Christian dualism of the worldly realm and the kingdom of God. “‘The experiment world’ begins only with Lessing,” Gérard Raulet has thus maintained. “This is also the beginning of the doubly problematic relationship of the ornament with the medium, with both ‘literacy’ and the ‘most advanced material.’”26 Lessing’s ideas would continue to hover in the background of the ornament debate, and no less a luminary than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe enthusiastically testified to their longevity. Celebrating the philosopher’s achievement in his autobiographical work Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), the poet gushed: “One has to be a young man to visualize what an effect Lessing’s Laocoön had on us, this work

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swept us away from the regions of meager contemplation and onto the open terrain of thought. The saying ‘Ut pictura poesis,’ so long misunderstood, was now suddenly set aside, and the difference between the pictorial and the verbal arts clear.”27 Admittedly, when it came to the act of reception, Goethe nonetheless assumed a union of the two in the actual response to a work.28 Yet this insight into the multifaceted nature of perception and appropriation did not undermine the poet’s faithfulness to Lessing’s rejection of intermedial border crossings. To the contrary; “one of the most striking signs of decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.” Goethe affirmed and regarded it as the artist’s duty to know “how to separate his own branch from the others, and to isolate it as far as may be.”29

Goethe’s Intervention Although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe joined the anti-allegorical fraction, he emerged as a staunch defender of the arabesque. Surprisingly, the position arose from a rather conventional conception of décor as strictly supplemental. In his brief essay of 1789 “Von Arabesken” (Of arabesques), Goethe allowed himself to join in the era’s exuberance for the frescoes in Pompeii and “the baths of Titus.” Yet his praise betrayed a notably normative view, as it focused on the decorations’ appropriate systematic qualities. He admired the finely struck balance between the illusionistic, usually mythological picture at the center and the subservient decorative frame, which steers eye and mind, as a playful commentary, toward the inner field. The ancients knew, he felt, “the arabesques’ proper place.”30 Interestingly enough, matters of decorum played only a minor role in his equally strong enthusiasm for Raphael’s grotesques in the Vatican loggia, which impressed Goethe through their sheer abundance of invention and creative power. As such, the arabesque found his approval as a realm of free configuration, as an incarnation of fantasy as such, which explains his delight in Albrecht Dürer’s pen warm-ups in the prayer book of Emperor Maximilian as well (see figures  4.1, 4.2, 5.2, 5.3, and 6.2). Put differently, Goethe saw the arabesque’s liminal character as the property that enabled this decorative supplement to grant to our imagination the greatest freedom. In contrast to Winckelmann, he was not at all disturbed by the arabesque’s apparent lack of signification. He felt no urge to call on allegory to come to the rescue of what seemed not to denote any meaning (or simply to mean nothing). Instead, he decided to exorcise allegory altogether. Ironically, Goethe called for that purpose upon none other than allegory’s advocate, Winckelmann. Moving from Wirkungsästhetik to Autonomieästhetik—from an aesthetics of effect to an aesthetics of autonomy—Goethe fervently condemned allegory for being neither self-contained nor self-determining. Existing merely for signification, allegory inevitably could achieve meaning only by referring to concepts outside of itself, in Goethe’s eyes a fatal flaw that caused a discord between form and content. The favorable counterpart to this deficient mode of expression was the symbol that, as a harmonious unity, made up a whole existence in itself. As in ancient art, Goethe’s unsurpassed model, beauty and meaning derived from the symbol’s capacity to give expression to an internal purpose without ever relating to anything outside of itself.31 Goethe’s contrast between symbol and allegory is a tangent not to be pursued further in this context. However, it is vital to our discussion insofar as it profiles the role of religion in the debates surrounding allegory and ornament. Here, Goethe joined the secularizing camp of Winckelmann and Lessing, and from this position attacked ferociously

70 The Arabesque Revolution and with never-ending vigor the Romantic project of reenchantment and its artistic parameters.32 One central victim was allegory. Goethe’s attack thus encompassed a fierce assault on the heteronymous pitfall of Romantic art, which loses “every thing finite [sic] and mortal,” as August Wilhelm Schlegel professed, in the contemplation of infinity” and reduces “every earthly enjoyment . . . [to] a fleeting and momentary illusion.”33 This is where Winckelmann comes (back) in. In his 1805 essay on Winckelmann and His Age, Goethe praised the archaeologist, who functioned here as his aesthetic alter ego, for representing an approach to art firmly grounded in experience. Winckelmann carried, the poet believed, the propensity of the ancients to “immediately [feel] completely at home within the pleasurable boundaries of this beautiful world.”34 In contrast to modern man—and here Goethe, of course, kept close tabs on the Romantics—the ancients did not lose themselves in the infinite, but concentrated “all their thoughts and desires and energy on immediate reality.” In the end, “even the products of their imagination have bones and marrows,” Goethe asserted, and could thus achieve a unity between form and subject missing so sorely in modern art.35 If Winckelmann was Goethe’s chief witness for a radical this-worldliness, Lessing provided Goethe’s conception of classicism with the desired delimitation of the arts’ respective properties. Admittedly, Goethe’s own creations, such as his famous novel Elective Affinities of 1809, more often than not strayed from the rules of this great semiotician and thus from his own. Indeed, Goethe’s comparison between poetry and the visual arts was less strict in its distinction between simultaneous and successive modes and even proposed a union between the two in the actual act of reception.36 This did not change the fact that Lessing’s categories remained key to Goethe’s theory formation, which ultimately embraced the strict rejection of any intermedial border crossing. His critical reaction to the performances of Lady Hamilton, who mesmerized her contemporaries by freezing into attitudes inspired by ancient models, showed as much.37

Outlining Autonomy Winckelmann’s Greece and Lessing’s border work laid important foundations for Neoclassicism’s ideal of beauty, with its emphasis on restraint, clarity and harmony, universality, and idealism. Searching for “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” artists and theoreticians alike associated the beautiful with a concrete concept, and what would have fulfilled this requirement for a precise definition better than a firm contour? Thus, one reason for the tremendous success of the kind of radical outline drawing performed in John Flaxman’s translation of archaic vase painting into contemporary art was its twofold capacity to command a formal regime while giving expression to a conceptual project (see figure 3.1). Both stylish and imaginative, the condensed and purified contour could pair narrative with abstraction, absolute clarity of form with poetic-lyrical appearance. Thus, the line assumed, as we must recall, an important double function: On the one hand, the controlled Neoclassicist line was emphatically descriptive, constituting the object by tracing its form; in this capacity, it remained subordinated to a mimetic purpose. On the other hand, it took on an autonomous artistic value, which, in its autonomy, endowed the lineament itself with an independent expressive meaning radically formal and formalist in nature.38 Inevitably, the success of this double function depended on a fine balance between the heteronymous and autonomous dimension of line and outline. The Romantic arabesque would inherit this condition and its preconditions.

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Involuntarily, the obsession with purity, essences, and outlines also brought into focus what was adjoining. The extensive-excessive border work undertaken by the Neoclassicist thinkers and their fellow practitioners heightened the awareness of what was crowded out and fostered an investigation into the nature of that “other,” which, expelled from the center, lived in the margins. The interdependence of frame and framed came into sharper focus, and, in turn, the expedition into a land beyond rules, reason, and self-sufficiency drove home the necessity to create a transition between inside and outside. As a result, the twilight zone between object and subject, artwork and viewer, or, in short, art and life was first more clearly defined and then (with regard to older notions of the decorative) redefined. This brought about a profound inversion of the Neoclassicist attitude toward the ornament. If an older generation had aimed to expel the ornament from the work as a potential danger to its essence, the younger generation reassessed this devaluation as they advanced a new understanding of ornament and work alike and posited the latter as radical autonomous or, to quote Karl Philipp Moritz, as “das in sich Vollendete,” as “that which is complete in itself” (a terminology which implies self-sufficiency as well as formal and conceptual wholeness, or, to add another translation, that “which is perfect and perfected in itself”).39 As the frame around this (new) self-referential symbolic entity, the ornament was charged with heightening and reflecting the latter’s state of autonomy and perfection.40 In the process of this reorganization and reevaluation, the ornament’s decorative task yielded to a functionalist role. The ornamented (ergon) emerged as the essential source of the ornament (parergon), which, in turn, became the indispensable intermediary between outside and inside. Accordingly, Neoclassicist theory assigned the protection and enhancement of the ornamented as the ornament’s main task and single justification. In the German language, a notable linguistic shift marked this functional reassignment. Before Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, the common term for a work’s embellishment was Zierrath, which means “adornment.” With the new symbol theories, a different term entered the usage, Latin in its roots and charged with a new program: das Ornament.

The Ornament’s Final Emancipation: On Karl Philipp Moritz Rarely, however, did the described move from the ornament’s exclusion to the acceptance of a structural codependence between frame and framed challenge established hierarchies. The value difference between core and supplement tended to be rigorously upheld, even if the arabesque was, as in Goethe’s 1789 essay, defended. It took another qualitatively significant step to argue for an equivalence in value. The thinker who took this step was Karl Philipp Moritz, a name less familiar than that of a Goethe or a Kant, but unjustifiably so. Among the most complex, if also confusingly prolific, repetitive, and unsystematic, authors of his time, Moritz influenced both, shaping the symbol theory of Goethe as much as Kant’s idea of an object’s purposiveness without purpose. He also advanced, as Helmut Pfotenhauer has shown, “a singularly radical formulation of the idea of aesthetic autonomy.”41 This position was crucial to his fundamental rethinking of the ornament, which he resolutely and irreversibly emancipated from artistic and aesthetic subordination. For Moritz, ornamentation was no longer Spielerei but ernstes Spiel, not bauble but earnest play.42 As such, it not only carried its full aesthetic meaning, its Kunstsinn, within itself, it also made manifest that inner artistic sensibility through its own outer form—and outer form alone! The

72 The Arabesque Revolution ornament’s essence is fully visible on the surface; indeed, essence and surface are one, so that this essence is materialized in a manner undistorted, unfiltered, and free of the apparatus of mediating conventions. Moritz’s writings went to the heart of the Neoclassicist ornament debate. His merciless rejection of allegory entailed a stern warning not to perceive arabesques “as a kind of hieroglyphs.”43 Instead, he upheld the idea (and the ideal) of an essential form born from a successive process of purging everything amorphous, unstructured, accidental. This idea would find a paradigmatic explication in the seminal treatise Vorbegriffe zu einer Theorie der Ornamente (Prolegomena of a theory of ornaments). Published in 1793, the book presented ornamentation as a principle of isolation, with the important qualification that the decorative supplement must obey and embody the same rules as the work itself.44 Moritz’s proposed union of ergo and parergon as structurally and theoretically—in short, as aesthetically—coexisting implied a dissolution of the traditional distinction between applied and fine arts. As ornament and the ornamented became united under the category of a universal impulse toward beauty, their mutual objectives merged in the experience of a singular aesthetic moment of loss of self that foreshadowed a central feature of Arthur Schopenhauer’s thought.45 In this context, Moritz formulated a principle which shortly afterward would gain a hegemonic position in aesthetics: the end of art—its purpose—was not effect but pleasure. He first articulated this seminal idea in 1795, in an essay with the long-winded title “Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich Vollendeten” (An Attempt to Unify All the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of That Which Is Complete in Itself) that he published that year in the Berlinische Monatszeitschrift, one of the premier journals of the late Enlightenment.46 Of course, pleasure here did not denote empty titillation or mere sensual stimulation; Moritz specified it as a form of higher pleasure produced by a state of absorption itself marked by forgetting oneself in the contemplation of a complete aesthetic whole. Accordingly, the linear isolation of a form (and form as such) through ornamentation was elevated as the root for an independent aesthetic moment with its own independent inner purposiveness. If this idea sounds familiar, it seems worth repeating that we find in Moritz, scattered across a variety of often confusingly similar essays, the basic outline of Immanuel Kant’s subsequent notion of aesthetic judgment. What Kant then provided was a highly complex, systematically worked out theory of the liminal as parergon and thus of that—as the prefix para denotes—that is beyond or outside of the work, the ergon. Taking up where Moritz left off, but with greater precision and philosophical congruity, Kant developed a complex theory of parergonality, which, in turn, created the fertile soil from which the Romantic arabesque (after mixing it anew with the symbolic, allegorical, and hieroglyphic) would sprout. Given the importance of Kant’s thought for the early days of the Romantic arabesque, it seems imperative to examine this seedbed in more detail, even more so because it entails the disappearance of a goddess, and who would not like to know the secret to such a magic act?

Notes 1. Werner Busch, “Die Arabeske,” 13–15; furthermore idem, “Goethe und Neureuther.” 2. I thank Margaret Graves for our many inspiring conversations about arabesques across cultures and centuries; for a stimulating take on the Islamic arabesque, see her essay “Spatchcocking the Arabesque.”

Ornament, Allegory, Autonomy 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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Lüttichau, Die deutsche Ornamentkritik. Schäfer, Ohne Anfang, 19–22. See, for example, Boileau or Corneille; Raulet, “Von der Allegorie,” 57–58. For the evolution of Winckelmann’s thought, see Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Winckelmann, “Reflections,” 45. Fried, “Antiquity Now”; see further Grewe, “Reenchantment.” For Winckelmann’s influence on the German Nazarenes, see Grewe, “Reenchantment,” and idem, The Nazarenes, esp. chap. 11, 209–25. Winckelmann, “Reflections,” 44. Raulet, “Von der Allegorie,” 58. See Morrison, Winckelmann. Two seminal examples of this shift are Winckelmann’s Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst (1759) and his Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben (1763). Gérard Raulet, whose work on eighteenth-century ornament theory has inspired much of my account, does not recognize Winckelmann’s later turn to an aesthetics of effect; for a revisionist approach see Lattanzi, “Winckelmann et Longin,” and idem, “Winckelmann.” Schmidt, Die Gewaltstruktur. Winckelmann, Gedanken, 44. Ibid., 42. See Schreiber, The Topography. Werner Busch, “Die Arabeske,” 18. I thank Lorenzo Lattanzi for his feedback; Raulet’s juxtaposition of Lessing’s “aesthetics of effect” and Winckelmann’s ontological-metaphysical thinking fails to take into account, as Lattanzi has emphasized, the evolution of the historian’s aesthetic theory after his move from Dresden to Rome. Raulet’s approach is nonetheless vital to the goals of this chapter. On the antireligious element of Lessing’s thinking, see Mitchell’s musings on “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre,” in idem, Iconology, 95–115. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 259–60. Lessing, Laocoön. Presumably executed around 50 BC, the statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons in the coils of a huge serpent was rediscovered in 1506 and attributed to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Polydoros, and Athenodoros. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoön. See, for example, Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” 38. Unfortunately, Lessing’s further revisionist musings on these mediumistic restrictions remained fragmentary and unpublished; see Flax, “From Portrait.” Lessing, “De la Motte,” 120. Raulet, “Von der Allegorie,” 67. Ibid. Quoted in English from Poetry and Truth: Parts One to Three, translated in Robert R. Heitner, in Goethe, From My Life, 1:238. Vosskamp, “Goethes Klassizismus.” For a discussion of Lessing’s fragmentary, unpublished sketches for such a union as realized in the medium of the theater, see Flax, “From Portrait.” Goethe, “Introduction to the ‘Propyläen,’” in Gage, Goethe on Art, 11. Goethe, in Werner Busch, “Die Arabeske,” 19. See Grewe, The Nazarenes, chap. 7, 129–47. Grewe, Painting the Sacred and The Nazarenes. A. W. Schlegel, Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 15. Goethe, “Winckelmann,” 101. Ibid. Vosskamp, “Goethes Klassizismus.” Maierhofer, “Goethe.” Werner Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild, 167. Moritz, “Versuch einer Vereinigung”; for a succinct discussion of Moritz’s central ideas and of the terminology in English, see Elliott Schreiber’s introduction to his superb, longoverdue translation of this seminal essay, ibid., 94–97. Moritz, “Versuch einer Vereinigung.” Pfotenhauer, “Die Signatur,” 67.

74 The Arabesque Revolution 42. Moritz, “Vorbegriffe,” 401. 43. Ibid., 28. 44. Ibid.; for Moritz’s theories and abstraction, see furthermore Morgan, “The Idea of Abstraction,” 231. 45. Ibid., 232. 46. Moritz, “Versuch einer Vereinigung.”

8

The Disappearance of a Goddess On Immanuel Kant’s Parergonality

Let’s imagine a cold winter day, somewhere in Germany. A group of friends has gathered around a crackling fireplace, snuggled into warm blankets, singing along as they hover over the tune’s enchanting illustration (figure 8.1). As we pore over Eugen Neureuther’s whimsical rendition of a Schnaderhüpfel, a jolly type of yodeling folksong from the Tyrolean mountain region of Bavaria, it seems far-fetched, if not outright absurd, to think of philosophy. What could this charming young couple, looking so fresh and neat in their local costume, merrily intoning “Un’a Büchserl zum Schießen” (A small rifle to shoot), possibly have to do with the challenging, rather abstract brain gymnastics of an Immanuel Kant? Of course, this question is at the heart of my entire endeavor, which seeks out the strange, flamboyantly winding and highly arabesque line which connects Kant and comics. Immanuel Kant set the arabesque free. This is his crucial contribution to the aesthetic debates and artistic practices we are concerned with. Immanuel Kant set the arabesque free from any preconceived functionality or symbolism and, in an utterly modernist move, posited the ornament as an embodiment of a-significance and nonrepresentationality. While the Romantics would shrink away from those implications of Kant’s aesthetics adverse to their spiritual yearnings, their arabesque revolution could not have happened without it. Thus, let us indulge Kant and see what the disappearance of a goddess has to do with it all.

Toward the Modern Ludic Field It is easy to see how Moritz’s notion of a self-contained significance of form in ornamentation anticipated twentieth-century concerns with formalism. However, formalism’s primary advocates, like Clement Greenberg, would read Kant, not the more obscure essayist from the equally obscure city of Hamelin. This does not diminish the importance of Moritz’s aesthetic edifice, even more modern for his pioneering inquiry into anthropology and psychology. Indeed, his proposition that ornamentation arose from a primal human instinct produced important offspring: For one, it provided a theoretical foundation for nonmimetic pictorial procedures, which would, if only a century later, bloom into abstraction and, ultimately, pure nonobjectivity.1 Second, it ushered in the idea of play. Associating adornment with an “inner drive for perfection,” Moritz introduced a ludic dimension to aesthetic autonomy that he continued to define (far from being a domain of unnecessary or purely childish amusement) as an anthropological condition. In short, the ornament emerged from the most fundamental psychological DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-10

76 The Arabesque Revolution

Figure 8.1 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Tyrolean Hunter’s Song, 1830. Lithograph, 32.7 x 20.3 cm (image). From Neureuther, Baierische Gebirgslieder: Schnoderhüpfeln (1831–34). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2015–192-7e.

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condition of humanness. It was an elemental and pure expression of a creative energy that prompted not only the maker of the Apollo of Belvedere but also primitive man to rise above the sheer contingency of bare need and give “a kind of completion and perfection to that, which, having no conclusion, no border in and of itself, transforms itself into a whole.”2 And thus the ornament opened up the pathway to the modern ludic field. Soon the ludic became part and parcel of modern aesthetics. Taking up Moritz’s anthropology and Kant’s subsequent propositions, Friedrich Schiller, for example, posited an inborn play-drive as the central agent of creative freedom.3 The famous playwright thought of it as the harmonizing force regulating the constant opposition between two further, always competing drives (those of sense and form), and thus mediating the innate tension between sensibility and reason, particulars and universals, personal experience and the dead weight of elderly authority, Jetztzeit and philistine maturity.4 The play-drive is then, Schiller believed, what distinguishes us from the animal kingdom; it is an irrevocable psychological condition, an anthropological fact, which alone makes the human fully human, irrespective of the cultural stage of development an individual represents. With Schiller, the modern ludic field was fully born.5 Play would remain a key ingredient of the Romantic arabesque, as did the notion of aesthetic autonomy. Although the arabesque’s relationship to the aesthetics of autonomy would ultimately be rather ambivalent, it delivered, via Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, two indispensable concepts: a-significance and nonrepresentationality, both anchored in the foundational idea of parergonality.

The Disappearance of a Goddess: On Kant’s Re-Painting Parergonality implies that the formerly liminal, marginalized, and subordinated becomes an artifact’s modus operandi. What we encounter here is a principle of continuous deferral, a principle of permanent displacement. And this perpetuum mobile of inversion would not stop even before the main protagonist of academic art, which until then had triumphed as the glorified hero of traditional history painting: the human body. Around 1800, crustaceans and other parerga took over as the essential objects of aesthetic contemplation. Kant initiated this radical reversal by assuming an epistemological viewpoint that, no longer preoccupied with ideal beauty as such, focused on the conditions that allow us to form an aesthetic judgment.6 Central to this analysis was Kant’s distinction between independent and dependent beauty as advanced in his “Analytic of the Beautiful,” §16: There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) or merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance with it. . . . Flowers are free natural beauties. . . . Many birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise) and a host of marine crustaceans are beauties in themselves. . . . Thus designs à la grecque, foliage for borders or on wallpaper, etc., signify nothing by themselves . . . , and are free beauties.7 To be pure, the judgment of taste needs to focus on free beauty, which means on mere form. To play, the imagination needs to be free from the pressure of forming concepts,

78 The Arabesque Revolution of determining “what the object is meant to represent” (§16). To be free, the mind needs to leave aside any object that (in itself) presupposes a concept of what it ought to be or rules on how to judge its perfection or imperfection. In short, to secure disinterested delight, Kant had to remove any dependent beauty, above all the human body. The extraction of the human figure from (or, perhaps more aptly, as) the object of aesthetic judgment did not imply pushing the beautiful nude off its academic pedestal. Such normative iconoclasm would be the preserve of later eons. Yet it meant to decenter it from the aesthetic universe as unsuitable to elicit pure disinterested delight, because the “beauty of man” always presupposes the concept of an end (whether a Neoplatonic idea of ideal beauty or, to descend into less erudite quarters, sexual desire). For Kant, the body thus belongs to the category of dependent beauty. Crustaceans, in contrast, do not require concepts in order to be contemplated (at least as long as we do not indulge in fantasies of fishing or memories of a hot steamy bowl of bouillabaisse or other opulent seafood dishes). Kant looked at the shells and crustaceans of the sea as free creatures, as true ornaments of nature encountered in a liminal space between land and sea. Entering into Kant’s theory “as empty enclosures, as ‘coverings’ without ‘contents,’ or as a frame without a center,” their further use for decorative frameworks would then produce, as Winfried Menninghaus has noted, “a doubled arabesque structure.”8 Crustaceans hence embody what Kant calls free beauty. As such, they invite aesthetic contemplation. A thought experiment might help us to gain a deeper understanding of Kant’s move. To that end, let us dissect Sandro Botticelli’s famous rendition of the mythical birth of Venus into adherent and free beauty, that is, into pulchritudo adhaerens and pulchritudo vaga (figure 8.2). To that end, we must first extract the human body as an example for dependent beauty. Soon the landscape itself unfolds before our eyes in pristine virginity, emptied out of Venus’s exposed form and the flamboyantly dressed

Figure 8.2 Anonymous, after Sandro Botticelli, Scallop (Variation on The Birth of Venus), 2004. Digital image. Collection Cordula Grewe, Philadelphia, PA.

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woman about to wrap an ornate cloth around the goddess’s nakedness, freed from the swift figure of Zephyr, the god of the west wind, who approaches forcefully from the left, carrying a female companion along by his firm grip. With all the mythological figures out of sight, our attention finally turns exclusively to the giant scallop shell, which only a few seconds ago fulfilled merely a subservient function as Venus’s oceanic means of transport. Once removed from legend and relieved from its duties as the carrier for the goddess of beauty, the shell turns into a perfect example for Kant’s notion of ornament and pure ornamentation, and thus for independent beauty. The product of a radical revision of the ornament debate from the perspective of reception theory, parergonality soon evolved from a powerful theorem to a no less productive category of practice. The Romantics were crucial to this material shift. Their appropriation of Kant’s concept transformed his theory into a structural principle of all texts. As a result, the Romantic arabesque established a paradigm of writing that understood narration as a concentrated perpetuum mobile of framing, reframing, and deforming that reached a level of intensity that bordered on the absurd. Here a final definition seems appropriate, and thus we shall turn to Friedrich Schlegel one more time.

New Borders Under the Romantic pen, the parergon left behind its protective function. It no longer assimilated the nature of the work it framed but turned itself into the ergon’s principle. The Neoclassicist ornament turned into the Romantic arabesque. The past chapters have traced the winding path that brought us to this juncture and followed the increase of art’s absolute autonomy as it boosted the ornament’s autonomous character as well. Admittedly, Neoclassicism shied away from the ultimate (logical) step of having ornamentation become the work itself, yet it crossed a crucial threshold when it elevated this border phenomenon from mere decoration to soughtafter defense mechanism. By the late eighteenth century, the ornament was no longer a superfluous or superficial addition but a guard to protect what it ornamented— the purity of the work—by isolating it from both inside and outside. As shield and bulwark, the ornament was charged with compartmentalizing the world into small pieces of information available to be processed properly and efficiently. The ornament became an affirmative device to secure man’s hegemony over the threatening chaos that opened up beyond his own being. This process, however, could not fully eliminate the ornament’s subversive potential. Even when called upon to secure fixed meanings, it could flip at any moment and—instead of suturing the fissure between work and frame—drive a wedge between meaning and being. The Romantics perceived this dangerous undercurrent of the ornament’s ordering purpose as part of the Enlightenment’s dark heritage, which, due to a mechanistic and objectivist outlook, had conceived of the cosmos as an objective domain of entities bound together by mechanical laws of cause and effect. In this highly rationalized order, the act of marking borders could easily become a mechanism of separation. In this sense, the modern ornament was a Grenzgänger, a border crosser, a frontier runner, an existence at the limits and in a liminal space; in short, the modern ornament revealed itself as a crossover artist. Crossing the watershed of 1800 and thus the divide between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, ornament and allegory moved from the margins of a rationally ordered

80 The Arabesque Revolution wholeness into the fragmented field of ordered chaos. To put it differently, the arabesque transgressed from being the border of an art centered on border work to being the border of an art centered on perpetual border crossings.9 From now on, the arabesque was forging connections rather than delineating fields, an inner mechanism rather than a subcategory, permanently in flux rather than fixed. It is thus time to return to the Romantic revolution as it first broke out in the quarters of the word, in philosophy and theology, literature and literary criticism. It is time to return to the fraught and fruitful unity of reading and looking as two interrelated, inextricable sides of sight. Before we finally enter the world of artistic practice, from Peter Cornelius’s grand monumental frescoes to the graphic novels of Wilhelm Busch, we should take one last look at the arabesque’s structural conquest of modern literature.

The Romantic Arabesque Key to the revolution under investigation was, as we have seen, an erosion of the belief in the self-sufficiency of the text. The ensuing vacuum necessitated a supplement to recover the meaning of a text, to recover any meaning from a text, and this supplement was reading. As writing became understood as something that simultaneously guaranteed and threatened the identity of meaning (in the sense of true re-presentation, which, by its very nature, continually defers the presence of a unitary meaning), the supplement of reading emerged as a recuperative act, which in itself produces meaning.10 This process implied a deeply hermeneutical approach, and Romantic textuality indeed presented a break with the classical and Neoclassicist unity of spirit and letter. Not surprisingly, this break had significant consequences for the theoretical and practical grasp of the material. The new hermeneutical practice suggested an irreducible surplus of meaning and thus proceeded, on the basis of this surplus, to terminate the hegemony of preconceived rules, break the dominance of form, matter, and style, and empower spirit, manner, and tendency as the core principles of creative productivity. The rise of hermeneutics had yet another effect most crucial to our story. It contributed to a reenchantment of art by facilitating the reentry of an economy of salvation into the interpretative act, which defined the letter (once again) not through external form but spiritual essence. Taking their place in a long tradition in Western thinking, the German Romantics operated on the basis of the belief in a transcendence that ensured, as much as it presupposed, an excess of hieroglyphic meaning in each letter. The embrace of the hieroglyph as a key concept of poetic production fostered a penchant for the suggestive, the infinito, and the merely intimated. This fascination with allusion rather than a fully sketched picture found a powerful reflection in the Romantic interpretation of outline drawing. If the Neoclassicists had hailed the production of a John Flaxman for the capacity of its sharp, clearly defined line to isolate the individual shape and reduce object and subject matter to their essences (and thus form and present precisely articulated concepts), the Romantics focused on the imaginative potential of the pure contour. They hailed outline drawing for its evocative quality, its ability to activate the imaginative potential and far-reaching participation of the viewer (see figure 3.1).11 From a Romantic position, the pure contour derived its fullness from its incomplete, supplementary character. The intricate and paradoxical demands advanced by the Romantic project posed substantial challenges to the formation of a suitable theoretical paradigm. The response was a recourse to a continuous performance of dialectical operations: to

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criticize yet incorporate; to display yet rework; to dissect yet unite; etc. Within this endless spiral of failed attempts at sublimation, the highest and most impossible task was the creation of a narrative in the face of the breakdown of the principle of narrativity (and with it any belief in narrative logic). The new narrative-nonnarrativity had to be inclusive without being conclusive, to have no sense without being nonsense, to be endlessly evolving without fraying at the seams. This notion of a dialectical, never-ending process also shaped the Romantic approach to such classic oppositions as antique/modern, prose/poetry, and letter/spirit, now no longer seen as stable entities but as intertwined phenomena. In sum, the paradigm that early Romantic writing was grasping for had to be flexible, fluid, and in a state of permanent evolution. One paradigm that fit the Romantic bill was the fragment. Yet its evocative powers in the field of writing were limited, and this was even more true for the visual arts. Above all, the fragment did not possess the characteristics or qualities needed to create a complex, disparate, yet connective web of meanings, styles, narrators, etc. able to unfold in coordinated patterns and repeatable rapport. The paradigm indeed capable of meeting such demands, one closely interwoven with the fragment but ever more flexible and shape-shifting, was, of course, our main protagonist, the arabesque. Kant’s theory of parergonality, with its model of free and pure beauty, had provided the catalyst necessary to ignite the philosophical explosion that eventually would dislodge the arabesque from its denigration as “empty and vain decoration” and “gratuitous and cumbersome ornament” while preserving the arabesque’s playful character.12 In its new configuration, the arabesque assumed a privileged status as a form of double marginality—a border’s border phenomenon. This position enabled the arabesque to intensify the ornament’s original border work, excessively framing the frame of the framed. Where possible, this construction of multiple frames would assume the shape of a concentrated perpetuum mobile, a constant performance—to repeat an earlier observation—of framing, reframing, and deforming, the intensity of which would border on the absurd. In early Romanticism, work at the border tended to progress from an ornament ad infinitum to an arabesque ad absurdum. Like the reflections of the reflection that constituted the principle of Friedrich Schlegel’s universal poetry (Universalpoesie), his theory of the arabesque was also decked out in mathematical terms: x to the power of n, and the equation of the perfect square.13 As a number multiplied by itself produces a perfect square, the intensification of the framing process occurred through the rise of an ornament to its second power. The perfect square of the ornament was (what else?) the arabesque. Schlegel believed in finding analogies between certain properties of the mathematical operation of powers and essential qualities of Romantic poetry: as a textual equivalent to powers and integral calculus, which are potentially unlimited and infinite, Romantic prose was seen as a perpetual, self-perpetuating progression of variations (what Schlegel called “arabesque”) adept at staging a play of form and formal play that could incorporate breaks, transitions, and discontinuities into complex new unities.14 The product of this operation is always self-identical, as the starting point—the original number—remains the essential, irreducible core of its entire compounded offspring. In this sense, the self-reflective diversity of Romantic poetry was generated from a total totality; and the recovery of this absolute one through a sentimental artistic operation is Romanticism’s ultimate goal. At the same time, the process of expansion is also one of intensification, which is, in the case of creative imagination, both generated and self-generated. The ideal of this mathematical-imaginative operation (and its

82 The Arabesque Revolution material space) was now the work. Firmly situated in a concrete materiality, operation arabesque thus made creative use of Kant’s theory of parergonality by turning it inside out. This inversion encompassed a refocusing from the conditions of reception to those of the object proper while redefining the parameters of a-significance as the carrier of meaning. The first step to adapt Kant’s theory of parergonality to the needs of Romantic writing strategies was a transfer of notions like beauty without concept, purpose without purposiveness, or autonomous form without meaning onto the artwork. The elevation of ornamentation to pure beauty by the Königsberg philosopher proved a productive avenue for liberating art from the demands of preconceived standards and normative rules. It was especially helpful in emancipating art from the tyranny of Rome and Greece, the unquestioned norm of Neoclassicism. Not that the ancient models were simply discarded! But they were demoted as exclusive examples of modern emulation and, in the process, stripped of their binding character. Once the Romantics had broken free of Neoclassicism’s normative corset, their emphasis on fantasy, irony, play, and a heightened sense of subjectivity necessitated yet another step: to alter the basis of aesthetic autonomy and thus of the concept of beauty. In response, the definition of pulchritudo vaga shifted from Nicht-Bedeuten to Nichts-Bedeuten, that is, from Kant’s emphasis on non-significance (the independence of pure beauty from any concept) to a fantasy of radical a-significance (like “poems composed of nothing,” as Schlegel daydreamed, who enthusiastically associated “novellas out of nothing” with “arabesques as exempla of irony”).15 The new system of a-significance lived off the instrumentalist view of the arts taken by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Karl Philipp Moritz’s elaboration of aesthetic autonomy.16 In the name of illusion, beauty had ceased to be the only concept of good art, at least in poetry. While Lessing had added the characteristic as beauty’s pendant and value equivalent, Moritz had, in the name of delight, released the arabesque from normative regulations. Lawlessness was now “the essence of adornment itself, which does not tie itself to any law, because it has no other purpose than to charm and amuse.”17 The Romantic arabesque converted the autonomy from concepts into a freedom from sense. As “nature arabesque,” it embodied that poem or novella from and out of nothing that Schlegel had conjured up.18 Taken together, these steps prepared a twofold move central to future theories of writing and reading: On the one hand, the combination of “the most modest daintiness” and “deeply pursued meaningfulness” allowed for a conception of the imagination that empowered the latter without burdening it with the full weight of producing (or being) a self-identical work.19 On the other hand, the expansion or, respectively, dissolution of the three commandments, beauty, illusion, and mimesis, discharged the arabesque from adhering to the rules of coherence, totality, unity, and comprehensiveness. Without the pressures inherent in the production of a work that is self-sufficient and “perfected in itself,” the arabesque could unfold a critical, ironic, unhampered growth around its subject matter, entwining it in a mixture of satire, parody, and humorous comment. The Romantic arabesque evolved, just like Romanticism itself, from an intricate mixture of inheriting and inverting the principles of its predecessors (whether Enlightened philosopher or Neoclassicist theorist, Neo-pagan artist or the designer of decorative ornamentation). Given this pedigree, it seems hardly surprising that the relationship between ergon and parergon remained the ultimate reference point of arabesque practice while changing into its exact opposite. Thus, we must remind

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ourselves that the ergon no longer served as either justification or operational principle of its annotating border. The parergon now structured the ergon, as Romantic theory turned the arabesque’s uncontrolled growth pattern into the structural principle of the work itself. The frame broke free and into what it framed. The arabesque text emerged as infiltrated ergon, inhabited and veined by the parergon to such a degree that both ended up in diverse but inseparable patterns of oneness. The arabesque became the formal law of the work, thus determining the conditions of its possibilities.

Confessions from an Unromantic Age: On Reappropriations This new Romantic variation of parergonality arose, of course, from the conviction that the perfect work was unfeasible under the conditions of a prosaic modernity. In this sense, Friedrich Schlegel agreed with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on the arabesque’s status as an artistic expression eternally subordinated to high art while drawing opposite conclusions. If Goethe had banned the arabesque to live exclusively at the outskirts of a work, Schlegel interpreted this marginality as the only possible form of existence per se, at least for us moderns. In prosaic times like ours, only the secondary and subordinated (such as the arabesque in the field of composition or the novel in the area of genre) offered viable possibilities of creation. “Grotesques, arabesques and confessions are the only Romantic products of our unromantic age.”20 The fugitive and playful elements of the arabesque emerge as the model for the art of the present day, an art conceived as temporary and provisional. Johann Dominicus Fiorillo had anticipated this position when he mused in 1791 that “only in places where nobody has ever cultivated a sense of art as high and admirable subjects, there we might . . . make a beginning with grotesques and caricatures, and until better times find delectation in them.”21 The notion of the supplement thus extended beyond the work’s borders. Reading was not merely a supplement of the text, nor was ornamentation simply a decorative addendum. Instead, the object itself (whether written text or formed matter) was a parergon. For as long as a prosaic modernity governed life, modern creation had to be supplementary and supplementary in its entirety. What the Romantic arabesque now added was an emphatically temporal element to the spatial dimension of ornamentation, and this fusion of time and space provided the parergonal nature of the border decoration with a metaphoric power that elevated it to an overarching category of modern creation as such. If the Romantic self-understanding as a prequel to a second golden age of art, culture, and society fostered a recourse to subordinated art forms, it also favored hermeneutic theories in which the ornamental supplement—in an ironic-reflexive form—functions as the underlying structure of a text. This entropic move did not cancel out the difference between parergon and ergon. Instead, it perpetuated this difference within the work, which, not surprisingly, also affected the notion of autonomy. In Romantic terms, autonomy still implied freedom from both outside and inside as laid down in Kant’s concept of aesthetic experience and the judgment of taste. However, the Romantic version of autonomy subscribed to a paradox. It no longer rested upon defined borders but embraced the permanent exchange between inside and outside. As a result, the fault lines of ergon and parergon continually shifted, caught in an ongoing process of expansion and contraction, which did not sublate the central distinction of framed and enframed but rather permitted it to proliferate all the more tenaciously

84 The Arabesque Revolution and diversely in a mode of delirium.22 The arabesque rises as a feverish repetition of the Kantian border work. As productive as the adaptation of the arabesque proved for Romantic writing, however, when Romanticism finally began to bloom in the visual arts, the arabesque’s textual charging as an endless process of reflection and the reflection of the reflection created an almost unsurpassable threshold for a reincorporation into the visual arts. After all, how could a material(ized) visual image—as a fixed physical object—ever replicate any of the endlessly evolving qualities inherent in the literary arabesque? How could an artwork portray observing and reading as two different but intimately related modes of looking in the way that the literary had demanded of the arabesque? It simply, I boldly proclaim, could not. There was certainly no shortage of attempts to do just that. But precisely where the concrete object tried to translate the early Romantic arabesque into material form, resistances and fissures broke open between theory and practice that could not be papered over. The subject of the next chapter, the murals by Peter Cornelius for Munich’s first picture gallery, the Alte Pinakothek, is a striking case in point.

Notes 1. The path to abstraction is mapped out by Morgan, “The Idea of Abstraction.” 2. Schneider, “Zwischen Klassizismus,” 339. 3. Dale, “Idealism”; Docherty, Aesthetic Democracy, 61–77; Oz-Salzberger, “Did Adam Ferguson.” 4. Docherty, Aesthetic Democracy, esp. 73. 5. Laxton, “From Judgment,” 7–9. 6. For Kant’s reflections and influence on music and music theory, not touched upon in this book, see Watkins, Musical Vitalities. 7. Kant, Critique, 114. 8. Menninghaus, In Praise, 80. 9. Oesterle, “Vorbegriffe,” 124. 10. Rajan, The Supplement, 19. 11. A. W. Schlegel, “Über Zeichnungen.” 12. F. Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie,” in idem, Kritische, 2:330–31, 320. 13. Theisen and Barry, “xa Absolute Chaos.” 14. Ibid., 303. 15. Menninghaus, In Praise, 85–86. 16. See the previous chapter in this book. 17. Moritz, “Grundlinien,” 28; see further Oesterle, “Arabeske,” 273–74. 18. F. Schlegel, “Ideen zu Gedichten,” in idem, Kritische, 16:247, no. 182. 19. Brentano to Philipp Otto Runge, Berlin, January 21, 1810, in Brentano, Briefe, 202. 20. F. Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie,” in idem, Kritische, 2:330; see also Polheim, Die Arabeske, 137. 21. Fiorillo, Ueber die Groteske, 23–24; see further Burwick, The Haunted. 22. Menninghaus, In Praise, 86.

Part 3

The Writing on the Wall

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Art History Painted Peter Cornelius’s Murals for Munich’s First Picture Gallery, 1827–1840

April 7, 1826, was an important date in the history of museum architecture. That day the cornerstone was laid for Munich’s first public picture gallery, the Alte Pinakothek. Intended for the impressive collection of old master paintings owned by Ludwig of Bavaria, it was part of the king’s ambitious cultural politics, which would transform Munich into a cutting-edge center of modern exhibition spaces: from the world’s first museum dedicated solely to ancient sculpture, the Glyptothek (1830), to the first picture gallery exclusively devoted to contemporary art, the Neue Pinakothek (1854).1 Among these innovative structures, the 1826 design by Ludwig’s court architect, Leo von Klenze, stood out for its unprecedented response to the functional needs of a painting gallery. Finished in 1836, the Alte Pinakothek would consequently become “the most influential museum building of the nineteenth century.”2 Architectural innovation was augmented by groundbreaking pedagogy, including a complex fresco program. Stretching across the covered gallery on the museum’s upper level (a vast expanse of twenty-five bays modeled after the Vatican loggia, with arches, lunettes, and domes), it pioneered the modern art-history survey in brilliant colors and mesmerizing images.3 Today only a few drawings, prints, and black-and-white photographs remind us of the cycle’s epic quality and Raphaelesque splendor, which since its completion in 1840 have fallen prey to World War II and the harsh winter of 1946. Once, however, these wall decorations added a sophisticated, sprawling metacommentary on the objects on display and their cultural-philosophical framework. In the process, the frescoes, first conceived in 1827 as an attempt not only to paint but to poeticize history (and thus give metaphysical flight to the age-old genre of the artist vita), emancipated the arabesque as an equal to traditional history painting.

Breaking New Ground: On the Modern Art Museum The Munich case highlights two aspects often overlooked in the history of the modern museum. For one, it showcases the foundational role of German Europe in the evolution of this quintessentially nineteenth-century public institution, from the arthistorical hanging (chronological and by school) to the emergence of an independent building type. On the other hand, it points to a rich “proto-museological” history that reaches as far back as the mid-eighteenth century.4 By then, German princes had begun to part with older notions of collecting as means of self-representation, image cultivation, and the display of epicurean personal splendor. Inspired by enlightenedhumanistic claims of men’s general participation in a country’s educational assets, they instead endorsed the ideals of public utility, scholarliness, and accessibility.5 King DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-12

88 The Writing on the Wall Ludwig’s Alte Pinakothek was a glorious incarnation of these new values while establishing as a norm what had been merely a trend before: the museum as an autonomous building for a specialized collection whose function, architecture, and setting were—notwithstanding royal patronage—no longer intimately related to court or palace.6 The unprecedented focus of this novel exhibitionary space was now the city, its lifeblood the public. As with its institutional setup, the mission of the Alte Pinakothek was rooted in tradition and innovation alike. Designed as a powerful tool of historical, philosophical, and moral education, the museum drew for its pedagogical purpose on eighteenthcentury aesthetics and the special status it had assigned to art. Friedrich Schiller comes to mind here. In reaction to the revolutionary crisis that shook Europe in the wake of 1789, the poet, philosopher, and playwright had proposed the aesthetic education of man (to quote the title of his famous treatise of 1795) as the ultimate cure for the era’s spiritual malaise. Only art and the experience of beauty, Schiller maintained, could heal the modern spirit and thus recreate the cultural harmony indispensable for true political liberty.7 The Romantics took this idea a step further when they highlighted the significance of an unhampered contemplation (Anschauung) of original works of art and the necessity that such experience be not solitary but collective. Only then could art produce that precious and potent feeling of “community and social action.”8 The conception of the new Munich museum drew intensely on this ideal of constructing a universal community through aesthetic education, historical instruction, and philosophical penetration, principles that would find their most palpable, coherent, and complex articulation in Cornelius’s mural decoration.

The Pinakothek’s Rebellious Roots Reserving the second floor, entered through a modest doorway on the east end, for the collection’s display, Klenze had designed a simple yet effective elongated structure in the shape of a flattened H. The museum’s spine was a series of seven rooms dedicated to large-scale works, supplemented in the north by twenty-three cabinets for the smaller, more intimate pictures. This arrangement facilitated a modern presentation organized both chronologically and geographically, and further subdivided by size. It responded to the desire for historical organization while guaranteeing the optimal exposition of each individual piece. This new appreciation of unencumbered attention also governed the rooms’ overall aesthetic, which featured ornate ceiling decorations, matching the exhibition spaces’ content, but kept the walls themselves simple and the décor subdued. This allowed the paintings to dominate (as they still do) against a plain yet precious silk backdrop. The main interior decoration was preserved for the loggia, which, without display function, ran along the south side. The architect had envisioned an ornamental decoration subordinated to architecture and collection. His plans, however, were quickly thwarted by Peter Cornelius. The painter’s monumental Bavarian fresco projects of the 1830 arose not least from an ambitious paragone with the admired Italian Renaissance. If Michelangelo loomed large over the Last Judgment in the apse of nearby St. Ludwig, Raphael was the museum loggia’s guiding star. Executed in parallel, the two mural projects indeed formed a theoretical whole. Taken together, they produced a kind of religious-secular dialogue on cultural regeneration and the metaphysical power of emulation.9 In typical Romantic fashion, however, the articulation of form and quality of contour points

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to yet another influence: the art of the old German masters. Their archaism had indeed fueled Cornelius’s medievalist turn in 1809, when he had moved from his native Düsseldorf and early Neoclassicist training to Frankfurt. His new direction had quickly found a congenial subject in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1808 Faust, which was, with his Mephistophelian theme and mixture of forms and styles, a powerful incarnation of Romantic medievalism, in an arabesque format no less. Presented with early samples, Goethe accompanied his enthusiastic response with a reference to Albrecht Dürer’s recently reproduced “prayerbook in Munich.” After all, the Nuremberg master has “nowhere showed himself so free, so ingenious, so great or so beautiful as in these swiftly-executed pages” (see figures 5.2, 5.3, and 6.2).10 They have been, Cornelius simply replied, “in my studio from the day I began my work.”11 A panoply of motivic adaptations confirms the steady presence of Strixner’s Dürer. Cornelius’s idiom nonetheless never became fully Düreresque but retained, with its predilection for engraving’s clear lines, a Neoclassicist feel. The narrative and imaginative free play so admired by Goethe in Dürer’s “extemporized” penmanship would remain the preserve of the cycle’s title page (figure 9.1). As a witty, visually compelling summary of the drama’s core themes and key players, it doubles as table of contents and the series’ frame. In the end, Cornelius’s Faust cycle thus still shied away from Friedrich Schlegel’s most far-reaching definition of the arabesque as a mode of universal significance. Yet it took an important step in that direction. Engraved by Ferdinand Ruscheweyh between 1814 and 1816, the portfolio’s first edition was printed in Rome, where Cornelius had arrived on October 14, 1811, and only a few months later, in February 1812, joined the Lukasbund (or Brotherhood of St. Luke). The meeting with the rebellious artist fraternity, which had first united in opposition to the Viennese Academy of Art in 1809 and would soon become the nucleus of the Nazarene movement, proved momentous. Their core idea—to reform art through life, and life through art, and to do so in the name of Christ—spoke deeply to Cornelius. Making the Lukasbund’s program of religious revival and reenchantment his own, he also discovered his true vocation, a vocation that in scale, style, and material embodied the very opposite of the works on paper that had made his name: fresco painting. Infused by the Spirit of 1814—the spirit of the Wars of Liberation that had brought Napoleon’s reign to an end—Cornelius turned to fresco as the most potent source of artistic, social, and national regeneration. “Finally, I will speak of what according to my innermost conviction is the most powerful—I would like to say—the infallible remedy to give German art the basis for its direction to a new great age, worthy of the spirit of the nation. This is nothing but the reintroduction of fresco painting,”12 Cornelius exclaimed in a much-cited letter to the publicist and fervent nationalist Joseph Görres. Confident that fresco painting would give birth to a “new noble upsurge in art,” Cornelius envisioned a rapid blossoming of schools across the German lands, which then “would pour their truly exulted art with effective power into the heart of the nation, into the full life of man.” As fresco would speak “from the walls of high cathedrals, quiet chapels and lonely monasteries, of city halls, stores and halls, . . . in sweet color language of that old love, old faith” and reach the hearts of a new generation, “the old strength of our forefathers would be reborn, and . . . the Lord . . . again reconciled with his people.”13 Rome was key to Cornelius’s career for yet another reason. It was here, in the shadow of the Vatican, that he first met the powerful patron who would allow his

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Figure 9.1 Ferdinand Ruscheweyh, after Peter Cornelius, The High Points of Goethe’s “Faust” Arranged in an Arabesque Design, 1816 (published 1826). Engraving, 47.9 × 57.2 cm (plate), 58.7 × 69.5 cm (page). Title plate of Bilder zu Goethe’s Faust, 2nd ed. (1845). Collection Fiona Chalom, Los Angeles, CA.

fresco ambitions to unfold on a grand scale, the Bavarian crown prince Ludwig, who, in 1825, would succeed his father on the throne. In the same year, Cornelius assumed the directorship of the Munich Academy of Art, a position he would hold until 1840, a bittersweet year that seemed, on paper, like a triumphal moment—but on paper alone. Certainly, 1840 witnessed the completion of two major mural cycles, the museum decorations in the Alte Pinakothek and an ambitious cycle inspired by the Credo in the newly erected church of St. Ludwig that Cornelius himself cherished the most among his post-Roman projects.14 However, it was precisely the long-awaited fulfillment of the dream of his youth—to create a monumental religious fresco program—that, of all things, ended in an irreparable falling out with his royal patron. In the year of St. Ludwig’s completion, Cornelius left for Berlin, never to return. In 1826, however, at the laying of the Pinakothek’s cornerstone, all of this was still in the distant future and Ludwig was smitten with the vision of his new director. The king thus entrusted the former brethren of St. Luke with the loggia’s decoration despite knowing that a man like Cornelius would not settle for the kind of purely ornamental scheme proposed by

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his court architect. The opportunity to realize the Nazarene vision of public art was too rare and too tempting to forgo, and, risking a lasting rift with Klenze, the Nazarene seized the chance wholeheartedly, with ambitions high and heroic. Here, mural painting was to be a means not only of instruction but of spiritual uplift. As public art, fresco painting seemed—through the subjective experience of program and collection—capable of creating a collective experience able to reform society into an aesthetic community.15 Fittingly, fresco was also cherished as a collective endeavor in terms of production. It was an art form made as much for the community as in the community, and this quintessentially Nazarene ideal would inspire artists throughout the century.16 Cornelius’s approach aimed to put into action Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 call for the Aesthetic Education of Man: to provide an aesthetic experience which would, reconciling the ideal and the material, foster harmony in the individual and thus bring harmony to society.17 This, at least, was Cornelius’s utopia. This, at least, was the Nazarene vision.

“The Best Theory of Art Is Its History” In 1836, the Alte Pinakothek opened to the public. Another four years later the frescoes were finished at last, more than a decade after their inception. By then the social, political, and intellectual climate had changed, the museum age dawned.18 When finally unveiled, Cornelius’s cycle was already a historical document, testimony to the spirit of a bygone era. The emphatic orientation toward metaphysics revealed the project’s prototypically Romantic character, as it constructed the history of art through the lens of salvational history. Accordingly, Poetry herself ushers us into “Elysium’s palm grove” in the first lunette of the East Wing, the glorious personification of the creative spirit that unites all the arts.19 Honoring the project’s patron, the Bavarian king, she announces the museum itself as a sacred space.20 However, her leading role in the cycle’s opening scene notwithstanding, Poetry is not its queen, nor is the consecration of the Alte Pinakothek to her realm, Art, an act of aesthetic religion. Instead, it is Religion who triumphs as Art’s ultimate muse, mother, and mistress (figure 9.2). If references to antiquity are plentiful throughout the cycle, they inevitably surrender to the reign of the Holy Spirit, and the forefathers of the arts are thus biblical, not ancient. Gathered around Religion’s throne high up in the cupola of both the first and the last loggia, painting is embodied by Luke, architecture by Solomon, and poetry by King David, with music represented by a saint, St. Cecilia.21 In Cornelius’s vision, the temple of art does not replace the Christian church as a place of worship. Placing Religion above any worldly power, Poetry included, the loggia of the Alte Pinakothek paid tribute to a core principle of Nazarene thought and aesthetics. It was nonetheless more than merely a testimony to Cornelius’s Romanticism. It also profiled another side of the Nazarene painter: that of the quintessentially modern artist of the museum age. While deeply indebted to the philosophical ideas of German Idealism, Cornelius’s practice also grew from a keen awareness of the specific institutional context of contemporary art and the needs of modern display. In this sense, Nazarene idealism was neither escapist nor quixotic.22 Indeed, if Cornelius’s conception of the image as a space of theory-formation and his radical push for mediumistic self-reflexivity were unequivocally German Romantic,

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Figure 9.2 Peter Cornelius, Religion’s Union with the Arts, designed in 1827. Fresco. Alte Pinakothek, loggia, cupola of first bays in east (Italy) and west (northern countries). Executed 1834–40; destroyed World War II. Photograph ca. 1930. Courtesy of Frank Büttner (†), Gilching.

his desire to narrate the story of art in the manner of a “modern Vasari” as a series of “lives” (or, as we might call them, “biopics”) was not. An insatiable lust for painted art histories (and, soon, sculpted as well) marked the era’s mushrooming museum culture, from the banks of the Isar and the Main to the edges of the Seine and the Rhône or, across the Atlantic, the promenades lining the Hudson and the Schuylkill.23 However, among the many decorative schemes, Munich’s stood out for its systematic, genuinely art-historical quality, which prefigured the modern survey in its linear, clearly laid-out manner: two parallel cycles presenting the history of cis- and transalpine art from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. Each sequence began at an opposite end of the loggia’s longitudinal space, with the story of Italian art arising at the east, that of the Northern countries at the west entrance.24 Italy’s overture was Giovanni Pisano, its final bar Raphael. The North began with the Cologne school, Bartholomäus Zeitblom, and Hans Holbein the Elder

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and finished with Peter Paul Rubens, whose gigantic canvas The Last Judgment of 1617 is still a centerpiece of the museum’s collection. Approaching each other, the two cycles culminated in the work and death of Raphael, depicted in the central thirteenth bay, a move repeated in the collection’s topographical-chronological arrangement. Completed by a thick web of allegorical images and arabesque commentaries, the Munich frescoes visualized Friedrich Schlegel’s dictum that “The best theory of art is its history.”25

Arabesque Metaphysics Cornelius’s work had always tended toward the programmatic. When in 1827 he embraced the early Romantic proposition that the arabesque could carry universal significance (indeed, could signify the universal itself), he added new philosophical rigor to his thinking about ornamentation. The result was a manifesto of Nazarene theory written in wet plaster. Key to the cycle’s arabesque metaphysics was an intertwining—motivated by the Romantic notion of doubled reflection—of two opposing modes of narrative:26 The lunettes presented the story of art as a series of chronologically ordered artists’ vitae. The cupolas, in contrast, featured allegorical (and thus ahistorical) medallions encircled by small compartments and ornamented bands, which, as Ludwig Schorn explained in 1829, were charged with presenting the cycle’s “guiding ideas.”27 This dual system of history picture and metaphysical annotation was further augmented by elongated picture fields above the loggia entrance, which, located right beneath the frieze, span the entire distance between the pilasters (see figure 9.3). The result of this arabesque configuration was inspired but also exceedingly intricate. The length of Schorn’s guide to the planned program, which—part description, part explanation— was one of many to follow, certainly testifies to the dire need even among Cornelius’s contemporaries for extensive elucidation. Like few other monumental projects, the mural decoration of the Alte Pinakothek answered directly to the theoretical and metaphysical challenges posed by the literary arabesque. Indeed, Cornelius’s program aspired to a Schlegelian definition of the arabesque as an artificial combination of heterogeneous elements, which created meaning through endless cross-referencing. It thus replicated the emphatic self-referentiality of the literary arabesque and, in the spirit of the Romantic belief that the best commentary about a poem would be another poem (or the best theory of a painting another painting . . . and so forth), presented itself as art commenting on art.28 By producing new work, this act of doubling and self-reflection aimed to poeticize the original while raising it to a higher power. In this process, art history underwent a poetic transformation as well. It itself was elevated to a higher power, amplified from art history to art theory. At least this was, as Cornelius’s iconography and its complexity testify, the intention. The esoteric component of the Munich murals was mediated by the concreteness and sensuous beauty of its formal model, the Vatican loggia. Indeed, the picture gallery was not the first of Cornelius’s projects fashioned after this Renaissance extravaganza. Already the 1818 commission for the Glyptothek had stipulated that the rooms be decorated “in the manner of Raphael’s loggia with arabesques.”29 Certainly, the subject matter naturally changed in the Alte Pinakothek, as the task was now, as Ludwig Schorn noted, to depict “the history of modern painting in its main events as an

94 The Writing on the Wall introduction to the collection.”30 But the principal idea remained the same, and for that reason, Raphael and his grotteschi would become an overwhelming presence in the Pinakothek’s spatial conception and historiographical account. Within Cornelius’s engagement with the arabesque, the design for the king’s collection of old masters marked a twofold shift: first, from the decorative scale of his illustrative cycles to the monumental quality of an architectural setting; second, from the Northern roots of an innovative print culture considered emphatically German (Albrecht Dürer’s marginalia) to the Southern precedents of large-scale decorations accepted across Europe’s various national cultures as universal and timeless (Italian Renaissance fresco). At the same time, Cornelius’s grasp of the arabesque and his ability to translate its theoretical potential into a pictorial language experienced a remarkable evolution.

Ornament’s Emancipation The enchanting title page to Cornelius’s Faust had been the first artistic reflection of the young man’s thorough engagement with the rich literary and visual culture of the arabesque, Romantic and otherwise (see figure 9.1). Not much later, he continued this engagement in another print series after the heroic epic The Nibelungen. Only recently discovered, this celebrated hoard of Germanic myths had quickly become the rage of the day and would find its most imposing reflection in Richard Wagner’s no less epic music drama The Ring, which the German composer worked on from 1848 to 1874. A letter to the publisher Georg Andreas Reimer, written shortly after the completion of the Faust illustrations, allows us to date quite precisely the beginning of Cornelius’s interest. “I would be quite inclined,” Cornelius wrote on January 28, 1815, “to create a title page to the drawings after the Niebelungenlied [sic] in the style of Dürer’s Prayer Book, which at the same time as it intimates, like an overture, the pivotal moments of the entire poem in a light, fantastic manner nonetheless also introduces us to the gravity of the epic itself.”31 The outcome was delightful. Yet, for all its charms, it once again fell short of the arabesque’s most radical conception as advanced by its early Romantic authors.32 Cornelius’s struggle to romanticize his arabesque comes nowhere more clearly to the fore than in his exclusive conception of the Nibelungen’s title page as a framing device. This traditionalism contrasts with the progressive deliverance of the arabesque in both his Faust series and the Nibelungen cycle from mere decoration or subordinated ornament to a key device of narrativity. In both cases, the arabesque designs supply an animated summary of the respective poem as well as a clever exposition of the portfolio’s prints and succeed in combining the representation of simultaneity (as a single unified image) and sequence (in the abbreviated narration of the portfolio’s entire content). Thus, while the arabesque in Cornelius’s early graphic work did not yet possess the universal power Friedrich Schlegel had granted it, it took the first steps toward emancipation. In the Alte Pinakothek, it achieved this task. In the Munich picture gallery, the arabesque unfolded its full allegorical and referential potential. It became in status, importance, and philosophical charge on par with the history paintings it framed, absorbed, and (re)configured. Certainly, Cornelius agreed with Ludwig I’s desire to keep the framework “in a light and arabesque manner.”33 Still, as the painter wrote to the king on January 10, 1828, “everything that is light, buoyant and fantastic must arise from the depth and fullness of feeling [and]

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34

fantasy, indeed, of the most mature . . . gravity of thought.” After all, “the sense of ease, lightness, and effortlessness must for all intents and purposes be merely one of appearance; and should it not be superficial or sink to the level of worthless decoration, then it must be the result of a life dedicated to the most sacred and the most sublime of art.”35 True to this conviction, seriality, media interaction, and open narrative structures permeated the rules of high art in his museum loggia, as the most modern form of contemporary writing resurfaced in the discursivity of a symbolic system meant to transform art into history and art’s history into its own theory. Ludwig Schorn realized the nature of this endeavor when he seized the task of communicating the Romantic spirit of the program to the Biedermeier audience of the 1830s. “The character of the arabesque, which can be observed in all of these pictures, qualifies the fantasy of the artist to occupy a higher standpoint, from which to survey the relationship between nature and human history as a whole of concurrent powers,” Schorn instructed his readers. “The artists took the myths and the symbolic figures, which embodied the nature religion of the ancient world’s paganism, as the sensual foundation on which to erect the spiritual temple of Christianity and Christian art; and therefore he believed that he could incorporate ancient symbols and allusions into a fantastic treatment of painting’s history with the same right and justification as Raphael had done in his serene representations of biblical history surrounded by the merry play of the Greek gods.”36 And Schorn concluded, “not until such a freedom of motives, gained from an all-encompassing worldview, could Fantasy indisputably attain the full use of its creative force, and we see already in the earliest designs that Cornelius handled his subject with singularity of purpose and considerable thought.”37

Teaching by Example: The Pinakothek’s Second Loggia It would be impossible to discuss, let alone critically dissect, the entire cycle of the Alte Pinakothek in a single chapter. A look at the second loggia may thus suffice to demonstrate Cornelius’s technique of interpretation (figure 9.3). As in the Glyptothek’s early designs, an architectural frame—more theater prop than convincing structure—divides the lunette into three segments. In the center section, by far the largest, a sweeping terrace sets the stage for Giovanni Pisano, who presents his plans for the city’s Campo Santo to a group of stately men. To the right, two fellow sculptors work already on their respective tasks. We still contemplate the older man as, his face wrinkled from strained attention, he carves a splendid Corinthian capital, when our eye is caught by the busy signs of the city’s flourishing economic life in the middle ground, where we watch the disembarkation of an impressive vessel. Only then do we notice in the far distance Pisa’s architectural signature building, the dome with its adjacent leaning tower. Inspired by Giorgio Vasari, Cornelius now flanked this historical account with two scenes of mothers teaching their child how to walk—metaphors for art’s first steps toward a glorious rebirth after the decline of antiquity. These allegorical vignettes unfold above a frieze of antique fragments, mainly masks. The oversized heads not only remind us of Cornelius’s general conviction that everything new must grow from the remnants of what has vanished, but, more concretely, evoke Giorgio Vasari’s comment in his Vite that Pisano’s father, Nicola, had become the best sculptor of his time by imitating antiquity. Watching the fertile pastiche in solemn grandeur, the statues of Mars and Mercury in the background symbolize war and commerce as the era’s driving forces.

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Figure 9.3 Peter Cornelius, The Founding of the Campo Santo in Pisa, 1828. Alte Pinakothek, loggia, lunette of second bay in east (Italy). Executed 1834–40; destroyed in World War II. Pencil and pen with gray and black ink, 59.8 × 43 cm. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

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This socioeconomic gesture leads us to the cupola and the figure of Clio, the muse of history. Contrary to what one might now expect, the remaining decoration expands neither on the artist’s vita nor on the particular history of Italy. Instead, it focuses on the conditions of thirteenth-century Europe at large and the fate of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (figure 9.4). Here, religious fanaticism and picturesque adventure await us in episodes from the Second and Third Crusades, Bernard de Clairvaux’s famous sermon of 1146, which ignited the campaign of Conrad III, and Barbarossa’s legendary victory at Iconium in 1190. Surrounding them is a web of ornamental borders, which, forging ever-expanding arabesque connections, weave together historical specificity and philosophical perspective. The myth of the centaur Chiron teaching the young Achilles, for example, repeats the notion of art’s first origins (or, more appropriately here, its medieval revival). In this context, the twowinged, torch-bearing nudes embody what is perhaps the most interesting assumption advanced in this loggia: as morning and evening star, they represent Occident and Orient and thus the idea that the blossoming of Western culture after antiquity was rooted, first, in war, and, second, in the encounter with oriental culture. Cornelius spins forth this idea in the frieze, where the personification of Italy is the focal point of two processions. From the left, a caravan brings the sciences and riches of the Orient, while its counterpart on the right arrives with the architectural and artistic achievements of the North. In marked contrast to its Italian source, Vasari, the frieze insists on the significant influence of the Gothic on the development of Italian architecture around 1300. Italy’s artistic renewal depended, Cornelius proposes, on a twofold impregnation by “the other,” here the Oriental, there the Northern. This gesture points to a supreme principle of Nazarene art: the belief that a rebirth of contemporary art presupposes the fusion of opposites, like the marriage of Italia and Germania in their own time.38 The cycle in its entirety follows this logic. Although indebted to Vasari’s organicism, Cornelius did not portray the full cycle of growth, blossoming, and decay. His cycle stopped at the height of evolution, forgoing the stages of decline. The highpoint of Western art was, not unexpectedly, located in the Romantics’ most revered artist, Raphael. His life and death became the cycle’s center, both literally (as the thirteenth and thus central loggia) and theoretically. His persona hence links the cycle’s historical program to its production in the present. Positioning Raphael as the spatial and iconographical nodal point, the Munich frescoes designated themselves as a transformative repetition of their Vatican model. As such, they signaled a new beginning, in the here and now, a moment of rebirth and growth that, once again, followed upon the dark times of decay and decadence—times not shown but intimated by the absence of entire epochs.39 Cropping organicism’s full cycle, the arabesque thus articulated as work modus a rather paradoxical position between epigonality and originality, tradition and invention, past and future.40

Museums, Murals, and the Ideal of Bildung From their inception, the Pinakothek frescoes prompted extensive commentary, and several leading minds of the period followed suit. We already have met Ludwig Schorn, the renowned art historian and editor of the influential journal Das KunstBlatt, whose monumental exegesis would inspire (more than 150 years later) another brilliant extrapolation of Nazarene art theory from the murals, this time by Frank Büttner. Constraints of space prevent me from doing the same in this book. Yet the

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Figure 9.4 Peter Cornelius, The Crusades, 1828. Alte Pinakothek, loggia, cupola of first bay in east (Italy). Executed 1834–40; destroyed in World War II. Pencil and pen with brown, gray and black ink, 53.3 × 44.8 cm. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

fact that any detailed decipherment of Cornelius’s arabesques is inevitably a timeconsuming affair brings me back to a different yet vital aspect of this kind of public art—its demand for verbalization. This need for a supplemental text inevitably violates any modernist ideal of art’s self-sufficient and self-explanatory nature. Indeed, in its own time it had already caused controversy, not least because it raised the thorny issue of legibility. The criticism launched by contemporaries against what Charles Baudelaire had deprecatorily dubbed l’art philosophique converged on the intellectual nature of its Romantic rebuses. Its detractors found Nazarene art not viable for its conceptual character, and little has changed since.41 To this day, art historians and audiences alike have criticized its intellectual and exasperatingly discursive quality and denounced it as ideational art, Gedankenkunst, which deprives the viewer of sensual gratification.42

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For the Nazarenes, however, such deep intellectual penetration was essential to achieve the desired “spiritual education of the nation through the experience of beauty.” It was the indispensable pendant to sensuous pleasure.43 The belief of Friedrich Schiller that art could help to harmonize our sensual natures with society’s ethical imperatives implied, if realized in Cornelius’s fashion, a combination of sense experience and prolonged study. Alas, few visitors would have been able to decode (without a printed explanation in hand) the variety of references painted in beautiful colors onto the walls above their heads. However, if we can let go of our modernist prejudice that ambitious art needs to be self-explanatory, if we can surrender to the need for an erudite guide, the entire assemblage (building, fresco decoration, the specific hanging, and, finally, the collection itself) becomes remarkably unified in its didactic effect. It was this unified didactic conception that made Munich’s Alte Pinakothek a landmark in museum education. The sustained effort to teach and entertain through a series of spaces and experiences had one overarching goal: a visit to the museum was to become a true moment of Bildung—that overriding German concept of personal growth that encompasses formal education, aesthetic cultivation, and character formation. If I have one criticism, it is actually not the hieroglyphic nature, allegorical charge, or need for textual commentaries of Cornelius’s frescoes. It is rather their failure to realize their own primary goal, Volksbildung—a holistic education of the people. The project’s sublime ideal was an all-encompassing, utterly classless education, an edification of the entire nation, of every single individual among its people, and thus the creation of a universal collective. De facto, the cycle (of course) articulated only the cultural capital of a few, the Bildungsbürger, those privileged by education although not necessarily by political power. While Cornelius reached the lower segments of society with reproductions of his religious work, his museum murals were too intimidating for such outreach. Conversion to the Romantic utopia often remained, as in a 1907 caricature by Rudolf Wilke, a deathbed dream. We witness the last moments of a Munich worker, who, drowned in the plushness of his well-stuffed bedding, is hardly visible except for his gargantuan hands and an impenetrable thicket of facial hair. “Schorschl, if I survive,” the dying man pledges to the friend at his bedside, “I will definitely go to the Pinakothek!”44

The Next Generation: Wilhelm Kaulbach’s Countervision When Cornelius’s Pinakothek frescoes were finally unveiled in 1840, the Romantic age had come to an end, and so would the “Era Cornelius” and, with it, Munich’s Romantic wonder years. It made no difference (neither to the master’s fate nor to the city’s artistic makeup) that St. Ludwig established the Nazarene’s international reputation as a “German Michelangelo” and sought-after expert on fresco painting whom the British would call upon as a consultant for the wall decoration of the new Houses of Parliament.45 Ludwig I, however, took no pride in the fact that across the Channel no other than the Queen’s consort, Albert, a German prince himself, paid such court to Cornelius. The Munich royalty was simply disgruntled by the lack of a “classical brush,” and from now on he would bestow his favor on the younger Wilhelm von Kaulbach, ironically one of Cornelius’s most successful (and soon most rivalrous) students. When the Bavarian king commissioned yet another picture gallery in 1846, the Neue Pinakothek, a new generation built and painted it.46

100 The Writing on the Wall Not surprisingly, this new generation was intent on laying to rest the quintessential Romanticism of Cornelius’s experiment. Yet, involuntarily, it only confirmed its persevering significance and innovative power. The arabesque of the Pinakothek’s loggia remained a benchmark for subsequent projects, even for those conceived, as exemplified in the next chapter by Wilhelm Kaulbach’s designs for Munich and Berlin, in a spirit of critique. Indeed, the permutations of the arabesque unfolding from one to the next of these mural cycles unveil an unexpected yet fascinating persistence of the philosophical impulse and pedagogic ambitions that had marked the 1800s. This persistence is even more noteworthy as it survived, and ultimately bridged, a crucial conceptual shift from the art-historical to the cultural-historical museum.47 Naturally, the new coverage of civilizations across time and space (embodied by new institutions like Berlin’s Neue Museum) inevitably demanded innovations in both the aesthetics of display and the setup of the overarching explanatory framework. Yet even under these changed conditions the Romantic beginnings of museum mural decoration remained potent and perceptible.

Notes 1. Although the epithet Alte is anachronistic if referring to this particular picture gallery before the second Pinakothek, aptly named Neue (new), opened in 1854, it is used throughout for reasons of clarity. In 2002, a third Pinakothek was added, the Pinakothek der Moderne. For earlier iterations of the argument presented in this chapter see Grewe, “The Writing on the Wall,” and idem, “Museum Murals.” 2. Pevsner, A History of Building Types, 128. 3. My exploration of Cornelius’s frescoes (1834 and 1840) is indebted to Frank Büttner’s groundbreaking scholarship, especially his two magisterial volumes Peter Cornelius. 4. See Savoy, Tempel der Kunst. 5. Ibid., 10–26. 6. Buttlar, “Europäische Wurzeln,” 37. 7. Sheehan, Museums. 8. Quoted after Sheehan, Museums, 48. 9. See Grewe, “Historicism.” 10. Goethe to Cornelius, May 8, 1811, in Gage, Goethe on Art, 235. 11. Cornelius to Goethe, July 1, 1811, in Förster, Peter von Cornelius, 1:86. 12. Cornelius, “Letter to Joseph Görres,” 1135; see further Gossman, “Unwilling Moderns,” and idem, “Beyond Modern”; and, for a discussion of the belief in public fresco projects as a means to educate the people, Büttner, “Bildung.” 13. Cornelius, “Letter to Joseph Görres,” 1135. 14. See Grewe, “Historicism”; also idem, The Nazarenes. 15. For the intellectual roots of the German public museum see Sheehan, Museums. 16. See, for example, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; Reynaerts, “The Wall.” 17. Schiller, “On the Aesthetic.” 18. Sheehan, Museums, 83–137. 19. Boisserée, Tagebücher, 2:243; for an illustration, see Grewe, “The Writing on the Wall,” 214, fig. 2. 20. Büttner, Peter Cornelius, 2:83. 21. For an alternative typology, see Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s 1840 canvas Triumph of Religion in the Arts: Solomon with the Brazen Serpent (sculpture), St. John as the visionary of the Heavenly Jerusalem (architecture), King David as harpist (music), and the Madonna writing the Magnificat (poetry); see Account of the Picture. 22. See Grewe, “Historicism.” 23. See, for example, Gotlieb, “Poussin’s Lesson”; Webster, “A Mural”; Smith, Albrecht Dürer. 24. For the loggia before its destruction in 1945/46 see Grewe, The Nazarenes, 84, figs. 19, 20.

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25. F. Schlegel, “Aussichten für die Kunst in dem österreichischen Kaiserstaat,” in idem, Kritische, 4:230. 26. Schorn, “München, im März 1829.” 27. Ibid., 110. 28. Büttner, Peter Cornelius, 1:78–83. 29. Schnorr to his sister Ottilie, Rome, March 24, 1818, in Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Briefe, 57. 30. Schorn, “München, im März 1829,” 110. 31. Cornelius to Reimer, January 28, 1815, in Riegel, Peter Cornelius, 252; for the German Romantic reception of this captivting epic see Büttner, “Nibelungen-Bilder.” 32. Büttner, Peter Cornelius, 1:81–82. 33. Cornelius to Ludwig I, January 10, 1828, in Förster, Peter von Cornelius, 1:430 (punctuation modified). 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Schorn, “München, im März 1829,” 113. 37. Ibid. 38. Think here, for example, of Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s famous Italia and Germania (1815–28) in Grewe, Painting the Sacred, 300, fig. 6.16. 39. See Grewe, “Historicism.” 40. For the notion of “epigonality,” see Grewe, The Nazarenes, 209–25. 41. For a passionate argument against this persistent prejudice, see Grewe, The Nazarenes. 42. I have touched upon this issue first in the conclusion of Painting the Sacred, 303–20; for the notion Gedankenkunst, see further Grewe, The Nazarenes. 43. Gustav Waagen, in Sheehan, Museums, 115. 44. Sheehan, Museums, 121, fig. 20. 45. Curran, Romanesque Revival, 76. 46. Mittlmeier, Die Neue Pinakothek; see further Rott, Ludwig I. 47. Wezel, Die Konzeptionen.

10 History as Nationalist Vision Wilhelm Kaulbach’s Murals for Berlin’s Neue Museum, 1847–1865

When Ludwig of Bavaria decided to build a second picture gallery, he had no doubts about the necessity for another extensive propaedeutic mural decoration. The coveted commission went to Wilhelm Kaulbach, one of Cornelius’s most talented students and his successor as the director of Munich’s Art Academy.1 This decision was hardly surprising; after all, the acquisition of Kaulbach’s 1846 Destruction of Jerusalem, a gigantic machine of 6 by 7 meters (equaling 40 m2!) with a record-breaking price tag, had been the final motivation for a new Pinakothek dedicated exclusively to modern and contemporary art. The oversize format was characteristic of Kaulbach’s output, reflecting a predilection that owed much to Carl Theodor von Piloty, who had conquered German audiences with his theatrical fusion of realistic portrayal, painterly virtuosity, and coloristic vivacity on a grand scale.2 In contrast, Kaulbach’s sculpturalbaroque modeling and restrained coloration still placed him firmly in the genealogy of the Cornelius school, and so did the peculiar tension between the misgivings, then and now, prompted by his historical (and in the eyes of many simply histrionic) imagery and the unanimous admiration for his illustration. Take, for example, Kaulbach’s designs for the fables of Reynard the Fox, also finished in 1846 and inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s congenial adaptation of these medieval allegories (figure 10.1).3 Engraved by Rudolf Rahn and Adrian Schleich, the illustrations made Kaulbach “the most popular artist of the present,” and even the otherwise critical Anton Heinrich Springer gushed in 1858 about “the humor, the esprit, the satire and the ebullient abundance of witty ideas” displayed here in an almost Hogarthian fashion.4 Enchanted, Springer called this tenet of German art “humoristic idealism.” That epithet, however, hardly did justice to the uncontrolled nature of Kaulbach’s caustic disposition. Even “figures or passages in complex pictorial dramas” often displayed, breaking any academic rule of decorum, an irrepressible urge for “satire and enjoyment of fun”; often at odds with the chosen format and medium, “character in its breadth and sharpness is depicted with keenest relish, and at times the sardonic smile bursts into the loudest laugh.”5 This was already true for the title vignette of Goethe’s sixth canto, a callous spoof of Eduard Bendemann’s monumental Jews in Captivity, which, in 1832, had delivered a heartfelt plea for Jewish emancipation.6 Unfortunately, as Joseph Beavington Atkinson observed with some chagrin, Kaulbach’s grotesque degenerated on occasion “into the vulgar, the grand into the ridiculous.”7 The example that Atkinson gave was “the satire on ‘the Pigtail Age’ in a fresco outside the New Pinakothek,” a project designed between 1848 and 1850 and intended DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-13

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Figure 10.1 [Hans] Rudolf Rahn and Adrian Schleich, after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, title vignette of The Sixth Canto, 1846. Engraving, 16.6 × 7.1 cm (image). From Goethe, Reineke Fuchs (1846), 99.

to picture the birth of modern art under the patronage of the Bavarian king (see figure  10.2).8 Kaulbach had seemed a natural choice, but falsely so. When it was unveiled, a stunned public encountered not glorious history but insulting farce. The artist’s satirical brush did not even halt before his royal patron, and one can easily imagine Kaulbach whistling a merry tune as he gleefully sketched pictures more appropriate for the ephemeral pages of the local humor magazine than the sublime monumentality of intransient fresco. In the summer of 1854, Kaulbach’s uncontrolled sardonic temperament resulted in a public debacle.

Sardonic Scales The Neue Pinakothek was a remarkably simple yet innovative structure, square-cut and windowless, a modern basilica of monumental proportions, 107 m long, 29 m wide, and, at its nave, 27 m high. Breaking radically with traditional patterns of structural division (handed down from Vitruvian antiquity), the façade featured a gigantic pictorial frieze, a stately 5.5 m high and placed right beneath the cornice, that wrapped around the entire building like a colorful advertising banner. This was indeed its purpose: to broadcast in dramatic fashion what was inside this first museum of contemporary art while extolling the role of the Bavarian king in its recent bloom. Hence, the murals’ historical episodes ranged from a picturesque depiction of German artists as they gather outdoors to sketch the rural life of the Roman campagna to the glorification of Ludwig I as contemporary art collector. In the final scene, the monarch stepped off his throne to greet a group of artists and inspect the treasures they had to offer, a resounding celebration of the close relationship between the royal patron and his charge.

104 The Writing on the Wall Such heroic posturing did not, however, make the king forget the applied arts, carefully cultivated under his reign not least for state budgetary reasons. A series of carefully observed vignettes around the main scenes thus showed off specific trades, from porcelain manufacture and glass production to smithing. Allegories of the arts added a final touch, supplemented on the north façade by a portrait gallery that immortalized fourteen of Ludwig’s favorite protégés, from Bertel Thorvaldsen (as the oldest) to Johann von Schraudolph (as the youngest), who graced the wall in full length and realistic appearance.9 The effect was somewhat unsettling, as the men were lined up—lifted from their worldly existence into an abstract space of commemoration, the bodies oddly flattened against the monochrome background—like specimens in a display case. The artificiality of the ornamental frame reinforced this peculiar impression: a continuous, scalloped band of garlands that, overloaded with fruits and flowers, was held up by a group of exceedingly endearing putti. The prominence and size of the frieze made its polemic tone even more outrageous. As history painting deteriorated into satire, the heroism of modern art revealed itself as farce.

A Pigtail Age Allegory turned into caricature, as Wilhelm von Kaulbach sketched Peter Cornelius and his fellow Nazarenes Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Philipp Veit with the greatest physiognomic accuracy as the anemic riders of a stilted Pegasus, whom a fourth yet unidentified man, pistol in his belt, tries to mount from the back of the ultimate symbol of slowness and belatedness, a turtle (figure 10.2). Like an avant-garde of Don Quixotes, the three artists attack a strangely obsolete enemy, the academy in its eighteenth-century manifestation. Seemingly unaware of the academician they have already trampled down—an elderly gentleman, eyes closed but with an unexpected joyous smile on his lips, his arms still thrown around several sketchbooks and a mannikin uncannily alive—they are about to fight the wig-wearing Cerberus atop the Muses’

Figure 10.2 Wilhelm Kaulbach, The Struggle against Pedantry of Artists and Scientists under the Protection of Minerva, ca. 1851. Fresco design. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 179.5 cm. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

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dungeon. The beast is clearly in distress as it readies itself for battle. One head is turned back to spit angrily on the horse’s pristine white muzzle, the middle one is raised high, a shrill cry escaping its gaping mouth, the features distorted by pain and resentment, while the third focuses intently on the Nazarenes’ Neoclassicist backup advancing from the left. Protected by Minerva herself, Asmus Jakob Carstens, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann are having a go at Cerberus, and it is unclear whether pen and ink pot or mallet and sword will do the job. At the far left, a handsome Karl Friedrich Schinkel steps out of the water onto dry land, guided by Minerva’s owl and accompanied by the concert of a trio of frogs, to join the forces of Neoclassicism and Romanticism as they unite in the battle against a dead academic tradition.10 In contrast to the cycle’s other images, Kaulbach’s acid parody of the pigtail age was strangely hybrid, part allegory, part realistic portrait, with a sharp satirical tone that scorned what it allegedly celebrated, not least the patronage of its own benefactor, Ludwig I. Not surprisingly, many viewers felt irritated, if not furious. “It seems that what was supposed to be told in this painting was the struggle that preceded the victory of the more recent modern art, whose heir Mr. von Kaulbach has become. But in my opinion and in the opinion of others, the course of events was entirely different,” fumed Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a fellow professor of history painting and revered member of the Munich academy since 1827. “And the struggle was not merely a practical joke waged by jolly, bratty fellows for the sake of their own amusement. We see the movement in art and the efforts of the men, who cleared the way for us, in conjunction with the most noble battles of our people, and we believe that the history of the most recent German art is a precious part of the history of our times.”11 Like Schnorr, although not necessarily for the same reasons, the public overwhelmingly disliked Kaulbach’s murals, which remained unloved and mourned by few when they soon began to decay.12 Incensed, Peter Cornelius never forgot or forgave. When invited in 1851 to show his most recent production, a series of cartoons designed for the Berlin burial ground of the Prussian royal house, in Munich, he brusquely declined. “Everyone is outraged about the paintings on the Neue Pinakothek. Instead of a history of art, it is a pasquil of the same. Just like a viper [Kaulbach] bites the breast which nourished and raised him,” Cornelius seethed, adding, “Arrogance in fortune is not the mark of a noble nature.”13 Joseph Beavington Atkinson could not have agreed more. “These exceptional extravagances came not of weakness, but from excess of power.”14 What remains the true mystery is the king’s decision to sign off on this swan song of Munich’s golden age of art. Or, as Moritz von Schwind poignantly quipped: “King Ludwig has spent millions in order to make German art great and then thousands more so that he could be ridiculed for doing so.”15 If Kaulbach’s attempt to paint over his master’s place in history strikes us as rather Oedipal, it certainly failed to purge his in(ter)vention of its deep Nazarene roots. To the contrary, just like his former teacher in the Alte Pinakothek, “Kaulbach did not treat his assignment as a historical one, but rather as a poetic endeavor,” as the Allgemeine Zeitung pointed out in 1850; “he has, in a free, even humoristic manner, represented more general ideas than recorded particular events.”16 This poetic outlook was, not surprisingly, an immediate reflection of Kaulbach’s intense engagement with the Romantic arabesque.17 In the Neue Pinakothek, this legacy was quite subtle, remaining most visible in the fusion of genre-like vignettes with allegorical images and a portrait gallery, but otherwise suspended by the predominantly narrative sequence. But already, in Kaulbach’s next project, it would return as the decoration’s guiding principle.

106 The Writing on the Wall

From Art to World History Throughout the nineteenth century, Bavaria and Prussia competed for cultural and political hegemony, and even after the country’s unification in 1871, the southern state never ceased to resist and resent Prussia’s rise as Germany’s primary power.18 Part of this rivalry was a “museum race,” with Berlin soon catching up. While the Glyptothek was still under construction, Prussians countered with the erection of the so-called Alte Museum, which, located across the city palace, was erected from 1824 to 1830 based on plans by star architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. With its open portico and historicalphilosophical mural program, the building opened up an entirely new dimension of public outreach, educational mission, and flow of visitors.19 Unfortunately, Schinkel did not live long enough to see through the execution of his mural design, a role assumed by Peter Cornelius, who had arrived in the Prussian capital in 1840, the year of the architect’s death. Seven years later, the murals were finally completed.20 Already at its opening in 1830, Schinkel’s Alte Museum was too small for the vast and diverse collections it was meant to house. The Neue Museum, constructed between 1843 and 1855 based on plans by Friedrich August Stüler, was to remedy this situation. It provided space, as proudly pronounced in 1880, for “all of the collections, which to date had been housed in a measly and neither for their conservation nor for their use adequate manner, with rooms not only sufficient for the holdings at the time but also furnished with a sumptuousness previously unknown.”21 Accordingly, the first floor featured prehistoric, ethnological, and Egyptian displays, with a cabinet of curiosities and the print room on the top level. In between, the building’s entire middle section was reserved for the nascent yet rapidly growing corpus of plaster casts.22 Uniting these collections, Stüler created “a total work of art” which replaced the “temple of art” with an “exquisite colorful palace of cultural history.”23 Not surprisingly, the new anthropological perspective also demanded far-reaching changes in pedagogy and exhibition strategies, producing an aesthetic that emphasized a narrative framing of the displayed objects. This, in turn, created a need to anchor the diverse strands of the story thus created through the various cultural edifice— and what solution could have been more appealing to the age than a monumental exposition of world history in fresco? When Wilhelm Kaulbach shouldered this ambitious task, he once again followed in Cornelius’s footsteps. Like his former mentor, he set out to visualize not merely historical events but the philosophical and theological principles that shaped History’s unfolding. The scale of the subject matter—“the entire cultural history of humanity’s evolution according to its main phases”—was as colossal as the size of the frescoes’ destination, the museum’s central stairwell, an open multistory atrium of 39 m in length and 16 m in width.24 Not surprisingly, the finished cycle would indeed become of the most complex, most voluminous decorative schemes in the history of the modern museum and unmatched in its historical and philosophical aspirations.25

Universal History as (Yet Another) Arabesque Kaulbach approached his daunting assignment by mapping a system of pictorially independent fields of varying sizes and shapes upon the architecturally formless, over 35-m-long walls of the vestibule staircase. To that end, he embedded the visual and narrative core of this design—six monumental panels that narrated the “most

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important episodes of world history”—into a rich decorative program, with sixteen supplementary scenes, twelve decorative borders, four shorter frieze segments, and one continuous arabesque frieze that ran right beneath the cornice across the entire length. In total, this made up for thirty-nine individual image fields. A contract, signed on May 15, 1843, determined the subject matter of the central scenes, or at least of five of them.26 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Destruction of the Tower of Babel. Ancient Greece in its Full Bloom. The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. The Battle of the Huns. Godfrey of Bouillon’s Entry into the liberated Jerusalem or another subject, still to be determined, from the time of Charlemagne or the House of Hohenstaufen. 6. A subject still to be determined that would provide a meaning conclusion to the entire cycle. The vagueness of this fnal phrasing is striking. It releases a sense of discomfort, which refects an elemental dispute between artist and patron about that fnal moment in the story. In Kaulbach’s eyes, the Protestant Reformation was the cycle’s natural and historically necessitated conclusion; the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, however, vehemently opposed that view. We will come back to this dispute. For now, we might simply note that Kaulbach’s thematic choices adopted the periodization of universal history worked up by the German historicist school since the beginning of the century. As such, the cycle equated universal history with the evolution of the Occident, ending with Germany’s national history as its developmental high point. Thus, while presenting itself as universal, Kaulbach cultural history was de facto decidedly Eurocentric and, indeed, nationalistic.27 If the ideology of the Neue Museum’s history of human civilization seems more than problematic today, its contemporaries focused instead on its expressive modes. While Kaulbach’s conception of world as personalized history was well received, his use of allegory was not, and the Deutsche Kunstblatt reserved its praise for his ability to signify “through a single figure . . . an entire people” and to foretell “the latter’s fate through a single movement.”28 Kaulbach, in contrast, did not see an alternative to his deus ex machina of divine intercession for evoking the events’ higher meaning and thus partitioned the pictorial field into an earthly plane of human action and a heavenly sphere of divine intervention. If this abandonment of an Aristotelian unity of space and time violated academic norms and mainstream taste alike, it corresponded closely to the worldview of the deeply pious king, who still believed in the monarch’s divine right, and, beyond such Christian inflection, to the cycle’s profound Hegelian inflection. Already Kaulbach’s contemporaries had recognized Hegel’s philosophy behind the presentation of specific historical moments, understood in terms of cause and effect, as vital turning points in mankind’s constant progress toward greater self-realization and autonomous action. Meaning thus resided not only in “the singular historical event,” as the Illustrierte Zeitung observed in 1854, but in “the ideas of world history, which always come to light in a singular shattering event, but then continue to have unending reverberations in subsequent occurrences and consequences.”29 This Hegelian perspective made a compression of naturalistic historia and metaphysical subtext imperative, thus creating an internal tension Kaulbach would be unable to solve.

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Figure 10.3 Wilhelm Kaulbach, The Destruction of the Tower of Babel (with an Arabesque Frieze of the Indians), 1848. Fresco. Staircase in the Neue Museum, Berlin, south side (destroyed World War II). Photograph before 1945. Courtesy of Frank Büttner (†), Gilching.

Not that the painter didn’t try. In an attempt at sublimation, at Aufhebung in Hegelian terms, he added a children’s frieze as a tongue-in-cheek metacommentary. Yet this moment of Romantic irony failed to bring the desired resolution, and not merely for artistic reasons. To the contrary, the conceptual tension inherent in the controversial mixture of factual history and allegorical gesture pointed to an acute ambivalence about its own ideological, Romantic-Christian foundation. As a result, the composition’s static bipartite structure, implemented to picture an inevitable bond between divine economy and human agency, clashed with the idea of progress captured in unfolding the varied notions of the divine across world religions. As Kaulbach’s histories broke apart at the seams of idealism and naturalism, their theology fell prey to relativism.

“History We Must Paint, History Is the Religion of Our Time, History Alone Is Seasonable” Kaulbach’s programmatic pronouncement, chosen as the title of this section, has become something of a catchword to characterize this period.30 After all, what could better express the sensibility of the historicist age? What would more poignantly bring

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Figure 10.4 Wilhelm Kaulbach, The Age of Reformation (with an Arabesque of German Culture), 1864. Fresco. Staircase in the Neue Museum, Berlin, north side (destroyed in World War II). Photograph before 1945. Courtesy of Frank Büttner (†), Gilching.

out the unbridgeable gap between this Hegelian position and the religious Romanticism of a Peter Cornelius? History, not religion, is the God of the century. To paint history is to be of one’s own time. Yet Kaulbach’s affirmative tone should not deceive us. Behind his categorical dictum lurked the confession that contemporary art no longer had a true subject, not even itself. Art emerges as history’s insufficient surrogate. Kaulbach seems to have been quite aware of the fatal dimension of his proclamation, and this awareness makes up the modern, and in many regards Romantic, tendency of the “academic classicist” Kaulbach.31 The crowning frieze of frolicking children then came indeed as a revelation, but not of universal history’s true nature. Instead, it exposed the acutely nostalgic, painfully skeptical, and deeply fractured nature of Kaulbach’s arabesque aspirations.

The Politics of Babel Before we turn toward this ultimate transformation of the early Romantic arabesque in its historicist alter ego, we must, however, penetrate deeper into the historicophilosophical dimension of Kaulbach’s thinking. Already the choice of the opening image, The Destruction of the Tower of Babel, is programmatic (figure 10.3). The primordial moment of absolute origin is not—as would be appropriate for a

110 The Writing on the Wall Christian cycle and as was, for example, the case in Schinkel’s scheme for the Alte Museum—the genesis of the world. Instead, the origin of all origins is the birth of history, understood here, entirely in the sense of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, as the birth of cultural history at the moment of the separation of languages and races.32 Beyond its philosophical dimension as a prelude to world history, Kaulbach’s historicizing take on the biblical story also has a concrete, highly nationalist function. It propagates a notion of the Japhethites as the ancestors of the Germans, thus proposing that this tribe set into motion a gradual Germanization of the world. Kaulbach, like so many of his contemporaries, understood this idea in the most concrete political terms, namely, as an obligation to create a unified German nation. Consequently, he no longer saw the tower of Babel as a quintessential symbol of divine punishment for human hubris. Under his brush, it became a glorification of human emancipation.33 Babel, the Neue Museum told its viewer, was the first step on the way of humanity’s liberation from despotism. Indebted to Enlightenment thought, the cycle ended with the Reformation as the harbinger of modernity and, at the same time, the Germans’ most meaningful contribution to universal history (figure 10.4). To that end, Kaulbach worked out a complex yet clear link between his first and last image. For centuries, Roman Catholic tradition had interpreted the Reformation as a second Babel that had destroyed the unity of the church, just as God’s hand once had shattered the accord between men. The Neue Museum cycle openly played with this interpretative tradition while aggressively overturning Catholicism’s negative assessment. In Kaulbach’s partisan Protestant and implicitly secular vision, the Babylonian separation of peoples is not mere punishment but a leap toward liberation. The fresco cycle thus presented Luther’s uprising as a culmination point in the long but enduring process of mankind’s emancipation from bondage, this time as deliverance from religion itself. The politics of Kaulbach’s fresco, however, collided with the long-term goals of the king, who dreamt of becoming the representative of all Germans, a dream impossible without confessional reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. The Prussian monarch thus rigorously dismissed The Age of the Reformation, and his general director of all museums, Ignaz von Olfers, agreed.34 With the Reformation thematic blocked, the subject of the last panel remained undetermined until 1857, when a stroke forced Friedrich Wilhelm IV to step down and leave the affairs of the state to his brother.35 Regent from 1858 until the king’s death in 1861, the future William I was cut from very different cloth than his older sibling, aptly described as “the Romantic on the throne.”36 Unruffled by the prospect of controversy, he endorsed Kaulbach’s original proposition, following the advice of Leopold von Ranke, one of the most eminent historians of his time, who saw the people’s individuation indeed as a key criterion of progress and advancement. From this perspective, the Reformation was the cycle’s logical, indeed, imperative ending. Moreover, the new regent cared little about his brother’s conciliatory irenic hopes and instead advocated a radical tip of the confessional scale toward Protestantism’s absolute hegemony. He thus had his minister of culture, August von Bethmann-Hollweg, advise the artist that the final scene “need not be completely harmonious” but “must hint at the fact that it was commissioned by an evangelical prince.”37 With this notification, the way was paved for Kaulbach to visualize the Reformation as the dawn of culture rising

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Figure 10.5 Albert Teichel, after Wilhelm Kaulbach, Putti Frieze, 1868. Etching, 9.7 × 56.6 cm. Part 12 of Der Kinderfries: Teil I bis XII. Portfolio sheet 29 (59.8 × 81.2 cm) from Kaulbach, Die Wandgemälde im Treppenhaus des Neuen Museums in Berlin (1854 ff.). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-73.105.

from a fusion of religion, science, and art, with Luther modeling the individual’s ethical responsibility to emancipate himself from the authoritarian image of God as figured in the past.

Self-Ironic Twists In the early twentieth century, the reception of Kaulbach’s murals focused mainly on the six historical panels, thus isolating the narrative from its complex framework. His contemporaries, in contrast, were deeply occupied with the big picture and, well aware of the painter’s poetic aspirations, often regarded the cycle’s frieze as its most salient aspect, with its arabesque revelations of internal turmoil and ironic distance (figure 10.5).38 Composed of an acanthus tendril populated by a host of putti, it reveals its maker’s highly ambivalent stance vis-à-vis the ideology of progress celebrated below. Already the border’s iconography indicated a satiric rupture. The symbolic earnestness and metaphysical depth of Cornelius’s margins yielded to a droll theater of putti that delivered, in a pantomimic reenactment of the world’s ambitions, a reductio ad absurdum. As such, it radicalized the arabesque’s self-reflective potential as an ironic fracturing of the work within and through itself. Granted, the irony of the Berlin murals was less acidic than the Neue Pinakothek’s burlesque. However, satire once again ensconced the internal corrosion of Kaulbach’s “symbolic-historical style.”39 Idolizing a sublime “realistic idealism,” he seemed incapable of believing in his own artistic creed, or at least not fully.40 If the creation of a contemporary art at once timely (in its genuine historical character) and eternal (through a lasting transcendent idealism) was Kaulbach’s most cherished dream, it was also the most elusive. Nothing demonstrates this more powerfully than the frieze’s satirical rewriting of his story’s final panel, The Age of the Reformation. At first, the evolution of mankind seemed to end on an optimistic note, with the Reformation as a moment of supreme synthesis that would restore, and on a higher level, the unity of men and culture once lost to Babylonian confusion: religion, science, and art appear before us in harmony, and even the Romantic dream of Italia and Germania’s marriage seems to come true, as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael visit Albrecht Dürer while he is about to add the finishing touches to his famous life-sized Four Apostles (ironically, a highlight of Berlin’s competitor, the Alte Pinakothek). Even

112 The Writing on the Wall Kaulbach himself has a cameo appearance; grinding Dürer’s colors, he facilitates this transalpine unification. As our eyes now rise from this glorious chronicle toward the ceiling, pathos turns into bathos. Admittedly, the frieze still celebrates Germany’s cultural achievements, parading such luminaries as Jakob Grimm, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the celebrated scientist Alexander von Humboldt (see figure 10.5). Yet their transfiguration into playful putti undermines whatever sublimity might be evoked by the titles of the seminal books that they clutch all too firmly in their pudgy hands. Their silly cuteness is, however, not the only thing that questions the solidity of the very ground they stand on, as we are reminded by the scenes around them. At the far left, a chemical experiment introduces us to the realm of science. Yet notions of progress and rational objectivity immediately fall prey to the laboratory’s alliance to alchemy. To be sure, its two technicians, a pile of manuals at their feet, have successfully conjured up the notorious philosopher’s stone. Yet the newly fabricated treasure is not to be trusted, as even a cursory glance at the messenger of this latest product of modern science, a mischievous devil with large scalloped wings, reminds us. Blinded by our irrepressible hubris, however, modern man is oblivious to the obvious, and even a forceful pinch of the nose by the devil himself does not break the spell cast by the alleged triumph of science over nature. Modern man sees but does not see.41 Religion does not fare any better. If technical prowess blocks the chemists’ vision of spiritual truth, the man of the cloth is blindfolded by his own large hood. Incapable of seeing beyond his narrow beliefs, the priest takes the confession of a captive woman, who, accused of witchcraft, exhales a female devil. One might have expected to see now the Reformation as the emancipatory end to such Catholic superstition or the Inquisition’s torturous injustice. But far from it! The next pair, a ferocious monk with tonsure and a belligerent beret-wearing Protestant minister, is just as pigheaded. Butting heads, the confessional opponents fight over dogma and the Bible’s truthful interpretation with equal stubbornness, irrational rage, and a stomach-turning fanaticism. Not surprisingly, things do not get better when it comes to Art. The frieze persistently pokes fun at Neoclassicist art theory and the contemporary German art scene, thus eroding in a strange act of self-destruction the very foundations of the academic tradition Kaulbach’s own art was built upon. Take, for example, the riotous oath for the advancement of the arts, in the spirit of Jacques-Louis David’s valiant Horatii (figure 10.6). Yet history repeats itself only as farce, and the three putti literally cannot fill the shoes they are trying on. What remains of the grand posture struck by their Neoclassicist idols is a Punch-and-Judy show that makes us, though we twitch uneasily, sensing our ideals shattered and illusions lost, laugh out loud.

“Children of Reflection” We moderns are, Anton Springer exclaimed in 1858, “children of reflection!”—and there was only one possible reaction, artists and audiences agreed, to this “sentimental” condition: stylization.42 What such stylization should look like, however, remained an open question, as did the thorny issue of its spiritual or worldly orientation. Kaulbach certainly felt alienated by the Romantic quest for transcendence or the

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Figure 10.6 Wilhelm Kaulbach, Children’s Frieze (segment above the Allegory of Painting). Chalk on yellowish paper applied to canvas, 125 × 278 cm. Photographic reproduction of the cartoon (with notes) from Ostini, Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1906), 74, fig. 85.

Nazarene reform program to reenchant art and society, but neither could he commit to the unvarnished materialism of a fully unmediated immanence. Instead, the painter yearned for synthesis, for a perfect fusion of opposites (in the Hegelian sense of sublation, Aufhebung). Yet the attempt to provide a painted body for this philosophical proposition ended in failure, not powerful sublation but disjointed compromise. Kaulbach’s ambivalences are palpable at every step: in his stylistic choices, his blending of genre modalities, and, of course, his attitude toward the arabesque. No longer confident in the latter’s potential as universal principle, Kaulbach sacrificed the parergon’s key operation: to break down the borders between frame and center. Stripped of its generative principle, self-reflection folded back upon itself as an endless loop pronouncing again and again the impossibility of its core project: to synthesize (or at least reconcile) the real and the ideal. Once finished, the murals drowned in a cacophony of voices that now continued the heated internal dialogue between Kaulbach the peintre-philosophe and Kaulbach the modern painter (in the Ruskinian sense) on the walls of the Neue Museum:43 While the historical panels bombastically denounced the bankruptcy of idealist art, the putti frieze noisily pronounced irony, parody, and cynicism as the last resort for the era’s children of reflection. Kaulbach’s inability to make this skepticism the driving force of his creativity is perhaps the intrinsic tragedy of his career. From this perspective it seems only fitting that the truly impressive aesthetic achievements of Kaulbach’s mural projects were not the finished frescoes but their paper prototypes: the cartoons. With its bold expressivity and stark black-and-white, monumental drawing imbued Kaulbach’s vision with breathtaking power. In this, Kaulbach revealed himself once more as an unwilling Romantic: a veritable heir to Cornelius’s bold declaration of the cartoon as autonomous artwork. In the end, however, it was not Kaulbach’s aesthetic choice that would assign the Neue Museum cycle a disturbingly problematic place in German history but its content.

114 The Writing on the Wall Hegelian in spirit, Kaulbach’s cycle embodied a broader shift from Romantic universality to late nineteenth-century particularism, from the metaphysics of art to an assertion of historical progress, from patriotism to nationalism. The world’s genesis culminates in German national history, more precisely, in its Protestant tenet, a view soon canonized in print and imprinted on the minds of the nation’s schoolchildren. This included more than one violent subtext, of which the narrative’s open anti-Semitism is a particularly chilling aspect.44 The children frieze does nothing to soften the cycle’s aggressive cultural-imperialist and racial-supremacist message. As in Cornelius’s pioneering work in Munich, Kaulbach’s fresco decoration also served to incorporate a museum collection into a larger story. However, this time this larger story was no longer indebted to the sublime ideal—however fraught—of universal Bildung. Now it was committed to the striving of “the iron kingdom” for political hegemony.45

Postscript: The Modern Museum Mural On this somber note, I want to return to the beginning. The Alte Pinakothek and its fresco decoration are a fascinating project for many reasons. For one, the museum marks the transition from royal collection to public museum. The agent of this transition was royal himself, and his motivation was indeed driven by the same Romantic belief in art’s collective basis and ethical power that drove his artists. Ludwig I thus appears only in the margins of Cornelius’s cycle. At the same time, Cornelius’s murals address key themes, which proved to be vital throughout the nineteenth century:46 First, the concept of fresco painting as an intrinsically public art, able to defy the force of the modern market economy. As such, it would become the venerated symbol for a now-vanished accord between social and spiritual life, a notion still pertinent to the fervent debates over the desirability of the completion of the Pantheon murals in Paris, commissioned as early as 1755 yet still unfinished in 1874.47 Second, the desire to contextualize art, to embed it in an explanatory cultural framework, a desire that responded to an ongoing need to structure and order the remnants of the past. The Alte Pinakothek combined narrative with a modern sensibility of display. The murals functioned like an overture, shaping but not intruding on the experience of the artworks. Third, the idea of murals as pedagogy, an idea that responded to the era’s imperative of education. The centrality of art in the philosophy of German Idealism explains why a prince like Ludwig would see the museum as a core institution for education. Fourth, the use of murals as a means of national identity formation, an aspect that draws attention to another theme at the heart of Nazarene fresco practice: the contemporary relevance of historicist decorations as a vital link between past, present, and future. Nazarene frescoes tried to fulfill what Karl Friedrich Schinkel had articulated as the ultimate mission of art: “True art must in some way be a monument; that is, it should contain the products of a transcendent human spirit that will survive as long as its materials retain their shape.”48 Neither of the works discussed in this article retained its material shape. Monuments turned into ruins, fresco into dust. Nonetheless, invoking their spirit might be a way to continue what these monuments began: the engagement with history, with the place that art (and the museums that preserve and show it) holds in it, and finally with the role both art and history play in our attempt to give meaning to life. In an age marked by a dizzying presentism, in life and in art, historicism’s serious insistence on the importance of context might be a lesson not to be undervalued.49

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Notes 1. As previously discussed in Grewe, “The Writing on the Wall.” 2. Piloty’s 1855 Seni at the Dead Body of Wallenstein is truly one of the century’s most remarkable theatrical history paintings (oil on canvas, 312 × 365 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich); Büttner and Baumstark, Grosser Auftritt. 3. Goethe, Reineke Fuchs. 4. Springer, Geschichte, 113. 5. [Atkinson], “Kaulbach,” 17. 6. For a discussion of Eduard Bendemann’s 1832 The Captive Jews in Babylon (oil on canvas, 183 × 280 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum und Fondation Corboud, Cologne), see Grewe, “Christliche Allegorie,” and idem, The Nazarenes, 269–87. For Kaulbach’s parody of Bendemann’s famous canvas see Scholl, “Später Orientalismus,” 59–60. 7. [Atkinson], “Kaulbach,” 17. 8. Execution started in 1850. 9. As a second-generation Nazarene, Schraudolph himself would become instrumental in perpetuating the movement’s influential fresco tradition; Ritter, Johann Baptist Schraudolph. 10. For the Nazarenes’ anti-academic origins with its evocation of the German Neoclassicists as forefathers, see Grewe, Painting the Sacred (2009), esp. chap. 6, 253–302, and idem, The Nazarenes, esp. chaps. 1–3, 21–67. 11. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, “Über Kaulbachs,” reprinted in Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Künstlerische Wege, 196–211. 12. A notable exception was the young Hegelian critic Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow; see Büttner, “Herrscherlob und Satire,” 116–17. 13. Cornelius to Joseph Schlotthauer, August 10, 1851, in Förster, Peter von Cornelius, 2:319. 14. [Atkinson], “Kaulbach.” 15. Moritz von Schwind, in Sheehan, Museums, 98. 16. Allgemeine Zeitung 63, supplement (March 4, 1850), in Mittlmeier, Die Neue Pinakothek, 224. 17. The oldest surviving design for the Neue Pinakothek documents this interest. Büttner, “Herrscherlob und Satire,” 110. 18. For the decades around 1900, see Lewis, Art for All? 19. Trempler, Wandbildprogramm. 20. Design 1828/29–1840, execution 1841–47. Anonymous, Zur Geschichte der Königlichen Museen in Berlin, 53. 21. Ibid., 54. 22. Ibid. 23. Wezel, “Von der kunstgeschichtlichen,” 183. 24. Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum 1790–1870, 123; a good impression of the frescos’ arrangement provides Stüler’s longitudinal section of the Neue Museum’s Staircase reproduced in Grewe, “The Writing on the Wall,” 233, fig. 9. 25. Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum 1790–1870; also Menke-Schwinghammer, Weltgeschichte als “Nationalepos.” 26. Contract between Wilhelm von Kaulbach and Gustav Waagen, Munich, May 15, 1843, § 2, in Menke-Schwinghammer, Weltgeschichte als “Nationalepos,” 212–13. 27. Wagner, Allegorie und Geschichte, 127. 28. Eggers, “Ein Gang,” 394. 29. Illustrierte Zeitung, in Wagner, Allegorie und Geschichte, 132. 30. Teichlein, “Zur Charakteristik,” 264. 31. Ibid., 118. 32. Wagner, Allegorie und Geschichte, 129. 33. Ibid., 129–33. 34. Ibid., 127 and 145. 35. Barclay, Frederick William IV. 36. Strauss, Der Romantiker auf dem Throne. 37. Karl Schnaase to Wilhelm von Kaulbach, January 5, 1859, in Wagner, Allegorie und Geschichte, 150. 38. See, for example, the still very Hegelian interpretation by Victor Kaiser, Kaulbach’s Bilderkreis.

116 The Writing on the Wall 39. Schasler, Die Wandgemälde. 40. For a reading of Kaulbach’s cynicism as an expression of his modernity, see Werner Busch, “Wilhelm von Kaulbach”; also idem, Die notwendige Arabeske. 41. For the persistence of the medieval juxtaposition of purely mechanical and spiritually pure forms of seeing in Romantic art, see Grewe, Painting the Sacred, 253–301. 42. Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”; see further Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske. 43. For the painter’s characterization as “a classicist and an idealist, even if a skeptic one,” see Werner Busch, “Wilhelm von Kaulbach,” 138. 44. See Menke-Schwinghammer’s excellent analysis, Weltgeschichte als “Nationalepos,” as well as Ronen, “Kaulbach’s Wandering Jew.” 45. Clark, Iron Kingdom. 46. For an exploration of the key themes discussed here, see, for example, the various essays united in Museum History Journal 5, no. 2 (2012). 47. Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation, 20, 24–26, 31–37, 63. 48. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, in Sheehan, Museums, 85. 49. The thorny issue of presentism was, for example, at the heart of Foster, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’”; for a discussion of what Romanticism and historicism might have to offer to that “contemporary,” see Grewe, The Nazarenes.

Part 4

Turning the Page

11 Philipp Otto Runge’s Flypaper On Intimacy

Few architectural projects have attempted to recover the critical potential and potency of the Romantic arabesque on the same monumental scale as the frescoes of the Alte Pinakothek (see figures 9.2–9.4). Yet precisely this aspiration would produce the project’s birth defect as a self-generating symbol system. The envisioned grandeur of the Vatican loggia caused Cornelius’s system of signification to fail on the level of looking as associative concept formation. The strain of staring too long at a ceiling too detailed in its metaphysical exposition prevented a transformation of the experience evoked by the arabesque novel into embodied vision, kinesthetic perception, and proprioceptive identification. However, the challenge of realizing the Romantic arabesque in the visual arts was not merely one of medium. Nor was it strictly a matter of legibility (or lack thereof) or mediumistic self-sufficiency. Instead, the arabesque’s success to pattern looking as formalist and interpretive activity was above all a question of intimacy.

A Syndic’s Arabesque Paradise: On Intimacy Throughout its history, the arabesque thrived in intimate spaces, sprawling across the living quarters of Pompeii and Herculaneum or frolicking in the indulgent preciousness of the Rococo boudoir. In 1830, this ancient intimacy found an exquisite reincarnation à la Philipp Otto Runge in the cabinet of the Hamburg diplomat and politician Karl Sieveking, one of the four syndics of the prosperous Hanseatic city and a noteworthy patron of the arts and philanthropist.1 Paneled with gold-flamed poplar, the room forms an inviting setting for a decorative scheme both charming and symbolically rich (figure 11.1). For all its lushness and splendor, the space is carefully laid out to absorb our physical presence into its spatial-allegorical fabric, creating a sense of embeddedness inviting manifold and varied conversations, conversations that, by design and location, would occur repeatedly at different times of the day and in all seasons. It is a surrounding that will inflect and induce various states of mind, whether in direct interaction with others (prompting erudite explication and lively discussion) or in moments of cozy solitude, when its occupant might be engrossed in work or simply relaxing. As our gaze, merely half aware of what it sees, glides across the colorful shapes, taking in design and décor in dreamy reverie or distracted preoccupation, we are simply living the arabesque, not scrutinizing it with the discerning eye of the connoisseur or scholar. Here, the arabesque is not a didactic edifice, not a place of erudition and collecting encountered under exceptional circumstances but a natural habitat to let the mind wander. In short, the cabinet of the syndic Sieveking fosters the kind of comfortable, DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-15

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Figure 11.1 Erwin Speckter, Arabesques, 1830. Wall decorations for Cabin, Built in Memory of a Passage on a Ship by Alexis de Chateauneuf (interior and furniture design). Originally in the former country house of Dr. Karl Sieveking, Hamburg-Hamm, Germany. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. © photo: Roman Raacke and Dennis Conrad.

contemplative dialogue inherent to the novel, which, as an object, we can possess, handle, make our own. The lofty arcades of the museum loggia had to remain strangers to such intimate dialogue and the peculiar oneness of work and recipient it nurtured. Nor could the monumental arabesque cultivate that kind of contemplative pause, that self-absorbed musing, needed to realize the novel’s creative, critical potency in utterly material and object-based terms. On a smaller scale, however, on the scale we just have explored, architectural thinking had inspired some of the earliest, most advanced ventures into the novel territory of the Romantic arabesque, and Philipp Otto Runge acknowledged as much. Given his “particular inclination toward the arabesque,” the Hamburg artist could not think “of something lovelier than decorating an entire house in this manner.”2 Inspired by the same models as Peter Cornelius before him, Runge nonetheless envisioned an entirely different space than the echoing halls and grand staircases of the modern museum. His vision was decidedly intimate, marked by the desire for a close relationship between the arabesques’ character and the mindset and emotional makeup of those inhabiting them. This kind of room decoration sought to exteriorize the self into a three-dimensional space, which, in turn, would touch (through lived experience, embodied perspective, and physical envelopment) the inner being of the people who moved through it.3

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Between Pure Decoration and Mystic Enigma: On Runge’s Times of Day Runge’s premature death at the age of thirty-three destroyed his lofty dream of arabesquing a room (or even an entire house) and reduced his innovative plans for an arabesque Gesamtkunstwerk to a state of conceptual ruins. Yet, throughout, his thinking was deeply architectural. His iconic 1805 cycle Times of Day is a mesmerizing case in point. Already the prints’ large format reflected their initial conception as room decorations (figure 11.2a–d).4 Given the intended purpose, Runge initially worried they might be “too heavy a fare,” but when finished, they seemed “to produce a great many smaller things with ease,” and Runge noted, with much relief, that his labor had not been wasted after all.5 Although engraving had to substitute for fresco and large swathes of paper for monumental plaster patches, the four oversized prints still managed to take over the interior of any residential quarter. Goethe’s house in Weimar was a prominent example, where an edition of Runge’s precious work, received as a gift from the artist himself, dominated the poet’s music chamber. With intimacy as the connective tissue, the transition from one medium to another was pursuing a move from curtailed visual experience to expanded perceptual field, or, as Runge put it, “from isolated easel picture to the meaningful filling of a room.”6 Cyclical format and space-related thinking were closely linked, and this link determined the particular shape and growth pattern of the Romantic’s arabesque project. My citation of Runge’s confession of “a particular inclination toward the arabesque” has omitted a brief yet crucial subordinate clause which qualifies the nature of the “room decorations” thus evoked. The imagined arabesques had to be of the kind “that provides insight and true meaning.”7 This comment points to a central aspect of the artist’s arabesque project, the double nature of production as both emphatically decorative and systematically symbolic. The arabesque was to be at once strict ornamental adornment yet far-reaching allegory, pure form yet mystic hieroglyph, charming yet capaciously discursive. In short, the arabesque was, as an art form, to signify nothing and everything, being absolutely immaterial and radically meaningful.8 This was an ambitious program; the arabesque room decorations were charged with “express[ing] my idea of art in its entirety.”9 The evolution of Runge’s terminology reflected his own progression from a formalist approach to the arabesque as mere ornament to a multilayered understanding as a metaphysical form of reflection and structural principle of meaning production. The Times of Day are twofold arabesque precisely in this sense. They are ornamental frame and arabesque composition, positing an arabesque commentary on arabesque images so as to create an entirely arabesque system of ever-evolving cross-references.10 Runge himself was astonishingly attuned to the arabesque’s double nature and proposed, in response to the era’s clamoring for “elegance, ornament, finery,” to wrap “the most solid into an airy nothingness.”11 The result would be a kind of flypaper, he mused, “flypaper that could trap the viewer (although in all honesty) so that they first believe it to be mere room decoration but then cannot tear themselves away from it afterwards.”12 As the arabesque became step by step a center of Runge’s radical rethinking of contemporary art, the mechanism of parergonal reversal became, in a decidedly modernist fashion, increasingly open-ended and processual (prozesshaft).

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Figure 11.2a Johann Gottlieb Seyfert, after Philipp Otto Runge, Morning, 1803–5. From Runge, Times of Day, 1803–5, plate 1. Etching and engraving, 71.1 × 47.9 cm (plate); 72.4 × 48.9 cm (sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2001-94-1.

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Figure 11.2b Ephraim Gottlieb Krüger and Johann Adolph Darnstedt, after Philipp Otto Runge, Day, 1803–5. From Runge, Times of Day, 1803–5, plate 2. Etching and engraving, 72.4 × 48.4 cm (plate); 72.4 × 48.9 cm (sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2001-94-2.

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Figure 11.2c Johann Gottlieb Seyfert, after Philipp Otto Runge, Evening, 1803–5. From Runge, Times of Day, 1803–5, plate 3. Etching and engraving, 70.5 × 47 cm (plate); 72.4 × 48.9 cm (sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2001-94-3.

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Figure 11.2d Ephraim Gottlieb Krüger and Johann Adolph Darnstedt, after Philipp Otto Runge, Night, 1803–5. From Runge, Times of Day, 1803–5, plate 4. Etching and engraving, 72.4 × 47.9 cm (plate); 72.4 × 48.9 cm (sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2001-94-4.

126 Turning the Page In light of this modernist bent, Runge’s description of his project as the quest for a new landscape painting sounds deceptively traditional until we notice the radical redefinition of the terminology. Landscape no longer denotes a genre but a novel form of signification. Only this new meaning explains why Runge counted Raphael’s Sistine Madonna among the products of the era’s total tendency toward landscape. Intonating a process of increasing abstraction, which announces formless rhythm as its actual theme, it gestures toward a future nonobjectivity.13 On the other hand, Runge’s protomodernism stopped short of setting form absolute or erasing allegory.14 To the contrary, it was precisely the arabesque’s fusion of an inherently processual nature with an essentially hieroglyphic core that Runge saw as the precondition for modernity’s new landscape.15

Children’s Shapes and Arabesque Modernisms Runge’s sophistication in all things arabesque reflected his intimate knowledge of the era’s avant-garde literature, and he could count many of Romanticism’s poetic pioneers among his friends. Runge was an avid reader of Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Sternbald’s Wanderings), Ludwig Tieck’s 1798 landmark of the German Romantic novel, and had honed his skills in order to bring together the mystical, poetic and even whimsical in his illustrations for Tieck’s 1803 Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter, an anthology of medieval songs of courtly love.16 The partnership of poet and painter had produced “the rare but delightful spectacle of the interaction of two arts, in harmony and without servitude” that August Wilhelm Schlegel had first conjured up with such fervor in his review of John Flaxman’s outline drawings (see figure 3.1).17 Inspired by the Englishman’s example, Runge even plotted “to write a novel or else a story told through lots of images.”18 In light of Runge’s collaborative experience and mystic energy, it is truly puzzling why Brentano could not lure him into ornamenting his yet unfinished cycle of mystic poems, the Romanzen vom Rosenkranz (Romances of the rosary), dedicated by the increasingly religious poet to the Virgin Mary.19 Brentano had no doubt that Runge’s arabesques would reach the critical potential and evocative fullness of their literary sibling. One wonders why the artist did not share this confidence. After all, Runge’s “four hieroglyphic representation of the times of year in arabesque form” had become, as Ernst Förster reported in 1860, “for artists and scholars, for poets and philosopher a constant stimulus for interpretation, without . . . even Goethe and Schelling having succeeded in lifting the veil fully.”20 To which Tieck added that “it is easier to write a book about these four remarkable sheets than to say something sufficient in a few words.”21 The modern scholar might agree. Sufficient or not, a brief description of the Morning’s glory must nonetheless suffice to illuminate the cycle’s mechanism to produce meaning through a system of dualities (of negating, complementing, contrasting).

Structure as Form and Symbol System Day dawns in all its glory, Runge exclaimed to his beloved brother, and added in ekphratic enthusiasm a symbolic color scheme to his exposition of the prints’ blackand-white aesthetic (see figures 11.2 and 11.3).22 His letter thus evoked a sense of iridescent brilliance as Venus appears as the morning star and “the light dispels color.”23

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In contrast to the attention lavished on this vision, indeed realized not much later in paint, it seems rather curious that the lengthy exposition would not mention the arabesque borders, so vital and then still in the making, with a single word. Once finished and added as the arabesque frame of an arabesque project, the Times’s ornamental bands drew attention to the composition’s stylized geometry and symmetric orientation. As with most organic arabesques, the framing tendrils grow from a clear point of origin, here located at the exact center of the page’s bottom strip. In Morning, this source is an ancient symbol of eternity wrapped around the mystic emblem of the Urfeuer, the primordial fire: an Ouroboros serpent entwined around two inverted and crossed torches.24 As thick smoke spreads from the flickering torches across a shimmering body of water, the world’s primordial elements (fire and water) unite, just as Runge’s revered philosopher, the sixteenth-century mystic Jakob Böhme, had envisioned. At the same time, two children with Psyche wings emerge from the billowing clouds, a boy and a girl, mankind’s first couple and emblems of our souls, indeed, of the souls of all life. Turning and twisting, the genii rush across the rippling surface, with its cover of broad lotus leaves, toward the male genii perched in each corner upon the rims of the plants’ opened calyxes. Pointing with one hand to the pistils of these ornamental floats, each of them holds the stem of a lily in the other, which then rises, one on each side, in forceful uprightness until their blossoms wither midway, in the process birthing yet another child, another life, another new beginning, another even more glorious lily. In the design’s upper corners, these flowers end up as the divine cushions of two angels who kneel in prayer, their arms slung around their own breasts in a gesture of rupture and pious devotion. Heavenly creatures, they have nonetheless cast down their gaze, for they do not dare to lay eyes on the blinding image of the sun, surrounded by a gloriole of cherubs, and the holy name that emanates from its golden surface. The evocation of the Creator God as life’s ultimate destination thus gives the visual structure its direction. All is upward movement, all mirror image, all unwavering straight forms and mathematically precise configurations. Runge took great care in the construction of the Times’s dualities. They form a systematic matrix formalized in the prints’ cogent structure of inside and outside, frame and framed, ornament and ornamented. As these dualities are now put into motion as dialogue and dialectical sublimation, the prints’ cyclical configuration initiates further multiplication of formal relations and symbolic readings through a continuous interplay of juxtapositions and oppositions. Importantly, none of these represent fixed entities. Instead, they function like a leitmotif (or mathematical equation), geared toward free-association and never-ending variations. Underlying this focus on the project’s processual qualities was an ambitious attempt to realize the Romantic ideal of “endless plenitude in infinite unity” in (and as) the cycle’s structure.25 This observation brings us back to my initial query whether Runge’s artistic arabesque indeed succeeded in enacting the critical potential and evocative fullness of its literary correlate. To answer this question, we must turn to a central aspect of Runge’s dialectical and analogical thinking: the use of symmetry, regularity, and mathematics to harness the dark side of the arabesque’s imaginative potency. The cycle’s geometric layout is not merely the axis of abstraction, but an abstraction that, in turn, stores and releases the design’s allegorical potency.26 Nor does stylization function only as a means of making form autonomous, of freeing it from the configuration’s figurative elements. Instead, symmetry and regularity, abstraction and stylization also function as means of curtailment. Under Runge’s pencil, the arabesque assumes an apotropaic dimension.

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Devil’s Stuff For Runge, the arabesque was the only artistic principle sufficiently mobile (at least at this particular moment in time) to express the fullness and multiplicity of his artistic imagination. Enthusiastically, he proclaimed that the “thousand figures and shapes and . . . mellifluous images” inside him “could only be executed through arabesques.”27 As “fantasy’s music,” only the arabesque could retain that element of infinite flow, of unlimited affect and continuous effect, capable of producing, analogous to music and in the words of his admirer Joseph Görres, a fluid, in its dramatic expressivity flexible “true reflection” of ideas.28 For all its promises, however, the arabesque was not without its threats. Beneath Runge’s excitement about the parergon’s expressivist promise lingered an equally strong anxiety about its inherent dangers, about losing oneself in that never-ceasing maelstrom of endless ideas and boundless figments of the imagination. We are reminded of Albrecht Dürer’s anxieties about the dark recesses of fantasia. Romantic and Renaissance man agreed.29 If completely devoid of self-regulation, the arabesque would drive artists and audiences mad. By 1803, when Philipp Otto Runge wrote to his brother Daniel about his vision of the morning star, the expansion of the arabesque from continual spread to a means of aesthetic containment (capable of structuring the generative force behind its own growth) had become something of a commonplace.30 Yet this ordering grid laid upon a form grown wild (to come back to a core idea of my deliberations) took on an entirely different magnitude in the visual arts, where the gaze may perceive an entire system at once, where structure, order, and symmetry do not unfold in sequence but simultaneously, do not unfold in the tempo of reading word after word but are presented to our mind at one glance, in one instance, in a split second. The perceptual effect of Runge’s symmetric stylization is one of stasis; as such, it counteracts, even undermines, the processual element inscribed into his quintessentially Romantic conception of the arabesque on the visual level. In Runge’s laboratory, allegory was the alchemical agent that transformed fixed meaning into boundless plenitude. In this sense, Runge’s allegory is emphatically Romantic, allegory in an expanded field, serving as the catalyst for the perpetual formation of ever-new associative connections. Later generations would posthumously add fuel to this process by supplementing Runge’s original equation with further extraneous material, be it textual (such as the artist’s copious notes, published in 1841 by his beloved brother) or visual (from sketches of details and individual motifs to mathematical construction drawings). Countering this mystic magic, symmetry and regularity are in place to tip the scale, for all their allegorical abstraction, toward the decorative side of Romantic ornamentation. Chaos yields to rule as the arabesque renounces subversive excess in favor of a more amenable, lighthearted form of associative play and modern stream of unconsciousness.

Scores Here a comparison with music suggests itself, not least since Runge himself modeled his design practice quite consciously on musical formats, as our “Symphonic Intermezzo” in part 6 will show in more detail. What interests us most in the current context is the underlying experiential analogy. The productive tension in the Times

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between structure (visual effect) and free-flowing associative play (ekphratic interpretation) repeats itself in the intrinsic tension between sheet music (reading) and music as performance (sensory stimulation). If “pure,” that is, instrumental music is the most associative, most imaginative, and freest medium of its age, as E. T. A. Hoffmann proposed in his pathbreaking piece of music criticism, the 1813 essay “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” it is so only when performed.31 Of course, professional musicians and music lovers might comprehend a composition’s structure solely by listening, yet ultimately, music as performance is emphatically noncorporeal and fluid, a progression of fleeting sounds which resists the tectonics and fixed shape of material bodies. A score, in contrast, is firm and schematic, and it seems hardly a coincidence that Runge, when referring to the symphony as structural principle, would delineate an arabesque score.32 Accordingly, the cycle’s entire compositional logic aims at preventing the imagination from getting lost in an erratic, never-ending process of constant proliferation, which would inevitably progress from a sense of liberating freedom to a state of paralyzing psychosis. As the carefully orchestrated upward movement of the framing arabesques gives fantasy (the artist’s as much as ours) direction and purpose, stylization is called upon to ban madness.

Growth in Varying Degrees of Wildness (Raphael versus Dürer) Runge’s strategies to harness the arabesque’s dark side relied heavily on an emulative practice, and in this sense the Times were, despite the formalist autonomy they achieved, still deeply anchored in the era’s historicist practices. Runge’s choice of model underscores his concern to regulate the arabesque’s propensity toward arbitrariness and excess: the Vatican loggia, still praised in the nineteenth century for their capacity “to reign in the affinity of fantasy to the adventurous.”33 Runge’s Raphaelism solves the conundrum why he remained skeptical about Brentano’s collaborative proposal and points to the expressive differences embodied by their respective emulative ideals. The poet’s belief in the critical potency of the artistic arabesque was nurtured by Albrecht Dürer, whose marginalia modeled the desired escalation of word–image relationships from “abbildend” (copying and imaging) to “in die Verzierung überphantasirend” (transcending it into fantastical ornamentation).34 Runge, in contrast, feared such über-fantasizing as perilous (rather than productive), as a gateway to a fatal abyss into which an unregulated imagination would toss its careless steward. His arabesque had thus to stay within the borders, to cite an encyclopedia entry from 1845, “observed in the best works of antiquity and the Raphael school.”35 Despite their mutual infatuation with the arabesque, Brentano and Runge could not have felt more differently when it came to questions of decorum, propriety, and the limits of a “capriciousness bred by capriciousness.”36 Naturally, this marked difference overshadowed and, in the end, precluded any possibility of painter and poet collaborating.

Opposites . . . Unmarried The era’s juxtaposition of Raphael and Dürer as contrasting examples of arabesque thinking adds a new dimension to their place in the German Romantic imaginary. In this instance, the two old masters did not, as so often, stand for the utopian marriage of opposites, which will engender a new synthesis and thus a future golden age of art. In this instance, they embodied complementary, even conflicting incarnations of

130 Turning the Page associative play at (or beyond) the margins of the accepted aesthetic regimes. A collaboration between a poet and a painter of Brentano’s and Runge’s stature would have promised an exciting negotiation of these two decidedly individualized arabesque techniques and ornamental logics. If realized, the immediate, physical juxtaposition of poem and illustration, of word and image, would have made palpable the formal conditions of radical über- versus strictly purposive fantasizing. The material interaction of poem and ornamentation on the same page might also have inspired Runge to articulate his intermedial conception of art within an arabesque framework. Like his Romantic peers and fellow artists (think Nazarenes again!), Runge hailed poetry as art’s guiding principle. Yet, in contrast to a Clemens Brentano or Friedrich Schlegel, the painter did not equate the poetic with the unsayable. To the contrary, he believed in the concreteness of verbalized thought and articulating artistic intention in words. Consequently, he advocated writing as a means to keep alive the “the poetic furor of the first initial enthusiasm” during the execution of a particular object.37 This understanding of artistic practice is at odds with the insistence on mediumistic purity and the image’s self-evidence key to modernism and Runge’s modernist appropriation. Take, for example, Alfred Lichtwark. The pioneering museum director of fin-desiècle Hamburg believed that Runge’s “outline engravings from which his contemporaries gained knowledge of the Times of Day” provided “only a wholly inadequate, if not simply false image of his intention.”38 Blaming the prints for an erroneous focus on the project’s ideational content, Lichtwark simply preferred the paintings (see figure 11.3).39 Only the chromatic realization of Runge’s concept in paint provides “an idea of the artist’s essential objectives,” he insisted, and added: “What remains entirely incomprehensible in the empty lines of the contours has gained life here and significance. Everything has become color, light, air, and space.”40 This comment would have struck the master of the Times himself, regardless of his chromatic fantasies when writing about his black-and-white inventions, as quite peculiar. After all, Runge simply took it for granted that any true artwork would need further verbal explication. How else would it achieve legibility and steer its overall reception? The artwork had neither to be autonomous nor to rely on the materials’ selfexpressive purity. Eager, Runge searched for a “poetic supplement” and was thrilled when none other than Ludwig Tieck volunteered.41 Unfortunately, nothing came of this sympoetic dream, and the artist’s own attempt at an accompanying sonnet never progressed beyond a rudimentary state.42 The verses he did produce were problematic on their own terms, and Tieck wondered whether Runge’s lyrical efforts completely missed their mark for being even more arcane and more mysterious than the images themselves. Worried about the negative effect of such opacity, the poet proposed instead “to begin the whole thing with a rather understandable, almost indifferent dialogue.”43 Runge’s lyrical composition could then follow next, in the spirit of an experiment, “so that the poem would generate the representation of the possibility of such images, or the craving for the possibility thereof, in the reader’s mind.”44 Ultimately, however (and somewhat surprisingly), Tieck’s criticism would take a mediumspecific turn. Ludwig Tieck felt that his friend, against his best intentions, had allowed fantasy to lead him too deeply into the realm of arbitrariness. Symbol and allegory slipped all too often into overly capricious notations, especially in the marginal drawings, as if their draftsman had forgotten about “appearance in itself and as such.”45 In other words,

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Tieck carefully differentiated between the ineffable power self-generated by the object and its theoretical, verbally graspable conception. Runge, on the other hand, conflated poetic furor and the artwork’s ideational core. His arabesques consciously flouted, as Christian Scholl has convincingly argued, the aesthetic dictum that a picture must primarily take effect through sight and perception.46 The modernist medium-specific rebalancing of Runge’s project is intriguing, and more could be said about its significance for decoding and cataloguing the Romantic arabesque. Instead, I want to pursue the challenges posed by the material oneness of drawn line and formed letter pressed, side by side, onto a tightly confined space. The envisaged illustrations of Brentano’s Romanzen vom Rosenkranz (Romances of the rosary) were the closest Runge came to confronting this challenge, which put pressure on all his arabesque designs.47 After all, the necessity of a commentary—whether highly poetic or more pedantic and explanatory—always hovered at the edges of his inventions, and not just in printed form. Several of his paintings, too, included text (even if only as the briefest of lines). On the other hand, not even these fully rounded, autarkic pictures engaged a text as aggressively as Clemens Brentano had demanded; in short, they did not address the pertinent question of how the distinct logics of the two competing arabesque techniques—Raphael’s organized fantasizing and Dürer’s überphantasieren—would play out in the creation of a unified printed page. What a shame! For only in the direct confrontation of these various expressive modes and media, in their transformation into a unified idiom born from the ink’s blackness and the printing press’s leveling effect, could the visual arabesque have fathomed the depth of its textual dependency.

Silenced Poetry To put my thesis differently: Only the printed text puts up enough resistance so as to compel the most radical artistic arabesque to explore its fantastic potential to the fullest. In this sense, I could not disagree more with Lichtwark’s preference for color over line, painting over print. After all, the arrival of color only propelled the composition further away from the arabesque’s double codification as a medium of simultaneous seeing and reading and thus aggravated the lack of verbalization. Hence, a sense of loss and lack is inscribed into Runge’s Small Morning in oil when it is exhibited as a stand-alone picture, an impression reinforced by the posthumous cutting into pieces.48 Conceived as part of a total work of art, the canvas feels like an isolated, displaced fragment. As such, it condenses the limitations of the visual medium to speak to (and with) its audience. Against the white wall of the modern museum, the painted Morning gives shape to the hieroglyph’s (unavoidable) failure to become silent poetry. The beauty of the image’s pivotal hieroglyph, a light-footed, airborne female nude of iridescent pearliness, only sharpens the somewhat pained awareness of the picture’s muteness. This is true for its unharmed counterpart as well. Venus has returned (figure 11.3). Pure aesthetic judgment must yield to a yearning for purposiveness, as Beauty personified has once again displaced the object of disinterested delight. Yet Venus has not simply returned. She has returned in changed form. As she soars from the ocean waves of her youthful creation across a mysterious light-filled landscape, she is reborn, still a goddess, but so much more now, also Aurora, also the mother of God, both pagan and Christian, aesthetic mark and symbolic figure, pure light and embodied color, ancient and yet emphatically unclassical.

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Figure 11.3 Philipp Otto Runge, Small Morning, 1808. Oil on canvas, 109 × 85.5 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. © photo: Elke Walford; bpk / Hamburger Kunsthalle / Art Resource, NY.

Compared to Botticelli’s Venus, who had to step aside for our contemplation of her intricate crustacean carrier, Runge’s young girl is refreshingly real.49 Plump, with large feet, substantial hips, and a soft, round belly, she has nothing of the ethereal

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otherworldliness of her Renaissance sister. Perhaps her features lack idealized proportions, are a bit too round and rosy, a bit too Rococo, but they glow in a disarming naïveté and hold our gaze with a purity of expression free of any deceit or false coyness. Runge’s Venus is an utterly modern young woman, yet one with a long and complex lineage. Her body doubles as a space where an expansive system of multiplied meanings solidifies, a system that, by filling the individual iconographic sign with layers upon layers of possible readings, sets out to break open traditional strategies of pictorial syntax. This revisionist act has one overarching goal: to create a structure of deepest hieroglyphic meaning. Ultimately, however, this innocent body cannot contain this allegorical charge, not least due to mediumistic limitations. Even more than engraving, painting (as medium) proved unable to usurp (or rebirth) the textual dimension of the Romantic arabesque. In all its coloristic glory, the painted image remains tied to a pictorial sign system, which can create its own text (even if defined in the broadest metaphorical sense) merely on a metonymical level. Iconography triumphs, and the pictorial sign yearns for discursivity. Only when Romantic art finally shed some of its avant-garde ambitions did the modern marginalia finally take on (and take over) the text as a kind of pliable plastic mold. When Brentano’s vision of überfantasizing, of überphantasieren, finally became reality, it did so in a comedic mode.

Notes 1. The cabinet commemorated the patron’s diplomatic travels to Brazil; interior architecture and furniture by Alexis de Chateauneuf; wall design by Erwin Speckter; see Bertsch and Beyer, “Von Runge,” 95–97. 2. Runge to Friedrich Christoph Perthes, Dresden, September 6, 1802, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:152. 3. Bertsch and Beyer, “Von Runge,” 88. 4. Ibid., 93–95. 5. Runge to his brother Daniel, January 30, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1:33. 6. Runge to Friedrich August von Klinkowström, May 11, 1800, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:383. 7. Runge to Friedrich Christoph Perthes, September 6, 1802, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:152. 8. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske; see also Reinisch, Poesie, 117. 9. Runge to his father, January 13, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1:29. 10. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 51. 11. Runge to his father, January 13, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1:29. 12. Runge to his father, February 13, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:200–201. Runge himself used the term Leimrute (lime twig), a kind of trap that uses birdlime applied to a twig to snare small birds. For the idea of “Edenic name-giving,” see Grewe, The Nazarenes, 140–42, and 323n37. 13. For the idea of protomodernist abstraction, see Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich; see further Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 46. 14. While Scholl (Romantische Malerei) argues for the persistent importance of allegory in Runge’s work, Lange (Das bildnerische) has launched a radically modernist reading of the artist’s work. 15. Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich; Bertsch and Beyer, “Von Runge,” 102. 16. See Grewe, Painting the Sacred, 87–89 and fig. 2.7; see further Tieck, Minnelieder and McGillen, “The Romantic Editor.” 17. See A. W. Schlegel, “Über Zeichnungen,” 203. 18. Runge to his brother Daniel, December 31, 1799, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:38. 19. Composed between 1804 and 1812, the extensive, highly spiritual cycle of romances dedicated to an apocryphal Marian legend—a total of twenty-six hundred four-line stanzas in rhyming trochaic verse—was only published posthumously in 1852. See Afifi, Brentano/

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Runge, and Pravida, “Randzeichnung”; for Brentano’s continuous Runge reception later in life see MacLeod, “Brentano’s Remains.” Förster, Geschichte, 5:537. Tieck, Gesammelte Novellen, 5:27. Runge to his brother Daniel, January 30, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1:31. Ibid. Traeger, Philipp Otto Runge, 46–47. Büttner, Peter Cornelius, 2:80. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 51. Runge to Friedrich Christoph Perthes, December 19, 1802, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:187. Bertsch and Beyer, “Von Runge,” 88. See chapter 5 in this book. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 45–46. Hoffmann, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music.” For the integration of actual scores into arabesque prints, see Grewe, “The Lithographer’s Mark.” Encyclopedia entry from 1845, in Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 114. Brentano to Runge, January 21, 1810, in Brentano, Briefe, 205; see also chapter 5 in this book. Quoted in Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 114. Ibid. Daniel Runge, “Triumph des Amors,” in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1:219. Lichtwark, Herrmann Kauffmann, 38. Ibid.; for a beautifully illustrated discussion of Runge’s paintings and prints, see the exhibition catalogue Bertsch, Gaßnerm, and Howoldt, Kosmos Runge. Lichtwark, Herrmann Kauffmann, 38. Runge to his brother Daniel, March 10, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:203. Scholl, “Anschauung.” Runge to his brother Daniel, June 12, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:219. Ibid. Tieck, Gesammelte Novellen, 5:27. Scholl, Romantische Malerei; idem, “Anschauung” (2009). See chapter 5 in this book. Bertsch, Gaßnerm, and Howoldt, Kosmos Runge, section 6, “Kosmische Dimensionen— Die ‘Zeiten’ und die beiden Fassungen des ‘Morgen,’” 137–205, cat. nos. 88–156. For Botticelli, see fig. 8.2.

12 The Poet’s Pencil On Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim

At the center is a lack. The text cannot express itself fully; for completion, it needs a visual supplement. This, at least, was Clemens Brentano’s conviction, thus his promise to Philipp Otto Runge that his “annotating marginalia will seem the main point and my text a meager commentary.”1 Yet the poet’s plan to have his Marian romances embellished and elaborated by a set of mystic arabesques was more than an expression of disbelief in the text’s self-sufficiency. It testified to Brentano’s awareness of his romances’ material future, their impending objecthood as printed matter, and thus of the sensible edge bestowed upon contemporary models of writing and authorship by the era’s print revolution. This was particularly true for Schlegel’s theory of the novel and its role as the embodiment of the Romantic age, which soon expanded from matters of form and style to the physical shape, dissemination, and availability of the concrete thing (the novel as book). At this latest juncture between the labor of theory and technology’s workings, authors and artists now turned a new page.

Changing Places: A Theory Brentano was not alone in his supplemental fantasies. From the arabesque’s inception, a hardly suppressed discomfort about the insufficiency of the word alone lurked beneath Romanticism’s most ambitious poetic experiments. Yet Brentano was among the few in whom this discomfort exteriorized itself in an irrepressible urge to fulfill these fantasies themselves and supplement their poetic creations with their own designs. This dilettante impulse inevitably reinforced the impulse to take refuge in traditionally lower-ranked genres (such as book illustration) when, as we have seen, their higher-ranked cousins (above all, or course, painting and fresco) proved ill-equipped either to materialize the literary arabesque’s complex theoretical implications or to bestow physical form upon its musing on the relationship between observing and reading as two different yet related modes of looking. In turn, and not surprisingly, the arabesque would also provide a matrix for the artist-as-author, and we will look later (again) at the poignant example of Wilhelm Schadow, who would search for words when blindness had temporarily robbed him of pencil, pen, and brush.2 Exploring this process of changing places—of poets becoming illustrators and painters becoming authors—brings us now to the act of turning the page as both metaphor and physical activity. DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-16

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Modernizing the Medieval As we turn the page, we return to the vital notion of mixture, of a synesthetic synthesizing of all genres and artistic media that, having nurtured the evolution of an arabesque aesthetic, now enticed some of Romanticism’s literary pioneers to dabble in the visual arts, with Clemens Brentano being a particularly fascinating specimen of such intermedial crossover. We thus may take a closer look at this man who has already played such an important role in our story. Even within a fecund climate of avant-garde experimentation, Brentano stood out. Born in 1778, the budding writer developed such a radical version of the arabesque project that it even stunned, as we might recall, the arabesque’s mastermind, Friedrich Schlegel, and his circle of Jena Romantics. At the dawn of the new century Brentano’s breakthrough novel Godwi would conjure up an image of the self (of the I) so hopelessly subjective, broken up, and fragmented it would woo later generations with its precocious modernism. In 1802, however, it left readers despairing over the utter lack of any hope for redemption. Godwi killed off even the Romantic belief in the healing powers of poetry.3 Brentano’s Marian cycle of rosary romances, however, points to a dramatic shift in his inner life. After a deep spiritual crisis, the almost nihilistic worldview of his youth yielded to a Catholic awakening and a surprising mysticism. This, however, changed nothing about his infatuation with the arabesque or his desire to translate into poetic form what artists like an Albrecht Dürer or Philipp Otto Runge had conjured up in fluid pen lines. Brentano’s preoccupation with distinct visual models was the concrete, material side of a notably broad conception of the arabesque, which ranged from an understanding as a purely autonomous, exteriorized form of meaning production (one wholly lacking in content) to a socially motivated—and in this sense heteronymous—expression and thus indispensable framework to enable communal interaction and a deeply moral lifestyle.4 The poet’s arabesque mode encompassed this entire expanse. Consequently, it always combined the spiritual, the conceptual, and the material, fostering a creative exchange between poetological and artistic problems beyond matters of text formation. A seminal testimony to this intermedial spirit is the seminal collection of old German songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), published in three volumes between 1806 and 1808, for which he, like his coeditor Achim von Arnim, designed a frontispiece.5 In his contribution, Brentano tackled the daunting task of creating a visual equivalent to the particular mode of writing and editing at work in what was de facto a compilation of various sources: a mode best described as modernizing medieval poetry.

The Boy’s Magic Horn Opening the cover of the second volume, the reader encounters an enchanted world full of lighthearted imagination and wanderlust. The Rhine, which stretches in front of us as a bucolic riverscape, soon transforms into a fairyland, as an irrational contortion of size and space creates the kind of wonderland all too familiar from Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole (figure 12.1).6 The design’s core is an ornate horn, which, decorated with bands of shallow arcades and elaborate turrets, has become shelter for a merry band of fierce knights and swift riders, elegant damsels and armed watchmen. Mythical animals populate the foreground, watched over by another turret, while the horn’s spacious bend provides a splendid view of Heidelberg Castle. Two inscriptions frame the doings of the frolicking crowd. On the right, the words

The Poet’s Pencil

Figure 12.1 Ludwig Emil Grimm, after Clemens Brentano, The Magic Horn, 1808. Etching, 20.3 × 12.4 cm (page). Frontispiece of Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, vol. 2 (1808). Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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138 Turning the Page “o mater dei,” incised in bold Fraktura letters beneath the horn’s dome-like lid, give expression to the author’s growing Marian piety. On a banner on the left, the words “drink aus” (Drink up!) call for a very different kind of sentiment, one more in tune with the figures’ merrymaking and the carefree attitude of the young maiden in folk costume, who, obviously undisturbed by the exclamation’s frivolous spirit, holds the banner with unflinching firmness. Perched high on top of the whimsical finial, which caps the horn’s tapering end, this lovely lady of the Rhine also commands attention for her disproportionately large scale, which makes her artful support and its inhabitants look like children’s toys. The banner’s buoyant appeal is important for another reason as well. It draws attention to the original function of the fanciful contraption, which is not, as Achim von Arnim had wrongly suggested, a wind instrument but a drinking horn.7 Although such a notable display of ignorance was not free of embarrassment, Arnim’s mistake did capture a vital aspect: the scene’s celebratory sensibility. It is as if we can almost hear the laughter of the joyous crowd, the neighing of the horses, the gentle tunes of the instruments, and the tweeting of the birds, all ringing out together from the arcades on the right and the copious vines above. Indeed, a musical spirit seems to breathe through the entire composition, a generative sound calling form into being, from the melodious curve of the aristocratic table ornament to the swaying tendrils of vine and ivy, which, serving the print’s extravagant fowl as welcome resting posts, grow in tight loops around the two slender, fluted batons flanking the picturesque scene. The higher these magic wands grow, the lighter they become, until they finally open up into an airy canopy that provides the enchanted frame for the title’s equally animated flourishes.

On the Arabesque as Biological Model Brentano’s design signifies three core principles of the work it prefaces: First, the Wunderhorn’s reputedly genuine folk songs were the result of crafty reworking and modernization, just as the frontispiece was not an authentic reproduction of a medieval original but a modern bricolage. Second, the consistent choice of strikingly ornate Baroque elements for the frontispiece’s design points to the collection’s make-believe medievalism; much of its content did not date from the Middle Ages but rather from the seventeenth century (although one must grant that the finished product often preserved the melodic, spontaneous phrases and meters characteristic of old German folk song). Third, the arabesque harmonizes the composition’s diverse components and textures, achieving a unified impression of original fragment and modern reworking (rather than marking the seams between old and new). The same mode guided Brentano’s editorial process—in stark contrast to Arnim’s additive technique, which clearly pronounced the endeavor’s nature as willful collage. When Brentano attacked his friend and coeditor for it, Arnim insisted, with his typical selfconfidence, that “this is the allure of these . . . formations with their most glaring contrasts of centuries.”8

The Boy’s Magic Concert The jarring collage of clearly identified objets trouvés that Armin delivered for the compilation’s third volume showcases a decidedly different understanding of the

The Poet’s Pencil

Figure 12.2 Ludwig Emil Grimm, after Achim von Arnim, Music-Making Couple, 1808. Etching, 20.3 × 12.4 cm (page). Frontispiece of Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, vol. 3 (1808). Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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Figure 12.3 Caspar Heinrich Merz, after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, The Madhouse, 1835. Etching and engraving, 50 × 63.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1985-52-42124.

arabesque (figure 12.2). The central motif, a couple engaged in music-making, is a quite truthful copy of an engraving by the fifteenth-century printmaker Israhel van Meckenem. Arnim lifted the fanciful harpist and her lute-playing companion from their original spatial context (a simple if not unimpressive interior typical of an affluent Northern Renaissance residence) and transposed them onto the kind of open balcony so fashionable in nineteenth-century architecture. In the process, the poet reversed the copied detail and added a parrot, which, sitting oddly on a raptor’s post between the duet, raises a ring with his right claw. The exotic bird, too, is a copy, again after a fifteenth-century print, this time by a Wenzel von Olmütz. These medieval citations are held together by a neo-Gothic frame, the author’s unifying contribution and his only original invention. Arnim’s additive process produced what might be best described as an emphatic pastiche, one that programmatically flaunted a mosaic (rather than synthesis) of past and present, of medieval model and contemporary historicist invention. It seems only befitting the print’s outspokenly anachronistic nature that its main motif—the musicmaking couple—is itself a copy, which the prolific Meckenem had produced after a lost drawing (or drypoint) of the so-called Housebook Master.9 This medieval moment

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of appropriation is vital to the print’s logic. Like a sedimentary rock, the Romanticmedievalist arabesque pronounces, originality arises from a layering of various emulative moments.

On the Arabesque as Collage Technique Arnim’s frontispiece is noteworthy for yet another reason. Leaving the specific details of its composition aside, it speaks to an essential aspect of the arabesque that is, however, neglected when it comes to pictorial representation: the nature of the arabesque as a compositional technique and mode of bricolage. In the literary domain, this dimension of the arabesque has been taken as a given. In the visual arts, however, the understanding of the grotesquarabesque has tended to be curtailed by a focus on form, and form alone. This focus has resulted in an almost exclusive association of the Romantic arabesque in art with a specific kind of design—organic webs, rampant meanderings, and unbridled serpentine lines—in short: with nature-like wild growth (see figures 2.1 and 11.2a–d). In the minds of most art historians (and probably most post-Romantic practitioners as well), the artistic arabesque denotes the motif of tendril and scroll, which undergoes endless metamorphoses as it moves, just as it does in Raphael’s loggia or Runge’s Times of Day, from the organic to the inorganic, the figurative to the abstract, the purely ornamental (pleasing to the eye through form alone) to the eloquent grotesque (captivating through its monstrous transformations)—and back! This exclusive focus on the arabesque’s organic version has obscured another use, namely as a technique of fragmentation and reassemblage. This function of the artistic arabesque as a medium of collage has rarely been noticed, even though it was precisely this application that lived off key practices of the literary arabesque and its theory. A notable exception to this oblivion is Werner Busch’s 1985 book on the arabesque, which dedicates almost a third of its discussion to Wilhelm Kaulbach’s The Madhouse (figure 12.3).10 Designed in 1830 and engraved five years later, under Samuel Amsler’s supervision, by Heinrich Merz, the composition shows a motley group of crazed people imprisoned in the courtyard of a lunatic asylum. The print seems rather out of place among the filigree works by Philipp Otto Runge and Eugen Napoleon Neureuther that Busch discusses shortly beforehand. After all, Kaulbach’s emphasis on the human figure and a shallow, stage-like setting seems to generate just another genre scene. However, as Werner Busch has convincingly argued, it is not. The inclusion of this Hogarthian moral tale in his story of the arabesque makes sense as soon as we see beyond (or perhaps better through) its formal characteristics—its style, figure types, and genre associations—and foreground the work’s structural principle instead: the arabesque logic of the print’s narrativity and satirical mindset. Compelling as it is, Busch’s daring interpretation has had few followers, another reminder that definitions of the arabesque in the visual arts still privilege appearance over conception. Yet, as the examples of Arnim and Kaulbach show, appearances can be deceptive.

Biological Growth, Bricolage, and the Encounter of Visual Resistance There is no denying that the visual arts define themselves, by their very nature, first and foremost in visual terms. In arabesque studies, this immanent and, we might

142 Turning the Page add, inevitable orientation toward form is responsible for the ongoing, unquestioned dominance of the biological model of rank growth over the more conceptual model of collage. Of course, modern art would break free from a paradigm that posited an intimate and unbreakable link between idea and form, theory and appearance, a link that seems to have vanished without a trace in such phenomena as nonobjective or conceptual art. However, it takes some effort and imagination to apply the lessons learned from these modern movements to the figurations of the Romantic era. In the case of the arabesque’s bricolage mode, its lack of visual specificity has obscured its very existence from practitioners and scholars alike. Another factor has contributed to this oversight. While the distinction between the arabesque’s biological and bricolage type is quite stark in the realm of art, it seems decisively less pronounced in the literary domain, where the novel’s textual fabric easily weaves them together. The same, of course, is true for the fusion of the grotesque and the arabesque, two traditions and two terms carefully parsed out vis-à-vis ornamental decorations, but rarely when literature is concerned. Married to the abstract word, the arabesque’s divergent qualities simply do not matter as much. The literary arabesque could live off a productive assimilation of various visual traditions without having to come to terms with the intrinsic variations in patterning that has put up aesthetic resistance to their visual amalgamation. Medium matters. Accordingly, collage and wild growth took on decidedly different forms (literally) in their textual and visual manifestations, a fact that, in turn, demands a refined critical vocabulary and expanded theoretical framework. Any sustained discussion of the pictorial arabesque (as espoused by German Romanticism) must take into consideration this intrinsic tension between conceptual core and concretization.

An Artist’s Literary Detour Not surprisingly, the conceptual challenge posed by the back and forth between literary and pictorial arabesque in Romantic culture is also vital to my reading of Wilhelm Schadow’s autobiographical novel of 1854, Der moderne Vasari: Erinnerungen aus dem Künstlerleben (The modern Vasari: Reminiscences of an artist life), as an arabesque. In particular, it is indispensable to tease out the role played by Julius Hübner’s illustrations, which at first glance seem to fit so poorly into an arabesque format (see figures 1.1, 1.2, 14.1, 14.2, 17.1, and 17.2). As self-contained comical vignettes, they shun visual metamorphosis and have little use for unkempt tendrils, scrolls, or any other kind of untamed pattern. As systematic interventions, interruptions, and ruptures of the printed text, Hübner’s designs are nonetheless utterly arabesque, I contend, if not visually then conceptually. Put differently, they are arabesque insofar as they play a vital role in constructing the book’s arabesque structure as a whole and securing the bricolage character of the printed object. As a result, the vignettes’ determining role for the book’s compositional logic and their genuine arabesque quality only become visible from a conceptual perspective. Despite its belatedness, Schadow’s Moderne Vasari embodies a captivating fusion of the two arabesque models at the heart of my discussion, the biological and the bricolage type. Yet this fusion is peculiar insofar as the text embodies the model of rank growth and ordered chaos while the illustrations create a system of intervention by fragmentation, and thus fall under the category of bricolage. Word and image change places, the text performing the visual and the visual performing an art of the concept.

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Schadow’s literary dabbling thus assumed its character as a Romantic novel by layering literary and pictorial arabesque, producing a late Romantic rewriting of the crazed modernist imaginations spread out in such novels grown wild as Brentano’s Godwi or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s autobiography of an unruly tomcat, Kater Murr. To some, the evocation of these uncontested landmarks of modernist literature might seem a rather bold move. Yet it is a move already performed by the painter’s contemporaries, and the reviews published within months of the novel’s premiere tended to construct precisely this genealogy.11 In this vein, I also argue for an intimate connection between Schadow’s finely manicured landscape, if you will, of the 1850s and the unkempt gardens and untamed wilderness of the early 1800s.

The Arabesque Takeover: On Eugen Napoleon Neureuther’s Ballads and Romances Before we enter the nostalgic world of a blind artist-author, however, we have to turn another page and join the laughter and pleasing chills of Eugen Napoleon Neureuther’s Randzeichnungen zu Goethe’s Balladen und Romanzen (Border illustrations to Goethe’s ballads and romances).12 Today almost exclusively known as a prolific illustrator, the son of a Bavarian court artist had first made a name for himself when he joined the workshop of Peter Cornelius in late 1825. He was assigned to the Glypyothek’s Hall of Heroes, where he painted floral swags and grotesque borders around Cornelius’s mythological frescoes. The involvement with the city’s new museum of classical antiquities, a pet project of the art-loving and newly crowned King Ludwig I, proved momentous.13 The academy director soon took a shine to his young assistant, allowed him to supply his own border designs, and, posing himself as a latter-day Raphael, even promoted Neureuther as the future “German Johann von Udine.”14 In the years to come, Neureuther would continue trying himself at oil and fresco, but with mixed results and little lasting recognition. Instead, he carved out a productive and highly influential career in areas considered minor by the academy. One was the applied arts, where Neureuther’s arabesque became a best-seller, from the porcelain realm of service sets, sturdy beer seidels, and faience stoves to the wider world of manufactured items, be they loomed tapestries and floor carpets or wooden chairs and metal tables. Appointed director of the royal porcelain manufactory at Nymphenburg in 1848, Neureuther colonized dinner tables and living rooms with an army of weird and wonderful creatures, often sweetly erotic and even more often fiercely folkloristic, beakers in goat form and drinking horns with Cupid-shaped holders, kissing couples on ornamental cups and powdery-colored maidens braiding their blonde curls on tall vases, which, part crater, part forest fantasy, seemed to have jumped right out of a Walt Disney fairy tale.15 Unfortunately, we will not have time to explore this delicious labyrinth of industrial goods, market shares, and historicist taste. Instead, another arena demands our attention: print-making. Here, too, Neureuther’s first impulse was patriotically Bavarian, and it seems hardly a coincidence that his commitment to illustration (itself a genre considered by his contemporaries as a volkstümliche Kunstform, as an art and an aesthetic rooted in folk tradition) went hand in hand with an exploration of the jolly type of yodeling folk song of Tyrolean descent that we hovered over before plunging into the decidedly less entertaining aesthetics of Immanuel Kant (see figure 8.1).16 Neureuther would later publish the results of his illustrative

144 Turning the Page research with great success, but he waited almost three years before he dared to show examples of his album Schnoderhüpfeln to Cornelius in 1828. The Nazarene nodded his consent, yet he recommended that “it might be better to illustrate classical poems” and referred the young man to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s copious work.17 Neureuther obeyed. Thus, let us now (nestled again into our winged chairs, the fire crackling) open Goethe’s illustrated ballads and give center stage to one of the era’s most fascinating practitioners of the Dürer tradition. Admittedly, Neureuther’s arabesques are less modernist than the exuberant mystic inventions of a Philipp Otto Runge. On the other hand, they were more influential, more ubiquitous, and more engaged with the word as printed presence than their famous godparent. While Runge’s flypaper still dreamt of architectural placement, Neureuther’s illustrations truly took on (and truly took over) the text as a kind of pliable plastic mold. Welcome to Romanticism’s most covert revolution!

Notes 1. Brentano to Runge, January 21, 1810, in Brentano, Briefe, 205; chapter 5 in this book provides a detailed discussion of this quote. 2. See Prologue and part 5, “Taming the Arabesque.” 3. Schwinn, “Godwi.” 4. Feilchenfeldt, “Brentanos Theorie,” 143. 5. See Arnim and Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and idem, “The Boy’s Magic Horn.” 6. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures. 7. Achim von Arnim to the collection’s publisher, Zimmer, on November 28, 1807, in Rölleke, “Clemens Brentanos arabeskes Verfahren,” 150. 8. Ibid., 147–50. 9. Snyder, The Renaissance in the North, 40. 10. For an analysis of the print’s position within the scientific and medical context of its time see Waldvogel, Wilhelm Kaulbachs. 11. See chapters 13 and 14 in this book. 12. For a succinct discussion of Neureuther’s graphic work in English, see Ittmann, “Neureuther”; see further Reinisch, Poesie. 13. For a discussion of the Bavarian king’s building projects, see chapters 8 and 9 in this book. 14. See Ludwig, Neureuther, 27–28, and Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 58; for Cornelius’s letter to king Ludwig I, November 8, 1828, see Förster, Peter von Cornelius, 2:443–44. 15. Neureuther was relieved of his post in 1857, after he failed to remedy the precarious state of affairs at Nymphenburg; Bauer, Neureuther. 16. Muthesius, “Meaningful, Entertaining, Popular and ‘Bavarian.’” 17. For the 1827 notes from Neureuther’s estate, see Ludwig, Neureuther, 13.

13 Turning the Page On Eugen Napoleon Neureuther

While weaving a web of meaningful connections around the Glyptothek’s Homeric frescoes, Eugen Napoleon Neureuther became entranced with Albrecht Dürer’s marginalia. Of course, Johann Nepomuk Strixner’s 1808 reproductions had already excited his teacher and mentor a decade earlier (see figures 5.3 and 9.1).1 Yet, in contrast to the earlier Romantic adaptations of the Renaissance idol, Neureuther’s explorations brought back an emphatic notion of script. In 1825, Dürer’s calligraphic curlicues made a first appearance in Neureuther’s work, pointedly in a self-portrait, where they embellish the Gothic lettering of the artist’s own name (figure 13.1).2 The choice of the calligraphic font Fraktura was as programmatic as the chosen neomedievalist style, which, with its crisp lines and Renaissance garb, would remain the only emphatically Nazarene self-realization in Neureuther’s oeuvre. Whether the drawing was a genuine expression of the young man’s self-image at this point in time or more cynically an attempt to ingratiate himself with Cornelius, his Nazarene master, is of little importance in this context. What counts is the obvious interest in the double function of the line as abstract ornament and meaningful configuration. In Neureuther’s 1825 Self-Portrait the graphite trace continues smoothly and without effort from the decorative flourishes to the penmanship of the Latin alphabet, from which several blackletter typefaces emerge, only to stop (and then continue) its magic by bringing to life the face’s contours. The material unity of these various marks emphasizes the self-generative power of drawing and, with it, the intimate analogy between ornamentation (decoration), realist figuration (illusionism), and the signifying power of an entirely nonobjective arbitrary character set (language). From now on, Neureuther’s work in ink would live off an evocative interplay between these three levels of communication.3

The Spider’s Web Interestingly enough, the element of script remained absent from Neureuther’s earliest lithograph, Times of Day (figure 13.2).4 Dated 1826, the print continued his exploration of a strictly linear graphic style, although in an aesthetic direction immediately abandoned afterward. Jam-packed with scrolls, tropical vegetation, allegorical figures, and mythological protagonists, the page spins across its entire surface a lacy fabric of motifs which, hardly differentiated in texture, leaves the gaze wandering around in search of a clear path. The composition’s emphatic symmetry and evenly spaced-out figures do little to diffuse the acute sense of a horror vacui created by DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-17

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Figure 13.1 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Self-Portrait, 1825. Pencil drawing with watercolor, black contouring and gold highlights, 17.2 × 15.4 cm. Lenbachhaus, Munich. © C.G. Boerner, Düsseldorf, Archives.

the tapestry-like design. Even the spiderweb at the bottom of the page is deceptive. At first glance it seems to accord with Werner Busch’s reading as the birthplace of “the entire sheet.”5 After all, it quite powerfully visualizes the metamorphosis from abstraction to figural concretization as the arabesque’s genetic principle.6 However, the notion of a spiderweb lacks the directional pattern evoked by the semantic fields of “source, origin, seedling,” nor does it possess the concreteness of a specific point of origin called for by Werner Busch as marker and hallmark of the modern illustrative

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arabesque.7 Instead of creating a root for organic growth, Neureuther’s spiderweb dissipates across the entire width of the paper, providing the soil rather than the seed for the overabundance of vegetation that springs up from this fertile ground of tangled-up swirls and scrivener’s scrolls. As such, it denotes not the design’s origins but its underlying mechanism, a mechanism once again located in the procreative function of the abstract line to generate various forms of figurations and readings, and doubles as a powerful metaphor: Beware of entanglement! Ever since Gutenberg printed his first Bible, fear of the demon in the press and a suspicion of the printmaker’s dark magic had been a common ingredient in the fascination with the new medium. Even more than three hundred years later, little had changed when it came to such anxieties.8 As if he had intuited Dürer’s own discontent with the dark recesses of fantasia, Neureuther made the dangers of the imagination a core subject in his own lithographic initiation. A cloud of swift swirls at the bottom conjures up a bewildering three-headed creature, part demonic beast, part exotic mask, part semi-elephant. This disoriented tricaput adds a menacing note to the image of the gentle maiden sleeping peacefully on the throne above. Here, in contrast to the print’s inspiration, Runge’s Times, a sinister subtext slumbers beneath the surface, which reminds us that Night is the mother not only of Sleep but of Death as well, and that the cousins of sweet dreams are nightmares. Indeed, it is hard not to see the owl (in contrast to her mistress wide awake and staring at us with hypnotic intensity) as a reminder of the warning, uttered by Francisco Goya with such lasting eloquence in 1799, that The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. As our gaze experiences an emotional roller-coaster ride, wandering innocently through a grove of beauty only to get caught in a musty, damp wilderness impatient to swallow whoever might dare to set a foot amidst its treacherous mangroves, Neureuther’s play with states of consciousness oscillates between euphoria and unease, leaving us spellbound. Whether enchanted dream or hypnotic nightmare, the print advertises its entangling quality in equal measures. Even the auratic Apollo, who bursts into the picture on his fiery four-horse chariot, cannot dominate this multilayered arabesque, not even in the page’s upper echelon. Indeed, the price for such Apollonian rationality and ideal beauty seems a precarious lack of substance. While the Greek god’s contours are exquisite in their gracious purity, they are too refined to gain optical weight. Disoriented by the design’s overall web, our gaze thus wanders aimlessly, going back and forth, up and down, caught between the hallucinatory fog of creaturely ornamentation and the emblematic outline of Neoclassicist norms. The allegories of Dawn, to the left, and Dusk, to the right, only complicate this aesthetic struggle. Their forceful movement to the left (and thus against the reading direction) propels us out of the picture while counteracting the circular rotation suggested by (and best suited for) the print’s cyclical theme.

Reappropriations Finished in 1826, the Times of Day were Neureuther’s first lithograph. With its overall design, the sheet was still a far cry from the skillful manipulation of perspective and scale upon which his reputation as one of Germany’s foremost illustrators would be built. It also lacked musical or poetic inspiration. The print is nonetheless vital to our account. First, it shows Dürer and Runge’s crucial meeting at the crossroads of a new illustrative tradition, and Neureuther’s self-conscious working through these two towering models is nowhere as palpable as here. Second, it is the only work on

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Figure 13.2 Joseph Prestele, after Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Times of Day, 1826. Pen lithography, 35.25 × 27.3 cm. Frontispiece of Martius, Nova genera et species plantarum, vol. 3 (1829). Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis, MO.

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paper that has been identified as part of the promotional samples sent to Goethe in 1828. Last but not least, it testifies, as the recent discovery of the plate’s ultimate use has unearthed, to the frequent reappropriation of arabesque designs by the period’s book culture. Copied by another Bavarian painter and lithographer, Joseph Prestele, Neureuther’s reinterpretation of Runge via Dürer ended up as a decorative title page for a multivolume publication of exotic plants from Brazil.9 This use, probably suggested by Prestele, who specialized in botanical subjects and signed his name to most of the plant lithographs in the Martius volumes, seems somewhat odd. The mystic and emphatically allegorical nature of Neureuther’s sultry fantasy has little in common with the scientific quality of the botanical plates, just as the black-and-white of the title page forms a strange contrast to Brazil’s coloristic splendor reproduced inside. If anything, Prestele’s faithful lithographic reproduction of the 1826 lithograph testifies to the porous nature between fact and fiction, science, myth, and the imagination so characteristic of a Romantic mindset. It also testifies to the instant success of Neureuther’s arabesques. This held true for their reception in Weimar.

“A Poet of Arabesques” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was pleased. The director of the Munich academy, Peter Cornelius, had just sent him a few sample illustrations by one of his Munich students, and the poet liked what he saw (see figure 13.2). We do not know exactly what had been sent, but I like to imagine how the elderly man could not suppress a cheerful smile as he looked down upon the chatty dance of death unfolding on a rather unkempt graveyard beneath his own poem of 1813 about revenants and a watchman, a stolen shroud and a skeletal dancer smashed to smithereens (figures 13.3 and 13.4).10 With verve, Neureuther’s arabesque captures the rich texture of Goethe’s ballad, generally counted among the poet’s finest: the vivaciousness of its imagery, the suspense and delightful change of pace, the tingling play with contrasts (humor/tragedy, horror/ drollery, reality/superstition) spiced up with the flavors of archaic forms, popular ballads, and folk poetry.11 Coupling a figurative, exuberantly narrative verso page with an almost abstract lineament on its recto counterpart, Neureuther’s pictorial solution repeated the poem’s compositional technique of effective juxtapositions. As we open the book to Goethe’s 1813 ballad “Der Todtentanz” (The dance of death), our attention is caught immediately by the large tower on the left, a strange chimera of Gothic finial, exposed spiral staircase, and oversized leaves, atop which a screaming warder is mercilessly attacked from below by his bony pursuer, who, robbed of his shroud, is angrily mounting the arabesque structure at breakneck speed, assisted by a dragon-like creature on the right which has materialized against the night sky from an ethereal cloud of pen warm-up. The energetic movement repeats itself in this abstract ornamentation on the recto page, where a few abstract arabesque strokes evoke a physical sense of the skeleton’s frightening climb up, up, up and its timely crash when the bell chimes one. In the preparatory folio drawings, Neureuther added the heat of color to the vibrant sensation of explosive motion (figures 13.5 and 13.6). The fiery spirit of the graveyard dance ignites imagery and script, which burst out of the frame onto the sheet’s plain paper, while the scroll on the recto page spirals and skips, rushes and sashays upward, entangling itself in elegant pirouettes and knotty loops, playful curls and determined S-curves, until

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Figure 13.3 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, verso, 1829. Lithograph, 33.5 × 20.5 cm (image), 41 × 28.6 cm (page). From Neureuther, Randzeichnungen zu Goethe’s Balladen und Romanzen, part 1 (1829), plate 10. Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL. Gift of Stephen and Elizabeth Crawford.

On Eugen Napoleon Neureuther

Figure 13.4 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, recto, 1829. Lithograph, 33.5 × 20.5 cm (image), 41 × 28.6 cm (page). From Neureuther, Randzeichnungen zu Goethe’s Balladen und Romanzen, part 1, plate 11. Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL. Gift of Stephen and Elizabeth Crawford.

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Figure 13.5 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, 1829. Pen in black ink with watercolor, 37 × 23.5 cm. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

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Figure 13.6 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, The Dance of Death, 1829. Pen in red and black ink over pencil, 37 × 23.2 cm. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

154 Turning the Page it reaches its climax and suddenly turns red. Burning bright, the flaming color seems to be fired up by the flock of crimson letters following its rapid ascent as well as they can, one initial hopping on top of the other, forming a skittish, twirling, slithering stack of letters, its own alphabet skeleton, a skeletal organism also strangely alive, also frighteningly driven by the raging desire to reach the top of the page at all costs—until the same chime which ends the skeleton’s gruesome climb (verso) also brings its written alter ego to a sudden halt (recto). That sound of the bell still hangs in the air as a last black line circles down, the stylish diagram of a body’s rapid descent, graceful as the pirouette of an Olympic diver, trembling with the suppressed agitation of a ballerina holding her most difficult pose, a suspended motion of turning back upon itself. As we approach the bottom, a contorted bag of bones tells us about the inevitable finale of this elegant death spiral. Goethe was more than pleased. Delighted, he praised “the witty poet of arabesques” for capturing so congenially the ballad’s “lyrical-epic character.”12 And while we might still have to consider “this artistic treatment,” Goethe mused, “as subservient,” it would display “a genial perfection and technical proficiency, which one wouldn’t have dreamt of.” The marginalia are “like a melody, which accompany each single poem in the most wondrous manner and open up, through an imaginary reality, new directives for the imagination.”13 Smitten by the “charming humoristic sheets,” Goethe urged the young draftsman to consider dissemination in lithography and indeed recommended him to the important publishing house of Cotta.14 Neureuther followed suit, and the result incited an alluring revolution of the genre. It did so for two reasons: content and a holistic conception of each page as overall effect. Goethe’s reaction is fascinating. In its first instance, it shows off the poet’s traditionalism as he tries to tame the illustrations’ magic by accentuating their accessory nature and status as a minor genre (comedy). Yet this instinctive reflex is immediately contradicted by his equally instantaneous recognition of the marginalia’s independent power over the imagination. He perceived Neureuther’s arabesque as a conversation among equals, as two media on par—and, astonishingly, he did not recoil. Evoking the notion of leitmotif (poem) and variation (drawing), Goethe implored Neureuther “to continue to compete so creatively with the poet, to facilitate his intentions and thus, through such loyal sympathy and engagement, please and reward him.”15 Whatever lingering discomfort Goethe felt about the drawings’ autarky was shooed away by stating the obvious: that as far as content is concerned, marginalia always riff off the poems. Put at ease by Neureuther’s finely tuned sensibility toward a ballad’s tone or the intonation of a romance, Goethe felt generous and welcomed the new marginal drawings as an aesthetically pleasing exercise in ekphrasis.

The Copied Word The young draftsman was not the first to illustrate Goethe’s work without the poet’s participation or prior permission. Cornelius’s medievalist feast, his 1816 Faust cycle, was a glorious precedent for such independent adaptation (see figure 9.1). Yet Neureuther was the first to work up individual poems, not scenes from Goethe’s dramas or novels. The new choice of content went hand in hand with a programmatic annulment of the divorce of marginalia and text performed so powerfully in Strixner’s Dürer (see figure 5.3). Much was at stake in this reversal, as demonstrated by Neureuther’s masterful manipulation of his chosen medium, lithography. Of course, this particular choice of medium was not least an homage to Strixner, who had resorted to the same novel printing technique (if for different reasons). Driven

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by the desire to capture the essence and fluidity of Dürer’s expressive drawing style, the older printmaker had opted for the most advanced means to reproduce faithfully the original gestural stroke of an artist; Neureuther now pushed this interest further. He wanted to unite line and letter as two different kinds of marks, as two forms of scribbling, of calligraphy and handwriting. As he inscribed the act of copying a poem by hand into the process of drawing an illustrative annotation, he repositioned the genre illustration and prepared for a takeover of the image as the dominant element in structuring the viewer’s poetic perception. Neureuther’s dazzling move acted on the contemporary obsession with reliving the artist’s virtuosity by tracing the original gestural stroke. Although such an act of presentification was, ultimately, mere illusion, the young illustrator ingeniously harnessed its energy, pushing its parameters, quite suddenly, from the drawn line to the carefully formed letter. This, in turn, produced a heightened awareness of the text’s own materiality, of the physical properties of the printed image (that is, of the text), and of the copyist’s role in conjuring up the thoughts captured in this genii’s bottle, the written word. In the Randzeichnungen zu Goethe’s Balladen und Romanzen, marginal drawing and poem no longer merely embrace each other but intertwine intimately.16 Each mark—whether line or letter, punctuation or abstract lineament, font or object—is a product of the artist’s labor, and this fact matters to the pages’ interpretation. It certainly mattered, as his preparatory drawings suggests, to Neureuther’s understanding of his practice, which reveal a keen sense of the aesthetic effect and conceptual implications of his overall design process. Neureuther rightfully saw in Goethe an impulse that already drove the collecting activities of the Brothers Grimm or the obsession with Minne and medieval poetry that had seized Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim: the passion for something archaic, raw, natural. Here, it meant a passion for the Volkslied (popular song). Of course, such naïveté reborn had itself to be a product of artifice, and Neureuther’s imagery reveals as much (see figure 8.1). His line does not make itself invisible, does not pretend to be what it is not; it happily lays bare its workings, turning in front of our eyes from abstract scroll into illusion (here a mouse, there the gnarled root of a tree), conjuring bodies out of nothing, bodies still part blank page, part convincing human being, like the Erlking’s supernatural daughters, who gain more and more bodily concreteness as they move toward the main storyline (but away from the body of the text) and become fully embedded in nature’s lush undergrowth (see figure 13.9). The self-reflexivity of such a mark necessarily unveils the representational strategies it employs, lays open the mechanism of making a contemporary folkloric image, of adapting the Volkslied for the present, tells us that both arise from an aesthetics located between sensorial concreteness and ideal abstraction.17 Carefully staging the drawn mark in its twofold capacity as illusionist figuration and abstract self-referential ornament, Dürer’s heir thus added a poetological meta-level not available through the text alone. If the ballad governed the representation’s content, the image controlled the content’s reception.18

The Curse of Politics If Neureuther’s arabesque aimed to lay bare the mutual principles of poetic and artistic creation, it nonetheless shunned the overtly didactic or compulsory. Foregrounding the element of play, its initial effect was diversion, not differentiation or an exercise in critical thinking. Despite clear signposts that alert us to the constructed nature of all representation, poetic and otherwise, nothing in Neureuther’s designs forces the

156 Turning the Page audience to leave the literal level and thus the level of pure entertainment. Neureuther’s revolution was a covert one. This was the secret to its success, its strength, but also its weakness. Where revolutionary content invaded innovative practice, patrons and audiences recoiled. If Neureuther had known the havoc that would be wreaked by his next commission, he would have refused Cotta’s invitation in 1830 to capture the July Revolution’s Trois Glorieuses in print. But he didn’t, and speedily set out for Paris. Within a few months he had produced three arabesque melodies each in a revolutionary key (figure 13.7). Bookended by a splendid title page in the colors of the Tricolore and a page of explanatory text, the ensuing five lithographs appeared already in early 1831, printed by Knecht and Roissy with the descriptive title 27, 28, 29 Juillet 1830 représentés en trois tableaux renfermant trois chansons patriotiques (27th, 28th, and 29th of July 1820 representing three tableaus containing three patriotic songs). The cycle itself was revolutionary on several fronts. It featured some of the first truly convincing depictions of masses in action while performing a rather remarkable recalibration of history as representation.19 Academic norms and genre modalities yielded, together with the outlook of popular prints, to a well-researched version of the juste milieu (although the German term bürgerliche Mitte might be more appropriate here and less fraught), one capable of putting on display a set of factual yet (inevitably) disparate incidents for historical and (hopefully) critical reflection. The result was a daring fusion of documentary intent, historical facticity, and the grotesquarabesque’s free play that presented causal links while parading the events’ randomness. Unprecedented in its application to the task at hand, the arabesque meshed well with the musical theme chosen as the series’ organizing principle. Each song, having been France’s national anthem at one point, added a cultural element at once historical record and activist propaganda: “Veillons au Salut de l’Empire,” the Napoleonic call to “ensure the salvation of the Empire”; “La Marseillaise,” originally titled “War Song for the Army of the Rhine,” which was first adopted in 1795 (see figure 13.7); and, finally, “La Parisienne,” written as an immediate homage to 1830 and the nation’s new hymn until the demise of the July Monarchy in 1848. Effectively negotiating art and history’s multifaceted temporality, the cycle used the ritual of singing together to connect historical vignettes with the present. Thus, creating a temporal chord between various moments in time, the series lives off the presentist aspect of all representation, which it continues to highlight. Through an act of repetition, the print cycle delivers the Revolution to historical memory (or at least it intended to) while preserving it as an agent of political fermentation.20 Not surprisingly, the conservative poet in Weimar was outraged, as was the counterrevolutionary king of Bavaria, and Neureuther’s sojourn into contemporary politics would cost him dearly. It did not help much to blame all prorevolutionary sentiment on his employer, the publisher Cotta. The damage was done. To add injury to insult, his Paris series elicited little press, and where it did, reviewers uniformly complained about the arabesque’s unsuitability to articulate such emphatically political pronouncements.21 Neureuther fled the scene, never to come back.

Friendly Takeover Burnt by his flirtation with insurgency, Neureuther took refuge in folk songs and famous ballads, fairy tales, and the Gothic stories of the eighteenth-century master

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Figure 13.7 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, 28 Juillet 1830: La Marseillaise, 1831. Lithograph in reddishbrown ink, 55 × 43 cm. From Neureuther, Souvenir du 27, 28, 29 Juillet 1830 (1831). Kunsthalle Bremen.

158 Turning the Page of the macabre Gottfried August Bürger. From then on, Neureuther’s revolutionary efforts were restricted to a realm of aesthetic exploration and protected by a cocoon of sanctioned verses and beloved subjects. Holding up in a world of learnedness and social acceptability, of folkloric simplicity and (supposedly) unaffected naturalness, he restricted his radical agenda to wresting the arabesque’s critical potential from its literary incarnation and (re)introducing it into art. As he proceeded to copy poems and ballads word for word onto the stone, he made them his material possession and, as such, representation’s reflection upon itself. Goethe had succumbed to a false sense of security when he stated so confidently that Neureuther’s illustrations were still subservient. They were not. They drastically (re)shaped the access to the printed text, now part and parcel of the maddening metamorphoses of the crumbly pencil line. Neureuther’s marginalia not only illustrate but literally embrace, engulf, overgrow the written word they emanate from. The text is under siege—occupied, colonized, reshaped—until the book’s physical appearance fully succumbs to the dominance of its decorated parts. Despite its vehemence, this takeover is a friendly one, as already Goethe had noted with satisfaction, one that respects the essence of its captured partner while gently guiding the steps of its sister art. Key to this operation is, of course, the careful assimilation of script and gestural mark, of drawing style and the words’ material presence, of stanzas, paragraphs, or verses and the drawn border work. If successful, it fosters a syncopated reading, which, structured by a rhythm intoned by the drawn line rather than a linguistic structure, instinctively follows the illustrations’ lead. Often, as in his fabulous intonation of Goethe’s Dance of Death, Neureuther refined the creation of such syncopated rhythms by alternating a page jam-packed with ornamental and figural motifs (with lines, scrolls and flourishes, plants, animals, and human figures, all busily scurrying along, tripping over each other, trying to get ahead wherever they are heading) with a page much more serene, less crowded, governed by a rather abstract line configuration that mirrors the temporal structure of the printed passage it embroiders. This all is so pleasant, so amusing, so utterly affable that we easily lose sight of the arabesque’s return here as artfully ordered confusion. Regaining material substance, the ornamental arabesque finally assumes the form of a “charming symmetry of contradictions,” generating decorative borders full of imagination, playfulness, and caprice and open-ended capriccios of different voices, perspectives, and modes of representation. In short, the arabesque in art finally comes into its Romantic own by recapitulating Schlegel’s famous equation, “chaotic form—arabesque, fairy tale.”22 If Neureuther had been inclined toward the (infamous) Romantic penchant for theory formation, he might have produced the kind of pictorial manifesto we are familiar with from the Nazarene cohort, perhaps a lithograph titled The Anti-Laocoön. It is a shame he did not, as only a few have countered Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famous dictate of medium-specificity more effortlessly. Neureuther’s multiperspective arabesques introduce an element of temporal unfolding that, without any recourse to allegory or other discursive pictorial traditions, forces us to pursue an additive process of looking quite akin to reading. His images possess a syntax that creates a narrative on different levels (some illustrative, others not) and invites us to adopt the kind of reading habit inculcated right at this time by another new genre, the graphic novel (see figures 20.1–20.6, 21.1, and 21.3–21.8). The text, the printed word, on the other hand, slips again and again into a condition of a primarily visual building block. The more familiar the poems become in their embellished format (and Neureuther’s

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contemporaries would have known many a piece by heart!), the more our need to read the text vanishes and the temporal quality of the text’s material manifestation yields to its spatial presentification.

Incantations This process of the poems’ pictorial reification was fueled by the arabesque’s desire to stall and rechannel the flow of language. The drawings hovering around the borders of Goethe’s Dance of Death, for example, create an enchanted analogy to the poet’s masterful use of dactyls, monosyllables, and spirant sounds (k . . . k . . . k . . . reckt, ruckt, wackelt, klippert’s, klappert’s, Zacken, Lacken .  .  .) to produce the clumsy, dangling, disjointed, rocking motion of dancing skeletons with its staccato, clacking effect.23 We can literally see the ballad’s soundscape, and see it particularly clearly where it does not show the action as figural animation. At the same time, the line does everything in its power to solidify the text as verbal image. Like the skeleton in pursuit of its shroud, our gaze races up the tower’s convoluted structure, rushing up against the grain of the poem’s natural downward surge. The dynamic thrust upward is all the more forceful on the opposite page, where the scroll’s swirling movement carries us up, up, up with great speed, only to tumble down with even greater velocity until the cracked bones of the undead dancer create a resting place for our gaze. The final spiral loop is so tense, so brimming with stored-up energy, that it threatens to pull down the text itself, resistant in its solid black density, pull it down into the abyss without leaving the audience time to read it first. When we finally get around to reading the poem word by word, the border drawing continues to clamor for our attention, luring us constantly into the text’s surroundings, where we get lost in thought. Thus distracted, we forget to read on. Instead, we muse about the touching reunion of a mother with her young offspring, a scene strangely tender and true to life (despite the figures’ grisly decay) and thus the more horrifying. In its most extreme, the letters themselves seem driven by a desire to escape their alphabetic function, a craving most palpable in the fully colored folio drawings (see figures 13.5 and 13.6). Here, crawling upon each other in a state of electric nervousness, the initials, burning bright in their crimson red, struggle to reach the poem’s peak before the fatal fall occurs, struggle to leave behind, it seems, the words they are tied to, struggle to forsake meaning so as to follow the melody of the simple line, which rises with acrobatic lightness on their left. Overwhelmed by this frantic if futile escape, all we can do is sigh, echoing the skeleton’s last exhale—and then refocus . . . until the bell chimes again and ends it all. In its strongest moments, this procedure leaves us with a sense of unease, a deeply felt discomfort belying the seeming lightheartedness of poetry and scenery. Beneath the decorative surface and poetic products of a refined bourgeois culture, something dark slumbers. The Times of Day had warned us. Albrecht Dürer was right. Fantasia is a cruel mistress, and the journey into the recesses of our imagination might produce monsters we are not ready to face, let alone stare down.

The Arabesque’s Uncanny Afterlife Neureuther opened his illustrations with Goethe’s youthful tribute to unrequited love, the 1771 ballad “Heidenröslein” (figure 13.8). As our gaze falls upon the sumptuous border drawing of this first page, we are struck by its atmospheric physicality. We can almost feel the heat on our skin as we stumble across this late summer day, sense

160 Turning the Page

Figure 13.8 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Heath Rose, 1829. Lithograph, 33.5 × 20.5 cm (image), 41 × 28.6 cm (page). From Neureuther, Randzeichnungen zu Goethe’s Balladen und Romanzen, part 1, plate 1. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

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the bursting life around us, as we shoo away countless critters, swarming in the air and rustling on the ground, and make our way slowly through the fertile growth of this overly lush meadow. Even before our focus shifts to the poem encircled by this radiant arabesque, the visual oversaturation evokes an imaginary soundscape. As we follow the chaotic hubbub of these tiny insects and birds, sight makes us remember the comforting noises we associate with such a summer day, the buzzing and humming, tweeting and singing. Yet do not be lulled into a false sense of security! After all, when creation’s eternal rhythm seems to have transformed, as memory structure, into a palpable all-sensory experience, something ominous creeps into the print. Something is wrong in this earthly paradise. The source of impending doom is, of course, man, this time in the form of a young boy who breaches this peaceful habitat with violent impatience. We recoil from the brutality of his forward motion, repelled by the glint of unbridled determination in his eyes and the rash selfishness of his desire. A sense of foreboding seeps into the boy’s scrutiny, a sense of barely hidden malice. The illustration’s teeming composition evokes the uncanny, as the swarming multitude unleashes a centrifugal power, which prevents our gaze from taking control or resting calmly on the center, on the poem’s delectable study. We are ripped apart, buzzing life turning into fright and flight, as a wreath woven from scrivener’s scrolls presses down on the composition with agitated force. These ornamental flourishes are too dense, too compact, too overfull, with scrolls beating too fast, like a heart in danger. Each detail is sweet, charming, beguiling in its veracity and carefree in its everyday occurrence, yet, as a compositional fabric contracts and then explodes, these enchanting details tell a different story, a story not of love but violence. Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden, War so jung und morgenschön, Lief er schnell es nah zu sehn, Sah’s mit vielen Freuden. Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden. Knabe sprach: “Ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden.” Röslein sprach: “Ich steche dich, Dass du ewig denkst an mich, Und ich will’s nicht leiden.” Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden. Und der wilde Knabe brach ’s Röslein auf der Heiden; Röslein wehrte sich und stach, Half ihr doch kein Weh und Ach, Musste es eben leiden. Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.

Once a boy a Rosebud spied, Heathrose fair and tender! All array’d in youthful pride,— Quickly to the spot he hied, Ravished by her splendour. Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red, Heathrose fair and tender! Said the boy, “I’ll now pick thee, Heathrose fair and tender!” Said the rosebud, “I’ll prick thee, So that thou’lt remember me, Ne’er will I surrender!” Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red, Heathrose fair and tender! Now the cruel boy must pick Heathrose fair and tender; Rosebud did her best to prick,— Vain ’twas ’gainst her fate to kick— She must needs surrender. Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red, Heathrose fair and tender!24

Neureuther opened his Goethe ballads with a rape.

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Trauma Revealed Goethe’s ballad is about trauma. Yet, for the longest time, the poem’s reception suppressed that trauma, just as the poet himself paid little heed to the rose’s fate and, like his story’s perpetrator, lightly brushed off what little blood had been drawn.25 The audience followed suit and instead found inspiration in Goethe’s sojourn into popular song as an art that hides art. In 1815, Franz Schubert produced his own version of artful artlessness, when he delivered a sprightly G-major setting for high voice and piano, which has made the poem more famous than it would have otherwise been. Schubert had chosen wisely. Soon his song became unanimously regarded as a little gem and, bouncing around in seemingly naïve songfulness, itself acquired the status of a Volkslied (D. 257, op. 3/3). For all its bucolic playfulness, however, the melody seems to strike the wrong tone, at least if we listen to the rose’s shrill cry for help. Schubert, not caring to do so, buried the rose’s anguish, with Goethe at his side, in the loftier striving for a new, genuinely German cultural identity. The evil of sexual predation dissolves as author and composer pursue their desire for what we might call, Milton in mind, purity regained, for an authenticity and simplicity of expression long lost but now rediscovered. The fate of the ballad’s anonymous heroine seems to matter little in the pursuit of the greater good, just as the fate of the rose’s muse, a certain parson’s daughter named Friederike Brion, mattered little to Goethe once he had left Strasburg behind and with it the heartbroken girl he had enjoyed so much during their short but intense love affair. Written shortly before his departure in the fall of 1771, the “Heidenröslein” divulges the premeditated nature of Goethe’s betrayal, as he subsequently wallowed a bit too smugly in the pain and guilt he felt . . . ach so briefly. What mattered to him most was great art, and the ensuing canonization of both ballad and song would serve to justify this attitude. To this day, form trumps content, and the work’s underlying misogyny has done little to harm its fame, just as Gauguin’s colonial chauvinism does little to thwart his popularity. Imprisoned in a masterwork, the “Heidenröslein” still needs to surrender. In the light of the unbroken esteem the “Heidenröslein” has enjoyed, its unsettled und unsettling rendition by Neureuther is quite astonishing. The ballad’s violent subtext reverberates through his marginalia like a stream of unconsciousness. This is true for other illustrations as well, which lay bare, beneath familiar verses and catchy tunes, the horrors of daily existence and make visible the trauma and tragedies all too often hidden in plain sight. Neureuther’s seismographic illustration of the rose’s suffering and emotional turmoil gains further persuasion in being born from an almost instinctive understanding, as Goethe himself had so fondly noted, of the ballad’s poetic mechanism and aesthetic effect. In this context, Neureuther’s adaptation of Albrecht Dürer assumes further importance. It allowed the illustrator to pay tribute to the poet’s successful composition of an artless art, which dresses sophistication as something simple, plain, and strong.26 Neureuther did the same. The result exposed Goethe’s voyeuristic pleasure in watching the girl’s destruction and, with it, the poet’s self-satisfied invitation to join in his sadistic enjoyment.27

Psychosomatic Tremors For a long time I did not quite understand myself what was so unsettling about Neureuther’s opening border drawing. Feeling dissatisfied, I dismissed the “Heidenröslein”

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arabesque as an unsuccessful detour from his enticing play with perspectival spaces, which in so many of his lithographic ballads achieves such bewitching solutions to pictorial storytelling. But then I remembered the unease, indeed, the repulsion, I felt as a child every time I heard these famous lines, and I understood. The print’s centrifugal arabesque registers a disturbance not yet fully erupted, not unlike a seismograph which alerts us to the first rumbles of an earthquake. As these tremors of impending doom unleash waves of anxiety and movement in the arabesque, we face a disorienting diffusion of attention. The fact that we cannot take in the composition at one glance robs us of our dominance over the natural world and thus of the hegemonic position assigned to MAN by the Renaissance’s pictorial imagination of one-point perspective. The dispersed and dispersing dynamic of the border work of the “Heidenröslein” replaces Alberti’s finestra aperta with a petri dish in which a mottled assemblage of fauna and flora scrambles to escape beyond the border of its confinement. The unraveling force of this commotion is, of course, the ballad at the center. The gentle chaos of Neureuther’s illustration thus can register in different ways. To some it might just be a lighthearted, somewhat unorganized ornamental diversion; to others, like myself, it unleashes the prey’s flight instinct buried deep inside us. “Flee!” the swarm of little insects seems to whisper. “Flee! because man is without mercy!” The page is less a window onto a tortured soul than a psychosomatic membrane refracting the rippling effect of abuse. Goethe’s “Heidenröslein” is the story of a rape, and the darkness of this unavenged crime pulsates around the edges of Neureuther’s border work. Neureuther did not pillory Goethe. Indeed, we might ask whether his arabesque was even intended to unearth the poem’s savagery. Was it supposed to indict the inhumanity beneath the polished beauty of Goethe’s famous tale? Hard to say. But already Neureuther’s first lithograph, the one packaged neatly into Cornelius’s promotion letter to Weimar, shows a palpable interest in the uncharted, dark territories beneath rationality’s surface (see figure 13.2). Once we excavate the illustrations further, they point us toward a string of sinister motifs that runs through the poet’s oeuvre like a bloody thread. Indeed, it seems no coincidence that Neureuther would also include Goethe’s poem “Erlkönig” (Erl King) in his first selection and thus another terrifying tale of murderous rape (figure 13.9). In this sense, Neureuther’s ability to capture the ballads’ sentiment and spirit went beyond what Goethe saw (or, it seems, wanted to fess up to).

Lithography’s Psychology If we grant Neureuther’s illustrations a psychoanalytical edge, the choice of medium seems hardly accidental. At least if we look through the eyes of the illustrator’s contemporaries, who commented on the peculiar power of the mechanically reproduced image to reflect its maker’s state of mind (and, I would add, the mind of his subject). Accordingly, Charles Baudelaire insisted in 1862 that it would be difficult “for an artist not to describe his most intimate personality on the copper.”28 The paradox inherent in seeing the multiple as the most accurate reflection of its maker’s character—and, I might add, unconscious—is obvious and brings me to my final point. “For the border drawing did not make do—contrary to its name—with the border,” as Jutta Reinisch has pointed out; “nor is it drawn.”29 The term itself then bears the paradox of the multiple’s individualism. Here, Baudelaire’s reference to (copper) engraving might not

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Figure 13.9 Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Erlking, 1829. Lithograph, 33.5 × 20.5 cm (image), 41 × 28.6 cm (page). From Neureuther, Randzeichnungen zu Goethe’s Balladen und Romanzen, part 2, plate 18. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

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have been the most apt when it came to reproductive techniques, although it does recall Dürer and his musings on the engraved multiple as the most secure repository for an image of the self, his own and that of others (see figure 5.1).30 Lithography delivered (t)his originary paradox with even greater veracity and in much wider circulation. The hand’s virtuous trace can endlessly be repeated, and in this repetition perform its psychological (and psychoanalytic) work. While trying to spin a web of meaningful connections around Cornelius’s vignette from Greek mythology, Eugen Napoleon Neureuther set out to revolutionize the lithographic medium, raising it from illustration to (psycho)analytic tool.

Notes 1. See Ittmann, “Neureuther.” 2. Ibid., 359–60n12; see further Zanker von Meyer, Ideal und Natur, cat. no. 100. 3. For the other two early examples from 1825/26, see Reinisch, Poesie (2013), 1:164–67; 2:328–29, color plates 10 and 11. 4. See Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 59; idem, “Neureuther in Runges Bahnen,” 335; Busch, Maisak, and Weisheit, Verwandlung der Welt, 285–86, cat. no. 128. The lithograph’s later use was first identified by John Ittmann, “Neureuther,” 359–60. 5. Busch, Maisak, and Weisheit, Verwandlung der Welt, 285–86, cat. no. 128. 6. Ibid. 7. For the idea of the arabesque’s directional growth pattern, see Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske. 8. Parshall, “The Demon.” 9. Sponsored by the Bavarian king Maximilian Joseph I, the findings of this voyage (1815–17) would be published by Carl Friedrich Philipp Martius in three volumes as Nova genera et species plantarum quas in itinere per Brasiliam; Ittmann, “Neureuther,” 359–60n12. 10. Stegemeier, “Goethe and the ‘Totentanz.’” 11. Ibid., 584. 12. For the citations from the two letters written by Goethe in response to Cornelius’s gift and sent together in the same envelope (to Neureuther, September 23, 1828; and to Cornelius, September 26, 1828), see Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 58 (with a wrong date, 1826, for the letter to Cornelius). 13. Cited after Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 58. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Schreiber, “At the Edge.” 17. Ibid., 10–14, 15. 18. Ibid. 19. Werner Busch, “Neureuthers Serie”; see also idem, “27, 28, 29 Juillet 1830.” 20. See Reinisch, Poesie, 1:238–60; 2:130–33, figs. 121–24. 21. Ibid., 1:258. 22. F. Schlegel, “Dialogue,” 86. 23. Stegemeier, “Goethe and the ‘Totentanz,’” 583. 24. Bowring, “Heathrose.” 25. The next two paragraphs draw particularly on Kramer, Musical Meaning, 51–67, and Ellis Dye’s analysis of the “Heidenröslein” in idem, Love and Death in Goethe, 46–51. 26. Dye, Love and Death in Goethe, 46. 27. Ibid., 50. 28. Quoted after Parshall, “The Demon,” 142 (emphasis in original). 29. Reinisch, “Das Kind der Erfindung,” 271. 30. See my previous discussion of Dürer in chapter 5.

Part 5

Taming the Arabesque

Figure 14.1 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, The Old Man, 1853. Wood engraving, 15 × 23 cm (page). Frontispiece of Schadow, Der moderne Vasari (1854). Collection Cordula Grewe, Philadelphia, PA.

14 The Artist as Arabesque Wilhelm Schadow as the Modern Vasari

Now that we have lived through a revolution, conquered the world with the arabesque, watched authors and artists change places, and turned a page, it is time to return to the beginning, to our prologue and the frontispiece of Der moderne Vasari, the autobiographical manifesto that in 1854 set the tone for an arabesque novel, and would do so again, almost 150 years later, for this account (see figure 1.1). In short, it is time to return to Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow-Godenhaus, by then knighted, the man and the artist.

The Artist-Author as Arabesque Like a leitmotif, the modern Vasari’s emblematic likeness proclaims the book’s predominant mood, a constant oscillation between silliness (frame story) and seriousness (art history and theory). The three-quarter profile, the emblem’s pictura, shows an elderly man with prominent features into which old age has carved deep furrows, a face like a weathered mountainscape, wistful and wise, dominated by a fleshy nose and bushy eyebrows that cast a dramatic shadow over the thickly set, half-closed eyes and give the face a pensive expression (figure 14.1). Only the fine curly hair interrupts the contemplative atmosphere, a jumble of ornamental, energized lines that, mirrored by the smoky ringlets below, seem to assume a life of their own. Lost in thought, his gaze lowered, the old man is fully self-absorbed, his head propped up on his left hand. It is a strong hand, a manly hand, but also a well-manicured hand, a hand speaking of courtly elegance. It is the hand of a man who can assert himself, but who also knows how to enjoy life and lighthearted amusement. A sense of physical strength and willpower thus battles the likeness’s first impression of nostalgic reminiscence, capturing with notable and loving empathy the two sides of Schadow’s character: the sensitive Romantic, harmony-driven and expressive, and the prince of painters, ready to assert his reign over academy and marketplace. The frontispiece thus does not deliver a panegyric portrait of a celebrity, nor does it celebrate the author as genius. Instead, it indulges in a complex psychological study, its analysis aided by the recourse to symbolic systems of past and present and the old-master gravitas of style and execution. The portrait is also noteworthy for its play with academic norms of decorum. Breaking the rules of a stately likeness, it plays out as a genre scene that, however, assumes weight through biblical cross-references. Plucking the figure right from the narrative’s vivid description of contemporary life in Düsseldorf, it displays Schadow as he sucks energetically, lips pursed, on a meerschaum pipe expertly tucked into the corner of his mouth. As the aging academy director emits thick clouds of smoke, a DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-19

170 Taming the Arabesque rather foreboding message, as we might recall, materializes from the decadent fumes: “Vanitas Vanitatum Vanitas!” The biblical quotation, adapted from Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; All is vanity” (KJV), resonates with the lines etched into the whimsical scroll above: “Quid mundus ni fumus? Fumans obliscere mundum!” Pinned to a frame of wooden sticks, the inscriptio’s question, “What is the world but smoke? While smoking, forget the world!,” plays to the overall mood of resignation while undermining the apocalyptic magnitude of the biblical citation by turning to the author’s habitual nicotine indulgence. The emblem does not give away the sitter’s name; he is simply der Alte (the Old Man). But already the novel’s opening lines introduce him as the story’s main character, who doubles, as we are also told, as the narrator of the “reminiscences of an artistic life” promised in the subtitle. Thus, to the initiated and the careful reader alike, the frontispiece heralds the book’s nature as a roman à clef. For such an endeavor, a disguised portrait, which transforms the author into an emblem, seems a particularly fitting preface. Yet the emblem functions as a key not only to the relationship between the book’s author and its “chief oracle of wisdom” (as a British reviewer would have it) but also to the novel’s main themes and pictorial mode.1 For one, it programmatically fuses word and image, a fusion that—last but not least—affirms the project’s historicist affection for the Renaissance, in particular sixteenth-century Italy, where the emblem book as pictorial-literary genre emerged from medieval allegory and bestiaries. As such, the frontispiece indicates a surplus of meaning, a surplus hidden beneath the text’s literal meaning, demanding an allegorical reading, of author and text alike, and raising expectation that, for all its entertaining lightness, a moral lesson will be taught. Turning to matters of contemporary art, the opening illustration fulfills yet another function. It serves as a declaration of Schadow’s artistic principles, highlighting his role as an intermediary between Romantic idealism and Biedermeier realism, between aesthetic universalism (with the performed allegorese reaching across time) and mimetic truthfulness (with portraiture gesturing toward a specific moment, a particular place, a concrete occupation). While the biblical citation reinforces the moralistic message of the word-frame, the sitter’s likeness is sketched with an eye for truth to life. This is true for the depicted pastime as well, which does not aim at some anemic personification of an abstract virtue but at a life-filled depiction of the habit, quite popular then, of socializing over a pipe. Schadow was indeed, as his letters divulge, very fond of this routine, as is his alter ego, der Alte, in the novel. Mingling with a good smoke and a hot cup of dark roast in hand invokes the image of a man happily tending to the small pleasures of the body and the convivial companionship of friends and like-minded colleagues. Unfortunately, such comfort never lasts long enough, and the mood rapidly swings, in tune with the frontispiece’s leitmotif, from Gemütlichkeit (an atmosphere of material comfort and snug sociability) to claustrophobic confinement. The face, seen in intense closeup, seems painfully compressed into a space too constricted for the man’s substantial presence. With no prospect of escaping these constraints, resignation seems inevitable. The frontispiece thus masterfully rounds out the characterization of an artist whose existence oscillated between social glamour and agoraphobic retreats into the safety of his own home, between a fiery, fighting spirit and a mind predisposed to depression. The author’s somber epithets (the Geriatric, the Old, the Invalid) add a sense of memento mori to the likeness and conjure up the pessimism, nostalgic world-weariness, and introverted melancholia that Schadow was so prone to in his twilight years.

The Artist as Arabesque 171 Last but not least, the frontispiece would not properly realize its task of providing a pictorial foreword for what amounts to a literary paragone with the father of art history, Giorgio Vasari, if it did not reflect upon art as well. Indeed, artistic practice and issues of medium are directly evoked by the two dates inserted on the scroll (1837) and in Hübner’s ligatured signature (1854). Celebrating twenty years of unbroken comradeship, they link the print back to the original pencil drawing, a study for the eponym of Hübner’s acclaimed canvas Job and His Friends (1838).2 The Old Testament figure seems a particularly meaningful reference, as already the Brotherhood of St. Luke, the secessionist fraternity that Schadow had joined in 1813, had frequently evoked Job as a robust metaphor for the suffering of the righteous artist (above all, of course, of themselves).3 This interpictorial cross-reference prompts the image to transcend the (auto)biographical context again while paying tribute to a central aspect of Schadow’s persona: his deep piety and devout Catholicism. As the personal blends into the artistic, and the artistic into the religious, the emblematic fusion of portrait and allegory puts into action the core of Schadow’s practice, teaching, and theory: the synthesis of idealism and realism.

Contemporary Reactions Der moderne Vasari elicited immediate reactions even beyond the German borders. On January 13, 1855, only a few months after it was published, the London periodical Athenaeum dedicated a lengthy review to the novel (attractive for its mixture of Bildungsroman, artist biographies, and sumptuous production), which had been released only a few months earlier.4 The British reviewer, himself a well-known critic and playwright, opened with a nod to Schadow’s celebrity status. “Few families could present the world with a cluster of names so illustrious in the history of Art as the family of Schadow,” John Oxenford proclaimed. First comes the father, the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, “one of those men whom, lonely in their own day, history consents to regard as the forerunners of great revolutions.” Then follows the oldest son, Rudolph, “likewise eminent in sculpture but cut off, in the midst of his career, at the early age of thirty-six.” Last comes Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, “the painter,—the present Director of the Düsseldorf Academy,—the representative, both with pen and pencil, of Christian Art,—the companion of Cornelius, Overbeck, Veit, and other men of whom Dr. Nagler says, ‘they made the reconquest of the lost Paradise the problem of their lives.’”5 Oxenford does not say much about the reasons behind this “reconquest.” He probably assumed that the brethren of St. Luke were household names in the land of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and thus deemed a lengthy introduction unnecessary. Schadow felt otherwise. His novel dwells at length on the life of the Lukasbund’s founding father, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the Brotherhood itself, and his own role in the formation (and subsequent dispersal) of the Nazarene movement. His exposition vividly conjures up the burning feeling of living in an age of crisis, decadence, and decay that had ignited the painters’ belief that art was in dire need of regeneration, if not rebirth. Such rebirth, we are told, could only spring from the spirit of Christianity, and thus the young men’s quest for new models led them to an age when simple faith and stylistic simplicity seemed still to be one, the Middle Ages (which for the Nazarenes ended with the death of Raphael). True to this dictum, Schadow’s 1854

172 Taming the Arabesque debut as a fiction writer still carried out the return to an enchanted past hailed by the book itself.

Vasari Redux The novel’s title, Der moderne Vasari, underlines the Romantic credo that the past offers a remedy for the future. The historical model is heritage and regenerative resource at once, and it is in this spirit that Schadow gestured back to the sixteenth century and Giorgio Vasari’s famous collection Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568. Three hundred years after their initial publication, the Lives was once again cutting-edge, and not only in the German-speaking countries.6 After the push during the eighteenth century for “an art history without artists” (Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Stilgeschichte, that is, history of style), the artist’s persona and fate enjoyed renewed interest after 1800.7 Not surprisingly, Vasari quickly emerged as a prototype, and in the decades to come his artists’ biographies would be reprinted, re-edited, and translated throughout Europe.8 In Germany, this task was shouldered by the prestigious Stuttgart publisher J. G. Cotta, which issued the last volume of its ambitious translation in 1849. When Schadow brought his own artists’ lives onto the market five years later, he could count on broad familiarity with the “father of art history.”9 Despite his ambitious claim of pedigree, the painter himself emphasized the different nature of his project. Vasari’s work, he stated, was more for reference, a book not to be read cover to cover but studied piecemeal, one section at a time. His own book, in contrast, was intended “truly to be read.”10 As a fictionalized presentation of theory and history, Der moderne Vasari was made for entertainment as much as education. As such, it occupied a peculiar place within the quickly evolving landscape of arthistorical publishing. Although Schadow’s novel was part and parcel of the fashion for Vasari’s life-and-work model, it resisted its evolution into the modern monograph, which, by 1850, had emerged as a dominant type of literature.11 Performing a notable (although not entirely intended) deconstruction of this modern art-historical genre, Der moderne Vasari reveals biography itself as invention by framing its vignettes with “an unpretentious novella,” part fact, part fiction.12 This narrative strategy distinguished Schadow’s account as much from its Renaissance model as from its contemporary competitors on the monograph market.

The Frame Story Set in contemporary Düsseldorf, the funny, repeatedly slapstick frame story chronicles the life of the city and its art scene, paying special attention to the socioeconomic side of art production around 1850. Three decades as academy director had provided Schadow with ample experience of the demands and headaches posed by running a large-scale operation like that and marketing its products, and this experience shows. Der moderne Vasari abounds in broad-ranging reflections on the role of academies and art societies, art criticism and art history, exhibitions and museums. In this sense, the “novella” is hardly irrelevant to the book’s core interest in understanding the artist’s place in the modern world. Admittedly, the reader, engrossed in the burlesque adventures and pursuit of marital bliss by the novella’s two young heroes, the genre painter Gustav Dolph and his best friend, the landscapist “the fat Franz,” can easily forget the profundity of the issues addressed.13 Yet the duo’s “mental sufferings—treated not

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sentimentally, but comically—and ultimate triumph” soon emerge as important entry points into a critical look at the tensions threatening the harmonious coexistence and sustainability of an ever-growing artistic community, and their root causes.14 For better or worse, Schadow rarely had enough distance (or self-discipline) to keep his own feelings, professional skirmishes, and mental struggles from coloring his narrative, and sometimes his tone becomes regrettably whiny. Fortunately, the somber moments when his alter ego wallows in self-pity never last long enough to overshadow the overall jovial tone. Beneath Schadow’s disillusioned grumbles, we hear the sound of love: love for his family, his friends, his students, indeed, for life itself, a love that sustains his figures and his belief in art and carries them forward.

Power Games If the frame story illustrated the text’s theoretical principles with anecdotes from contemporary life, the biographies provided the necessary historical framework. Unwillingly, this juxtaposition also foregrounds the discrepancy between theory and practice, or, more precisely, between theory and practicality. It exposes Schadow’s inability (and unwillingness) to enforce his highest ideals upon the academy as a whole and at all costs. As flexible guideline rather than absolute norm, his naturalist idealism was elastic enough to support a broad range of practices.15 This flexibility was key to the incredible success of the Düsseldorf institution under Schadow’s leadership. As its growing reputation attracted students from all over the world, including the United States, Scandinavia, and Russia, and enrollment rose dramatically, fewer and fewer of the newcomers shared the Nazarene’s lofty idealism or his preference for history painting and religious art.16 Nor, for that matter, did Schadow believe that every artist had “the wings” necessary to ascend into the highest heavens of art. Of more than a hundred talents, he mused, only seventy-five might have enough genius to paint a fine landscape and fifty a pretty genre picture or portrait; but “if there are three among them for gods and heroes that is already many.”17 Under the circumstances, Schadow simply had to welcome diversification. There were not enough patrons (or resources) to finance the kind of idealist art he favored most. For better or worse, genre and landscape appealed to a much broader range of buyers, not least for matters of size. While the academic world still associated a subject’s importance with large formats, bourgeois buyers were more concerned with the proportions of their living rooms. Concessions to public taste and market realities had to be made, and Schadow was willing to make them—if they at least remained somewhat within the limits of a naturalist idealism. Consequently, he tolerated, even supported, “lower” genres like landscape and genre, as long as they were “rich in spirit” and marked by an “ideal tone.”18 Thus, the kind of naturalism acceptable to Schadow included an idealized naturalism.19 Such concessions to the forces of the market did not mean a general laissez-faire. To the contrary, Schadow was quite determined to pressure students and, for that matter, the city’s free artist community into the straitjacket of his convictions. This provoked much opposition, and the 1840s were marked by frequent attacks on the academy and its director.20 Though deeply hurt, Schadow prevailed in shaping Düsseldorf’s art, down to the aesthetic choices of his opponents, so that, as he noted contently in 1845, “a certain unity of method is unmistakable.”21 An important instrument to steer the city’s cultural politics was the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Art Society of

174 Taming the Arabesque the Rhenish Lands and Westphalia), which was founded in 1829 and quickly emerged as a central engine of the local production and art market.22 In this context, the idealist faction had celebrated a major success when the Kunstverein included a special clause in its bylaws to support public, monumental, and church art by using income from more popular but less esteemed genres (such as landscape and genre painting), a financial scheme unique among German art unions.23 Needless to say, the representatives of those allegedly lower genres were anything but thrilled by these stipulations. The Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen was part of a rich culture of privately funded societies that decidedly shaped life and sociability in nineteenth-century Germany. Among them, the art societies stood out for a simple, economic reason. Using membership fees to stock up on contemporary art, they offered the chance to win an original oil painting in the yearly lotteries, and those not among the lucky winners would still be satisfied with a reputable print, in the form of either Jahresgaben (subscription prints distributed annually) or Nietenblätter (consolation prizes).24 Though this practice was criticized by some as a despicable appeal to baser instincts (the sheer desire to possess), its defenders, such as the art historian Karl Schnaase and the philosopher-cum-diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt, defended it as an effective means to spread good taste (which, of course, meant bourgeois taste) in art.25 At the same time, the art societies’ practice made them a major commercial factor in the blossoming of the arts. In the first year of its existence, the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen proceeded by commissioning outline prints after the raffled paintings.26 The society did not restrict itself exclusively to this popular and common form of printmaking. In 1847–48, for example, it asked Adolph Schroedter for a portfolio of seven original lithographs, titled Arabesques Frieze, as the annual subscription print. The artist, who specialized in humorous genre scenes and arabesques, was at the height of his fame and market value. An oil version of a similar topic had just yielded the stunning sum of one thousand thalers, which made his art union contribution a highly coveted collector’s item.27 As the policy of lotteries, subscription prints, and consolation prizes turned art unions into major patrons, they began to play a significant role in the institutionalization of contemporary art, as was the case in Düsseldorf.28 As client, buyer, seller, and art-promoting benefactor, the art union created a much-noticed public sphere and quickly became one of the city’s most important patrons for the ever-increasing number of resident artists. Not everybody welcomed this development; Adolph Schroedter, for one, saw the current situation as detrimental to the creative development of the local art scene.29 Schadow and the other board members, however, countered such complaints about the society’s monopoly “as the only customer for major public works.”30 Without such backing, the Berlin court painter Wilhelm Hensel believed, history painting was in danger of being entirely wiped away “with the great genre mop.”31 Only special backing of public, monumental, and church art could prevent a lopsided orientation toward popular taste and helpless dependence on the latest fashion.32 Convinced that “not only art itself” but “the culture of the people” would profit from such public projects, Karl Leberecht Immermann (the city’s innovative theater director) defended the allocation of a quarter of the society’s revenues for their support.33 In the spirit of Schadow’s fusion of idealism and realism, the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen combined a market-oriented attitude with an adherence to the Romantic-Nazarene ideal of public art.

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The tribal factionalism of the Düsseldorf art scene is the foil against which the frame story of Der moderne Vasari unfolds, and knowledge about its main themes is essential for understanding Schadow’s various comments about genre or landscape painting and the parameters of modern print production. The novel’s novella also highlights a tension between Schadow’s conceptual frameworks as painter and writer. In light of the academy director’s aesthetic convictions and personal style, it is remarkable that his novel employed a formal principle not only of no importance to his own artistic work but indeed associated with the production of some of his fiercest critics.

The Book as Material Object There are no records of when exactly work on the novel commenced, but by January 1852, Schadow was already dictating parts of the manuscript.34 In the autumn of 1853, he had finished a final draft and succeeded in selling it to the prominent publishing house of Wilhelm Hertz.35 In November, he commissioned Julius Hübner to illustrate the book. For the execution in wood engraving, Schadow proposed Hugo Bürkner, another Düsseldorf graduate, who was running a highly successful studio in Dresden and had collaborated with Hübner before.36 Both agreed, and Hübner set out to design three types of images: a full-page emblem (as the book’s frontispiece), nine medallion portraits of selected artists, and seven comic vignettes with chubby putti (see figures 1.1. 1.2, 14.1, 14.2, 17.1, and 17.2). In contrast to so many other collaborations, the three men worked well together, a perfect Biedermeier miniature of the avant-garde dream of the artists’ collective. If harmonious, the process was nonetheless time-consuming, and, to the publisher’s great dismay, the trio’s “mutual dawdling would shatter his hopes to have the book ready for the annual Easter book fair in Leipzig.”37 In the end, the book would still appear in 1854, but only in the fall. Although Hübner had free rein when it came to the overall concept, Schadow made some pointed suggestions regarding specific details. He insisted, for example, that the portraits’ round medallions could only be constructed through a repetition of circles, which would create simple channel grooves (Hohlkehlen) or round shapes (Rundstücke). Even the quite handsome ornamentations with flowers or twines (Ranken), he argued, should be avoided, as they would destroy the essential circle symmetry. And while he assured Hübner that he trusted his good taste with an allocation of the wood engravings, he followed suit with far-reaching suggestions on that account. The portraits might be placed either before or after the chapter that discussed the respective sitters, Schadow wrote, while vignettes might appear in chapters without biographies.38 For the most part, however, the final layout would not follow the author’s recommendations. Hübner shared neither Schadow’s taste for circle symmetry nor his teacher’s anxieties about plant ornamentation (figure 14.2). Instead of restricting himself to a Neoclassicist architectural vocabulary, Hübner opted for much more organic imagery. A thick trompe-l’oeil vine forms the medallions’ outer ring, enclosing two smaller, hand-drawn circles, which, carefully shaded for three-dimensional effect, delineate the image’s inner sphere. From here, the artists’ likenesses, kept in the style of portrait busts, emerge as illusionist bas-reliefs. While the inner circles help to orient the image toward its own center, the outer border literally branches out onto the surrounding surface with decorative leaves and fruits sprouting from a trompe-l’oeil rim made of plants. Alternating between a choice of oak and acorns and a selection of vines and

176 Taming the Arabesque grapes, Hübner situated these embellishments in a symmetrical relationship to the page’s four corners, with the idea that the medallions seem optically inscribed into a square. The result is a heightened formal similarity between the text block and the pictures’ design, which enhances the page’s visual unity and helps to anchor the medallions within the building mass of the text. At the same time, the plant decorations counterbalance the frame’s cool geometry and create an illusion of spatial recession, which offsets the concurrent projection of the portrait busts into the viewer’s realm. The final effect is ultimately somewhat unsettling, as the gaze shifts back and forth in a doomed attempt to reconcile the illogical relationships of scale and placement. In sum, Hübner’s design choices create a subtle tension between illusionary devices and spaces, which adds liveliness to the image as a whole while working toward a smooth integration of page, ornamental frame, and portrait. A detailed analysis of the illustrations, especially the comic vignettes, would occupy a chapter in its own right.39 For now, it will suffice to highlight the formal and structural importance of Hübner’s decoration. For one, Hübner’s designs, with their coquettish variation in tone and style, are key to the novel’s metamorphosis from handwritten dictation to lavish object. On the other hand, the illustrations, at once intervention and parody, are vital to the text’s arabesque gestalt. Rising above a role as subordinate decoration and supportive measure, they assume an independent force which shapes the novel’s textual fabric via visual interruptions and a poignant articulation of rather expansive, entirely autonomous arguments. The result, today largely forgotten, was received quite favorably by, among others, Alexander von Humboldt, then eighty-four years old and a living legend. The Prussian polymath had obtained a complete copy within two days of the novel’s release, and immediately wrote the author a thank you note for such expedient delivery. Since its arrival, Humboldt confessed, he had been completely absorbed (very much to the detriment of other obligations) by the “brilliant text,” which he had, as the proudly reported, read “line by line.” This intensive study had emboldened him not only to recommend the novel to the king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in general terms, but to point out specific passages that his majesty might want to have read to him, a task he had even volunteered himself.40 Humboldt only regretted that Schadow had not dwelt long enough on the art-historical subjects, which were “of highest interest,” and concluded that the painter should follow up with a second volume.41 Schadow would heed Humboldt’s advice. Whatever misgivings he had felt about the collective’s mutual tardiness were washed away by the splendor of the final product. The painter-poet was mightily pleased. Appearance mattered to him, not least because he hoped that the enchanting adornments might compensate for any deficits of his “little work bis dat qui cito dat [he gives twice who gives promptly].”42 Little did he know that the book’s material allure would come with an unexpected cost. When he presented Hertz with a second part, the publisher recoiled. The standards for fine printing set by the first volume were too costly to keep up; on the other hand, it seemed unfeasible for the sequel to be drabber. The original’s preciousness thus condemned its continuation to a forgotten existence in some drawer where it would fade from memory. Of course, in 1854 nobody could foresee this, and the trio jauntily celebrated the successful creation of a total work of the printing press. For now, the book’s beauty paid off. John Oxenford did not hold back on his enthusiasm about the Moderne Vasari’s lavish outfitting.43 “One word more in commendation of this delightful book.

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Figure 14.2 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, Asmus [Jacob] Carstens, ca. 1853. From Schadow, Der moderne Vasari (1854), 11. Collection Cordula Grewe, Philadelphia, PA.

178 Taming the Arabesque It is choicely printed, and adorned with dainty medallion portraits and fanciful vignettes:—an elegant specimen of that publishing art which is unprovided with a special name, but which is so serviceable in covering our drawing-room tables with agreeable objects.”44 After he had spent much ink on evaluating the novel’s art-historical content and theoretical qualities, the critic’s final commendation of the book as a book is noteworthy. It reminds us that Schadow’s novel did not least appeal as a kind of nineteenth-century coffee-table book. This in itself is a crucial insight, albeit hardly the only one, to be gained from the Athenaeum’s lengthy review. The other, perhaps even more astonishing insight, as the next chapter details, is the Moderne Vasari’s appreciation as a quintessential arabesque.

Notes 1. Oxenford, “The Modern Vasari,” 43. 2. Monschau-Schmittmann, Julius Hübner, 181–83. 3. The Nazarenes’ fascination with Job was stirred by a canvas of one of their Viennese professors, Eberhard Wächter’s Grieving Job and His Friends, 1793/94–1824 (oil on canvas, 194.6 × 274.5 cm, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart); see Grewe, The Nazarenes, 124–27 (with illustrations of the final oil and a reproductive etching). 4. Schadow, Der moderne Vasari; Oxenford, “The Modern Vasari.” See further Grewe, “Art between Muse and Marketplace”; Rose and Zangs, “Wilhelm von Schadows.” 5. Oxenford, “The Modern Vasari,” 43; Oxenford’s reference is to Nagler, “Schadow.” 6. See, for example, Graham, “Amorous Passions.” 7. See Guercio, Art as Existence, esp. chap. 1, 24–46. 8. For the critical fortune of Vasari’s Lives during the nineteenth century, see Paola Baracchi’s preface in Vasari, Le vite, 1:ix–xlv. 9. Vasari, Leben. 10. Schadow to Julius Hübner (written by Charlotte Schadow), April 5, 1853, Heinrich-HeineInstitut, Düsseldorf, no. 48.3460/40. 11. Guercio, Art as Existence. 12. Schadow to Julius Hübner (written by Charlotte Schadow), April 5, 1853, Heinrich-HeineInstitut, Düsseldorf, no. 48.3460/40. While the Moderne Vasari’s title refers to the entire book as a “novella,” I preserve that term for the frame story and otherwise apply the term “novel.” This usage is more in step with the period’s genre definitions and makes room for the fact that the terminology of our amateur poet was, when it came to literature, neither precise nor consistent. 13. While the character of Dolph seems to have been mainly modeled after the genre painter Eduard Geselschap (1814–78), the identification of the source for Franz is more difficult. See Rose and Zangs, “Wilhelm von Schadows,” esp. 158–59. 14. Oxenford, “The Modern Vasari,” 43. 15. For the various forms of idealism practiced at the Düsseldorf Academy and its unusual endorsement of historical genre painting, see Grewe, The Nazarenes, chaps. 13–15. 16. For the institutional history of art in Prussia, including the role of art criticism, see Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum. 17. Schadow’s article “Wissenschaftliche Kunst und Christliche Kunst” has only survived as an abbreviated reprint, in Finke, “Aus den Papieren,” 179. 18. See the debate between Franz, Gustav Dolph, and numerous members of an artist association in Schadow, Der moderne Vasari, chap. 4, 96–111. For the tensions within the Düsseldorf art scene, see Rose and Zangs, “Wilhelm von Schadows,” 175. 19. See Grewe, The Nazarenes, part 3, “The Nazarene Divide.” 20. Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum. 21. Schadow, “Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule,” 60. 22. For the society’s history and sponsorship, see Biedermann, Bürgerliches Mäzenatentum. 23. Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum, 104. 24. Horn, Düsseldorfer Graphik.

The Artist as Arabesque 179 25. Grossmann discusses these “motors of embourgeoisment” in Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum, 91–94. 26. For a list of the prints see Eberlein, Geschichte, 60–63; see further Horn, Düsseldorfer Graphik, 146–47. 27. In the acquisition year 1846/47, the Kunstverein paid one thousand thalers for Schroedter’s frieze-like painting Barn Dance and Binge; Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum, 105n484. 28. See Risch-Stolz, “Kunst und Kommerz.” 29. Schroedter to an unknown friend, October 20, 1845, in Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum, 106–7 and n. 488. 30. Ibid. 31. Wilhelm Hensel to a “Patron and Friend,” March 22, 1837, in Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum, 76 and n. 306. 32. Eberlein, Geschichte, 10–12. 33. More precisely, a quarter after the deduction of administrative costs; Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum, 102n467; Immermann, “Andeutungen,” 709. 34. Charlotte Schadow to unknown friend, January 9, 1852, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, no. 54.2477. 35. Schadow to Julius Hübner (written by Charlotte Schadow), April 5, 1853, Heinrich-HeineInstitut, no. 48.3460/40; Schadow announced the manuscript’s completion to Joseph Fraenkel on October 15, 1853; Heinrich-Heine-Institut, no. 15.1507/1. 36. The artists selected are Asmus Jakob Carstens, John Flaxman, Antonio Canova, Johann Gottfried Schadow, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Peter Cornelius, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Christian Daniel Rauch, and Rudolph Schadow. The woodcutter’s name appears as Bürkner or Bürckner. Schadow to Julius Hübner (written by Charlotte Schadow), November 16, 1853, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, no. 48.3460/45. 37. Wilhelm and Charlotte Schadow to Julius Hübner, April 4, 1854, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, no. 48.3460/50. 38. Schadow to Julius Hübner (written by Charlotte Schadow), December 6, 1853, HeinrichHeine-Institut, no. 48.3460/46. 39. See chapter 20 in this book. 40. Alexander von Humboldt to Schadow, in Finke, “Aus den Papieren,” 173. 41. For the relationship of Humboldt and Schadow and plans for a sequel, see Rose and Zangs, “Wilhelm von Schadows,” 153, 177–78. 42. Schadow to Julius Hübner, Düsseldorf, December 6, 1853, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Düsseldorf, no. 48.3460/46. 43. Oxenford, “The Modern Vasari,” 45. 44. Ibid.

15 The Humorous Arabesque From Wilhelm Schadow to Karl Leberecht Immermann and Back, via Johann Baptist Sonderland

If the publisher, Wilhelm Hertz, was responsible for the book’s attractive packaging, Schadow pursued his own strategy of marketability by adapting the popular style of best-selling author H. Clauren, the anagrammatic pseudonym for Carl (Gottlieb Samuel) Heun.1 This was a peculiar choice for a man who, in the field of art, upheld the highest standards of morally uplifting, purified idealism. Yet, when it came to writing, Schadow seemed little deterred by his model’s kitschy populism or the ferocious attack by the poet Wilhelm Hauff on this kind of mawkish Trivialliteratur (popular literature). Trivial or not, the frame story is vital to the novel’s chaotic (arabesque) structure. It “braids together,” as Schadow put it, an astonishingly disparate array of literary genres, “a potpourri of history, criticism, and poetry,” as the periodical Deutsches Museum had it in 1855, “an enjoyable, snug jumble of art history, aesthetic reflections, political and social allusions, occasional poems, a small novella and novel-like descriptions: all thrown together rather haphazardly.”2 As if the textual hodgepodge was not already enough of a snare, Hübner’s wood engravings added further disruption by stalling the reading process in unevenly timed intervals. The metaphor of braiding thus fittingly captures the collage-like technique of Schadow’s writing, one marked by stitching together features that do not organically belong to each other. One could dismiss the text’s fragmented nature as evidence of a lack of talent (as Schadow’s less Romantic critics would do) were it not for the fact that it originated within a literary culture that had defined avant-garde writing precisely by this kind of bricolage, by the kind of ordered chaos it called arabesque.3

The Arabesque as Potpourri The thread that holds Schadow’s potpourri together is the “reminiscences of an artist life.”4 Yet, as John Oxenford complained, “the portion of the book which entitles it to this appellation is the least important and instructive,” although even this “somewhat trivial tale . . . is not without sparkling episodes.” Schadow is at his best “when he does not indulge in quips and cranks,” namely in the “series of lives of those painters and sculptors who have influenced Art from the dawn of a new mode of thought in the last century to the time of Overbeck inclusive.” The decision to present these biographies in the format of a dialogue was ingenious, the British critic gushed, because the questions and remarks of the “old invalid’s” various conversation partners render them “fitting vehicles for opinions on Art and Art-education in general.” Indeed, Oxenford was so taken by these vitae that he decided to include two extensive translations of DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-20

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Schadow’s passages about Asmus Jakob Carstens and Johann Friedrich Overbeck, who, among the chosen few illustrated by Hübner’s swift pencil, appear in effigy on pages 11 and 159, respectively (see figure 14.2). Smitten by the style of the novel’s prose, Oxenford avidly lists all of the painters presented in this manner: “Flaxman, Canova and Schadow’s father, Johann Gottfried Schadow, Thorvaldsen, Cornelius, Overbeck and, treated with particular love, the author’s brother, Rudolph, as well as a few others.” He delights in the collegial tone of Schadow, who treats his subjects “in a most delightful manner, generally with the warmth and enthusiasm of a personal friend and fellow-labourer.” Only once does Schadow interrupt his “stream of pleasantness,” when it comes to correcting “the French mistake, that [Jacques-Louis] David was an essential reformer of Art.” Oxenford again quotes from the novel to communicate its style of argumentation: “As for poor David, ‘his art was, in fact, the expression of the heartless, cruel and cold fanaticism of that republican party, of which he was a zealous adherent,’—‘showing . . . nothing but the unartistic spirit of his age.’” In short, the biographies offer “a quantity of pleasant reading,” as they are not only entertaining and instructive but afford “an amount of pleasure not often to be derived from the perusal of German prose.”5

Fact and Fiction By 1854, Schadow had published extensively, mostly on art instruction and art theory. His first major article, “Gedanken über eine folgerichtige Ausbildung des Malers” (Thoughts on the coherent education of a painter), appeared in 1828, two years after he assumed the position of director of the Düsseldorf Academy.6 As the first extensive presentation of Schadow’s art theory and associated teaching philosophy, the programmatic piece centered, not surprisingly, on the principle of a naturalist idealism. The Nazarenes basically envisioned an infusion of more life into the conceptual and ideational approach practiced by the Brotherhood of St. Luke. As an idealist, he still located the artwork’s origins in the idea as first captured in drawing, thus submitting to an initial focus on line, clearly delineated purified forms, and graphic media, especially the cartoon. At the same time, his idealism still subscribed to an ideal of emulation, an ideal centered, not surprisingly, on the Romantics’ Middle Ages and Renaissance. Naturalism, on the other hand, stood for a closer adherence to nature: careful observation of plant life, extensive study of drapery and the life model, and a skillful efficiency in portraiture, with a notable emphasis on a truthful rendition of physiognomy. Not surprisingly, the ideal medium suggested by Schadow to achieve such greater corporeality was oil painting, which he singled out for its sensuality of color.7 Soon Schadow found himself attacked for his position from both sides of the equation: his more radically idealist peers, like Overbeck and Cornelius, accused him of decadent sensuality and pedestrian imagination, while the emerging generation of naturalist and socially minded realists rejected his approach as too timid and antithetical to capture reality as it was (or at least as the realists saw it), which meant above all reality without any filter or idealist palliative. Schadow felt the recurrent need to defend his naturalist idealism against both parties and would express this feeling with passion and a theoretical agenda in his article about the “two parties in the art world: idealists and materialist.”8 It was part of the same defense so eloquently advanced in Der moderne Vasari.

182 Taming the Arabesque His various experiences in writing and publishing on art instilled in Schadow, as he confessed to Julius Hübner on April 5, 1853, a certain confidence in his competence as art critic and theoretician. He could not say the same about his poetry, although he had tried his hand at that too.9 It must therefore have been a particular comfort and affirmation that Alexander von Humboldt felt especially pleased by several of the Moderne Vasari’s poems.10 Schadow clearly profited from the freedom granted by an arabesque composition technique to approach his project in an additive manner. While his ambitions had grown into novel size, he could still pursue the entire range of his interests and writing experiences as an assortment of basically free-standing vignettes, be they songs, poems or theater plays, biographical sketches, formal analysis, or instruction about art education and art-theoretical reflections. The only pressure for coherence in structure left was the novella’s prose narrative, and, as we know, these reminiscences became the project’s least satisfying element. At the same time, Schadow’s novel perpetuated in writing what had already been, as witnessed in Cornelius’s Alte Pinakothek frescoes, a long-standing practice in Nazarene art: to construct genealogies of modern art’s regeneration around 1800 and to do so by fusing biography, art history, and theory.11 Firmly rooted in this tradition, the mixture of narrative and reflection, dialogue and description, syncopated and enriched by the poems, tableaux vivants, and dramatic performances, constructs a finely layered body of commentaries, which adds a self-reflexive dimension to Schadow’s otherwise rather rigid insistence on his concept of naturalist idealism.

Art History, Interrupted The theater play, inserted into chapter 2, carries special weight in this induction of a reflective mode. Like an appendix which has found its way surprisingly into the main body of the text, it adds a general history of art (from antiquity to the Napoleonic era) to the story of modern art told through the series of biographical sketches.12 Embedded in the fictive description of a royal visit, which occasions the performance of this Festspiel (festival), we encounter a text within a text, itself an arabesque, a hybrid of recitations and tableaux vivants. The play’s pedagogic purpose is clearly laid out in the preceding dialogue about what subject to choose. In this crucial passage, the novel presents its own overarching agenda, as the perspectives of reader and fictive personage align and become mutual targets of Schadow’s attempt at indoctrination. Surfacing abruptly on page 39, the play represents a prudently placed mise en abyme, a delayed beginning that provides an art-historical framework for the assessment of modern art after the fact, that is, after the evaluation of its main contemporary representatives has already begun. This rupture of a continuous linear narration forces the reader to participate actively in the writing of that (art) history. The reader’s implication as critical agent fulfills an important function, and not only for the logic of the novel’s narrative structure. It also highlights the subjective nature of the entire explanatory system mapped out by Schadow. At the same time, the passage’s open didacticism addresses yet another important aspect of such performances, which the director, an eye always on the market and the material needs of his flock, cultivated with never-faltering energy: to integrate the local community of artists into the social fabric of bourgeois life and to draw near to both the sphere of the aristocracy and the court of Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig von Preussen, the nephew of the Prussian king, who, stationed in Düsseldorf as the general of the feared Fifth

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Regiment of the Ulans, played a seminal role in the city’s social fabric as a kind of “ersatz king.”13 For all his commitment to Romantic idealism, Düsseldorf’s academy director was a marketing genius. He was therefore no less controversial or contested.

Romantic Returns When Schadow published his autobiographical fiction, the modernist Romantic revolution in writing, which has occupied us so intensely in the earlier part of this book, seemed a lifetime ago. And it was. Schadow was only eleven years old when the modern novel remade itself as a “colorful hodgepodge of sickly wit” in 1799.14 And while his formative years were spent in Rome among the Lukasbrüder, the brethren of St. Luke, few art histories have perceived the Düsseldorf school in terms of its Romantic heritage.15 Who could blame them? Already the period itself felt acutely that the passing of Hegel in 1831 and Goethe in 1832 had marked the end of an era, their achievements throwing an intimidating shadow over German culture for decades to come. The next generation was haunted by the sense, often but not always accompanied by paralysis, of standing on the shoulders of giants. Immermann’s quintessentially modern concept of epigonality had its roots here too.16 Nonetheless, strong ties existed between the Romantic revolution and the Düsseldorf renaissance.17 Sometimes quite subcutaneous in purely visual terms, they were rather obvious in the literary arena. Initiated into world literature by Karl Immermann and Friedrich von Uechtritz, another lawyer-turned-poet, the new crop of art students engaged poetic subjects with fervor and read what by then had become the “early Romantic classics.” In the early 1830s, painter-poet Robert Reinick, for example, read Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1826 Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the life of a good-for-nothing)—no less than four times!—to a captivated audience of painters, and three immediately ordered the novel for themselves. Enthusiastically, Reinick reported back to Berlin and wanted Eichendorff to know what kind of furor his “good-fornothing” had caused in the Rhenish city. Tell him, he instructed his close friend, art historian Franz Kugler, “I am proud to be his apostle.”18 Ten years later, the famous Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen enjoyed a lively visit with the Düsseldorf artist community and admired Carl Ferdinand Sohn’s monumental adaptation of Goethe’s 1788 play Torquato Tasso, which shows the sixteenth-century Italian poet with his two admirers, the princess Leonore d’Este, sister of the duke of Ferrara, and her friend, Leonore Sanvitale. The list of literary interests and connections was long; it was commenced in 1826 by Schadow’s programmatic personification Poetry, who in golden letters immortalizes on a marble tablet the names “Horaz, Shakespeare, Dante, Calderon, Camões, Goethe, Schiller, Tieck.”19 The painting captures her as she is still writing down the last name, a poignant expression of Schadow’s belief in the future, in a new literary tradition worth being delivered to memoria in due time. German Romanticism was everywhere in Biedermeier Düsseldorf, and nothing illustrates the ongoing dialogue between early Romantic past and present literary production perhaps more poignantly than Karl Leberecht Immermann’s satirical romance Münchhausen, tellingly subtitled A Story in Arabesques. Published between 1838 and 1839, his imaginative wanderings updated the Romantic avant-garde writings for the next generation.20 Not coincidentally, Oxenford was also an aficionado of the Düsseldorf poet, whose Wonders in the Spessart he had translated in 1844.21 Looking back, Schadow’s entanglement in the Romantic arabesque seemed simply inevitable.

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A Story in Arabesques By midcentury, the arabesque, both as a literary and artistic genre, had played a central role in Düsseldorf’s vivid intellectual scene and its creative production for decades. In this sense, the academy director merely joined a trend long in merry flow before his own dabbling in the modern novel. Yet it seems that the novel’s conception owed in particular, consciously or not, to Immermann’s influence. A cherished collaborator of Schadow’s, the poet wore many hats: he earned a living as a district court judge, but his true passion was literature, a passion he realized as theater director, dramatist, and the author of the first comprehensive Zeitroman in German literature (a genre of prose fiction that, concerning itself with the mores of the times, would prove vital for the novel’s future). Immermann had moved to Düsseldorf in the same year as Schadow, and for many years he was one of the artist’s closest friends. Immermann’s Münchhausen: A Story in Arabesques was an 812-page mammoth.22 Its subtitle was a paradigmatic declaration about its self-understanding as an updated example of Friedrich Schlegel’s “colorful hodgepodge of sickly wit.”23 Indeed, by mixing satire with keen realism and a Romantic cadence of prose, Immermann added to the Romantic novel a brilliant analysis of contemporary Biedermeier culture and a shrill criticism of his time. These unfolded within a dualistic structure, for the novel interweaves two seemingly independent parts and literary genres: the over-the-top tall tales of the title’s antihero, the “Baron of Lies” Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen, and the idyllic village story of a Westphalian farm called Oberhof, which centers on the larger-than-life figure of the village leader, the Hofschulze. If the baron represents the fickle zeitgeist with its destructive yearning for the exotic and ever-new, the world of the Hofschulze stands for centuries-old customs, an organic life structure, and a rooted national and popular spirit. This juxtaposition, however, does not amount to a conservative utopia of rural living, as one might easily assume. To the contrary, Immermann’s arabesque perspective undermines and criticizes both sides of the equation. Although Schadow’s ideals hardly accorded with Immermann’s overarching critique of any passive persistence in a single condition, his novel, too, was certainly affected by “the great law of motion and change” that ruled the Münchhausen story.24 It seems, then, no mere coincidence that Oxendorf, who recognized the arabesque structure in Schadow’s novel, was also intimately familiar with Immermann.25

On the Path to the Comic Strip: Johann Baptist Sonderland A signifcant example of the close interaction and incessant interplay between word and image in this late Romantic Biedermeier culture is the adaptation of Immermann’s Münchhausen as a story in pictures (fgure 15.1).26 First issued in 1848 in a popular almanac, the Illustrirter Kalender, the publication is remarkable on two accounts. The fourteen pages with their sixty-fve illustrations were at the forefront of a new and increasingly popular genre, best described as the comic in its infant state. At the same time, they violated the genre’s frst rule, that the pictures’ sequence in itself would delineate a clear plot. As a result, any reader unfamiliar with Immermann’s eighthundred-pager must depend on an abbreviated version added to the sequence by its creator, Johann Baptist Sonderland. Sonderland knew the printing trade well through his father, who worked at the Düsseldorf lithographic printing office Arnz & Comp. from 1817 to 1858. The son,

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Figure 15.1 Eduard Kretzschmar, after Johann Baptist Sonderland, Immermann’s Münchhausen in Bildern, ca. 1848. Wood engraving, 15.3 × 7.7/ 9.9 cm (image), 18.6 × 26.5 cm (page). From Illustrirter Kalender für 1848 (1848), 153. Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Düsseldorf.

186 Taming the Arabesque too, had been first trained in this métier before enrolling at the Düsseldorf Academy, if only part-time, in 1822. He stood out, and four years later found himself among a handful of students taken on by the new director, whose master class he entered in 1837. Schadow’s trust was not misplaced. When Sonderland finally left the city in 1845, he had become one of the finest representatives of the art of the arabesque in print. A well-received contributor to Robert Reinick’s 1838 Lieder eines Malers mit Randzeichnungen seiner Freunde (Songs of a painter with sketches by his friends), a smash hit that will get its full due in the next chapter, he soon followed in the footsteps of Neureuther’s poetic marginalia.27 The ensuing collection Bilder und Randzeichnungen zu deutschen Dichtungen (Pictures and marginalia accompanying German poems), released in numerous installments between 1838 and 1844, presented a broad variety of sources and authors, from folk songs and fairy tales to Enlightenment poets like Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. It even featured works by the liberal agitator Ferdinand Freiligrath, a Young German who would play a key role in the revolutionary events of 1848 in Düsseldorf, very much to Schadow’s chagrin. Sonderland’s title page displays remarkable self-confidence vis-à-vis the literary sources (figure 15.2). Its arabesque evolves around a self-portrait of the artist, who is comfortably seated on a wooden chair in his studiolo, the tool of his trade in hand, his left leg resting nonchalantly on a pile of massive tomes. Dressed in a loose-cut jacket and polished black shoes, his copious hair and opulent moustache neatly trimmed, the artist, legs crossed, looks up with engrossed concentration. Yet his gaze does not focus on the tranquil surroundings but goes inward, as the draftsman “invents” those images he will soon “etch” (as the book’s title so proudly advertises). Without denying poetry’s inspirational role, the vignette clearly emphasizes the originality of artistic adaptation. Taking flight, Sonderland’s imagination is leaving its literary sources, quite literally, behind. Shut away between heavy book covers, the texts have served their purpose of initiating the magic of printmaking, which now unfolds in scrolls and curlicues around the creator’s practice. This takeover continues in the publication itself, which, too, severs image and text and, in stark contrast to Neureuther’s marginalia, banishes the full citation of each illustrated poem to the back of the book. Among the city’s profitable output of high-quality illustrated books, Sonderland’s venture stood out, and not only because it was one of the rarer single-authored extravaganzas. It also embodied, like few others, the school’s interest in genre painting. “Here a true joy of realistic detail dominates,” Gerhard Rudolph observes, although the mood remains overall, as so often with the younger Romantics, “sentimental.”28 The realistic traits also do not break the hegemony of an ideal conception, as “the thought determines the picture’s essential meaning” and the playful arabesque serves as a shield against an unvarnished (let alone politically progressive) realism. Not all approved. Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter, for example, a popular poet, novelist, and chronicler of the Rhine region, carped that the artist had treated most ballads too superficially, except for the enchanting sheets dedicated to “fairy-tale-like poems.”29 The critic might have had in mind an image like the little gnomes of Cologne plucked from a local legend, which had gained renewed popularity through an 1836 retelling by August Kopisch (figure 15.3). Smitten, The Christian Remembrancer raved in 1841 that this invention was “worth all the rest put together.”30 For those readers “unskilled in fairy lore,” the London-based monthly explained the nature of the poem’s tiny heroes, the Heinzelmen, “a class of elves who whilome [formerly] were invaluable allies to the housewives and tradesmen of Cologne, labouring all night long in their

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Figure 15.2 Johann Baptist Sonderland, Self-Portrait with Arabesques, May 1844. Etching, 28.2 × 23 cm (plate), 48 × 38 cm (sheet). Second title page of Sonderland, Bilder und Randzeichnungen (1844). Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Düsseldorf.

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Figure 15.3 Johann Baptist Sonderland, The Little Gnomes, ca. 1838. Etching with masked plate tone, 33.5 × 25.4 cm (plate), 46.5 × 34.1 cm (sheet). From Sonderland, Bilder und Randzeichnungen, part 1. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1985-52-15093.

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service; and . . . doing in that brief interval more than ten men could have accomplished by day.”31 Of course, such paradisiac moments never last. In this instance, the harbinger of loss is the tailor’s wife. Overcome by curiosity and boredom and pricked by mischief and malice, the “prying dame” scatters dried peas upon the stairs at night. The inevitable happens. The “poor little elves” tumble down the hard wooden planks and, vexed and sorely bruised by their grievous fall, quit the ungrateful city forever. Gone are they! all are gone! the spot That once they lov’d they visit not! We cannot rest us now as then, At ease, help none for idle men Slaves must we, At all times, be, Tailor, and baker, and sausage-maker, Must toil for ever, and scrape and peel, And trudge, and drudge, and wind and wheel; Do all for ourselves, With no help from the elves! Must fashion our dress, And smooth down and press, And rub, scrub, grub, Chop blocks, and break, And cook, and bake. Oh, were it now as in the days of yore! Alas! the bright old time returns no more!32 Naturally, a Romantic mind like Sonderland’s was seized by the poem’s mixture of medieval setting and grotesquerie, harmless humor and folksy dreamscape, and the Düsseldorf draftsman translated Kopisch’s tale into a cornucopia of fgures which, with a clever sketch of the regrettable treachery committed by the tailor’s wife at the center, represent the labors of the Heinzelmen with a great sense of detail and narrative verve. “There must be hundreds of fgures, each more comical than the other,” The Christian Remembrancer concluded. “Altogether this plate is the gem of the collection.”33 Interestingly enough, the overall layout did not meet with the same enthusiastic response. The British journal objected to the overly wide margins (tellingly cut away for our purposes of illustrating Sonderland’s print), which, “no doubt very handsome in the eyes of the book collector,” make for a rather “unwieldy volume.”34 In contrast, the exile of the poem’s full citation to the book’s final pages was met with silent agreement. This sentiment might explain why Sonderland felt no qualms about reducing Immermann’s Münchhausen to the briefest of aide-mémoire.35 This obvious trust in a prior knowledge of the literary source on the part of the audience, however, introduced a peculiar instability into the relationship of word and image. Sonderland’s pictures are not illustrations in the true sense because they are neither visual punctuations of the original text nor heterogeneous with its abbreviated version. Yet neither are they autonomous, for they cannot carry the story on their own. Sonderland’s project thus oscillates between the traditional genre of book illustration and the impending fashion of self-reliant picture stories. On the other hand, the hybrid character of Sonderland’s

190 Taming the Arabesque solution harked back to the arabesque confusion at the heart of Immermann’s Münchhausen itself, which could only be solved by dissecting the story and thus destroying its compositional core. This was exactly what happened when the Oberhof part was published independently in 1863 and became, as autonomous extract, more popular than the unabridged original (a threateningly massive four volumes).36 Consequently, when a professor at the Johanneum in Hamburg finally tackled the challenging task of translation, he restricted his efforts to the Oberhof, presenting to his English audience A Tale of Westphalian Life: With a Life of Immermann and English Notes.37 In literary terms, Der moderne Vasari was a stopgap solution, well-received but without followers. While Immermann continued to create the Romantic arabesque in the spirit of the prerevolutionary Vormärz (the period preceding the 1848 March Revolution), Schadow’s humorous arabesque remained unfinished business and as such qualifies as Alain Muzelle’s “weak arabesque.”38 In artistic terms, the master himself was only a midwife, not a parent, to the arabesque outburst happening under his watch. Oddly enough, it was precisely Schadow’s dedication to “painting as language” that laid the foundation for the entrepreneurial endeavors of his students outside of the academic hierarchy of genres, and the next chapter will indulge a bit more in this entertaining arabesque interlude ruled by the “king of the arabesque,” Adolph Schroedter. Thus, even if Schadow’s publication was something of the Romantic novel’s swan song, a nostalgic goodbye bathed in the bluish light of dusk, an unraveling of the original’s challenge, the arabesque’s taming was not without its merry tunes or bright flashes of wit and inspiration. Tamed or not, the painter’s contemporaries still placed the novel firmly within a Romantic context. This is noteworthy, as I met with fierce resistance when I first proposed the same. Therefore, I want to end this chapter by revisiting briefly (and thereby corroborating) my perhaps provocative proposition: published in 1854, Der moderne Vasari was a Romantic arabesque.

The Late Arabesque in Review To prove my point, let us turn to Paris in the winter of 1856. That year, on January 26, the French journal L’Athenaeum français: Revue universelle de la littérature, de la science, et des beaux-arts presented Schadow’s Moderne Vasari to its readers.39 The review opened with some general deliberations. If the novel [roman] is the epic of modern times, the new German novel [nouvelle allemande] is the classical drama. In order to employ fully rounded characters who do not bear the stamp of a common mold, the classical author composes them from the thousand idiosyncrasies that we encounter dispersed throughout ordinary life, concentrating them into one personage. The author of a novel proceeds in an analogous manner. He only has to paint one fact in order to reflect— as in a genre painting—an epoch; he distills it from all prior facts in order to give it emphasis, thereby locating the matter of principle interest in the text at a given point. After this lengthy introduction, the reviewer, a certain Monsieur I. Plachta, continued, “It is at this genre of composition that one of the leaders of Romanticism in Germany excels with incontestable superiority. Although Mr. Schadow was inspired by Ludwig Tieck without being able to sustain comparison with him, he is nonetheless worthy

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of standing among his ranks, as his newest source of merit is worthy of attracting attention.”40 Plachta was in agreement with his colleague across the channel, John Oxenford, who also stressed the connection between the early Romantic novel and this “newest source of merit.” While he disproved of Schadow’s adaptation into fiction à la H. Clauren, this dislike did not prevent the perceptive critic from reinscribing the somewhat insipid frame story into the tradition of Romantic avant-garde techniques of writing.41 There is also much amusing matter connected with the rehearsals and the final exhibition of tableaux vivants, which will remind the reader of the comic side of [E. T. A.] Hoffmann, especially as manifested in the entertainment given to the Prince, at the commencement of “Kater Murr.” . . . Not only some of the humorous details, but even the form of the book, remind one of “Kater Murr,” for the odd scenes to which we have above referred have, beyond the fact that they take place within the world of Art, little more to do with the serious object of the work than the novel which Hoffmann’s cat uses as blotting paper . . . with the feline autobiography. Oxenford’s comparison sets the stakes high. The extraordinary narrative virtuosity of Kater Murr’s “thrown-together mess” has secured this unique novelistic experiment “a prominent place among the handful of outstanding epic monuments in nineteenthcentury European literature.”42 Propelled by a double-optics principle, Hoffmann’s novel intertwines two seemingly unrelated protagonists and their equally distinct, generically different narratives (the memoirs of Murr, a tomcat, and an anonymous biography of the musician Kreisler), which are connected by the intervention of an editor, as which Hoffmann signs himself.43 Yet for Oxenford the differences seemed more a matter of degree than kind, and Plachta concurred. The French reviewer certainly put his finger on the disconnect between the painter’s gentle comedy and Romanticism’s most radical arabesque when he admitted that Schadow’s “enjoyable, snug jumble” would not stand comparison with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s exalted grotesqueries (and the same holds true, we might add, for Brentano’s or Tieck’s masterworks as well). The chaotic contours of the Moderne Vasari are but a faint shadow of the complex disorder of Murr’s feline “autobiography,” which evinces chaos, rupture, and fragmentation on virtually every level, both in structure and in content.44 Schadow himself displayed a notable lack of reflection upon the generic typology and literary implications of his compositional technique when he tried to separate, at least in his mind, his art-historical discussions from the frame story, which he kept calling, for reasons of length (but therefore no less erroneously), a “novella.”45 Nonetheless, Plachta, like the British playwright, placed the 1854 novel firmly in the arabesque tradition of contemporary German literature.46 Not coincidentally, so did Alexander von Humboldt, who cogently characterized the book’s arabesque nature as made up from “connected fragments.”47

Text/Image Bricolage For the seasoned reader of the Romantic novel, the collage of different types of text in Der moderne Vasari offers few, if any, surprises. The book had, however, one

192 Taming the Arabesque advantage over its avant-garde predecessors of the early 1800s: by now, half a century later, new printing techniques allowed for an effortless and affordable integration of copious illustrations, and Schadow made full use of this benefit. Indeed, the novel’s essential nature as a true collaboration of author, illustrator, and printmaker presupposed the new alliance of word and image forged by wood engraving. As a result, Julius Hübner’s pictorial interventions could become an integral part of the manuscript’s transformation into an arabesque. The lively correspondence between Schadow and Hübner testifies to their mutual excitement about the project. Part of this exchange was, as we saw, an intense discussion of design questions, including the critical matter of the images’ distribution. It speaks to the deeply Romantic nature of the endeavor that the two artists never developed a coherent plan but settled for a surprisingly asymmetrical scheme. Most illustrations accumulate on the first thirty pages, where the frontispiece emblem is followed first, on page 1, by a vignette of a putto writing (as the chapter opening), then by four of the nine portraits in rapid sequence: Asmus Carstens [sic] on page 11, John Flaxman on page 18, Antonio Canova on page 21, and finally Schadow’s father, Johann Gottfried, on page 23. The barrage of images ends abruptly with the beginning of chapter 2 on page 32, where Hübner’s second vignette, a trumpet-blowing putto, kicks off thirty pages of pure text. This striking lack of symmetry consorts with an equally notable inconsistency in the chapter openings. While the first four and the last two chapters start out with a vignette followed by a heading and a poem, the fifth and sixth chapters substitute a medallion portrait for such a vignette. These fluctuations and variations create the feeling of an open-ended flow and thus reinforce the arabesque structure of the text itself. While the images configure the perception of the text, the novel’s emblematic frontispiece provides the necessary reading instructions for the images to follow. In light of these observations, I feel inclined to modify my core proposition: published in 1854, Der moderne Vasari is a Romantic arabesque in its material shape as a book; it is a Romantic arabesque as total artifact.

Notes 1. Schadow to Joseph Fraenkel, October 15, 1853, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Düsseldorf, no. 15.1507/1. For the controversy between Clauren and Hauff see Berghahn, “Der Zug des Herzens.” 2. [Prutz], “Literatur und Kunst,” 910. 3. For such a negative critique, see P.G.O., “Doktor Wilhelm v. Schadow.” 4. All citations from Oxenford, “The Modern Vasari.” 5. Ibid., 43–44. 6. Schadow, “Gedanken.” 7. Schadow also referred to this concept as “realist idealism,” thus using the terms “naturalism” and “realism” interchangeably. 8. Schadow, “Zwei Parteien.” 9. Schadow to Julius Hübner (written by Charlotte Schadow), April 5, 1853, Heinrich-HeineInstitut, no. 48.3460/40. 10. Finke, “Aus den Papieren,” 173. 11. In most cases, this invention of tradition had taken pictorial form and, unlike Schadow, excluded artists or movements they disapproved of; see Grewe, The Nazarenes, chaps. 1–3; Schadow, Der moderne Vasari, 27–31. 12. Schadow, Der moderne Vasari, “Festspiel,” 39–65. 13. For Schadow’s formidable portrait of the prince, see Grewe, “Secrets of a Mystery Man.” 14. F. Schlegel, “Dialogue,” 95; see also chapter 2 in this book.

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15. See Grewe, “Nazarene or Not?” 16. For Immermann’s concept of epigonality and its modern(ist) implications, see Grewe, “Notes From the Field”; reprinted as “Appropriation and Epigonality.” 17. See Grewe, “Nazarene or Not?,” and idem, The Nazarenes, 283–85. 18. Robert Reinick to Franz Kugler, July 1833, quoted in Ewenz, “. . . dass der Künstler,” 268. 19. Grewe, Wilhelm Schadow, no. 31: “Poesie (auch Genius oder Muse der Poesie), 1826,” 70–76. 20. Immermann, Münchhausen; see further Oesterle, “Arabeske und Zeitgeist,” and Hasubek, “Ein Lieblingsbuch.” 21. Immermann, “The Wonders in the Spessart.” 22. Immermann, Münchhausen; Hasubek, “Ein Lieblingsbuch.” 23. F. Schlegel, “Dialogue,” 95; see also chapters 1 and 11 in this book. 24. Cited in Holst, “Karl Immermann,” 174. 25. The story first appeared at the end of Münchhausen’s fifth chapter; see Immermann, “The Wonders in the Spessart.” 26. Sonderland and Kretzschmar, “Immermann’s Münchhausen in Bildern”; see further Hasubek, “Ein Lieblingsbuch,” 42–47. 27. Reinick, Lieder eines Malers; Sonderland, Bilder und Randzeichnungen. 28. Rudolph, “Buchgraphik in Düsseldorf,” 145. 29. Müller von Königswinter, Düsseldorfer Künstler, 213. 30. Anonymous, “Illustrations of Ballad Poetry,” 396. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 397. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 395–96. 35. Sonderland and Kretzschmar, “Immermann’s Münchhausen in Bildern,” 153. 36. Hasubek, “Ein Lieblingsbuch”; Immermann, Der Oberhof. 37. Immermann, Der Oberhof. 38. Muzelle, L’arabesque. 39. Plachta, “Der moderne Vasari.” 40. Ibid. 41. Oxenford, “The Modern Vasari,” 43. 42. The first quote comes from Clason, “Chaotic Contours,” 95, the second from Scher, “E. T. A. Hoffmann.” 43. Hoffmann, Kater Murr. 44. Clason, “Chaotic Contours,” 95. 45. Schadow to Julius Hübner (written by Charlotte Schadow), April 5, 1853, Heinrich-HeineInstitut, Düsseldorf, no. 48.3460/40. 46. Clason, “Chaotic Contours,” 95. 47. Alexander von Humboldt, in Finke, “Aus den Papieren,” 173.

16 The Arabesque’s Kingdom Adolph Schroedter and Theodor Mintrop

If Schadow’s literary endeavor could draw inspiration from poetic arabesques of world stature, his book project was also swept up by his students’ ornamental craze, which overgrew invitation and business cards, shop signs and theater programs, and above all compilations of songs and folktales with fantastic decorations and Düreresque marginalia. We already encountered Robert Reinick’s sensational economic and critical success, the Lieder eines Malers mit Randzeichnungen seiner Freunde (Songs of a Painter with Sketches by His Friends), but it is worth a closer look.1 Financed by subscription, the first edition of one thousand copies was already sold out in November 1837, weeks before the book was published. Naturally, a second edition was immediately released after the first print run, followed in quick succession by several other volumes, including an English translation.2 As such, the Lieder eines Malers exemplify the lively print culture which blossomed during the years of Schadow’s directorship, in both quality and quantity, and mastered the fields of reproductive and original prints with equal bravura.3 Reinick’s initiative also highlights the tight-knit structure of the city’s artistic community across genre battle lines. The album united a who’s-who of the Düsseldorf art scene, from Andreas Achenbach, Eduard Bendemann, and Carl Friedrich Lessing to the academy director himself, in total twenty-nine artists—no small feat given the diversity (and sometimes adversity) of their styles and personalities. Of course, one artist in particular could not be absent, the “king of the arabesque,” Adolph Schroedter.

The King of the Arabesque Adolph Schroedter had joined the Düsseldorf Academy in the fourth quarter of 1829, finishing his studies, under Schadow’s supervision, six years later. Graduation did not sever his ties to his alma mater, and he retained, as one of the director’s master students, an atelier in the academy building from 1836/37 to 1844/45.4 Whatever quarrels he might have had with Schadow did not hamper his career; by the 1840s, Schroedter was among the city’s highest-paid painters, Schadow included, although fame did not easily translate into institutional recognition. The coveted painter and illustrator had to wait until 1859 for an appointment as professor, joining Carl Friedrich Lessing in Karlsruhe. The reservations against one of the period’s leading genre painters were fueled by the central role that the arabesque played in Schroedter’s art, both in oil and ink. Indeed, the first print he produced upon his arrival at the Rhine in 1831, a Dream about the Bottle, was an arabesque tour de force. DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-21

The Arabesque’s Kingdom 195

Figure 16.1 Adolph Schroedter, The Dream of the Bottle (also The Corkpuller), 1831. Etching, 34.8 × 25.2 cm (plate), 38.1 × 28 cm (sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1985-52-18984.

The boisterous etching gives proof of Schroedter’s dazzling gift for translating the principles of Romantic irony into visually pleasing yet intellectually sharp figurations, which oscillate between popular-communal and esoteric-particularized readings (figure 16.1). This associative quality already comes to the fore in the noteworthy multiplication of titles, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of Schroedter’s multifaceted invention. The one most commonly cited—The Corkpuller— intimates the name and shop sign of a popular wine tavern frequented regularly by the local artists. At the same time, it hints directly at the printmaker himself,

196 Taming the Arabesque who liked to deduce his name, Schroedter, from the professional occupation of the Weinschroeter (the German term for wine drayman) and thus chose a corkscrew as his signet. Schroedter’s early etching intensified this wordplay by doubling the entire design as his initials: a dynamic S-shape (formed by the arabesque borders) inscribed into the giant A (the print’s central motif, the bottle). This emphatically private and local humor finds a correlate in the highly sophisticated wit arising from an energetic devouring (and comic recasting) of famous literary characters and artistic references, whether the tragic heroes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ballads or the creatures, critters, and comical figures of a Bosch, Brueghel, or Jacques Callot, whose grotesque beggars dancing the sfessania were very much on Schroedter’s mind.5 The etching’s fantastic content is matched by equally exuberant penmanship: the freeing of the spirit’s spirits penned up in a funnel-shaped glass bottle. The gigantic vessel, reminiscent of a chemist’s utensils, beams with associations of medieval alchemy and the mysterious concoctions of witches and warlocks. As such, it projects into the print like a pyramidal chimney, a bottomless Moloch about to boil over. Its size is gargantuan compared to the minuteness of the men who, tied to the corkscrew by long straps, spin around the bottle’s top in desperate frenzy. Determined not to give up, regardless of the challenge, they sweat and swear, huff and puff, push and pull with all their might so that the vitreous prison’s cap might finally give in—and lift up. For all its fantastic exuberance, the scene strikes a tone true to life. A world of delirium awaits the lucky conqueror who, in pursuit of alcoholic oblivion, succeeds in freeing the visions of fairies, knights, and beautiful maidens, of gnomes, witches, and vixens, bubbling up from the bottle’s bottom. Caution is in place, and the arabesque’s fountainhead adds a decidedly darker note to the burlesque assembly above and its bottled-up phantasmagoria. Turning away from the lighthearted, often absurd, and consistently funny hustle, the shrouded dwarf child which dwells at the arabesque’s source, face ominously shaded by the cape’s oversized hood, seems worried, even taken aback, as he (or she?) contemplates the poppy pods he holds, a symbol of eternal sleep. No less foreboding is his companion, a mousy, bat-like creature, which, taking off with a speedy flap of its thin, elongated wings, approaches with alarming directness. The creature of the night reminds us that the spirit’s liberators might not be rewarded with the uplifting highs of tipsy forgetfulness, which can drown our sorrows, but the chilling clamminess of nightmares. But Schroedter neither wags his finger nor simply sides with carefree silliness. His print strikes a fine balance between moral admonishment and a humorous indulgence in debauchery. Aptly, two very different kinds of men reside over the print: here, a majestic but brooding king, there, a carefree, inebriated nobleman, both of them famous figures in contemporary poetry. On the left, the ruler of ancient Thule sits forlorn, a heavy ornate chalice clutched against his broad chest. Paying no heed to the young squire at his side, the king looks away in sorrow, his gaze lost in a distant past. Es war ein König in Thule, Gar treu bis an das Grab, Dem sterbend seine Buhle einen goldnen Becher gab.

There was a king in Thule, Was faithful till the grave, To whom his mistress, dying, A golden goblet gave.6

The Arabesque’s Kingdom 197 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe frst conjured up this stirring monument to faithfulness and love beyond the grave in the summer of 1774 when composing his drama Faust. The episode serves a crucial double function: to introduce Margaret, the ill-fated love interest of the play’s antihero, and to set up a moral foil to Faust’s sinful behavior (see fgure 9.1).7 One could hardly think of a more unexpected counterpart to Goethe’s mystical fgure than the jolly fat man on the right, the hero from Wilhelm Müller’s 1825 Tafellieder (Toasting songs). Happy in his drunken stupor, this German nobleman does not know of such grand emotions or brooding symbolism. Appropriately, his carefree quest for a wine worth drinking ends (and with it his life as well) in the picturesque village of Montefascone, located on the Lago di Bolsena. Here, his faithful servant and discriminating scout had fnally discovered a wine worth the journey, and thus marked the tavern door in large red letters: Est Est Est.8 In pairing the king of Thule with Müller’s thirsty traveler, the print mixes gravity with jauntiness, high culture with the accoutrements of cheerful sociability, and thus Bildung (education and self-formation) with the praise of abandon. The world of wonders at the bottle’s bottom leaves no doubt that all of this is tongue in cheek. But it is not only Schroedter’s army of comical characters and carefully stylized allusions to a larger narrative that hold the viewer’s attention; the composition’s vigorous formal structure does as well. Heir to Albrecht Dürer and Eugen Neureuther alike, it weaves together organic softness and rigid mechanical form, defined outlines and subtle shading, plastic modeling and a pure abstract line.9 Like the hodgepodge of figures, the more abstract visual elements also live off an impressive array of citations. The marginalia of Emperor Maximilian’s prayer book greet us again in the rampant thistle, which shelters a motley group of miniature humans in its spiky growth (see figures 4.1, 4.2, 5.2, 5.3, and 6.2). The bottled-up spirits, on the other hand, seem to have escaped from a Baroque inferno not unlike Peter Paul Rubens’s Fall of the Damned, then (as it is now) an apocalyptic highlight of the royal collections in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and well-known to the printmaker.10 The principle that holds together this crazy multitude of motifs, styles, and references is the mobility of the arabesque. Visually mixing incongruent elements, it transforms incoherence into a binding agent. The sparkling wit of this concoction is perhaps the print’s most enchanting quality: Symmetry follows asymmetry, while rapid switches of view from below and above induce vertigo; perspectival illusionism fades into the flatness of ornament and decorative patterns, while the burlesque-grotesque motifs compete for attention with the beauty of purely calligraphic lines. Never a boring minute.

The New Samson Schroedter’s noteworthy nod to contemporary life and fashion brings us back to our discussion of Schadow’s Moderne Vasari and the cult of the arabesque in midnineteenth-century Düsseldorf. In contrast to earlier expressions of the Romantic arabesque like Peter Cornelius’s Nibelungen suite, the next generation was no longer fixated on ages long gone but preoccupied with a new detail-realism.11 Often, such contemporaneity went hand in hand with a self-ironic parody of their own Romantic roots, as in Schroedter’s endearing contribution to the 1838 compilation of Reinick’s illustrated poems, The New Samson (figure 16.2). The foil for the print’s satirical take on the biblical story is the early Romantics’ declaration of war against the prosaic world of the bourgeois philistine, which Schroedter’s pencil subjects to a selfironic reassessment. The conceit is familiar: the artist rebel taking a stance against the

198 Taming the Arabesque

Figure 16.2 Adolph Schroedter, The New Samson, ca. 1838. Etching, 26 × 20.7 cm (sheet). From Reinick, Lieder eines Malers (1838), 27. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1985-52-18979.

petrifying norms of bourgeois society, as illustrated at the top, where a pack of Bohemian artists, flaunting massive beards and long locks, attacks a group of well-dressed men. Fearfully huddled together, these incarnations of the moral order try to escape as best as they can, one having already lost his hat, two others frantically grasping theirs, as a third tries to shield himself with a large umbrella. Yet nothing goes according to

The Arabesque’s Kingdom 199 plan, and already the scene’s diminutive size suggests that this heroic fight might be nothing more than a daydream. The reality of the situation unfolds along the two side panels, moving toward the stasis of a rather pompous gathering of middle-class types in the lower strip, where self-satisfied fatsos and ladies of all ages pass their time with smoking and gossip—firmly clutching pipes, coffee cups, and knitting needles. As our “new Samson” enters the philistines’ bastion at the top of the page with iconoclastic fury, the brawny artist does not anticipate (t)his end at all, suffocation by Biedermeier snugness. His downfall, however, comes unexpectedly soon in the shape of the household’s daughter, a “beautiful Delilah,” who quickly tames the lovestruck Bohemian. The basic moral of the story (the inevitable descent from aesthetic sublimity to everyday prosaicness) finds a powerful visual equivalent in Schroedter’s decision to reverse the arabesque’s more common orientation. Instead of unfolding from bottom (origin) to top (the arabesque’s final curlicues), the adventures of his new Samson have to be read from top to bottom, a reversal we need to keep in mind when facing Moritz von Schwind’s Symphony (see figure 18.1).

Upward Mobility Schroedter’s anecdotal reality check on Romantic ideals and Romanticism’s idealism resonates with the Moderne Vasari. Both lack a truly critical edge, and while they poke fun at human weaknesses and the absurdity of social conventions, they avoid cruelty and certainly pose no serious challenge to the status quo, reflecting an attitude that marked most of the print production in Düsseldorf. Political heft remained the reserve of caricature and carnival illustrations, and Schadow did everything to keep it that way. A conservative at heart, he weaponized the arabesque as a means to preserve, rather than challenge, the established order, thus fighting fragmentation with fragmentation. As it seemed impossible to overcome (or undo) the disintegration of modern society or reverse the destruction of traditional values and religious beliefs, the arabesque at least promised to glue together what the zeitgeist had scattered. Exploring and exploiting these mollifying capabilities, Schadow set out to transform what had been an instrument of analytical dissection and avant-garde transgression into an affirmative, antirevolutionary medium. At the same time, Schroedter’s new Samson is a kindred spirit of Schadow’s lovesick heroes, whose quest for the hands of two respectable burgher-daughters is a lesson in social climbing. Schadow himself was the poster child for the social integration he envisioned for his pupils. Elegant, witty, and a man of savoir vivre, the director had, as the local journal Düsseldorfer Kreisblatt reported, “nothing poetic, more the air of a courtier or minister than that of an artist.”12 Indeed, the notion of the artist as Bohemian or social outsider was anathema to Schadow, whose motto was social advancement, and not just his own. His entire flock was to move gracefully on the slippery parquet of court and high society, and to that end, lessons in etiquette, manners, and fashion supplemented the art instructions, a procedure that many of Schadow’s pupils, especially those from more modest backgrounds, found quite distressing.13 The fates of Der moderne Vasari’s main leads, Dolph and Franz, pointedly reflect Schadow’s agenda of upward mobility and his view of Düsseldorf’s artistic realities. In the end, social realities trumped aesthetic ideology. Schadow’s belief that there was no alternative to the path of the “new Samson” forced the former brethren of

200 Taming the Arabesque St. Luke to sanction genres less grand and less ideal (but more lucrative) than history painting. Schadow was painfully aware that the breakdown of the traditional patronage system had delivered the modern artist to the mercy of a capitalist market system driven (as he never failed to complain) by the superficial forces of fashion and press.14 In this battle, idealism could rarely survive, at least not on its own, and Schadow conceded as much. The figure of Dolph’s love interest, the beautiful offspring of a privy councilor, is the ultimate embodiment of such a practical viewpoint. It never crosses Henriette’s mind to criticize her future husband for his pursuit of genre painting because of its alleged lack in moral value or status. Despite some ambivalence about the state of affairs, Schadow ultimately agreed with his feisty female character: the main thing was that it sold. Among the novella’s many protagonists, only one incarnates Schadow’s ideal of the modern religious painter: a farmer’s son by the name of Theodor. Dolph and Franz first encounter the young man on one of their drawing expeditions into the “nearby, beautiful Ruhr region.”15 The force of his inner urge to draw (more specifically, to draw the biblical story), which not even the backbreaking chores of a farming life have been able to stifle, takes them by surprise, and they realize, astonished, that this country bumpkin, of all people, is a “born idealist.” Even in the most common natural phenomena, this child prodigy beholds the outlines of religious history, the sunlit evening clouds offering not merely an awe-inspiring spectacle of colors and shapes but the contours of a Last Supper.16 When Dolph presents the farm boy’s drawings to his mentor, der Alte exclaims, Giorgio Vasari in mind, “Sapperment! . . . That is a hotshot, truly a modern Giotto, whom Cimabue found as a shepherd lad drawing his own sheep in the sand.”17 Despite its clear evocation of the famous Renaissance myth of artistic genius, Schadow’s “young poet in peasant costume” was not simply a figment of the imagination. It drew from real life, down to the first name.

A Westphalian Giotto Little in the early upbringing of Theodor Mintrop would have presaged his rise to artistic stardom.18 Son of a Westphalian farmer, Theodor was indeed discovered at a young age by one of Schadow’s pupils, Eduard Geselschap (alias Dolph), who remained a lifelong friend and would appear regularly in Mintrop’s autobiographical records of life in Düsseldorf.19 Quickly acquiring epithets such as “Westphalian Giotto” and “rural Raphael,” Mintrop made the Nazarene ideals his own like few others in his cohort, imbuing his large history paintings with a quiet piety, gentle emotionalism, and Raphaelesque beauty akin to Nazarene Romanticism but enriched by a greater sense of chiaroscuro and intensified sweetness.20 Successful in his own time, Mintrop is hardly a household name anymore, and certainly not in the realm of grand history painting. Not that he was not trying! But his religious work never reached the innovative ingenuity of an Eduard Bendemann or the rhetorical power of a Carl Friedrich Lessing, and many of his monumental projects never came to fruition. The vast destruction in the twentieth century of what he did execute in ambitious fresco would only further his relegation to the margins of art history. Today, Mintrop is best known as a talented illustrator. Relieved from the fetters of history painting, he, like so many of his belated Romantic peers, came into his own on the intimacy of the page, where he could transform autobiographical experience into humorous arabesques.

The Arabesque’s Kingdom 201

King Heinzelman’s Love: Autobiography as Arabesque Omnipresent in Mintrop’s graphic work, both as motif and structural principle, his arabesque leanings forged a powerful kinship between master and pupil. Like Schadow, the farmer’s son was drawn to the ornamental’s conciliatory potential and its ability to infuse life’s prosaic reality with magic otherworldliness. Characteristic of this approach is his album König Heinzelmann’s Liebe (King Heinzelman’s love), designed in the late 1860s but published only posthumously in 1875 (figure 16.3).21 Intimating the series’ fusion of allegory and vignettes of daily life, the frontispiece evolves around the discord between Romanticism and mercantilism. Its airy architecture of deftly rendered flowers and dainty tendrils weaves together artistic quotations and allegorical figures, private memories of his friends’ happy courtship, and a detailed description of the Rhineland’s industrial landscape. The atmosphere vibrates with joy and an ease nurtured by abundance and the promise of plenty, a promise first given by the affectionate couple in the upper register (Mintrop’s beloved Anna Rose and her future husband, Theodor Piderit) and fulfilled by the female allegory at the center, who, part Demeter, part allegory of industry, relishes in the cornucopia of agricultural production and the wealth of manufacturing and trade she has inspired. We children of the twenty-first century might feel less reassured by the sense of order and balance trumpeted by the composition’s careful symmetry. Nor can we avert a sense of foreboding watching the ever-thickening smoke, which, puffing in arabesque formations from the multiplying chimneys of factories, steamboats, and locomotives, begins to obscure the fertile land and roaming river. In the age of climate change and global warming, industry’s gray veil seems more menetekel than jubilant sign of progress. Even Mintrop himself seems aware of the scene’s darker implications, and the print’s lower register harbors a group of mourning figures, their faces buried in their arms. They warn us not to be deceived by a cheerful surface that, at second glance, covers the grave of Poesy and Romantic culture. One might wish Mintrop had spoken more explicitly to the true victims of the era’s rapid social change, whether migrant workers or the growing urban poor; yet even without such progressive partisanship, the print articulates a candid critique of capitalism and the destructive forces unleashed by unrestrained mercantile interests. The triumphant allegory of industry at the center turns out to be a cruel mistress. Willfully, she has confined the arts to a watery cave beneath the floods of the Rhine, where their muse, her head resting on a harp in a gesture of utter despair or deadly slumber, is awaiting the resurrection of Imagination’s kingdom.22 Mintrop’s design evolves around this clash between industrial presence and ethereal ambiance, which translates into the stark dichotomy of an enchanted sweetness (above all evoked by the drove of delightful cherubs) and the allegory’s innate cultural pessimism. It is this stunning misalliance of message and atmosphere that gives the work its quintessentially Romantic quality and, as Schlegel would have had it, sickly wit. Yet it is also precisely this ironic twist that introduces a notable ambivalence. As the arabesque’s melodious lyricism and fairy-tale-like allure absorb the frontispiece’s anticapitalist gesture into an accordance of pure harmony, we are left wondering what to make of this nostalgic vision that neither dares to confront the evils it mourns nor allows us to indulge in our desire for pure escapism.

202 Taming the Arabesque

Figure 16.3 Theodor Mintrop, King Heinzelman’s Love, 1866. 26.3 × 18.9 cm (image), 46.7 × 34 cm (page). From Mintrop, König Heinzelmann’s Liebe (1875), 9. Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Düsseldorf.

The Arabesque’s Kingdom 203 Whatever our answer to this conundrum, it must take into account the album’s emphatically personal nature and insights into the artist’s sociability. As so often in Nazarene art, the importance of the work’s (auto)biographical element contrasts strangely with its clandestine nature, which already set Betty Lucas on a wrong course when in 1875 (roughly ten years after the album’s completion) she published Mintrop’s König Heinzelmann’s Liebe in collotype. Lucas’s subtitle, Ein Märchen in 70 Bildern (A fairy tale in seventy pictures), responds forcefully to the album’s world of make-believe, a world composed of droll figures, charming contemporary interiors, and accurate depictions of the era’s fashion and sartorial faux pas. However, it completely averts attention from its (at least implicit) political critique and ironic take on modern gender relationships and social mores. The editor did not even know that the drawings recounted a real-life story first fictionalized by its heroine, Anna Rose, and sent to Mintrop via mail shortly before her nuptials. When she married in 1860, the artist illustrated the tale as a wedding gift.23 In Mintrop’s graphic work, art emerges as a means to enchant or, perhaps more aptly, to reenchant reality, an attempt tinged not only by nostalgia and escapism but also, as Margaret Rose has argued, by ironic self-awareness. In short, the picture series’ good-natured humor is interlaced with a deeply Romantic self-reflexivity, which led him to aspire again and again to transcend the subjects’ mundane nature to a meta-level. This aspiration was fueled by what he, in an equally Romantic fashion, experienced as the deadening prosaicism of modern life and tried to counter with the weapons bestowed upon him by Poesy. Mintrop never ceased to believe in the potential of art to transport its audience beyond the boundaries of home and daily routine. Of course, this hope was in constant battle, as seen in König Heinzelmann’s frontispiece, with the fears raised by a rapidly industrializing society. Not surprisingly, this unresolved tension had already found its way into Mintrop’s earlier work, like the beautiful album of seventy-two wash and watercolor drawings dedicated to yet another female member of the Rose family, Minna. Executed between 1855 and 1857, the album continued Mintrop’s programmatic fusion of reality and fantasia.

Music-Making, Not Mysticism Take, for example, picture no. 26, which transforms the bourgeois living room into a stage, and the stage into a complex space of bourgeois tableau and allegorical fancy (figure 16.4). At the center of this playful picture puzzle are Minna and her husband, Theodor Bozi, a plump Biedermeier couple with bonnet and top hat, who are about to step, arms raised in expectant joy, into the open. Mintrop certainly does not idealize his subjects. They seem rather ordinary and, in their stoutness, a far cry from the image of Romantic lovers. This is particularly true for Bozi, whose ill-fitting suit makes him look rather pudgy and banal. And yet there is a warmth in Mintrop’s observation, a loving empathy, as he looks at the way life shapes our bodies and circumstances. This empathy inevitably changes our perception of the couple as we look on. We become aware of the care with which Bozi supports his wife and the fondness of his gaze as he looks, his head gently tilted, at Minna. Marriage might be a plain affair, but the honest devotion and tender love we witness here are not, which makes the couple’s characterization unexpectedly touching. The mundane and

204 Taming the Arabesque

Figure 16.4 Theodor Mintrop, Roses, Sea, and Sun, February 22, 1856. Pen, ink, wash, and watercolor over graphite, 29.8 × 29.6 cm. From Mintrop, Album für Minna, 1855–57, picture no. 26. Landesarchiv NRW (Abt. Ostwestfalen-Lippe), Detmold, D 72 Theodor Piderit, Nr. 18.

marvelous also mingle in the scene unfolding outside the opened French doors. While a pair of burly movers carry in an upright piano on the left, certainly moaning and groaning, none other than the god of poetry and music, of sun, light, truth and prophecy, appears amidst the Horae in the sky enthroned on his sun chariot (see also figure 13.2). Apollo, once again! The twenty-sixth picture in the Album for Minna creates a Biedermeier variation of the famous Romantic Fensterbilder, of those enigmatic “rooms with a view” composed by a Caspar David Friedrich or a Georg Friedrich Kersting.24 Pictorially, Mintrop plays with the uncertain status of the divine image, which could be read as an apparition, but also as an artwork, a picture-within-a-picture, a prop. The

The Arabesque’s Kingdom 205 theatrical curtain certainly pushes such a reading, and for a moment, we imagine the two leaving for a play or the opera. On the other hand, Mintrop consciously changes the motif’s key. When the earlier generation evoked enigmatic longing and nostalgic yearning, it did so in flat minor. Mintrop counters with a jubilant trill in flat major. Enigma yields to humor as the tropes of Romanticism return with an element of amiable caricature. It is still the experience of music (or, more precisely, its anticipation, stirred up by the sight of a noticeably heavy piano being carried up what seems a ridiculously steep staircase) which ushers in a vision of the sublime. Yet sublimity does not kindle eternal longing or some transcendental out-of-body experience; located in a quintessentially bourgeois form of sociability, the custom of Hausmusik, of music-making in the home, peters out into mundane if honest entertainment. Indeed, Apollo’s rather majestic appearance initiates an associative chain that moves from ancient grandeur to domestic bliss. Linking piano, sun god, and sea to the album’s heroine, the picture conjures up an immediate reference to another melody, Robert Schumann’s “O Sonn’, O Meer, O Rose.”25 The circle depicted here was undoubtedly familiar with this famous song; after all, Mintrop had illustrated Schumann’s Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (The pilgrimage of the rose) in 1852, and Minna was a passionate piano player.26 This intermedial reference plays an important role in Mintrop’s pictorial conception. Love and, more importantly, longing are the ultimate themes of Schumann’s song, and they reverberate through the drawing as well. At this intersection, a tinge of foreboding colors the scene. Mintrop was worried, and rightfully so. In the years when the album was in the making, Minna’s health was delicate at best, and she would succumb to consumption shortly after her thirtieth birthday in September 1857. The evocation of future happiness thus assumes an apotropaic quality. It adds a bittersweet note to the couple’s joyous step across the threshold of their home, which no longer simply suggests an innocent passage into the realm of the poetic imagination but doubles as a border crossing from the here and now to the beyond. A shadow falls upon this ultimate image of comfortable companionship as the words of the wedding vow ring in our ears: “Till death do us part.” Death is upon us, and love will need to last beyond the grave. Yet the army of cherubs soon shoos away the gloomy shadow of things to come, and the depiction’s spirited atmosphere does not let us dwell too long on these iconographic allusions and the desolate train of thought they might set in motion. Romantic longing yields to amusing entertainment as the winged helpers bring back the series’ humorous nature and point to its draftsman’s deft play with Baroque traditions. Indeed, the Baroque is the foil for the drawing’s optimistic final chord and main theme of the putti’s machinations: the victory over night, death, and winter. Busying themselves with household chores, the cherubs shoo away a dark-clad, warlock-like figure hovering portentously beneath the living room, which from this angle looks like a floating stage. His gaze lowered, he is an imposing presence and yet looks old and defeated, his long white beard flowing in the wind. Coming toward us, he seems eager to take flight from the heat of the glorious spring sun which streams so copiously through the French doors above. The sensation of movement is heightened by the billowing shawl wrapped in several layers around his body, although this impression is undermined by the fact that cape and beard

206 Taming the Arabesque blow in opposite directions. A peculiar violation of the laws of physics, this detail arrests the figure again, ties it to the spot where it hovers in midair. And thus the man, equipped with staff and owl, leaves us with an unsolvable riddle. Perhaps we can best read this wild image of arrested motion as a gesture toward eternal return. What lies beneath the world of the living, then, is a symbol of night and winter. If the winter allegory adds to the story’s dark undertone, it also plays a crucial supporting role. Its outspread arms do not only suggest defiance or the desire to flee an inhospitable scene; they can also be read in the opposite way, as an act of buttressing the shaking platform above. From that perspective, the old man morphs into a belated offspring of Atlas, carrying on his shoulders the world that he has been expelled from, a world drenched in the Apollonian promise of light and spring. As such, winter emerges as the arabesque’s ultimate source, that point of origin from which its fantastic forms grow, a final topsy-turvy allusion to the Creator God. The allegory’s Janus-headed nature is reified in the gnomes he has called upon as his troops, who now try valiantly to conquer the sunshine above: a hoard of Heinzelmen. With laughter and mischief, the putti push back these unwanted intruders to their world of poetry, beating them with flowers and emptying on them their watering cans, not taking into account that these little elves might just come, as Sonderland had proposed, to clean up and restore order (see figure 15.3). Or is this precisely the reason why the putti attack? With its peculiar and constantly shifting quality, Mintrop’s allegory of winter, night, and the unconscious seems an apt caryatid for a buoyant world of illusions, where happiness and Apollo’s appearance are but brief and fleeting moments.

Memento Mori In Mintrop’s illustration no. 26, the allusion to the seasons leaves us with the hope of cyclical renewal (figure 16.5). In the album’s last image, however, the scene’s eerie undertone evolves into a forthright (if still humorous) memento mori. The image

Figure 16.5 Theodor Mintrop, A Modern Dance of Death, April 5, 1857. Pen, ink, wash, and watercolor over graphite, 9.6/9.1 × 37.9/37.6 cm. From Mintrop, Album für Minna, 1855–57, picture no. 72. Landesarchiv NRW (Abt. Ostwestfalen-Lippe), Detmold, D 72 Theodor Piderit, Nr. 18.

The Arabesque’s Kingdom 207 shows various members of the Rose family and their partners coming together in a droll adaptation of the Dance of Death. Rosen auf den Weg gestreut und des Harms vergessen.

Roses strewn along the way Ev’ry harm forgotten!27

With this citation from Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty’s poem Lebenspfichten (Life’s obligations) as their journey’s maxim, the group sways happily in the rhythm of the stanza’s eighteenth-century setting by Johann Friedrich Reichardt.28 The choice of this particular piece does not only illustrate the album’s underlying mission to commit the memory of the people Mintrop loves to art as its trustworthy keeper; it also emphasizes the interplay between community (as constitutive for art) and art (as constitutive for communal experience). Not coincidentally, the song chosen as the suite’s fnal chord exemplifes the kind of turn toward a Volkston (a popular folkloric tone) performed in Goethe’s Heidenröslein and meant to encourage, as Reichardt explicitly stated in 1779, communal singing.29 Easy to grasp and easy to recall, the song displays a down-to-earth directness also at work in Mintrop’s genre scenes. Hölty’s text, on the other hand, with its rustic scenes of springtime dancing and outdoor drinking, takes as its main theme a motto that aptly captures the spirit of the album as a whole: Carpe diem. Eine kleine Spanne Zeit ward uns zugemessen.  Heute hüpft im Frühlingstanz noch der frohe Knabe; Morgen weht der Totenkranz schon auf seinem Grabe.

A small span of time Was given us.  Today the happy boy Still frolics in the spring dance; Tomorrow flies the wreath of death Already on his grave.30

This sentiment brings us back to the modern Vasari’s similar admonishment, “Vanitas Vanitatum Vanitas!” (see fgures 1.1 and 14.1). Taming the wild growth of the arabesque with humor and the quick, masterly strokes of pen and plume, the Album for Minna embodies the same nostalgic pessimism that haunted any late Romantic or belated idealist in a time of ever fercer realism. As such, it brings to bear upon Mintrop’s graphic novel (for what else, after all, is this arabesque picture story of allegorized family life?) the sensibility of an entire generation.

Notes 1. Reinick, Lieder eines Malers. 2. The subscription success explains why several editions—with different specifications vis-àvis the publishers listed (see records, Staatsbibliothek Berlin)—appeared almost simultaneously; for an English example, see Howitt, Dusseldorf Artists-Album; for further analysis, see Hütt, Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule, 154; N. Müller, Kunst & Marketing; ObersteHetbleck, “Buchgraphische Gemeinschaftswerke.” 3. Hütt, Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule, section “Düsseldorfer Druckgraphik,” 153–60; Rudolph, “Buchgraphik in Düsseldorf.” 4. Theilmann, “Schroedter (Schröter).” 5. Baumgärtel, Adolph Schroedter, 42–43. 6. Dole, The Works of J. W. Goethe, vol. 9, Poems, 130.

208 Taming the Arabesque 7. The ballad was first published (as an individual song) in the third edition of the 1782 collection Volks- und andere Lieder by Weimar court composer Siegmund Freiherr von Seckendorff (1744–85); see www.liederlexikon.de/lieder/es_war_ein_koenig_in_thule. 8. Wilhelm Müller, “Est Est! Romanze,” in idem, Werke, 1:165–68. 9. Kruse, “Adolf Schroedter als Graphiker.” 10. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Fall of the Damned, 1620/21, oil on oak panel, 286 × 224 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 11. Büttner, “Nibelungen-Bilder.” 12. Anonymous, “Wilhelm Schadow.” 13. For a witty description of these evening lessons in manners, see Schirmer, Die Lebenserinnerungen, 54–55. 14. For the breakdown of the traditional patronage system and its complicated process, see Grossmann, Künstler, Hof und Bürgertum. 15. Located in what is today the German state of North Rhine–Westphalia, the river Ruhr is an important tributary of the lower Rhine. Schadow, Der moderne Vasari, 136–47. 16. Ibid., 137. 17. Ibid., 144. 18. Zangs, Theodor Mintrop. 19. See, for example, Geselschap’s appearance in a charming drawing of a tableau vivant staged, with Mintrop present, in October 1855; see Grewe, “Portrait of the Artist as an Arabesque,” 121, fig. 10. 20. See Baumgärtel, Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule, 2:116–17; Biedermann, Bürgerliches Mäzenatentum, 174–75. 21. Mintrop, König Heinzelmann’s Liebe. 22. For the ambiguity of the muse’s pose (lament or slumber?), see Rose, Theodor Mintrop, 59. 23. The main characters of König Heinzelmann’s Liebe are Anna Rose (1839–86) and her fiancé, Theodor Piderit (1826–1912); Rose, Theodor Mintrop, 43–55. 24. Rewald, Rooms with a View. 25. For Clara and Robert Schumann’s cycle of twelve songs set to poems by Friedrich Rückert (first published in 1841), see Hallmark, “The Rückert Lieder.” 26. Rose, Theodor Mintrop, 20. 27. Translation by author. 28. Reichardt, Oden und Lieder (1779); for a discussion of Reichardt’s 1779 setting of Hölty’s 1776 poem see also Nehrfors Hultén, “Shaping the Nation with Song,” esp. 92–103; for picture no. 72 see Rose, Theodor Mintrop, 160–63. 29. Nehrfors Hultén, “Shaping the Nation with Song,” 101. 30. Ibid., 102–3.

17 Illustration as Intervention and Parody On Julius Hübner

“Because I am a painter, should I not be a poet?” Julius Hübner asked in 1856, when presenting his own ekphratic feast: a two-volume Picture Breviary, sumptuously illustrated with etchings by his trusted collaborator Hugo Bürkner and accompanied by the artist’s own ballads.1 Introducing fifty-two old masters from Dresden’s famous picture gallery, the project testified to the kinship between Schadow and his former student. Thus, its defensive undercurrent points to mutual anxieties about a decline of artistic capacities, anxieties aggravated by a sense of being under attack (by students and the press alike). Hübner was fortunate enough not to suffer any of the debilitating physical and mental effects that had crippled Schadow. But he was not spared the crumbling of the international reputation he had garnered in his twenties as one of Düsseldorf’s shooting stars. Now, in the late 1850s, the limelight had faded, and the accomplished poet turned to another creative outlet to rekindle enthusiasm: the written word. Hübner’s urge to express himself in words rather than color may have been fueled by the discrepancy between dwindling artistic fame and simultaneous institutional recognition. Two years after his move to Dresden in 1839, he was appointed professor of history painting at the city’s prestigious Academy of Arts and, in 1871, director of the picture gallery. In the decades to come, his reputation and position would secure a steady stream of commissions but could not prevent a painful dearth of critical acclaim and public attention. The truth was, the greater his ambitions, the weightier the chosen topics, the more lackluster the reception. The public cared little for his grand historical fantasies of the 1850s, and the reviews of the wistful appearances in 1855 of a Charles V in the Cloister of St. Just or the aging Frederick the Great in His Last Days on the Terrace of Sanssouci were polite at best, mostly lukewarm, and often outright dismissive.2 His 1866 remake of the Protestant Reformation, The Disputation of Luther with Dr. Eck, fared no better. In the end, Schadow and Hübner were handed the same verdict: excellent teachers but mediocre talents.3 As the Dresden professor struggled with the direction that modern art had taken, his poetic ambitions grew steadily and peaked, in 1868, with an adaptation of one hundred Petrarch sonnets, embellished with an engraved frontispiece of Laura, followed three years later by a compilation of occasional poems.4 For many reasons, mostly economic, none of these later publications could compete with the visual opulence of the Picture Breviary of the Dresden Gallery, which, while conceived as a collection companion, differed profoundly from the usual fare of guidebooks. In a remarkable iconic turn, art assumed agency on the breviary’s pages.5 The painted protagonists greeted their modern visitors as if in intimate conversation, disinterested DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-22

210 Taming the Arabesque in dry lectures about makers, history, or iconography. At stake was a highly personal relationship, and the sumptuous publication thus did not deliver a richly illustrated art history nor a perfunctory guide but an ode to art’s emotive power. In turn, this emphasis on an emotional bond between past and present implied sharing in the old masters’ piety and religious beliefs. Here, too, Hübner was truly Schadow’s disciple. Naturally, the collaboration on Schadow’s novel was effortless. Filled with sympoetic fervor and ekphratic empathy, he set out to add his voice to the text his hand was about to embellish. Rising from delightful decoration to critical commentary, the illustrations assumed a creative role as interventions in their own right. As the book materialized as splendid object, its arabesque potential began to unfold in unforeseen measures. Ultimately, only the comedic play of Hübner’s lovely putti was powerful enough to bring the novel’s Romantic seed to flourish.

The Vignettes’ Parodic Intervention Already the first of Hübner’s vignettes performs, quite paradigmatically, an ironic interruption (see figure 17.1). Like an exclamation point, it wittily punctures the introduction’s otherwise serious tone. Marking the transition to the story’s actual beginning, the wood engraving puts a comical spin on the frontispiece’s solemn gravity, unearthing a refreshing sense of irony hidden beneath the author’s nostalgic churlishness and vulnerability to depression and other maladies (see figures 1.1 and 14.1). Night has fallen (figure 17.1). The single flame of an antique oil lamp illuminates a sparse chamber whose most prominent piece of furniture is a heavy, coarse wooden table. Several books and an inkpot are huddled together on its surface, serving the needs of a putto who has made himself comfortable on a low footstool. His chubby body exudes amused self-contentment, as does the broad grin on his face. His mischievous expression betrays dubious intentions, just like the oversized mask he hides behind. The masquerade points to the ironic nature of the putto’s writings, which he is scribbling into the pages of an opened tome propped up in front of him on a flimsy book holder. And indeed, the putto directly addresses the reader with a plea for forgiveness: “Nichts für ungut—No offense!” Antiquity, too, makes its entrance, but once again with a satirical twist. Brightly lit, the stark white of the mask does not conjure up the glorious world of perfect bodies and male sensuality that a man like Johann Joachim Winckelmann dreamt of when slumbering in the presence of Greek antiquity. Instead, it recalls the dull plaster of death masks, that sensation of powdery fragility that, so antagonistic to the marble’s smooth coolness, all too often bestows a cemetery gloom upon the collections of antique plaster casts. Such sinister associations, however, do not linger. The scene’s cheery atmosphere quickly dissolves any brooding thoughts of death and decay, evoking memories of those playful masquerades so popular in nineteenth-century society, of carnivals or masked balls (see also figure 18.1). The mask becomes a stand-in for a topsy-turvy world, for a period when rules are broken, laws bent, and border crossings permitted. Tellingly, it is modeled after Schadow: the same prominent nose, the same furrowed physiognomy. This resemblance seems only fitting given the cherub’s task of filling in line after line on the director’s behalf and in his name. Schadow appears here, quite aptly, not as a painter but as a poet. And as in life, this changing of places relies on others. In its comic distortion, the scene’s core motif captures the novelist’s dependence on the eyes and hands of his loyal wife, Charlotte. The mask’s

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Figure 17.1 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, “No offense!” Chapter 1, ca. 1853. Wood engraving, 15 × 23 cm (page). From Schadow, Der moderne Vasari (1854), 1. Collection Cordula Grewe, Philadelphia, PA.

212 Taming the Arabesque closed eyes allude to the blindness haunting Schadow in these years and give the reason why the painter’s palette is put aside, neatly stored on a nail on the back wall, and replaced by a quill. The assurances of the novel’s quality as roman à clef do not stop at these selfreflexive references. The mask also draws attention to another author’s autobiographical musings by evoking, quite literally, the title of Karl Leberecht Immermann’s much-discussed prose work Düsseldorfer Anfänge: Maskengespräche (Düsseldorf beginnings: conversations behind masks). First published in 1840 and reprinted three years later as the third part of the playwright’s Memorabilia, Immermann’s reminiscences are preoccupied, not unlike Der moderne Vasari, with Düsseldorf’s art scene and interject discussions of art and aesthetics into the narrative. Unfortunately, they were not written in the spirit of friendship. By 1840, the climate between the academy and theater director, once best friends and productive collaborators, was glacial at best, and Immermann, well-known for his temper and tactlessness, felt no shame in spewing harsh insults in what were effectively his covert memoirs.6 Schadow, rather sensitive in personal matters, felt appropriately hurt. Against this background, Hübner’s vignette signals with partisan ardor that we are about to enter an alternative account (a much-needed corrective) to Immermann’s version of Düsseldorf’s artistic and communal life. The vignette’s metaphor of masking and unmasking calls for its own unveiling. As we proceed accordingly, several levels come into view. On the one hand, the putto emerges as a traditional allegory of genius and youth. On the other hand, he embodies a rhetorical strategy, one that seeks to establish an ironic distance from its own central categories. This playfulness itself, in turn, has two levels of signification. It outlines the thematic field of the Romantic novel, playfulness standing in for concepts such as chaos, arabesque, fairy tale. In this sense, the vignette enacts a moment of self-reflexivity, which alerts the reader to the multiple levels of production and interpretation embedded in the book as a whole. At the same time, the putto’s puckishness signals relaxed entertainment, even a certain frivolity, which Schadow certainly delivered, or at least tried to deliver, in the novella’s framing love story. To a certain degree, these significations are mutually exclusive, which highlights the productive role assigned to the reader. In typical Romantic fashion, we are asked to weave together the novel’s disparate elements, even if there is neither a promise nor any true hope of ever dissolving its internal tensions. The element of Romantic irony is also manifest in the cherubs’ Rococo garb, a style that the German Romantics (the Nazarenes included) had firmly denounced as decadent. Already on page 8, Schadow launches an invective against the aristocratic style of the ancien régime. Shortly afterward, he woefully laments the misguided appetite of Frederick the Great, the most revered of all Prussian kings, for the likes of a Van Loo or Watteau.7 Making fun of the Rococo as a childish affair which dresses up nature in silly costume, Hübner’s vignettes distance maker and mentor from the flippancy and superficiality associated with the “audacious, if not racy brushwork” of the French eighteenth century. As such, they translate into charming outline Schadow’s scorn toward those who mistook such facile nothingness for “geniality.”8 In the wake of the Rococo’s condemnation as the epitome of modernity’s depravity, the putti’s folly is the foil, the counterpoint, to the Romantics’ striving for a rebirth of contemporary art from the spirit of a religious revival and the resurrection of the old masters. Behind the humorous façade lurks a fundamental critique.

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Fortunately, Hübner could laugh about himself as well. He did not pass up the chance to subject the Romantic position itself (and, with it, the novel’s essential arabesque structure) to an ironic unmasking. By parading Romantic irony as Rococo masquerade, the vignettes gesture toward an intimate connection between Romantic arabesque and French rocaille, resolutely overlooked (if not outright denied) by the Romantics. Dressed in Rococo garb, the putti put gentle, deconstructionist pressure on the Romantic claim of aesthetic reform. Affirming the text’s aesthetic positions and proposed genealogy of modern art, the vignettes also undermine their own stability.

The Blind Connoisseur Hübner’s erudition and wit peak on page 96, where a putto, perched in front of an easel, hands folded across his knee in a gesture of greatest attentiveness, introduces chapter 4 and its leitmotif: a mockery of the self-declared connoisseur whose expertise (and arrogance) rests solely on cursorily reading around in art history (figure  17.2). Just a bit of a Karl Schnaase or a Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, the ensuing poem remarks with indignation, and the modern critic thinks he cannot err—Oh, what a fool!9 All strained looking is for nothing, and the putto’s vision remains blurred, glasses or not. His confusion thus plays on the medieval trope of man’s misguided trust in his own powers. As scientifically enhanced eyesight leads to nowhere but spiritual blindness, merely mechanical seeing, associated with the demonic in Christian doctrine, doubles as a symbol of the critic’s ignorance in the secular world of artistic production.10 And what an ignoramus we have here! Stricken with visual illiteracy, self-deception, and a fatuous mind, Hübner’s putto does not, for all his concerted effort, understand the true meaning of art, his spiritual eye only further blinded, as the poem categorically declares, by the copious reading material that makes up his throne. It does not help that his evaluative criteria, as his Rococo outfit reveals, are hopelessly obsolete. Proudly dressed up in the insignia of an eighteenth-century aristocrat, complete with epée, dandy’s cape, and a pompous powdered wig, the cherubic art critic is the ultimate incarnation of the philistine critic. Hübner wants to amuse. Critique comes light-footed, wrapped up in a witty spoof on shallow clients and a misled salon public. But he has more to offer than that. Embedded in his burlesque is a carefully worked-out commentary, astute and erudite, on the nature of art, its power to deceive, and the question of spiritual truth. Its earnest humor tackles century-long debates about the relationship between reality and image, between mimesis and invention. At stake is nothing less than the fundamental question, What is art’s essence? The nodal point of this complex discourse is the silhouette on the vignette’s imaginary canvas, or, more aptly, the shadow that produces it. Part natural phenomenon, part mystic metaphor, the shadow emerges as a key element of the book’s discursive structure, a powerful reference to the act of metamorphosis at the heart of art’s making and its struggle to reconcile the reality outside and inside of its very own mediums. The first slippage occurs between the putto’s face and its shadow. Given the angle of figure and easel, the strict profile view of the silhouette is at odds with the putto’s actual positioning. Yet not only that; while the putto seems cheery and mellow, his shadowy effigy utters a scream of horror. As disgust distorts the facial features of the silhouette, the face ages, leaving the image of an elderly man behind. Two things, then,

214 Taming the Arabesque

Figure 17.2 Hugo Bürkner, after Julius Hübner, Chapter 4. “O Connoisseurship! O Connoisseurship!” From Schadow, Der moderne Vasari (1854), 96. Collection Cordula Grewe, Philadelphia, PA.

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come into play, and both center on the mimetic nature of the visual arts: the allusion to the origins of art in outline drawing and the role of illusionism in art’s efficacy.

On Outlines, Parlor Games, and the Origins of Painting The origins of art are evoked by a classic trope, a profile view cast in shadow. The motif alludes to a well-known ancient legend, much cited in the period, as Henry Fuseli’s London lectures show. Extolling Greek outline as the origin of painting, they once again recount Pliny’s “amorous tale of the Corinthian maid, who traced the shade of her departing lover by the secret lamp.”11 With popularity came creative license, and many Romantics treated the anecdote so freely that “virtually nothing is left of the . . . episode,” as Hugo von Blomberg, a poet and painter himself, observed in 1863 (figure 17.3). Indeed, a print like the large etching executed in 1839 by Julius Caesar Thaeter after a design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel shows “neither the interior nor the farewell, neither the pair of lovers nor the pottery workshop; it is the youth who guides the crayon, not the maiden.”12 Transposed into the “realm of the Greek pastoral,” as Blomberg observed, so as to “lend it an aura of Arcadian antiquity,” Pliny’s legend channeled Schinkel’s own artistic convictions. In 1854, Schadow followed suit, although in dramatized form, on page 40 in his festival play: “Second Scene (The curtain opens, we see a Greek youth, who draws the silhouette of his lover).”13 Hübner picked up on this theatrical staging, teasing out a further dimension of Pliny’s origin myth in his vignette. In a few strokes, the Rococo spoof brings down the myth of art’s origins from the Olympus of Greek legend to the bourgeoisie’s salon and cozy sitting room. Folded into Hübner’s evocation of Pliny is a reference to the fashion of silhouettes and cutouts, which by the end of the eighteenth century had become a favorite pastime, a skillful method of commemoration, and, in the case of Philipp Otto Runge, even a path to a modernist form of abstraction. Evoking the performance of art as parlor game, Hübner also alluded to another fashionable form of entertainment, the tableau vivant. Schadow was intimately familiar with staging living pictures since childhood, as his father, Johann Gottfried Schadow, had been an avid organizer of such performances during his upbringing in Berlin. Once Wilhelm had moved to the Rhineland, he, too, took up this practice, which, ideal for wooing patrons and ensuring the school’s good standing among its wealthy clientele, would take up ample space in his students’ lives and the pages of Der moderne Vasari alike. An avid impresario of this para-artistic genre, the Düsseldorf Academy director was nonetheless torn. His fear that such parlor games might damage the status of high art never waned, and his novel condemns them as mindless diversions that distract from a more serious engagement (both educational and uplifting) with art. Mixing critique with complicity, Hübner’s vignette captures this ambiguity.

On Bees, Flies, and Shadowy Inversions If the shadow holds the key to the vignette’s musing on the origins of art, its illusionist references work through the question of art’s efficacy. The putto’s horror draws our attention to the small insect which, crawling along the canvas’s surface, defaces what seems to be the head of a young woman bathed in the glow of a radiant nimbus. The identity of the critter is, quite programmatically, far from unambiguous.

216 Taming the Arabesque

Figure 17.3 Julius Caesar Thaeter, after Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The Origin of Painting, 1839. Etching with masked plate tone, 32.5 × 40.3 cm (plate), 41.5 × 56.2 cm (sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1985-52-19425.

Opinions are divided. Is it a bee, as Margaret Rose and Gabriele Zangs have argued, or, as I believe, a fly?14 In the latter case, the juxtaposition of an insect cherished for millennia as the producer of sweet honey and its pestilent counterimage would enact the same principle of negative inversion at work in the mutation of the putto’s smile into a horrified shadow image. At this juncture, Schadow’s frontispiece is a crucial signpost for finding an answer in the emblem tradition. If, for example, we apply the lesson of Hadrianus Junius’s 1565 Emblemata, the equation bee/fly symbolizes the opposing pair of ingenuus candor (sincere, genuine candor) and obtrectatio (jealousy, envious disparagement). Accordingly, the bee, which draws sweet honey from bitter thyme, tells us that candor befits the learned, while the dark fly, which sucks pus from a horse’s abscesses, embodies the resentful jealousy that suits the enviers.15 While we still ponder the gravity of this emblematic innuendo, we realize that even such an erudite, if somewhat arcane, explanation might not be exhaustive. Following

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the transformation of the bee into a fly, we wonder why the silhouette is so dismayed. On the most basic level, this revulsion simply reflects a common reaction to an animal familiar to everybody as a pest. On a more sophisticated level, however, the fly is also an emblem of artistic skill, of the artist’s ability to create illusions. In an unexpected turn, the fly thus brings us back to Pliny’s legend and the notion of mimesis as (and at) the origins of art.

A Fly’s Mimesis For the Renaissance, the lifelike fly became what Zeuxis’s grapes had been for Pliny: the epitome of mastering the art of illusion.16 Take, for example, Schadow’s literary model, Giorgio Vasari, who illustrated Giotto’s supreme naturalism and superiority over his master, Cimabue, through an anecdote about a painted fly: As a young man, Giotto “once painted on the nose of a figure, which Cimabue had completed, a fly so natural looking that the master, returning to continue the work, tried more than once to chase the fly away . . . , thinking it was real, before he realized his error.”17 If Vasari showed off Giotto’s technical abilities and humor, Antonio Averlino, better known as Il Filarete, used the anecdote to demonstrate the superiority of Renaissance painting over its ancient predecessor. While Zeuxis had been able to fool birds into mistaking his grapes for real, Giotto could dupe even people.18 This emphasis on painting’s capacity to deceive, in turn, was an important aspect of Schadow’s insistence on naturalism, in particular his partisanship for color. Hübner’s iconography affirms the value that his teacher placed on art’s illusory powers. In text and image, Der moderne Vasari took a firm stand against the radically idealist fraction of the Nazarene movement, which, with Peter Cornelius and Johann Friedrich Overbeck at the forefront, vehemently renounced such sensual deception. For them, drawing embodied the supreme expression of the idea (including in its monumental form as cartoon), an epitome of the creative process and the carrier of art’s moral core. Schadow and his school, by contrast, saw the creative process as completed only after the last dab of color was applied. Not surprisingly, given his personal inclinations and artistic path, Schadow’s insistence on the physical qualities of painting was (last but not least) indebted to the Nazarenes’ religious mission. Befitting his master’s piety, Hübner’s vignette paid tribute to this as well. This time, however, meaning is not embedded in the animals’ reciprocal relationship but in their iconography as attributes of the female figure, whose contours emerge, faintly and reluctantly, on the canvas’s virginal white.

St. Luke’s Vision The putto’s black silhouette has such a stark presence that most viewers will only register the motif on the easel (barely visible in the canvas’ upper portion) at second glance: a female head surrounded by a halo of light rays. At first, an identification of the mysterious motif seems impossible; too faint are the outlines, too fragmented the body. Yet, to the adventurous interpreter, the two flying insects might again provide the key for an informed guess. And again, our starting point is the Renaissance fascination with the lifelike fly. The artist who was perhaps the most captivated by trompe l’oeil representations of the small bug was Carlo Crivelli, that painter from the March of Ancona who defied the Venetian softness of a Bellini with a crispness of line and precision of contour still uncanny today and certainly more Northern in spirit. Crivelli’s signature trait was

218 Taming the Arabesque a somewhat willful addition of fruits and flowers to his sacred subjects, which, often depicted in pendant festoons, add lavish and haptic appeal. But flies, too, appear in several of Crivelli’s paintings of saints.19 Following this argument, the question arises: might Hübner’s unidentified bodiless woman be a Madonna? The presence of a bee supports this identification; after all, this industrious, productive insect was a common attribute of the Holy Virgin, and the figure’s radiating corona has certainly alerted us to its divinity. Yet, even taken together, these allusions might be dismissed as little more than mere conjecture, were it not for the presence of yet another animal, a stately bull, which stretches out behind the easel with leisurely ease. The beast, too, carries a nimbus, and thus reveals itself as the symbol of St. Luke, author of one of the canonical Gospels, patron saint of painters and, last but not least, the eponym of the Lukasbund, that avant-garde brotherhood that Schadow had joined in 1813. Indeed, Hübner’s bull is a direct quote from the fraternity’s signet.20 As such, it not only asserts the image’s religious undertones; it also proclaims Schadow’s loyalty to the values of that artist-union of German expatriates in Rome that had so decisively shaped his formative years. The final twist of Hübner’s vignette then evokes Schadow’s dedication to (and battle for) religious art by alluding to the motif of St. Luke painting the Virgin. Coming back to the Madonna and the fly, then, the important lesson we can learn from the games played by Crivelli and Hübner lies in their insistence on a close link between a playful deception of the eye and the observer’s religious experience. Let us dwell on this idea for a moment. The master of all flies is Beelzebub, which in Hebrew means “lord of the flies.” His subjects are often a plague upon God’s people, as in Exodus 8:21–22, where a swarm of flies descends upon Egypt. Thus, if Crivelli’s viewers, duped by his brilliant illusionism, try to shoo the illusionist fly away, they try to brush aside the devil as well. “Crivelli then,” as Norman Land has suggested, “invests the Plinian topos—which we may call deceptio or ‘fooling the viewer’—with a new gravity and a new meaning; the Plinian cliché attains a theological significance.” We are compelled by the picture, in a spiritual as much as physical way, to participate in its illusion. “As the viewer physically attempts to brush the fly away, there emerges between him and the painting a deep sense of spiritual communion. We participate in the painting and commune with it by rejecting the arch deceiver, Satan, in the form of the fly, which, in turn, has deceived our eyes.”21 The possibility of such communion also motivated Schadow to insist on the corporeality of painting, even if his ideas of realism were far less radical than those of Crivelli or the Northern Renaissance. Art and its history come full circle in Hübner’s vignette, reaching from the shores of ancient myth to the paradisiac fields of Christian legend, where a merciful Madonna grants a portrait session to her enraptured evangelist. Mimesis is the anchor point of this arch and the nodal point of the satire’s deeper meaning: an assertion of art’s capacity to create religious meaning through material form. Following in Schadow’s footsteps, Hübner hails illusionism as a crucial means to evoke the divine. For a Nazarene, this was quite a radical thought.

Meaning and Play Hübner’s vignette acts out the original meaning of illusion as embedded in the word’s Latin root: ludere, to play. In this sense, its rich associative play with the iconographic tradition is first and foremost a call for a fun game of medieval symbolism. Yet it also

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draws attention to the seriousness of such play, not least to the image’s instability, or, at least, mutability. This embrace of this constantly changing character is, in itself, programmatic, quintessentially Nazarene and indebted to German Idealist philosophies (which we have seen at work in Venus’s disappearance in chapter 8). Rather than projecting the discovery of one ultimate truth, Hübner’s allegories suggest a variety of explanations that, instead of canceling each other out, coexist and converse. At the same time, the insight into the image’s instability also raises a question about the limits of interpretation, or, put differently, of its desired and desirable scope. To what extent, we must ask ourselves, does Hübner’s humorous fly sustain the level of deep allegorical reading advanced so far in this chapter? There is no ultimate answer to this question. The vignettes’ subversive charm derives precisely from a vibrant oscillation between emblematic depth and lighthearted amusement. Certainly, many of Schadow’s contemporary readers would have overlooked the illustrations’ discursive complexity. Seen through the lens of pocket calendars and literary almanacs, the book’s droll putti could easily appear as little more than comedic, purely decorative ornaments. And even if the sensitive reader grasped their function as ironic trope, the need for an expansive iconographical knowledge might still have been in the way of a successful decoding. These caveats do not, however, render invalid my quest for unearthing the picture’s allegorical depth, and I call upon Schadow himself as my witness.

Allegory and Illegibility As Hübner’s vignettes manipulate an astounding repertoire of iconographic traditions, they create a witty gloss on core themes of the period’s artistic and aesthetic debates. Naturally, the unfolding of this critical and satirical potential relies upon our ability to recognize the fireworks of references, which is, to repeat this point, also the crux of the matter. The modern age was no longer familiar with the centuries-old systems of pictorial communication, and Schadow freely addressed, with a good dose of self-irony, the incapacity of modern audiences to comprehend allegories and iconographic schemata.22 Halfway through his novel, the discussion of this tragic Babylonian confusion turns to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s exterior murals for the Alte Museum in Berlin, which had been underway for more than ten years when Der moderne Vasari appeared. Musing on the star architect’s attempt to represent the development of the human spirit in ancient garb, Schadow concluded that Greek antiquity had been exhausted as a source for public imagery.23 Yet, confessed the Nazarene, quite pained, he himself had no convincing alternative to offer, now that Christianity, too, had ceased to be the fabric of all experience. The frame story proceeds to illustrate the problem of visual (il)literacy through a rather funny anecdote. The Prussian king has announced a visit, Düsseldorf is buzzing with excitement about the upcoming festivities in his honor, and the family of the honorable “Regierungssekretär R.” is busily preparing for one of the planned tableaux vivants. The daughters, Henriette (alias Jette) and Gustchen, are asked to depict “Horae”—but neither girl knows what or who they are. The mother tries patiently to explain the ancient myth, but to no avail. Neither of her daughters seems able (or willing) to understand “how a human being can represent an hour, or an hour a human being.”24 Exhausted, the mother exclaims, “Such nonsense could never enter

220 Taming the Arabesque the mind of a state official, and could only have been invented by old pagans or young artists.”25 Schadow’s account raises the fundamental issue whether the entire system of allegorical signification was doomed to collapse—or had done so already. Not surprisingly, Nazarene practice sought to stabilize communication and rebuild a shared pictorial language by providing explanatory frameworks within and through art itself. Indeed, Schadow’s novel, too, was driven by an urge to secure meaning. Hence, at the core of Der moderne Vasari lies a paradox: On the one hand, the novel’s structure and logic as illustrated object acknowledge the impossibility of producing stable signification and make creative use of this insight. On the other hand, the interplay of text and image seeks to construct exactly the kind of stabilizing systems it thus has announced not to exist. In short, Schadow wanted to have his cake and eat it too. The result was a big tummyache.

A Final Word on Collaboration and Arabesque Bricolage As the product of a close friendship, Hübner’s illustrations represent a series of empathetic and insightful reactions to an existing narrative. While the selection of portraits was the publisher’s, the vignettes embody Hübner’s most personal response to the manuscript he was proofreading. As we saw, they provide a running commentary that not only reinforces but reshapes content and narrative structure alike. The uneven rhythm of these pictorial punctuations buttresses the text’s arabesque structure as a loosely connected hodgepodge of diverse literary pieces. At the same time, the illustrations consciously slow down the reading process, calling for prolonged study. As nodal points of intensified word–image relations, they propel the story forward while simultaneously holding it back. Visualizing the text’s metatext, the vignettes perform the quintessential Romantic task of doubled self-reflection, here reimagined as art reflecting upon not upon art but writing. In this sense, Hübner’s vignettes are not arabesque in formal terms, but contextually and conceptually so. As such, they embody the model of the arabesque as bricolage. Looked at as a complex object (rather than disembodied text), Schadow’s Moderne Vasari presents a captivating mixture of the two arabesque models previously discussed: the biological and the bricolage (see figures 12.1 and 12.2). In Schadow’s novel, this fusion is peculiar insofar as the text (the printed word) assumes the model of rank growth and ordered chaos, while the visual (Hübner’s illustrations) embodies a system of intervention by fragmentation and thus falls into the category of bricolage. This final inversion is, however, constitutive. Only this particular layering of literary and pictorial arabesque (to repeat my central hypothesis) secured the 1854 publication its quality as Romantic arabesque and a late Romantic offspring of the crazed modernist imaginings first grown wild is such novels as Brentano’s Godwi or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr. Inversion, on the other hand, would not have been possible without collaboration, a fact that Schadow recognized and enthusiastically endorsed Hübner’s correspondence with Schadow highlights the active, independent, and determining role he played in the development of individual motifs as well as the layout in its entirety. In January 1854, Schadow had emphasized how delighted he was that his friend thought of his “novella publication as our project,” how “happy” it made him “to join forces.”26 This collective spirit explains why the illustrations do not just illustrate but enhance, shape, restructure the text they accompany. It draws

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attention to the fact that Der moderne Vasari only succeeded as a Romantic arabesque in its material form, as an object. Last but not least, it reminds us how much the Moderne Vasari embodied the communal spirit that the artists’ contemporaries associated so closely with Düsseldorf and that was so vital to the perception of the city’s artistic community as a school. For Schadow, the fusion of text and image enacted the ideal of the medieval workshop held dear by the Brotherhood of St. Luke and the wider Nazarene movement alike. The combination of different hands and authorships, as well as their technical execution, into one perfectly integrated product was thus not merely a default. It represented a consciously anticapitalist model of nonalienated work, which even implicated the participant with the least creative role—the reproductive part of the production—Hugo Bürkner. A text is more than merely a printed version of a manuscript, Schadow believed, and the arabesque is a multimedia affair. With this in mind, Der moderne Vasari makes explicit what is often overlooked: that the history of the book is, in its very essence, always a collaborative story.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Hübner, Bilder-Brevier. Renger, “Weil ich ein Maler bin . . . ,” 383. Ibid., 370. Hübner, Hundert ausgewählte; idem, Helldunkel. For the iconic turn in the twenty-first century, see, for example, Mitchell, What Do Pictures. Hasubek, Epigonentum und Originalität, 140. Schadow, Der moderne Vasari, 24. Ibid., 8. Podro emphasizes the seminal role of “Schnaase’s Prototype” in The Critical, 31–42. See Grewe, Painting the Sacred, 253–301. Henry Fuseli, in Kirk, Outlines, xiii–xiv. The episode cited by Fuseli is from Pliny’s Natural History, bk. 35, chap. 43; see Grewe, “Outline.” Hugo von Blomberg, in Trempler, Wandbildprogramm, 61. I thank Russell Stockman for his help with the translation. Ibid.; for further variations of the Pliny legend in German print culture, see Grewe, “Outline.” Rose and Zangs, “Wilhelm von Schadows,” 156. Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, 919. Land, “Giotto’s Fly.” Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Carlo Crivelli, Madonna and Child, 1480, tempera and gold on wood, 36.5 × 23.5 cm (painted surface), 37.8 × 25.4 cm (overall), Metropolitan Museum, New York. See Grewe, The Nazarenes (2015), 22, fig. 4. Land, “Giotto’s Fly,” 14–15. Schadow, Der moderne Vasari, 154–55. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 38. Ibid. Schadow to Julius Hübner, January 18, 1854, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, no. 48.3460/47.

Part 6

A Symphonic Intermezzo

18 Beethoven, or the Call for Freedom in Composition On Moritz von Schwind

From the pocket-sized adventures of Wilhelm Schadow’s Moderne Vasari and Düsseldorf’s arabesque kingdom, we return to the dream of the fresco painter of casting his colorful spell onto the nation’s walls. Moritz von Schwind was less ambitious in his desires than the Nazarenes. He did not fantasize about monumental lectures on the history and metaphysics of art or decorations of biblical dimensions but about house concerts, the bourgeois music chamber, and a symphonic intermezzo (figure 18.1). While Schwind busily contributed to the taming of the arabesque, his infatuation with music turns his flourishes into a heartfelt (if disillusioned) response to the musical fantasies of a Philipp Otto Runge. His 1852 Symphony provocatively intervenes in the fervent debates about the sublimity of music and the (in)capacity of the visual arts to adapt its nonmimetic possibilities. Where early Romanticism regarded music as the ultimate revelation of the infinite, Schwind’s ironic and witty “symphony” traces the victory of cold Biedermeier realism over the utopian promise of art. This chapter thus explores the innovative power of failure.

Overture Appropriately, we begin our inquiry with an overture. “In the next few days,” Moritz von Schwind wrote to the Austrian poet, librettist, and lithographer Franz von Schober on December 14, 1849, I will have sent the modern drawing, have a look at it. . . . I have worked at it for a long time, until it has become fully and completely perfected. The costume is not as cumbersome as is usually believed, but the inaction of our time could drive one to despair. . . . The whole should be thought as the wall of a music room dedicated to Beethoven, . . . and thus is fittingly based on a piece by Beethoven: Fantasy for Piano, Orchestra and Choir in C minor, the only one orchestrated in this manner and thus recognizable in the picture, moreover written on the music book of a female singer. Upon this foundation, the whole little story proceeds in four economical steps, which are analogous to the four stereotypical parts of a symphony—symphony, andante, scherzo, and allegro: rehearsal of the musical piece in a home theater, with a cobbled-together orchestra and a similarly assembled choir, during which a female singer who stands up for a small solo (oh bold action!) attracts the attention of a young man—an encounter without further approach—a small masquerade ball, at which our pair confess their feelings, and in conclusion a moment from their honeymoon, DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-24

226 A Symphonic Intermezzo

Figure 18.1 Moritz von Schwind, A Symphony, 1852. Oil on canvas, 168.8 × 100 cm. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

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where the delighted man shows his wife the small castle in which they are going to live. In accordance with the choir, which is an ode to nature’s joys, the entire composition is surrounded by forest and air (the four winds), [while] the adjoining decorations feature the various times of the day, the benefits of swimming and the dew of the mountains, the pleasures of travel and the like. Ganymede as the symbol of the awakening spring forms pretty much the center. This might sound rather dry, and might in the end be better left unsaid, but it cannot be done any other way. I would prefer if somebody else made up a story for me based on the picture, so I could see that the effort of engagement would not be too much for the viewer. But don’t make yourself a picture from this description, it will look entirely different anyway.1 If Schober was confused, so are we. Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy is not a symphony. A novella about modern romance does not count among the themes sanctioned by the academy for history painting. Pictorial cycles are supposed to renarrate texts, not fabricate them. And free association is the realm of instrumental music, not of the discursive patterning at work in a chorus, especially not in one as added on and ancillary as the choir in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy.2 The paradoxes do not end here. As we read Schwind’s vivid, detailed description of his “musical drawing,” we begin to conjure up the composition. Yet just when we have formed a concise idea, when the demanding work of ekphratic visualization is already done, the painter commands us to wipe clean the slate of our imagination because we, like words, must fail in this endeavor. Schwind’s revoked affirmation of an analogy between word and image is not a chance occurrence. It reflects the even greater enigma that structure would precede content in a piece which seems so utterly driven by plot. Long before Schwind came up with his Biedermeier love story, he had sketched out the abstract arrangement and rhythmic organization of the pictorial fields, and he had done so via another analogy, this time with instrumental music.3 What do we make of this? Or, perhaps more aptly, how do we make sense of this? To uncover the complexity and multifaceted meaning of Schwind’s “modern drawing,” we need to fine-tune our ear to its nuances and productive contradictions, beginning with its original title, a title given (for once) by the maker himself on the occasion of the canvas’s premiere at the Munich art association: “Project for the Wall Decoration of a Music Room. With Use of the Fantasy for Piano, Orchestra, and Choir of Beethoven’s op. 80.”4 Many were deaf to the subtlety of this caption, like the famous music critic Eduard Hanslick, who got it wrong on three accounts when he wrote in 1854 that we are indebted to the highly imaginative painter M. von Schwind for a very attractive illustration of the Fantasia for Piano op. 80 by Beethoven. The artist has grasped the separate movements as interrelated events involving the same central characters and has represented them pictorially. Just as the painter extracts scenes and figures from the tones, so does the listener classify them as feelings and events. Both interpretations have some connections with the tones, but not a necessary one. And scientific laws have to do only with necessary connections.5 However, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy is not a symphony, Schwind’s picture is not an illustration, and fnally, the project is all about “necessary connections.”

228 A Symphonic Intermezzo Certainly, the “necessary connections” in Schwind’s Symphony are not, as Hanslick rightly noted, tonal in nature but mathematical. It is thus not surprising that the music critic, whose own work was about tonal relationships as the basis for the temporal structures of musical form, would reject Schwind’s approach. Indeed, one must note that the idea of musical form at work here is somewhat limited and not really specifically musical: simply a four-part structure with contrasting segments. Nor is it true to the particular format of the fantasy for piano it refers to, which flaunts a rebellious negation of proportioned composition that, if taken seriously, would undermine precisely the geometry constructed in its name. These observations all point to an essential element of Schwind’s Symphony. The painter did not paint Beethoven’s piece, as Hanslick suggested, at least not if understood as subservient illustration. Instead he made use of it, as clearly stated in his descriptive caption, and did so selectively and freely. Schwind’s Symphony is all about form, and therein lies its ingenious relationship to the possibilities of instrumental music. Once envisioned as unmovable fresco, the large-scale canvas adapts, comments upon, and ultimately makes visible what the form of such music without words is about. But having done so, it turns around, strangely, to fill the abstract form with narrative, thus reintroducing the kind of textuality expelled from its assembly. Even then, however, Schwind’s invention insists on independence. The plot does not illustrate a preexisting source but exists strictly as pictorial sequence. The noteworthy fusion of abstract formal invention and loquacious genre painting creates an ironic “thrown-together mess,” to quote E. T. A. Hoffmann’s epithet for the Romantic novel, which simultaneously asserts and undermines conventions—academic, Romantic, and otherwise.6 As smooth as the picture might look, a series of fissures is constitutive for its program. In the liminal spaces thus opened up, traditional textuality, with its linear progression, yields to a reversibility of reading, or at least the possibility of such, and we read the image top to bottom and bottom to top. It is here where the cyclical form borrowed from music generates its most unexpected and advanced effects. Finished in 1852, the picture is quintessentially Romantic insofar as it pursues an ironic form of narrative and structures painting after music. Yet it is also a rebuttal of the core ideas of early Romanticism it thus evokes. The Symphony rethinks structure in terms not of metaphysics but of pictorial narration, social networks, and music as bourgeois performance. The last aspect is key. Music in Schwind is as much structural as motivic. Because of this double function, his composition hardly addresses the paragone of the arts, nor does it fall prone to the dream of synesthesia, that obsession of modernist artists and art historians. Instead, the design consciously works with and as analogy—just as Schwind himself, as the opening quote reminds us, had intended.

Absolute Painting “How does spirit manifest itself?” Wassily Kandinsky asked. “By sound,” he answered simply, sound being the universe’s main feature.7 And thus music births the model of absolute painting. For Kandinsky, this kind of pictorial soundscape reduces the traces of mimetic representation to infinitely small residues, thus unleashing painting’s intrinsic powers to communicate and produce inner feeling through expressive means alone (line, color, surface). This metaphysical striving made Kandinsky a consummate heir of early Romantic thought and the belief in painting’s potential to become a presentiment

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of the absolute through an adaptation to music. As such, he exemplifies the orientation toward music as an act of emancipation. Painting no longer had to represent something. Henceforth, it could produce meaning as such, meaning now located in a universal but abstract emotion, one no longer tied to the concrete feeling of a specific person at a particular moment, but emotion as such. This meant capturing not the grief felt by Agamemnon in the face of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, but grief itself.8 Traditional history painting, bound to the human figure and a narrative told through facial expression and pantomime, could not fulfill this new requirement. Hence the call for pure, absolute painting (born from musicalization) to prepare the ground for the rise of landscape from a lower genre to the new master signifier, and, beyond landscape, the ascent of the arabesque from mere embellishment to hieroglyph. This brings us full circle back to the origins of the Romantic arabesque (and thus the example of Runge), sprouting, with the new flourish, a new soundscape as well. While the eighteenth century had favored vocal music for its better communication of content, the nineteenth century witnessed the exaltation of instrumental music as a fuller embodiment of the new ideal of pure transcendence. Even before E. T. A. Hoffmann canonized this belief in his 1813 essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music, German critics had advocated instrumental music as less material and thus purer.9 They supported this argument by drawing an analogy between instrumental music and the pictorial arabesque.

Instrumental Music and the Arabesque Absolute In 1801, a musical dilettante by the name of Friedrich Triest, in daily life a preacher in Stettin, drew a direct parallel between “compositions without music” and Raphael’s arabesques. Both are “independent games without purpose”; but as such, both have a cultivating effect.10 We hear the lessons of Immanuel Kant when Triest aligns this edifying outcome with a strictly aesthetic purposiveness. Shortly afterward, the composer and music publisher Hans Georg Nägeli reiterated this idea when comparing Bach’s Keyboard Suite no. 6 in E Minor (BWV 830) with a garland of Raphaelesque arabesques, describing both as organized chaos.11 If the eighteenth century had subordinated the arabesque as mere decoration, the nineteenth century now pursued the other extreme and liberated it from any determination external to its own intrinsic and strictly aesthetic purposiveness. Like music (more concretely, like instrumental music), the arabesque could now stand for absolute art. All this came together in the precocious work of Runge, whose work translated the era’s fascination with absolute music into visual form. While his Lesson of the Nightingale, painted between 1804 and 1805, was to become “the same as what a fugue is in music,” his sought-after cycle of 1805, Times of Day, had, as we have already noted, adapted a symphonic structure (see figure 11.2a–d).12 Musing about the Times, he confessed on January 30, 1803, “that I, by wanting to make merely carefree decorations, have produced against my will only the most sublime composition I have ever made; for all four pictures belong precisely together, and I have treated them exactly like a symphony.”13 Runge’s emphasis on exactitude of treatment, however, seems a bit exaggerated. While his cycle repeats the four-part structure of his musical model, the individual plates adapt the mood of the symphony’s four movements (the variations in tonality and tempi of allegro, adagio, trio, and allegro) in neither a systematic nor a rigorous manner. The most sustained attempt at close translation is

230 A Symphonic Intermezzo perhaps the opening print, Morning, which visualizes quite effectively the fairly fast, but stately and unhurried, pace of an allegro (see figure 11.2). A rhythmic sequence of a mathematically constructed geometry (a buoyant upward movement of rectangles and systematically decreasing circles) captures the movement’s tempo, while the allegro’s ambience is conjured up by the design’s lightness, which gives ample space to the sheet’s natural white and the lightheartedness of the central motif, an imposing lily, bewitching in its symmetry and sparkling in an abundance of genie figures. Runge did not achieve such congenial compositional correlation in all four of his prints, nor did he try. But he successfully differentiated the respective moods so that the cycle as a whole indeed mirrors the changing tempi—and thus temperaments—of the symphony’s four movements. “Through this I have learned to understand,” Runge concluded, “that such a thing happens equally in our art, namely, how much one facilitates one’s tasks if one grasps the compositional technique that informs the whole of a composition and allows it, varied, again and again to shine through the whole.”14 As we are carried along by the Romantic tune of absolute art, we must note, however, that the analogy drawn out here between artistic design and symphonic composition is still mainly metaphorical. It does not model art after music but associates a certain musical format (in this case the symphony) with a set of emotions, a sense of sublimity, solemnity, and universal harmony between nature and universe.15 This, in turn, was true for art as absolute music in general.

Kandinsky’s Interlude Although Runge’s figurative outlines are a far cry from Kandinsky’s radically abstracted color feasts, the two embody a similar approach to the musicalization of art. Key is the creation of emotional analogies. Whether cosmic allegory or personal mythology, each part of Runge’s image was composed in relationship to a principal musical idea, perhaps best understood as an emotional leitmotif. The musical metaphor was the grand matrix for all other choices, from individual colors and their combinations to the shape and melody of the lines, from the composition’s overarching structure to the iconographical motives and the storylines they create. Ultimately, the analogy of music and painting was only the starting point for an expanded vision that aimed for, as its supreme goal, the all-encompassing, all-moving Gesamtkunstwerk.16 Much more could be said about this, but for the purpose of this chapter it may suffice to emphasize the quintessentially mystical and metaphysical nature of this early Romantic version of art’s musicalization. In search of the origins of abstraction, the twentieth century has celebrated early German Romanticism for its protomodernist qualities, and the twenty-first century has followed suit. Hard-pressed, however, to find an aesthetic vanguard among the visual artists of the time, Philipp Otto Runge has risen to the status of a visionary, whose attack on aesthetic hierarchies corresponded so memorably to the radical valorization of Beethoven’s instrumental music as a revelation of the infinite put forth by E. T. A. Hoffmann.17 However, the Hamburg painter is a poignant example showing that the 1800s were not yet able to perform nonobjectivity on paper (or, for that matter, in color). For the Romantic generation, such abstraction could only be thought of in terms of stylized mimesis, ornamentation, arabesques, or landscapes without staffage. Only in the twentieth century would a Kandinsky or a Franz Marc be able to translate what a man like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had imagined as

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Farbenbilder (color pictures) into the expressive movement of (almost) pure color fields and bold lines.18 In such modernist manifestations of Romantic principles, the setting tends toward an articulation of radically simplified ciphers, so that the imprint of a concert, as in Kandinsky’s Impression III, is dominated by the juxtaposition of large unmodulated color fields (blood red, jet black, sunshine yellow) brought into vibration by slashes of agitated lines, some black, some white, some blue. The abstract movement of color is only sparsely interrupted by remnants of reality. A series of thumb-like shapes, heads reduced to small roundish tops, rush in at the left. These are figures from the audience, we assume, whom the music’s power has set into motion, not unlike a patch of reeds at a river ruffled by a hot summer breeze or the violent blast of an autumn wind. The effect of Kandinsky’s composition is one of virtuous dynamism, an immediate address of our sensory apparatus and its emotional chords.19 To that end, the structured rhythm of Runge’s symphonic plates has yielded to a sweeping, vibrant crescendo. Fascinated by the Romantic musicalization of the pictorial and fixated on constructing abstraction’s genealogy, modernists tended to downplay the stark discrepancy between theory and practice in Runge’s work. They also tended to overlook that the painter’s vision, like his days on earth, was short-lived. Others stepped up to fill the void, yet for many reasons, mostly questions of modern taste, their path-breaking solutions are often marginalized, Schwind’s Symphony being a striking case in point. Yet Schwind’s Beethoven adaptation (like his ambitions at reform in general) stands as an important alternative to the more famous trajectory from Runge to Kandinsky, one less modernist but no less modern. As reality breaks into utopia, art becomes affirmative and a form of communication aimed to glue together a fragmented society. In the process, Schwind’s project achieved a fundamental redefinition of what musical form might mean for painting.

Breaking Boundaries In contrast to Runge, Schwind was a talented musician, and his letters abound in astute reviews of musical performances. Music was a kind of staple food for him, of which every man, as Schwind pronounced, “needs a daily mouthful.”20 Nonetheless, he had shed the metaphysical inflection of early Romanticism. Certainly, Schwind still agreed on the necessity of creating an analogy between music and painting. However, the nature of this analogy differed decidedly from Runge’s nature-based mysticism. It was free of philosophical depth or religious overtones and instead concerned with practical matters, especially issues of creative autonomy and genre hierarchy. Schwind’s goal was no longer to approximate painting to music. Music fascinated him as a resource for reform, and for him the object and objective of art’s musicalization was nothing less than the possibilities of pictorial arrangement. Scholars have long emphasized the importance of formal considerations for Schwind’s musical work, but have also noted the fundamental ambivalence at their center. “On the one hand, Schwind’s arabesque was supposed to be self-explanatory, on the other, to gesture beyond itself,” Werner Busch has observed, concluding that “it does not seem capable of doing justice to either.”21 Schwind knew of the early Romantic faith in the arabesque’s mediating and reconciliatory powers, and he felt an urgent need for both. But the painter no longer had confidence in the capacity of this aesthetic operation to heal modernity’s ailments. This was particularly true for the

232 A Symphonic Intermezzo discord of man and nature, which Schwind associated with the artist’s alienation from his audience, an alienation fueled by a painful discrepancy between subjective sentiment and social reality.22 His artistic experiments betray a profound sense of estrangement, without getting lost in merely nostalgic reprisals of what once was or anemic rehearsals of the status quo. To the contrary, the Beethoven project staged a rebellion against institutionalized traditions, academic norms, and the regulations of ordered categories. This rebellion is no less profound for being launched from a conservative Romantic position, particularly one still steeped in Idealism, with its drive toward self-realization and self-fulfillment. Indeed, a vanguard mentality among conservative thinkers is itself an honorable Romantic tradition.23 In his attempt to break the borders holding in (and holding back) the profession he practiced, Schwind frequently garnered arguments for the necessity of painting’s emancipation from other arts.24 In this, music played a particularly significant role, not only in its disembodied form as pure composition but also as lived experience and actual practice. As such, music was critical for Schwind’s proposition of how to free himself (and thus painting) from conventions and paralyzing restrictions. His Symphony exemplifies this work of redefinition in a paradigmatic manner.

The Value of Autonomy Like the early Romantics or the later Hegel, Schwind ranked painting below music, yet, unlike theirs, his reasons were not aesthetic.25 The painter believed fully and firmly in the equality of the arts. Painting was not per se inferior because of the medium’s specific capacities but only because of the disadvantages it suffered, as public and patrons were unwilling to grant the painter the same freedoms enjoyed by the composer for centuries. Schwind illustrated his point with an anecdote about Frederick the Great of Prussia. Tired of the monarch’s meddling, his court musician, Carl Heinrich Graun, allegedly exclaimed, “Hold on, Your Grace, in my score, I am king!” This was how it had to be for Schwind. “Aut rex aut nihil. I cannot think one way today and tomorrow another upon command.”26 He thus resented the fact that patrons kept meddling, very much, he felt, to painting’s detriment. The other deadly force was the academy. Passionately, Schwind denounced this time-honored institution for limiting painting to a pitifully small array of genres and forms. What a discrepancy with music, with its plenitude of types! Not coincidentally, Schwind turned to Beethoven as the ultimate embodiment of the creative lawbreaker. Making use of Beethoven in this way was a declaration of seizing liberty in invention. Not surprisingly, autonomy was an integral part of the Symphony project, and its design indeed preceded its commission.27

Form First Form first; content last: this simple but alluring fact illuminates the radical nature of Schwind’s approach. Long before he had set his romance to Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, he had worked out the project’s symphonic structure in a schematic sketch: an oblong format with arched top that, divided into four zones, evolved from a large rectangle at the bottom through a tripartite field with a square centerpiece and arabesque decorations on each side to the interlude of a frieze topped by a lunette with a large circle inscribed into it (figure 18.2).28 The caption, Symphony no. 3, points to

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Figure 18.2 Moritz von Schwind, Symphony no. 3, before 1852. Pencil, 33 × 20.3 cm. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.

Beethoven’s famous Eroica as Schwind’s initial inspiration.29 Yet the specific plot of the musical model was clearly secondary in the artist’s mind to the composition’s formal structure. While the layout showed exacting precision, only three of the sections had content assigned to them (“Aurora” as the first movement), scribbled into the bottom field; the myth of “Hero and Leander” as the adagio in the middle square; and, in the tondo, “The Pleiades” as the last movement). The scherzo, however, the third movement, summarily described in the rough draft as “a merry frieze,” remained but a vague placeholder. This obvious preoccupation with form over content explains the ease with which Schwind would later fill his initial design with an entirely new theme, his fictional romance. What was at stake in his cursory pencil drawing was a deeply rooted desire to find a visual analogue for the musical format. The design of the Eroica prefigures almost exactly the final format of The Symphony. Only subtle refinements are registered, as in the adagio, where Schwind reduced the side panels of the original layout to a more self-contained square, or in the final movement, which he simplified by replacing the more agitated combination of tondo and spandrels with the calmer, more expansive purity of an uninterrupted semicircle. The effect is

234 A Symphonic Intermezzo dramatic. In contrast to Kandinsky’s concert impression, The Symphony does not initiate abandonment to a subjective musical sentiment. Instead, it provides structure. The pictorial form of Schwind’s musical structure is twofold: internal and workspecific and outward and reception-oriented. Accordingly, the composition’s upward tectonic movement configures the work itself (its format, content, and sequential logic), while simultaneously steering its reception and thus the viewer’s experience. Form turns out to be the work’s essence: the ground of its production, of the production of meaning, and of the associative relationship formed by and with the audience. The true subject of Schwind’s Project for the Wall Decoration of a Music Room is the formal law of instrumental music.

Notes 1. Schwind to Franz von Schober, December 14, 1849, in Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind, 253–54. 2. My discussion of Beethoven’s composition is inspired by Minor, “Choral Fantasies,” 8–32. 3. See the beginning of chapter 19 in this book. 4. Anonymous,“Kunstverein XII. Ausstellung”; see further Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 263–64. 5. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 37. 6. Grewe, “Portrait of the Artist as an Arabesque,” esp. 104–5; quote 329. 7. Ashmore, “Sound in Kandinsky’s.” 8. Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 81–85. 9. Hoffmann, “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik.” 10. Friedrich Triest, in Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 154, who also discusses in depth the notion of the arabesque as visible music (154–62). 11. Nägeli, Johann Sebastian Bach, 9–10. 12. For a succinct analysis of Runge’s Lesson of the Nightingale, see Grave, “Runges Poetologie”; see further chapter 11 in this book. 13. Runge to his brother Daniel, January 30, 1803, in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1:33. 14. Runge, in Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis, 88. 15. Gottdang on Runge, Vorbild Musik, 165–214, esp. 178. 16. While musicologists tend to reserve the term Gesamtkunstwerk for the concept’s canonical realization by Wagner, its origins are quintessentially Romantic; see, for example, Morgan, “The Cosmology”; also Koss, Modernism. For an extensive discussion of Runge’s musical painting and further secondary literature, see Gottdang, Vorbild Musik. 17. See Lemoine and Rousseau, Aux origines. 18. Seidel, “Die Symphonie,” 30. 19. For a reproduction of Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 Impression III (Concert), now at the Städtische Galerie im Lehnbachhaus, Munich, see Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 454, color plate 6. 20. Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind, 511. 21. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 104; also idem, “Conservatism,” 252–67. 22. Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske, 104. 23. For the Brotherhood of St. Luke as an alternative “avant-garde of the counter-revolution,” see Grewe, The Nazarenes, esp. chap. 3, 51–67. 24. My discussion here is indebted to the seminal study of painting’s musicalization between 1780 and 1915 by Gottdang, Vorbild Musik. 25. Ibid., 254–56. 26. Schwind to Franz von Schober, June 22, 1853, in Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind, 326. 27. Schwind began to search for a patron only after he had finished his “modern . . . musical drawing”; see Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 263–64. 28. See Grewe, “Schwind’s Symphony,” 233, fig. 12.3. 29. Gottdang, “Von der ‘Eroica.’”

19 The Laws of Form On Seriality and Pictures’ Stories

Despite the triumphal procession of instrumental music in the early nineteenth century, it had been met originally with suspicion and bewilderment, being dismissed as inarticulate and insubstantial. For a man like Immanuel Kant, the association with the arabesque was a negative one, because he saw both as devoid of meaning.1 Only the productions of Mozart and Beethoven would silence the doubts about the capacity of instrumental music to unite and reign over variety. Once the artistic nature of instrumental composition was accepted, its proponents, including Christian Gottfried Körner in 1795, advocated its power to subsume the most manifold expressions under a general law of form and thus to represent a musical character.2 It was this formal law that fascinated Schwind. “Weary of the arbitrariness and formlessness that has caught on in the practice of the arabesque, yet on the other hand convinced of the necessity of compositions assembled from multiple pictures,” the painter remarked on July 31, 1850, “I have seized on something that music has developed to the utmost degree, the four-part form of which the Quartet, Sonata, or Symphony consists.”3 If early Romanticism desired to express the immeasurable, infinite, incomprehensible, indeterminate side of music in pictorial notation, Schwind’s Symphony followed an altogether different ambition. Its focus was the determinacy of music, the clarity and descriptiveness of a wordless score, its goal to make visible the invisible essence of the tonal artwork. The picture aimed, as Wilhelm Seidel has so aptly observed, “to represent the different characteristics of the events it develops, and thereby to reproduce the context that unites them.”4 The task at hand was to reconstruct and replicate (and perhaps even build to scale) the very principle of symphonic order. As in instrumental music, the word (or, more precisely, the text) no longer determines format, form, or meaning of pictorial invention. It occupies a subservient function, elicited as a medium and means to arouse the emotional effect of the specific segments predetermined by the design. In this sense, The Symphony is highly abstract. As such, it reacted directly to the era’s overarching contestation of the academic hierarchy of genres and the norms of history painting. Schwind took up this challenge by working through seriality. With his musical inclination, he could find inspiration for this strategy in the Romantic rethinking of the symphony’s sonata form. In the age of Mozart and Haydn, the crossing over of themes among the different movements had not yet been the hallmark of this genre. It was Beethoven, the revered idol of Schwind’s piece, who began experimenting with a more cyclic form that would reach its apotheosis in Brahms. Schwind certainly participated in these innovations. His recourse to a four-part structure (prefigured, as the artist himself had pointed out, in instrumental genres such as DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-25

236 A Symphonic Intermezzo the string quartet, sonata, and symphony) opened up a model suitable to address the formal problem that moved and motivated Schwind most deeply: cyclic painting.

Paths to Abstraction The abstract foundation of Schwind’s modern musical drawing can be best understood against the shift in music appreciation signaled by Hanslick’s 1854 manifesto, Das Musikalisch-Schöne (On the Musically Beautiful). This seminal, and in its time sensational, publication mapped out an important shift from the listening subject (the emotions and ideas stirred up in the listener) to the artificial object itself (its form and movement). It was this shift that Schwind repeated in his symphonic project. It is thus not without irony that Hanslick was blind to a pictorial revolution so sympathetic to his own aesthetic. The abstract foundation of Schwind’s modern musical drawing also alerts us to the complex relationship of the work to the musical piece it refers to, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy. Schwind was well aware that Beethoven’s piano piece is not a symphony. Indeed, he counted on the astonishment of his audience when it realized that Beethoven’s composition was not divided into four parts at all but flowed in one breath.5 Indeed, this tension between musical structure and musical reference was not random, but a potent, highly conscious, and inherently significant strategy. Around the same time that Schwind finished the oil version of his music chamber project, he also contemplated a picture dedicated to Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.6 Once again, neither the format nor the plot of the chosen source regulated the design. Instead, the logic of the opera was inscribed into the structure of a symphonic layout. The work’s form and its source thus entered into a productive dialogue, as the design’s format reshaped the experience of the opera as pictorial production.

The Four Movements of Schwind’s Symphony To translate symphonic composition into a new form of narrative painting, Schwind recreated its basic structure in three interrelated steps: first, through the picture’s overall four-part structure; second, through the variety of rhythm in each section; finally, through changes in the mood of each individual episode, as the succession of fields weaves together a happy-ending romance between a young singer and a rural aristocrat. In the letter to Franz von Schober, quoted at the opening of the previous chapter, Schwind himself established the analogy between the story’s four chapters and “the four stereotypical parts of a symphony—symphony, andante, scherzo, and allegro [sic].” Indeed, the static nature of the initial scene, which shows the performance of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, and its symmetric composition and expansive format fulfill the function of a symphony’s first movement to create a stable beginning, fairly fast, but weighty in content and feeling (figure 19.1).7 The juxtaposition of the divided choir with the rise of the orchestra as its counterpoint roughly mirrors the diagrammatic form of the sonata, with the contrast between the singer in the blue dress (the picture’s heroine), poised to sing, and her yellow-clad pianist counterpart as the visual and iconographical incarnation of a sonata’s basic premise, namely, the contrast and drama between two or more themes and tonalities. The movement to and of the next episode in the woods, realized as the contraction of a substantial horizontal rectangle

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Figure 19.1 Julius Ernst, after Moritz von Schwind, A Symphony, 1856. Etching with engraving, 81.1 × 48.5 (plate), 95 × 55 (sheet). Beethoven-Haus, Bonn.

238 A Symphonic Intermezzo (first scene) to a much smaller, almost square format (second scene), reflects the slow and solemn character of the symphony’s second movement, the andante. The content supports the latter’s quieter, slower, and more solemn character, by offering, in Schwind’s own words, “an encounter without further approach.” Rapidly, this movement leads to the merry and lively scherzo of a ball (third scene). Unfolding in a space reminiscent of a theater box, the wine color of the velvety curtain glowing in the artificial light of gas lamps, the scene nonetheless transports us into the open, into the night-filled air of a pergola or some other park structure built from luscious grass and decorated with flowers in full bloom and fruits ripe for plucking. Culture and nature meet, just as they do in our lovers’ story. An elegant sequence of three vignettes, the low rectangular partition adapts the symmetrical shape of an ABA form characteristic of this symphonic movement: two scenes of a masquerade ball enfolding the lovers’ tender embrace. The finale, an elegant arched tympanum, then stretches again across the painting’s entire width, as is appropriate for the pendant of the first movement. The happy ending also satisfies the demands of a symphony’s fourth part to be cheerful, gay, and content, and the semicircular closure even recalls the shape of the rondo. Many of Schwind’s contemporaries accepted his proposition and praised, like Michael Teichlein in 1866, the “felicitous choice of formats.”8 The first movement is expanded and elevated, while “the finale resembles the first movement in solemn breadth,” the critic observed; in between, “the scherzo of a masquerade ball rustles as an elongated compressed rectangle, with the melodic trio, as an explanation, at its center.”9 My own extrapolation could not be summarized more succinctly.

The Particular, the Universal, and the Arabesque Schwind called the result of his compositional efforts a “musical novella,” and his terminology seems an apt choice, as it was for Schadow’s frame story. “Novella” fittingly denotes the picture’s narrative mode, which, with its emphatically contemporary setting and exceedingly private content, aligns with genre painting. It also evokes the representation’s utterly concrete nature, that is, the story’s highly individualized character, accentuated by using portraits for the features of numerous orchestra and choir members. Most of them are obscure today, except for the prominently placed likeness of the painter’s close friend Franz Schubert. Schwind’s contemporaries would also have identified the singer with little effort as Karoline Hetzenecker, who was widely adored throughout the 1840s as Munich’s nightingale. The singer’s life mirrored that of her fictive counterpart, as she, too, married into the rural gentry, in her case a judge. Despite the uncanny parallel, Schwind’s love-struck performer was not directly modeled on the soprano, whose nuptials Schwind’s novella actually preceded.10 Interestingly, the artist did not subscribe to this social ideal of women’s marital destiny; to the contrary, he deeply resented the singer’s marriage, seeing it as the death knell on her career, which makes the parallel between fact and fiction even more eerie. In any case, the Symphony’s emphasis on portraiture and detailed realism brings home the design’s specificity and autobiographical element. This did not preclude Schwind, the Romantic, to generalize the particular as well. Not surprisingly, this task fell upon the arabesque, which, as running commentary, is called upon to frame the specific story with universal meaning. As with Runge’s Times of the Day, Schwind’s marginal drawings evoke a syncretic religious sphere. While the statues of Saint Cecilia and Venus on each side of the stage

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suggest a dialogue between Christianity and antiquity, the arabesques intertwine the rhythm of human life with that of nature (the times of day and the ages of men). And as the bounded figures of Amor and Psyche symbolize love as fettered by the rules of polite society, the abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter denotes the moment of deliverance by an awakening spring. Schwind’s own description provides a detailed summary of the border’s content. “In accordance with the choir, which is an ode to nature’s joys, the entire composition is surrounded by forest and air (the four winds), [while] the adjoining decorations feature the various times of the day, the benefits of swimming and the dew of the mountains, the pleasures of travel and the like. Ganymede as the symbol of the awakening spring forms pretty much the center.”11 However, more important than the similarities between Runge and Schwind’s visions are their differences. The cosmic has yielded to the affirmative. The arabesque no longer signals an infinite relation between all elements or performs a parergonal inversion of frame and tableau. Instead, it returns to being mere ornamentation.12 Neither the arrangement of the borders nor the design’s exacting form grants the arabesque the kind of structural power it had assumed in early Romantic writing or, for that matter, Runge’s print cycle. Schwind’s description clearly indicates this loss when he identifies a text—the chorus’s “ode to nature’s joys”—as the arabesque’s point of origin. If the design frees itself from the reliance of history painting on a poetic source, subordination to an illustrative function returns in the decorative embellishment. Once again, the arabesque is a litmus test, this time for The Taming of Romanticism in general.13 The contained quality of Schwind’s decorative framework reflects the insurmountable distance between a prosaic present and the Romantic homesickness for a union with nature. Schwind still charges nature with redemptive powers; love’s blossoming is nourished by the vitality of an intricate thicket, one enlivened by the sounds of flora and fauna, in particular the melodic chime of birdsong. The forest scene highlights the central place of nature in the adagio, where it forms the locus amoenus of the lovers’ chance encounter. Nature and music are still one. However, this oneness does not transcend mere metaphor. In its strictly ornamental subordination, the forested borders no longer grant us self-assertion through a fusion with the universe. They withhold the promise of nature mysticism given in Runge’s Times of the Day. The utopian hope for a new golden age has yielded to a pragmatic integration of music-making into daily life. Identity formation is still at the core of this Biedermeier musicalization of painting, yet only in terms of sociability and citizenry, not some essential mystical core.

Private Performance as Public Sphere To understand the psychological depth and political resonances of this particular aspect, we must recall that choral singing was not simply private amusement. Seen as edifying, participatory, and a source of collective agency, communal singing was closely associated with forging a national identity, an identity united, before Germany’s belated unification in 1871, by culture alone.14 Schwind portrays this desired community formation as part and parcel of the individual’s self-realization, and he does so not least through the concert rehearsal being made up mostly of dilettantes, “a cobbled-together orchestra and a similarly assembled choir.”15 While the individual ultimately triumphs over the group experience (in Beethoven’s op. 80 and Schwind’s

240 A Symphonic Intermezzo Symphony alike), the body politic of chorus and choir nonetheless resonates through the entire composition. Pursuing autonomy, the painter explores the public importance of the private sphere and, in so doing, seeks to rescue the possibility of higher meaning within a bourgeois-aristocratic setting. The prosaic has escaped the Romantic operation by which poets like Novalis had hoped to poeticize contemporary society, if not modernity itself. The result is the embourgeoisement of the arabesque. In defense of Schwind, one may point to the innovative side of his Biedermeier Gesamtkunstwerk. While Runge’s analogies remain structural plays of philosophical import, Schwind’s picture aligns a realistic event to a particular piece of music. This particularity was important, and, as we have seen, Schwind specifically chose a piece that, because of its unusual orchestration, was easily recognizable. Painting and music are equals precisely because they exist separately and only come together, as loving companions, in their medium-specific reality.

The Arabesque’s Unexpected Return: Rethinking the Choir Yet nothing is ever as simple as it looks in Romantic art, not even in its tamed version. In the return to ornamental containment, the arabesque contaminated the center from which it had been expelled (once again). After successfully wresting the organizational potential from the arabesque to charge the design’s core with its power instead, Schwind immediately reintroduced ornamental thinking as the composition’s foundation: The Symphony’s first movement is an arabesque. A subversive inversion takes place as the poem sung by the choir not only delivers the textual source for the picture’s marginalia but indicates its own arabesque nature. In both Schwind’s picture and Beethoven’s composition, the chorus of spirits is an anomaly, a performance with no self-generated thematic material or agency. Once again, a title prepares us for this rupture of norms and the productive incoherence it creates. The first edition of Beethoven’s composition, dated 1811, advertises the piece as “Fantasie für Klavier mit Begleitung des ganzen Orchesters und Chor.” The English translation does not capture the provocative element hidden in this phrasing: “Fantasy for piano with accompaniment of the entire orchestra and chorus” lacks the emphatic exclusion of the chorus from the genitive phrase (“und Chor”).16 “The chorus is quite literally tacked on,” Ryan Minor observes, “neither included in the fantasia nor its accompaniment.”17 The spiritual journey evoked by the choir in the composition’s final moment, “once a spirit has soared aloft / a chorus of spirits always resounds for him,” receives an uncanny affirmation in the ghostly quality of the piece’s “magnificent finale,” as Beethoven called it.18 The Geisterchor emerges itself as a kind of apparition, intangible and elusive in its shifting appearance, a manifesto of the two meanings contained in the German word Geist (as in Geisterchor), an ensemble of ghosts as much as of spirits. The sheer vocal presence of Beethoven’s chorus, whose quality is, as Minor highlights, one of re-sounding rather than sounding, “introduces an emptiness behind the chorus’s music, as if the choral voices were themselves a purely sonic apparition, a visitor from somewhere else. If the vocal soloists occupy a more liminal space of multiplied human agency—it is they, in Beethoven’s setting, who refer to the “music of our lives”—the chorus sings solely from a position external to those lives, and indeed to the rest of the work.”19 From an early Romantic vantage point, this external placement qualifies Beethoven’s “chorus of the spirits” as arabesque. In turn, Schwind’s use of the chorus as the foundation of symphonic stability

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infuses a subversive quality into the entire notion of a law of form so carefully set up as the work’s abstract logic. The arabesque beginning of a highly ordered structure gestures toward the systematic instability and poetic fluctuation at the core of Schwind’s creative work. The Symphony lives off a productive undermining of any strict border between periphery and center, chaos and order, multitude and isolation, and, ultimately, universality and particularity. The artist’s neat explanation hides this complexity, which, however, came to the fore in his contemporaries’ difficulties in reading the picture without further prompting. Schwind had anticipated this and confessed to Franz von Schober that the Symphony’s interpretation might demand quite a bit of the viewer.20 The challenge to established modes of communication was not without its price. The power of the symphonic structure was its capacity to subsume the most manifold expressions under a general law of form and thus to represent a musical character. Yet the audience had to undergo a learning process before it could tap into this power. This was true for instrumental music as much as for Schwind’s cyclic painting.

Seriality: On Storytelling in a Minute Monumental Mode In typical Biedermeier fashion, Schwind’s solution is simultaneously backward- and forward-looking. On the one hand, the narrative structure of the romance between a famous (female) singer and an affluent (landowning) suitor challenges the early Romantic utopia of music’s transcendental power. As social practice, the performance of Beethoven indeed becomes the vehicle for creativity’s demise, as the fulfillment of love in marriage terminates the heroine’s career and thus her musical presence. Romance is deadening, and this cruel irony translates into a victory of realistic narration over the liberating logic of the abstract arabesque. One could now interpret this victory and return to ornamental containment as the not-yet moment (in the story of the emergence of abstraction) where the return to narrative, and this particular one of love and marriage, frustrated earlier Romantic aspirations to absolute music as a means to “liberate” art from bourgeois realism.21 For this reading to hold true, however, one must subscribe to a certain set of values firmly inscribed, like the apotheosis of abstraction over figuration, in the teleology of modernism. Yet the belief in a sequence of avant-garde idioms, which, with ever-increasing rapidity, create a spiral of new (yet soon-to-be obsolete) styles, does not account for the complexity of modernity marked by the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous; nor does it consider the possibility or shape of emancipatory spaces carved out within (or even through) conservative positions. Acknowledging the existence of a conservative avant-garde and the creative potential of rearguard movements does not imply the need to subscribe to their ideologies. It does demand, though, making allowances for an exploration of what it means to be modern beyond a modernist framework.22 This, in turn, requires the scholar to steer free of the Scylla of (self-)identification of author and subject and the Charybdis of anachronistic judgments in taste. Schwind and his oeuvre certainly remind us that things are rarely as clear-cut as they seem. The Symphony intones the deadening power of romance and the victory of realistic narration over the liberating logic of the abstract arabesque with notable smoothness and deceptive lightheartedness. Yet if Schwind was the scribe of this modern truth, he was an unwilling one. When the real Karoline Hetzenecker took leave of the stage in 1849 to retire into married life, the artist poured his regrets into a series of allegories

242 A Symphonic Intermezzo which lament, in one way or another, the audience’s grave loss. In a critical recasting of the antique tradition, for example, Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies, becomes a fearsome warden who leads the handcuffed singer away from her public.23 While the cage that awaits the obedient woman might be gilded, it condemns the nightingale to eternal muteness. Silence is not always golden. Schwind’s anger about bourgeois repression finds a hidden, perhaps unconscious, outlet in The Symphony as well. By playing with the possibility of a reversed reading (explored more in the coda of this chapter), the composition offers an exit strategy from marriage’s fetters. In the spirit of Romantic irony, an arabesque inversion leads us from privacy to semipublic performance, from exclusive togetherness to group activity, thus celebrating the couple’s (momentary) separation during the concert as a path to freedom. Unexpected, the arabesque resumes its subversive power. If Schwind resented the gender politics of his story, he also took an unconventional stance toward the textual nature of his work. First, the Symphony is but another of his innovative attacks on the traditional hierarchy of genres. Symphonic composition, infused with the unruliness of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, becomes the matrix for a provocative fusion of genre, history painting, and ornament. The result is a “musical novella” whose storyline stands for itself. This brings me to my second point, Schwind’s desire to substitute picture for word, a desire constitutive for German Romanticism, but mainly in book illustration. The trail to this new approach had been blazed, to return to our earlier discussion, by John Flaxman’s outlines after Homer, Aeschylus, and Dante, which, much more successful in Germany than in his native England, were soon taken up by German printmakers and illustrators. They even inspired Runge to plot “a novel or another kind of story purely in pictures,” a remark that highlights a crucial feature of outline drawing: the ability to create dense sequences that can condense a substantive narrative into a comprehensible yet purely pictorial account.24 Schwind took up the challenge of translating this seriality from the small scale of printed matter (mostly the page) to the ample dimensions of substantial histories (whether on canvas or fresco). The result was somewhat paradoxical. Much closer to the narrative techniques of the comic strip than to the rhetoric of academic history painting, the ensuing multipanel pictures grew in size without conjuring up a sense of monumentality. As such, they pioneered a “minute monumental mode,” so to speak, which perpetuated intimacy as a reading strategy for large-scale compositions. The sequential structure of another multipanel storyboard exemplifies this kind of crossover (figure 19.2): an 1854 rendition of The Fairy Tale of Cinderella in vignettes painted in oil and held together by a lavish gold frame itself decorated with arabesques and figurines.25 Textuality remains the painting’s backbone, but history now encompasses genre and the narrative techniques of book illustration. The pictures born from this new union inevitably crossed the limits drawn between painting and poetry with such fervor by the eighteenth-century philosophers who accompanied us at the outset of our journey.26 Swept up in the storm that beat against tradition’s bastion, nostalgia turns into an emancipatory force. At the core of Schwind’s graphic novel in paint was an act of liberation (a liberation from academic norms and the straitjacket of modern aesthetics), which had, I might add, a notable effect on the critical reception of his work as well. His contemporaries accepted Schwind’s musicalization not only for those pictures immediately inspired by music but for other works as well. Without any prompting, Moritz Carrière, for example, interpreted Schwind’s daring elevation of fairy tale to history painting in musical terms. The four large panels of Cinderella,

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Figure 19.2 Moritz von Schwind, The Fairy Tale of Cinderella, 1854. Oil on canvas, multiple parts inserted into panel frame, 152 × 480 cm. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

the critic maintained, are just “like the four movements of a symphony . . . : the first is the powerful euphonic entrance. . . . Now follows like a glorious allegro the ball scene shimmering with lights; the moonlight in the garden reminds us of the Adagio, . . . and at the discovery of Cinderella the long trumpets belt out a resounding finale.”27 With an abstract formalism at its core, Schwind’s particular musicalization of painting constructed a new kind of pictorial narration that emancipated art from its traditional relationship to poetry. More importantly, it prefigured an emphatically structural approach to the effect of images and the production of meaning that, in no lesser terms than Runge’s, articulates principles brought only to fruition in abstract and nonobjective art. The Symphony pushed this evolution to its logical conclusion. Inventing its own story, it shed the last remnants of heteronomy. It no longer illustrated a preexisting text but became the text itself.

Coda: From Symphony to Fugue Obsessed with the laws of form, Moritz von Schwind underestimated the arabesque’s resistance to domestication and constant potential for inversion. Or perhaps, as suggested earlier, the Romantic nature of Schwind’s art and thinking became manifest precisely in this clandestine but potent return of arabesque subversion. So far, our reading of The Symphony has followed art-historical convention. It has begun at the bottom of the page, at the arabesque’s root, in just the way Schwind, at the outset of the previous chapter, had suggested. However, the image itself does not configure a reading from bottom up as either inevitable or absolutely necessary. It remains open to the alternative. Without the fetters of preconceived norms, the viewer might as well begin at the top and read the story in the opposite direction. In this reading, the married couple does not leave society. Instead, the pair reintegrates, step by step, into communal life, with the ball as the first move, followed by a restful walk, and, as the magnificent finale, the performance of the Beethoven concert. In this version of the story, the last scene suggests an increased separation of the couple, which results in a dramatic opening up of exclusive togetherness to an integration into the broader circle of friends and family. Most importantly, this storyline restores the heroine’s musical agency, even suggesting that distance, if not separation, from a partner is necessary for

244 A Symphonic Intermezzo creative freedom (in general) and female emancipation (in particular). One might note that Schwind himself never married. The notion of thematic inversion comes to mind, as in a fugue, with Schwind’s arabesque rewriting itself in an overturning of its own fate. As the narrative flow reverses its direction, the isolation of the individual (or, as in this case, the heroic couple) yields to a collective activity, the communal music-making. Agency and autonomy return, but now no longer as the nostalgic lament of a lonely character, the hero. They are the fruit of participatory practice and communal achievement.28 In this version, in this final inversion, a very different vision of the Geisterchor arises: the apparition of an age of art and liberation.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Seidel, “Die Symphonie,” 10–11. Schmidt, Zur Theorie, 67–69. Schwind to Ernst Rietschel, July 31, 1850, in Thöne, “Zwei Briefe,” 270. Seidel, “Die Symphonie,” 12. Schwind to Konrad Jahn, March 2, 1850, in Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind, 261–62. See figs. 6 and 7 in Seidel, “Die Symphonie,” 22. For close-up details of each scene, see Grewe, “Schwind’s Symphony,” 13–14, figs. 12.4–12.7. Michael Teichlein, in Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 273. Ibid. For an identification of the romance with the singer’s private life, see, for example, Pommeranz-Liedtke, Moritz von Schwind, 27; for the refutation of this reading, see Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 268, and idem, “Von der ‘Eroica,’” 108, esp. n. 33. Schwind to Franz von Schober, December 14, 1849, in Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind, 253–54; cited in full at the opening of chapter 18 in this book. Werner Busch, “Conservatism,” 265. Nemoianu, The Taming. Minor, “Choral Fantasies.” Schwind to Franz von Schober, December 14, 1849, in Stoessl, Moritz von Schwind, 253–54. Kinsky and Halm, Das Werk Beethovens, 213. Minor, “Choral Fantasies,” 15. Quoted and translated in ibid., 10. Ibid., 13. For the difficulties of Schwind’s contemporaries to read the Symphony’s story without further textual explanations, see Gottdang, Vorbild Musik. I want to thank the anonymous peer reviewer whom I cite here and whose feedback helped me greatly to sharpen my argument (even if this meant, in this particular case, putting pressure on my argument in its original form through constructive disagreement). See Grewe, The Nazarenes. Seidel, “Die Symphonie,” 22–25, esp. figs. 9, 10. Grewe, “Outline”; quote in Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2:38. Not surprisingly, a reduction back into print followed shortly afterward, among others an affordably priced version in wood engraving (after engravings by Julius Thaeter), measuring 46.7 × 31 cm; Schwind, Aschenbrödel. See chapter 7 in this book. Moritz Carrière, in Gottdang, Vorbild Musik, 273. Minor, “Choral Fantasies.”

Part 7

A Satirical Finale

20 Contagious Laughter On Pandemics, the Comics’ Birth, and Rodolphe Töpffer

A quick glance . . . and we feel dizzy (figure 20.1). The entire page vibrates, every mark quivering, every line twirling as they hurry across the page in pursuit of a Monsieur and a Mademoiselle who, just as impulsive as the graphic traces, seem engaged in some sort of mad race, almost airborne as they speed along, legs apart as if performing a split in midair.1 Meet Mr. Cryptogame, botanist and butterfly lover, who is looking for a way out (naturally to no avail, being, as he is, trapped on a large Norwegian whaling ship and running in circles around the upper deck). Meet Ms. Elvire, the Doppelgänger of Don Giovanni’s abandoned lover, who soon catches up so that we, in a paradox inversion, can catch the pursuer being pursued. Such madness is contagious. Seeing the couple’s frantic chase, a fat little man (Enchante Monsieur Abbé!) “flees and pursues all at once. Seeing which, the Moors too. Seeing which, the domestic animals too” (figure 20.2). “Seeing which, the farm birds too. Seeing which, the rats too” (figure 20.3). Sense yields to senseless rotation, which exerts an irresistible pull on all creatures, and not just creatures alone. As the numbers proliferate and the wild roundabout assumes meteorological force, the inanimate is animated as well. “The immense race lends a circular movement to the atmospheric column, and all the objects on deck are also drawn into a state of circular pursuit” (figure 20.3). Crazed, this circularity marries natural disaster to industrial mayhem, as it lives off serial production and manufactures a row of multiplied, multiplying Moors who seem to have just come off some assembly line—not an army of fierce individuals but a combat unit of identical clones. Mechanical repetition is not only a matter of print. As animate and inanimate objects take on a life of their own, the entire ship “begins to spin at a rate of eight revolutions per second” (figure 20.4). Like a modern Don Quixote, we feel an irrepressible urge to attack this windmilllike whirlwind and expose ourselves to its contagious condition, which threatens to sweep us, too, up in that never-ending tornado of sterile obsessions and delusions that has already taken its monomaniacal heroes.2 Not coincidentally, the silhouettes of the rats which scurry along beneath the frenzied gallop of Elvire & Co. look more like sperm than vermin, transforming the heated twister into a primordial soup of modern mania. Only the dey of Algiers, who lounges lazily at the harbor’s shore, shows no sign of contagion. Perhaps he simply doesn’t see clearly, as the impenetrable smoke emanating in thick puffs from his lips and the ornate hookah beside him has fogged up his DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-27

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Figure 20.1 Rodolphe Töpffer, Mr. Cryptogame Fleeing and Elvire in Pursuit, 1844. Steel-nibbed pen, 18 × 16 cm. From Histoire de M. Cryptogame, 1844, vignettes 127 and 128. Printed as lithographic facsimile, 26 × 17 cm, in Caricatures, vol. 11, tome 8 of Töpffer, Oeuvres complètes (1942–52). Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, Aarau, AKB 12900.

vision. Thus, all he perceives across the calm sea is “something like a whirlwind.” If the Arab ruler is baffled, he nonetheless remains completely unmoved, his lethargy sketching a sinister stereotype of a seraglio’s sultan (and indeed, his life will be cut short by an outraged Elvire, taking revenge for her abduction like a modern-day Judith). This bloodthirsty event is still in the far distance, as the storm carries, unbeknownst to the dey, the arabesque novel to the shores of the comic strip, which are (who would have guessed?) the tranquil promenade of Lake Geneva. And here we meet the unlikely producer of this ultimate Romantic arabesque, a Swiss teacher and founder of a private boarding school named Rodolphe Töpffer.

A Poetics of the Empty Center As a sequence of cause and effect that conspicuously lacks any sensible point of origin, Töpffer’s whirlwind creates a stunning “poetics of the empty center.”3 The pictorial sequences unfold without a central panel, the captions—delivered in an exalted, misplaced tone—deliciously clashing with the unfortunate situations they comment upon. The arabesque’s grotesque vocabulary rearranges itself as “a language of visual slapstick” governed (how could it be otherwise?) by chance, contingency, and a lack of coherence.4 The grammar is that of the absurd, its crop not only nonsense but a total elimination of nature’s laws altogether, especially those of gravity: people and objects take flight and, in imitation of the ancient arabesques in Herculaneum or Pompei,

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Figure 20.2 Rodolphe Töpffer, The Abbé, the Moors, and the Domestic Animals in Pursuit, 1844. Steel-nibbed pen, 18 × 16 cm. From Histoire de M. Cryptogame, 1844, vignettes 129 to 131. Printed as lithographic facsimile, 26 × 17 cm, in Caricatures, vol. 11, tome 8 of Töpffer, Oeuvres complètes (1942–52). Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, Aarau, AKB 12900.

become weightless patterns tied to the world only in the loosest, most haphazard manner.5 This poetics of an empty center reconnects us powerfully to the organized chaos of the literary arabesque and an artfully ordered confusion that also evolves around nothingness.6 In an unprecedented fashion, the literary arabesque begets the pictorial logic of Töpffer’s story, which is indeed nil, except for its purely serial manifestation as rhapsodic growth from one sequence to another. The core remains empty, not epicenter but void, as the narrative deliberately spirals around the empty hub of a missing central panel.7

The Absurdity of Modern Life: Death and Deadpan Satire As so often with the Romantic arabesque, the modernism of Töpffer’s adventures originates in a deep suspicion of modernity itself. In high-pitched, screeching voices his scurrilous antiheroes stutter ardent warnings against the pitfalls of what many of his contemporaries (too many, in Töpffer’s opinion) were extolling, equally loudly, as “progress.” The Swiss native started to doodle roughly three decades after the original Romantic overturn of literary conventions, and the “father of the comic strip” did not like the direction the modern world had been heading in ever since.8 Rattled by the fear of further revolutions (thus the eight spins of his hurricane vessel), he added a radical critique of the period’s sociological condition to the arabesque’s previous suspension of all practical ends and purposeful storylines.

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Figure 20.3 Rodolphe Töpffer, The Farm Birds, the Rats, and All Objects on Deck in Pursuit, 1844. Steel-nibbed pen, 18 × 16 cm. From Histoire de M. Cryptogame, 1844, vignettes 132 to 134. Printed as lithographic facsimile, 26 × 17 cm, in Caricatures, vol. 11, tome 8 of Töpffer, Oeuvres complètes (1942–52). Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, Aarau, AKB 12900.

The whirlwind is a perfect case in point for Töpffer’s misgivings. The episode’s lunacy reduces ad absurdum the belief that strict deterministic laws govern the world and that free will is but an illusion. More concretely, the nautical stampede ridicules a famous passage from Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. “In a whirlwind of dust,” the materialist philosopher proposed in his 1770 treatise, “there is not a single particle . . . that has been placed by chance, . . . that does not . . . act after the manner in which it ought to act.” The same holds true for the world of man, so that “in those terrible convulsions that sometimes agitate political societies . . . there is not a single action, a single word, a single thought, a single will, a single passion in its agents . . . that does not act as of necessity.” Indeed, “it must act from the peculiar situation these agents occupy in the moral whirlwind.”9 Obviously, Töpffer could not have agreed less. His breathless concatenation of causes and effects parodies the laws of physics and perverts the laws of physical motion into a contagious disease, one contracted by sight alone. Its organizing principle is the threat of lawlessness, its logic that of pandemic, and not coincidentally so. The 1820s were overshadowed by the news of cholera outbreaks in Asia, which, by 1830, had crossed into Europe. The pandemic occupied Töpffer intensely, and the album Monsieur Pencil, sketched around 1831 and published nine years later, takes on the deadly victory march of Morbus Diabolus, the helpless panic it unleashed, and the completely ineffective, often outright absurd countermeasures taken.10 In Töpffer’s treatment, the disease spreads now from the protagonists to the panels themselves, infecting episode after episode until his entire “literature in prints,”

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Figure 20.4 Rodolphe Töpffer, A Norwegian Whaling Ship Spinning at a Rate of Eight Revolutions per Second, 1844. Steel-nibbed pen, 18 × 16 cm, vignette 135. Printed as lithographic facsimile, 26 × 17 cm, in Caricatures, vol. 11, tome 8 of Töpffer, Oeuvres complètes (1942–52). Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, Aarau, AKB 12900.

as the Swiss himself called his oblong books, suffers from the same malady.11 Or, to use another modern metaphor, the stampede’s frenzied energy is transmitted like an electric current from episode to episode, from person to person, from person to object, in an ever-descending hierarchy.12 Like any good arabesque, the nonsense has its own intrinsic logic. “Go little book and choose your world, for at crazy things, those who do not laugh, yawn; and those who do not yield, resist; and those who reason, are mistaken, and those who would keep a straight face, can please themselves.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wasn’t resisting at all. Au contraire! When Frédéric Soret, a former schoolmate of Töpffer and now in Weimar as the tutor of the duke’s children, presented the giant of German letters with four samples of the new genre in the winter of 1830/31, the poet was enthused. This was somewhat surprising. After all, the octogenarian disliked caricature with a vengeance and never ventured far from his taste for the more conventional beauty of the Neoclassicist body, preferably male. Yet he did not seem disturbed at all by the obvious lack of refinement in Töpffer’s style; a degenerative eye disease had forced the artist to abandon his dream of attending the academy.13 Goethe’s imprimatur attests, as Thierry Smolderen and David Kunzle agree, to the genius of the educator’s unprecedented pictorial take on the Romantic literary tradition.14 “Apart from the originality of the drawings,” Soret reported contently back to his friend in Switzerland at the end of January 1831, M. de Goethe was particularly struck “by your talent for exhausting a subject, for getting the most out of it, for example, when all inhabitants of the vessel down to the furniture follow the

252 A Satirical Finale rotary movement of Cryptogame, when everything freezes and unfreezes as it were in the spirit of imitation.”15 It is hardly a coincidence that Goethe commented in particular on Cryptogame’s pandemic chase, which combines the most intense focus on direction possible with an equally stunning lack of purposiveness. Motif, meaning, and formal qualities reinforce each other, as the albums’ format, horizontal pages structured by a single register, creates an emphatically linear reading experience that does, however, disappoint any expectation of (or yearning for) an equally undeviating logic. In this new world of a littérature en estampes speed no longer carries us forward. We find ourselves in exhausting loops, faced with arrested development and recurrent scenes of painful banality. Linearity no longer implies the successful pursuit of our destiny. It merely means to be propelled forward by the wind of history, infected by the irresistible pull of time, stumbling, tripping, spinning around from one episode to the next, from one pane to another, our plans as futile as those of mice and men, desperately chasing our dreams, only to be condemned to mere chance encounters; in short, running around and around and around, like headless chicken, caught in a whirlwind of endless repetitions. As the modern hero becomes an oxymoron, the grandeur of eternal emotions dies, too. Passion is no longer glorious or divine, and the altar is just the trivial beginning of our desires’ long, slow, and painful death. Nobody knows that better than Mr. Cryptogame, who must discover on his way to Grasse that the “Beauty from Provence” he married head over heels in a whale’s belly had forgotten to tell him one important detail: that eight children from her first marriage would eagerly await his arrival. As the butterfly lover “passes his days moderately happy, amid a great domestic racket,” as Töpffer puts it, we cannot help but feel that the story’s true tragedy is the lack thereof, that passion’s demise is worse than a passionate passing. As we slowly sink into the morass of daily boredom, Elvire’s “unfortunate end”—unleashed by the news of her darling’s clandestine wedding—seems suddenly more enviable (figure 20.5). Of course, jealousy and rage are not emotions we want to condone, and yet, caught in Cryptogame’s courtyard, the vision of such emotional intensity opens up a strangely enticing glimpse of the Romantic promise for absolute feeling(s). Moreover, as Elvire’s self-explosion rearranges her in attractive fragments, her new multiple shapes—organized in a perfect half circle around what looks almost like the radiant aureole of a rising sun—promise a new arabesque. If the arabesque is indeed, as Clemens Brentano had suggested, an aesthetic-cultural litmus test, Töpffer’s comics sketch modernity as a hothouse of fatal diseases, which have killed off the last Romantic.

The Will to Doodle Bursting with grotesque irony, Töpffer’s unique hybridization of pictorial and literary storytelling is the ultimate embodiment of Romantic Witz, of Romantic irony. Yet beyond the textual format, his albums realize the early Romantic arabesque in visual and material terms as well, and it is this doubling that makes them so special and pioneering. Töpffer’s arabesque comics pry open the last existing borders between verbal and visual narration by creating a true mixed-media aesthetic. Vital to this mixed-media aesthetic is the uniformity of the page’s visual appearance, the homogeneity of word and image as concrete marks, a uniformity created by crafting each album in its entirety with one and the same tool—a steel-nibbed pen made

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Figure 20.5 Rodolphe Töpffer, Mr. Cryptogame’s Confession and Elvire’s Unfortunate End, 1844. Steel-nibbed pen, 18 × 16 cm, vignettes 194 and 195. Printed as lithographic facsimile, 26 × 17 cm, in Caricatures, vol. 11, tome 8 of Töpffer, Oeuvres complètes (1942–52). Aargauer Kantonsbibliothek, Aarau, AKB 12900.

from, of all things, a watch spring. Every line thus has the same character. Whether caption or figure, comma or borderline, the outline of a hat or the finishing swirl of an r—every mark is placed on the page with the same sketchy haste, the same character formation, the same modulation in width or hue, density or swelling. Thus, the arabesque unfurls across word and image in haphazard coherence, a spiderweb spun from an accidental aesthetics capable of governing drawing and script, diagram and layout alike. Töpffer’s comics thus live off an uncanny unity of letters, outlines, and borderlines. It seems only true to their Romantic roots that this inspired materiality was born from affliction. Measured by academic standards, Töpffer could not draw; nor was he a gifted poet. He was the consummate amateur, and this was precisely the secret to his (creative) success. By necessity, virtuosity yielded to a “will to scribble.” In its unsystematic draftsmanship, this doodling then proceeded to implode the borders between three types of lines usually distinguished (quite rigidly) in semiotic terms: script, drawing, diagram. Consequently, Töpffer’s technical mélange gave birth to what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would call, with remarkable perceptiveness, a “carrikirter Roman”—a caricatured, a graphic novel.16 The doodle emerges as the generative force of the albums’ arabesque quality. As such, it was not merely figurative but figural, an incorruptible equalizer of all things autograph, from the trace of a c or, for that matter, any other random letter to the zigzags creating various landscape textures, from the butterflies on Mr. Cryptogame’s hat to the simple dividing line with unexpected metamorphic powers.17

254 A Satirical Finale Doodle and arabesque come together in a process of radical de-differentiation, based on (and born from) an a-specific kind of line, the kind that tries to evade and withstand semiotic typification and typecasting.18 Together, the doubled arabesque is holistic and nonhierarchical, and it is so across formal and semiotic values. As the steel-nibbed pen unified the contours of letter, figure, and diagram, the ensuing homogenization of these three line-types ensured an open-ended quality while highlighting the arabesque’s intrinsic semiotic instability. Dilettantism became a programmatic artistic principle, which the Swiss cartoonist took into consideration when choosing a reproduction technique. The design’s multiplication had to secure the originals’ particular nature and all-over aesthetics, and thus Töpffer turned to autography, a technique he himself associated with the humblest of uses (the promotion of circulars, for example, or grocer’s bills). In this, Töpffer was mistaken, and his outlook a bit provincial. In England, the use of transfer lithography (the better-known term for this technique) was extensive, including for the writing of music, production of manuscript facsimiles, and printing of inexpensive children’s books, like Edward Lear’s 1846 smash hit Book of Nonsense, which set out to preserve the author’s scribbled handwriting. Whatever the use, high or low, autography appealed through its possibility of a “true copy” (an identical appearance of design and print) through the image’s double(d) reversal: instead of drawing directly onto the printing stone, as in common lithography, the design process begins with the use of special paper to work up the idea in a greasy material, which is then transferred onto the stone, followed, with a reversed matrix in place, by the actual printing.19 In contrast to other planographic or intaglio methods, the artist no longer has to worry about inversion or, most importantly for our case, the captions’ orientation. Handwriting can be reproduced along with the images in an intelligible manner.20 No wonder Töpffer was galvanized. After all, he could combine all elements of his new mixed-media aesthetic in one fluid motion—without having to think at all about parceling out the design or the subsequent printing process into various steps or diverging techniques.21 His autographic multiples were something of a facsimile. Nothing accentuates the significance of Töpffer’s style for the avant-garde effect of his new genre (and technique) more than the woodcut version of Cryptogame’s adventures in the French weekly L’Illustration (see figure 20.6). The magazine had never before serialized a graphic novel, but the success of running Töpffer’s bande dessinée in eleven installments between January and April 1845 was so instantaneous that less-lengthy imitators almost immediately followed suit. Once again, the father of the comic had made history. The experience was, nonetheless, somewhat tarnished. Poor eyesight and his particular artistic temperament prevented Töpffer from drawing directly on the woodblock as demanded by the transition to a medium of mass production, one capable of printing (unlike conventional lithography) at once image and type. Thus, he suggested a new star in the field, Amédée Charles Henri de Noé (alias Cham). A congenial choice, one would think, given the several albums that the Parisian caricaturist and lithographer had produced, since 1839, in a Töpfferian style. Yet when it came to translating the original’s flighty drawings and sparse outlines into the new medium, Cham faltered and delivered something of a “miniature Gustave Daumier” instead (see figure 20.6).22 The result was not what Töpffer had wanted. Certainly, neither he nor the publisher could complain about wanting popularity. If later editors (and comic historians) have preferred the originals, it was “Cham’s

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Figure 20.6 Anonymous, after an 1845 drawing by Cham, after Rodolphe Töpffer, Mr. Cryptogame Fleeing with Elvire and the Abbé in Pursuit, 1846. Wood engraving, 19 × 29 cm. From Histoire de Monsieur Cryptogame, 7th ed. (1880), 36. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, 91-B34502.

Cryptogame” that secured Töpffer’s legacy after his premature death and kept the butterfly lover in circulation when other picture stories of the Genevan had long gone out of print.23 Popular or not, however, there is no denying that Cham’s intervention destroyed the album’s essence. Above all, it erased the radical oneness of the verbal and nonverbal elements achieved through the line’s de-differentiation, outlook, and semiotic charge. As the professional draftsman added shading (and thus volume) and, preferring starker outlines, a more realistic treatment of action and scenery, figures and frames lost their evocative ambiguity. Under Cham’s pencil, the panels hardened into rigid, clearly distinct entities, their malleable quality and unexpected shape-shifting harnessed by fully formed, fortified borders (figure 20.6). As a result, the strip’s arabesque nature is (once again) reduced to one of narrative alone. While still experimental, the remarkable hybridization of script, image, diagram that had elevated Töpffer’s adventures above established conventions of pictorial storytelling is lost. Without “the will to doodle,” the individual scenes no longer unfold the expressive artlessness vital to the schoolmaster’s écriture automatique. “Töpffer’s law,” as Ernst Gombrich once called is, is broken.24 Cham’s Monsieur Cryptogame is still grotesque, but no longer in a mixed-media arabesque kind of way. Tellingly, the whirlwind chase assumes a new direction in the 1845 version, although here it was not the Parisian caricaturist who was to blame but the team of engravers who, headed by Best and Leloir, were charged with cutting Cham’s drawings into the

256 A Satirical Finale block. Whoever’s fault it was, however, the regrettable reversal (now from right to left) curtails the sense of insane speed and high-velocity insanity that made Töpffer’s pandemic so catching. As our Monsieur, his love-obsessed pursuer, and the crazed man of the cloth (all having gained substantial visual weight in the process) now race against the resistance of our reading direction, their madness slows down considerably, and not to the scene’s advantage. Moreover, the magazine’s redirection of the chase eliminates Töpffer’s absurd but highly programmatic inversion of its very logic (see figure 20.1). Here, we must quickly recall that, due to Cryptogame’s excessive speed, the fugitive ultimately pursued his pursuer in a desperate attempt to escape her escapades—and not vice versa! Admittedly, the Parisian serial is still funny. But it no longer has the original’s radical mediumistic edge. As such, the 1845 bande dessinée recoiled from its genesis as a Romantic arabesque. It was up to another of the comic’s fathers, Wilhelm Busch, to take up the torch.

Notes 1. Rodolphe Töpffer, Histoire de Monsieur Cryptogame, translated and reproduced in Kunzle, Rodolphe Töpffer (2007), 447–537; all Cryptogame citations in the following section are from this edition, 500–503; for an in-depth discussion of the comic strip’s long genesis and publication history, see Kunzle, “Monsieur Cryptogame.” 2. Kunzle, Rodolphe Töpffer, 44–45. 3. Smolderen, The Origins of Comics, 43. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Smolderen, The Origins of Comics, 49; F. Schlegel, “Zur Poesie,” in idem, Kritische, vol. 16, 276, fragment no. 274. 7. Smolderen, The Origins of Comics, 49. 8. Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip. 9. Holbach, System, 1:31–32. 10. Rodolphe Töpffer, Monsieur Pencil, translated and reproduced in Kunzle, Rodolphe Töpffer, 241–313. 11. Töpffer, “Réflexions à propos d’un programme,” 150; see also Mainardi, “The Invention of Comics” (accessed June 13, 2019). 12. Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip, 77. 13. Willems, “Rodolphe Töpffer,” 227. 14. Smolderen, The Origins of Comics, 48–50; Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip, 3–7. 15. Frédéric Soret to Töpffer, January 16, 1831, in Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip, 72; for the original letter (in French), see Gallati, Rodolphe Töpffer, 91. 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Frédéric Soret, January 10, 1831, cited after Gallati, Rodolphe Töpffer, 90. 17. See, for example, the motif of the border becoming a skull in Töpffer’s Mr. Crépin (vignette 66); see Kunzle, Rodolphe Töpffer, 124. 18. Weltzien, “Zig Zag,” 147–48. 19. For a discussion of graphiation, the authorial trace, and their theoretical implications, see Pylyser, “Eye/I”; for a theory of graphic enunciation, see Baetens, “Revealing Traces.” 20. Groensteen, M. Töpffer invente, 77. 21. Töpffer, “Notice sur les Essais d’autographie,” 171–72; see further Wivel, “Comic Transformations” (accessed August 20, 2020). 22. Töpffer, Histoire de M. Cryptogame; see further Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip, 125–29. 23. Ibid., 129. 24. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 336–42; for the relationship between physiognomy, Töpffer’s “will to doodle,” and his comics’ expressivity, see Weltzien, “Zig Zag,” 163–64.

21 “Ach! Poor Venus Is Perdue” On Wilhelm Busch

The contemporary reader could easily recognize himself in Rodolphe Töpffer’s gentlemen in crisis. Caught in a thick description of contemporary society, Mr. Cryptogame and his delusional fellow travelers held up a funhouse mirror to the distortions of the reader’s own self. The absurdity of overblown forms and the slapstick humor of their adventures, however, never diminish the depth or sincerity of their critique. Amidst the mayhem, they astutely dissect the most troubling aspects of modern life, including the era’s thorniest political topics, from the period’s militarism and abuse of state power to superstition and scientific hubris. Laughter was, of course, the much-needed safety valve and a strategy to get away with murder, and thus the choice of a lower key was a must. If, for reasons mapped out in this book, the modern arabesque thrived to its fullest outside of the academy’s Elysian fields, the Damoclean sword of censorship added another reason to escape into the marginalia. Yet even there, as Neureuther’s warning example showed, the cartoonist had to tread lightly. If the hot waters of contemporary politics were potentially deadly, so were the pressures of an emerging market economy. With sales in mind, publishing houses tended to bully illustrators into tailoring the arabesque to mainstream taste and a juste-milieu politics. Financial considerations thus accounted for the strange marriage of early Romanticism’s avant-garde visuality and a Biedermeier sensibility of propriety and privacy. These restrictions are what make the final twist of our arabesque so remarkable, and the perception of the graphic novel as a category of its own certainly helped. Divorced from high literature and well-known literary templates and born from a unique mixed-media aesthetic, Töpffer’s gentlemen in crisis could appeal even to a conservative anticaricaturist like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Delivered in an unleashed Romantic anti-Romanticism and peppered with a strong dose of realism, political farce, random murder, and chilling violence, suicide (successful or not), travesty, and the reversal of gender roles turned out to be socially acceptable and—serialized and subsequently reprinted as albums and other bound matter—profitable as well. Thus, when drawing and text found a new unity in the comic strip, they opened the door wide for a return of the arabesque’s subversive, critical, and ironic side. And they did so with a vengeance, as our last witness, Wilhelm Busch, will testify!

Reaching Maturity: From Romantic Arabesque to Cold-Blooded Grotesquerie Like Töpffer’s fatherhood, the parental role of the failed realist painter in raising the young comic strip was somewhat accidental. If poor eyesight had prevented the Swiss DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-28

258 A Satirical Finale from fulfilling his dream of an artistic career, having him turn to doodling instead, his German counterpart had been plagued by doubts about his talent after a series of disappointing experiences at various academies. After a year in Düsseldorf and a brief stint at Antwerp, Busch had finally landed in Munich in 1854. During his four years at the academy, Busch would remain the outsider he had been before. But it was here, in the Bavarian capital, that the son of a grocer and first of seven children finally secured his first real employment at two leading humor and satire magazines, the Fliegende Blätter (literally Flying Leaves or Flying Pages, but perhaps best translated as Loose Sheets) and the Münchner Bilderbogen (Munich Picture Sheets). At first designing merely cartoons without captions, Busch quickly moved on to caricatures with brief prose commentaries. In 1865, he then delivered the first cartoon strip of what would become his most popular and influential work, the cautionary tale of Max und Moritz’s seven boyish pranks (see figures 21.4 and 21.5). Like all of Busch’s mature comic strips, the story abounds in elements essential to the literary arabesque: wry aphorisms and verbal-graphic slapstick interspersed with startling outbursts of black humor and shockingly cold-blooded grotesquerie.1 In contrast to Töpffer, however, Busch has remained absent from discussions of the graphic novel’s Romantic origins. This seems peculiar given his widespread acceptance as a worthy heir to the Swiss schoolmaster, whom, as Scott McCloud has put it, he “perfected.”2 The absence of Wilhelm Busch in debates over the comic’s birth from the spirit of the arabesque is even more peculiar as this connection was, once again, not merely aesthetic but personal as well. If Töpffer’s Romantic affiliations were canonized by the intervention of the aged Goethe, who became the self-appointed midwife to the transition of the doodler’s novels into print, Busch’s arabesque links were fortified by his encounter with the modern Vasari himself, who was still serving as the director of the Düsseldorf Academy when Busch studied at the venerable institution, albeit briefly, in 1851. Mutually relegated to the margins of the profession (whether by impaired eyesight or aesthetic prejudices against French realism) and yet not fully capable of cutting tradition’s umbilical cord, the Swiss dilettante and the Courbet wannabe emerge as kindred spirits united by a fervent anti-Romantic Romanticism. In this spirit, mixing exaggerated images and hyperbolic verse in novel ways, Busch led la littérature en images on the barricades.3 In the remaking of Venus as glorious insurgent, the Romantic arabesque was (thus again) redrawn. It was inevitable that Busch’s revolution would look quite different than its Swiss counterpart. The German artists did not (nor could) share in Töpffer’s dilettantism and instead, unconcerned with the de-differentiation of the line so vital to his predecessor’s achievements, mobilized the most elite, most skilled elements of his trade, whether art history or academic laws. Consequently, Busch’s grotesqueries burst with virtuoso skill, crafty art-historical citations, and subtle if sly subversions of established pictorial traditions, motifs, and practices. Like Töpffer’s albums, Busch’s graphic novels hold up a funhouse mirror to their readers, gleefully skewering one sacred cow after another, be it cultural, political, or social. Yet the shape of that carnage is no longer the wobbly lines of a shaky, steel-nibbed pen but the fluid, precisely applied marks of a skilled draftsman who could use any tool in any medium (pen, pencil, or brush with graphite, ink, water color, gouache, oil, etc.) with the same ease. Busch’s thinking occurred as much in graphite gray and ink black as in the glow of watercolors or the crumbly color patterns of oil pastels. Unlike Töpffer’s flitting

“Ach! Poor Venus Is Perdue” 259 imagery, Busch’s quickly sketched midcentury slaughterhouse of (petit) bourgeois bigotry is virtuous precision.

Symbolic Inversions In one aspect, Töpffer still followed protocol: his main protagonists are, even if Messieurs in distress, exclusively male. Busch, in contrast, made the underdog his hero: women, children, animals, and even inanimate objects are mobilizing against the established order, whether in open rebellion or subversive mischief-making, a mottled army of gusty wives, girlish agitators, and fortified maidens, of tykes, truants, and other little terrors, of pesky insects and scheming dogs, not to forget the unruly ravens and roguish monkeys (who make Curious George look like a saint), on the march to subvert authority and upend what many a nineteenth-century man would have considered the natural order of things. Indeed, talking about things: even those random objects used daily but rarely noticed develop a mind of their own, assuming almost demonic power and, thus possessed, subjecting Busch’s personage to what the Left Hegelian critic and declared anti-Nazarene Friedrich Theodor Vischer so brilliantly called die Tücke des Objekts (the object’s treacherous trickery).4 Coming in all sizes, shapes, and substances, household items and other mundane things, now imbued with some insidious life force, punish their owners for their weaknesses, transgressions, and, above all, hypocrisy, and do so with petrifying effect. The home is no longer a castle but a perilous place of unknown dangers. The great chain of being is turned upside down and light is shone upon the animal in us. And even if our miscreants have their brutal comeuppance, they did at least enjoy the ride. Often, however, the underdog prevails, broomstick justice is served, and the oppressors leave bruised and befuddled. Busch’s is, in short, a world of symbolic inversion.5 Inversion also functions as the ruling paradigm when it comes to the cartoonist’s oedipal relationship with the Romantic heritage. In this sense, its legacy is much more central to the machinations of his misfits than of Töpffer’s—and also, one might add, considerably more sophisticated. Busch’s picture stories are an indispensable link in the growth of the modern arabesque, as they realize its core, the German Romantic ideal of ironic, self-reflexive play, by deconstructing just the Romantic paradigm they employ. The circle closes as we return to Kant’s parergonal crustacea and the last days of their reigning goddess. The end will come in form of Venus’s demise.

Carefree A vignette titled Sorglos (Carefree) illustrates the inversion of Romantic symbolism so central to Busch’s work (figure 21.1). The drawing hearkens back to the Romantic view of the raven as a herald of death, a macabre symbol for the frailty of human existence and the inexplicable nature of the supernatural, as represented by Édouard Manet’s illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s stirring poem “The Raven” (figure 21.2). And the Raven, never fitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

260 A Satirical Finale

Figure 21.1 Wilhelm Busch, Carefree, designed in 1892–94. Relief halftone and relief printing, 23.5 x 17 cm (page). From Busch, Hernach (1908), 60.

“Ach! Poor Venus Is Perdue” 261

Figure 21.2 Édouard Manet, Perched upon a Bust of Pallas, 1875. Transfer lithograph, 54.5 x 35.5 cm (sheet). From Poe, The Raven (1875). Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

262 A Satirical Finale And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the foor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies foating on the foor Shall be lifted—nevermore!6 Busch, however, replaces terror with triviality. His fn-de-siècle harbinger of death pays no attention to the magnitude of the vanitas motif that he temporarily inhabits. Instead, he decorates the skull with the contents of his bowels, mocking the symbolic discourse about destiny, human existence, and the transcendental advanced by Romantics such as Poe. Selbst mancher Weise Besieht ein leeres Denkgehäuse Mit Ernst und Bangen.— Der Rabe ist ganz unbefangen.7

An empty cranial cage Might leave a sage Awed and dispirited— The raven is quite uninhibited.

Busch’s ravens are human, all too human. Their evil is mischief and their end determined by the entanglement in the world of the petite-bourgeoisie—or, as in the case of Jack Crook, in the needlework of Auntie Lou.8 Der Tisch ist glatt—der Böse taumelt! Das Ende naht—sieh’ da! er baumelt! “Die Bösheit war sein Hauptpläsir, Drum”—spricht die Tante—hängt er hier!

Pure wantonness and disrespect Run riot—all must now be wrecked! “Mischief,” says Auntie “was his joy; Now see him hanging there, my boy!”

The little episode of the cheerful and unconcerned raven, Jack Crook, Bird of Evil, is paradigmatic for Busch’s insightful and acidic probing of the Romantic tradition (figure 21.3). A kind of fin-de-siècle Simpsons, Busch’s satirical personage enjoyed immense popularity with the readers of the kind of humorous magazines where he had first earned his spurs. Even today, generation upon generation has fallen in love with the slapstick humor of Busch’s comics for their stern moral tales and caustic social satire. Yet Busch’s production also stands out for its avid and astute participation in the contemporary (Romantic) discourse about modernity and the nature of art. Disappointed by the academic conversations conducted in the Elysian fields of high art, Busch continued the discourse by throwing the symbols at stake into the pits of small-town living, homely settings, and trivial circumstances. His comics became a testimony to a double failure: his own failure as a realist and the failure of the Romantic project to reenchant a disenchanted world, to romanticize it in its entirety.9

Seven Pranks, Two Deaths, and One Metamorphosis With Max and Moritz, an illustrated story in verse first published in 1865, Busch created a rustic tale of evil gusto, sardonic bathos, and ultimate grotesque.10 Terrorizing their village with their brutal pranks, the terrible duo would find a worldwide following, despite the rather gruesome and untimely death that awaits them at the end of their seventh misdeed. Within this fantastic tale of fantastically narrow-minded

“Ach! Poor Venus Is Perdue” 263

Figure 21.3 Wilhelm Busch, The Fatal End of Jack Crook, Bird of Evil, designed in 1867. Wood engraving, 38 x 27.5 (page). Part 4 “End” of Busch, Hans Huckebein (November 17, 1867), 125. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

264 A Satirical Finale

Figure 21.4 Wilhelm Busch, The Seventh Boyish Prank of Max and Moritz (Into the Mill), designed in 1863/64. Wood engraving, 21 x 13 cm (page). From Busch, Max und Moritz (1865), 51. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

“Ach! Poor Venus Is Perdue” 265

Figure 21.5 Wilhelm Busch, The Seventh Boyish Prank of Max and Moritz (The Fowl’s Fodder), designed in 1863/64. Wood engraving, 21 x 13 cm (page). From Busch, Max und Moritz (1865), 52. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

266 A Satirical Finale Babbitt life, the arabesque literally returns, at a central moment in the story, in the form of a mask. At the end of the story, our two antiheroes receive their brutal punishment and are thrown between the millstones of the local miller (figure 21.4). Rickeracke! Rickeracke! Geht die Mühle mit Geknacke.

Rickle-Rackle, rickle-rackle Hear the millstones grind and crackle.11

The mill thereby functions as a magical medium of metamorphosis, which does not destroy the bodies’ shapes, as one might assume, but rather converts their substance (fgure 21.5). Hier kann man sie noch erblicken Fein geschroten und in Stücken

Here is what the mill releases, Still themselves, but all in pieces.

The sign system that carries out this metaphorical metamorphosis is an ornament typically associated with the arabesque: a mask. The mask is the gate that marks the boy’s way of passage from living subject to artificial object, from animate form to inanimate pattern. In this function, the mask in Busch’s drawing does not undo but rather reinforces artistic tradition: from the Renaissance onward, the grotesque had functioned as a form that could question the rules of high art and cast shadows upon the belief in the mastery of the world of objects through mimesis, symmetry, and central perspective. On that, Busch and the early Romantics agreed. Yet they disagreed on what that might mean for art after 1800. In contrast to the utopian thinking still alive in German Romanticism, Busch rejected the notion of the arabesque as the seed for a new golden age of art and writing. The belief in the arabesque’s life-giving potential yields to an evocation of its destabilizing power. Thus, in Busch’s work, art inevitably serves to transform living into dead matter. Mirroring Nietzsche’s critique of the deadening character of idealist art, the artistic functions as an agent of paralysis.12 Again and again, Busch depicts the transformation of people into ornament. Inevitably, this ornamentation brings the dissolution of living form into inorganic substance. Take, for example, the story of Ice-Peter, first told in 1864, another tyke deaf to his parents’ advice and full of scorn for nature’s powers (figure 21.6). He soon faces his (deserved?) end, and that end is bleak. Our hero first solidifies into an ice sculpture before he decomposes, under the eyes of a horrified mother, into gruel (figure 21.7).13 As his form spreads out on the floor in decorative liquid patterns, his tale provides an arabesque remodeling of those myths of metamorphoses handed down from antiquity. Yet what a startling, unsettling digression from its ancient ancestors! Where, we ask half laughing, half shuddering, is a higher purpose? Where the silver lining of everlasting symbolism? Where that spark of hope, of redemption, that makes Ovid’s violence bearable? We look in vain and must accept: modern metamorphosis results only in the most mundane forms of memoria. No pomp and circumstance, no allegorical fireworks! Peter simply ends up in an earthen pot, quickly stored away in the basement, where from now on he will gather dust wedged in between cheese and pickles.14

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Figure 21.6 Wilhelm Busch, From “Crystal Cluster” to “Frozen Porcupine,” 1863. Wood engraving, 10.8 x 10 cm (image), 18.5 x 28 cm (page). From Busch, Der Eispeter (1864), picture 13.

Figure 21.7 Wilhelm Busch, Ice-Peter’s Dissolution into Gruel, 1863. Wood engraving, 14 x 22 cm (image), 18.5 x 28 cm (page). From Busch, Der Eispeter, picture 21. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston, MA.

268 A Satirical Finale

Figure 21.8 Wilhelm Busch, The Miller’s Bold Daughter, 1868. Wood engraving, 32 x 12.5 (image), 38 x 27.5 (page). From Über Land und Meer 10, no. 29 (April 19, 1868): 469. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

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Midas’s Touch In Busch’s comics, the trope of metamorphosis functions as a mise-en-abyme that indicates the grotesque-arabesque nature of the story’s narrative mode. It seeks to unmask Romanticism’s failure by subverting its symbolism. Art—once extolled by the early Romantics as the ultimate medium of social change and spiritual regeneration—now operates as a destructive force, replacing Pygmalion’s vivification of dead marble with the deadly touch of King Midas: artist and artwork do not create new life but destroy the existing. Put into the right hands, however, the artist’s deadly touch could have its emancipatory moments as well. An example of such emancipation occurs in the tale of a brave miller’s daughter, first published in 1868, in which three men—lawbreakers like their peers Max and Moritz—succumb to art’s transformative power (figure 21.8).15 Successfully battled by the fierce maiden, the three villains end up as dough. As such, they represent three central artistic principles (whose solidity, however, their very nature as dough questions): symmetry the first, spiral the second, fragment the third. The source of this fragmentation is the artist himself, who has embellished the fatally slicing box with his monogram.

Venus, One Last Time While we still ponder the sensation of a soft sound and even softer breeze as the blade of the artist’s miniature guillotine does its duty, we have reached the end. Or at least we have reached the last curlicue of this arabesque. Romanticism would become one of those avant-garde movements that has shaped popular culture, and decidedly so. Popular culture, in turn, has provided a crucial space for some of its core concepts to thrive outside the bounds of high art and, in the process, evolve its avant-garde logic in unexpected venues. Among these were book illustration, comic strip, and graphic novel, formats that enable a fusion of word and image in ways possible for neither the pure text nor the pure image. In this context, Busch’s work marks a turning point in the history of Romanticism, standing between the deconstruction of Romantic symbolism as obsolete idealist ideology and an ironic revival in twentieth-century art (think Dadaist Kurt Schwitters or Surrealist Max Ernst). Metaphorically speaking, this ironic revival reused the pieces into which idealist art had shattered when artists such as Busch pushed it from its Romantic pedestal. Thus, the end belongs to the fate of yet another Venus, one made, in true bourgeois fashion, out of plaster. As such, Venus is properly displayed on the mantelpiece of a fireplace. But even the bourgeois home proves to be no longer a safe haven for high art. This time, the enemy comes in form of the mistress’s cat (figure 21.9).16 Sehr in Ängsten sieht man ihn Aufwärts sausen am Kamin. Ach!—die Venus ist perdü— Klickeradoms!—von Medici!

At the same frenetic pace See him mount the fireplace. Ach! Poor Venus is perdue— Clickety-crash! De Medicis!

270 A Satirical Finale

Figure 21.9 [Johann Jacob?] Ettling, after Wilhelm, Busch, “Up the Fireplace” and “Venus is perdue,” 1871. Wood engraving, 21 x 14 cm. From Busch, Die fromme Helene (1873), 52 and 53. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston, MA.

Notes 1. For Busch’s complete oeuvre, see Ries, Wilhelm Busch; for the relationship between Romanticism and Renaissance in Busch’s work, see Theissing’s seminal study “Wilhelm Busch.” 2. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 17. 3. Gladwell, “Wilhelm Busch,” 12. 4. Vischer, Auch Einer, 1:24; see Gladwell, “Wilhelm Busch,” 16. 5. See Gladwell, “Wilhelm Busch.” 6. Poe, The Raven, 23. 7. Ries, Wilhelm Busch, 3:696. 8. Wilhelm Busch, “Hans Huckebein”; for an English translation, see Arndt, The Genius of Wilhelm Busch, 36–41. 9. Busch’s anti-Catholic sentiment and relationship to religion are discussed by Just, “Wilhelm Busch und die Katholiken”; Hess, “Pater Filucius”; and Dannowski, “Wie schad.” 10. For the original publication of this Story of Seven Boyish Pranks, see Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz; see further Arndt, The Genius of Wilhelm Busch; all citations are taken from Arndt’s edited volume. 11. Ries, Wilhelm Busch, 1:382; Arndt, The Genius of Wilhelm Busch, 35. All other citations from this passage are also on that page. 12. Willems, Abschied vom Wahren—Schönen—Guten, 80–89. 13. Wilhelm Busch, Der Eispeter. 14. For an image of Peter’s pathetic last resting place, see Grewe, “The Arabesque from Kant to Comics,” 654, fig. 19. 15. Wilhelm Busch, “Die kühne Müllerstochter.” 16. The plaster Venus belongs to the pious Helen, who herself will fall prey, although not to the cat but to her love of the bottle. Wilhelm Busch, Die fromme Helene.

22 The Last Act’s Final Flourish

“To their Master —Dr. Wilhelm von Schadow”

Prologue Let us anoint “The Lie” as our new King! And that is just what the members of the Malkasten, Düsseldorf’s independent artist society, did when they staged Cinderella’s Wedding on February 14, 1852. The goal of the masked play was to put back “the kingdom of poesy into existence” while escaping the danger of bromidic self-deception and atmospheric illusionism.1 With Romantic irony as its guiding principle, the play thus opened its illusory world to reflection and self-reflection so that authentic experience and truth might be found in the liminal moment of make-believe. Twenty years earlier, Immermann had already captured this paradox cogently in a text he had supplied for the first of Düsseldorf’s grand artist fêtes, the 1833 Dürer festival.2 Der Traum der Wirklichkeit ist flücht’ger Dunst— Und ewig wahr bleibt nur der Traum der Kunst.

The dream of reality is but fleeting mist— And eternally true remains the dream of art alone.

The festivals’ transformative potential derived not least from the ambitious fusion of genres that expanded the performance of living pictures into a totalized experience by adding musical scores and dramatic recitation. Schadow’s theatrical interlude in Der moderne Vasari demonstrates the centrality of such variegated combination of static and dynamic elements, which hearkened back to early Romantic theories of genre interaction (from Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of “sympoesy” or August Wilhelm Schlegel’s vision of theater as a total work of art to August Müller’s notion of a “universal comedy”) with its utopian notion of uniting, if only momentarily, real and ideal life, wirkliches und idealisches Leben.3 The theater could not fulfill, as Heinrich Theissing has observed, Müller’s high-flying expectations, but the artist festival could.4 The frame story of Der moderne Vasari confirms Theissing’s proposition that the artist festivals in nineteenth-century Düsseldorf pursued one purpose above all: to affirm a Romantic spirit in a prosaic age and to conjure up (even, indeed, constitute) its unity with German painting.5 Rightly, Theissing rejects a reduction of these performances to mere escapist fantasies. They fulfilled an important function in securing the ideal of community, of Gemeinschaft, an ideal that, accompanying us throughout DOI: 10.4324/9781351187350-29

272 A Satirical Finale this book, was at the center of the Romantics’ rebuttal of modern alienation and its alleged main cause, the process of radical individuation. On a more pragmatic level, the artists’ stagings were key to Schadow’s efforts to procure patronage and secure upward social mobility.

Act One: Community If Schadow was unable to develop a satisfying theory of the tableau vivant and its expansion into a Gesamtkunstwerk, he instinctively made use of its capacity to generate, renew, and repair precisely the ideal of a community he had cherished dearly since his days as a brother of St. Luke in Rome. An anecdote from Schadow’s second sojourn to Italy in 1830 illustrates the important role of such mutual celebrations for appeasement. “Round after round was drunk to our health, and when I found myself . . . near Schadow,” the Hamburg painter Erwin Speckter remembered in the pages of his diary; “he kissed me three times as a sign of reconciliation. . . . Already enthused from merry-making and wine, I was so touched that I drank brotherhood with every one of his pupils who came my way. Then they drank with all of Cornelius’s followers, and thus occurred a general fraternization.”6 As performance and festivities suspend reality in a moment of truthful artifice, to call on Immermann again, emotional barriers are broken down and hearts are opened up toward each other and toward the community as such. Peace might not last, but at least it is achieved, if only for a fleeting glimpse of eternity. Our final arabesque, then, created at a time when Der moderne Vasari was already underway, occupies itself with just such a “general fraternization,” one back at the Rhine and dedicated “To their Master—Dr. Wilhelm von Schadow.”7

Act Two: A Life in Arabesques It is Saturday the 29th, a cold but comfortable November evening in the year 1851. An excited crowd has gathered in front of the Director Schadow’s residence on Flinger Steinweg 58, with the entire artist community among the jubilant crowd. The flickering flames of the torches illuminate the faces with a magical sparkle, murmurs and laughter fill the air, until everybody goes quiet and the local Choral Society serenades the revered master, “with the participation,” as the poet Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter later recalled, “of all estates.”8 The next morning the street awakes with a new name, the one it still carries today: Schadow Strasse. And on this festive morning, the street shows itself in its Sunday best, flaunting flags and flowers to welcome local visitors and the honorable guests who, having made their way from near and far, do not want to miss the opportunity to gratulate the jubilarian in person. Twenty-five years earlier Schadow had arrived to lead the city’s academy to new glory. Admittedly, the path to becoming one of Europe’s leading academies had not always been smooth, and the Era Schadow had witnessed its share of strife and struggle, not to forget revolutionary unrest. Yet, on this glorious day, friend and foe agree that the Prussian painter has made due on his promise. In 1851, the Rhenish town could proudly rest assured of its place on the cultural map of the Western world. At 4:30 p.m., the official celebration commences in Geisler’s Hall. The overture is a spirited performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op. 67, which takes the assembled company by storm. No less enthusiastic is the response to what follows,

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three living pictures preceded by a prologue and staged, as Müller von Königswinter would gush, “after Schadow’s most noble creations”: The Adoration of the Shepherds (1823), The Wise and Foolish Virgins (1842), and, finally, the programmatic Fons Vitae (1848), a monumental multifigured composition completed only a few years earlier when revolutionary insurgencies had rattled Düsseldorf.9 After such cultured delights, it is time to satisfy more mundane desires, and the evening concludes with a sumptuous banquet and an even more splendid ball.10 All in all, Schadow’s anniversary turned out to be a memorable affair. For the master himself, the happy memories of that special day also assumed material form. As a sign of their respect, appreciation, and gratitude, his flock of students, present and past, made him the most personal gift, an album of seventy-one drawings and watercolors remarkable not only for its beauty and artistic quality but for the peacemaking sentiment behind it.11 Coming together, fervent supporters and declared opponents alike put aside their differences, and the ensuing collection of highly diverse works testifies to the high esteem their academic paterfamilias enjoyed until the very end and beyond all disagreement. The album also signaled a deep desire to conjure up the feeling of community, unity, and harmony that had ruled the school’s early years and that the anniversary celebrations promised to restore. Not surprisingly, the magnificent title page summarizes the life, art, and aesthetic convictions of the man who, ennobled in the meantime, had ruled over the city’s artistic fate for so long in (and as) an arabesque.

Interlude: Caspar Scheuren’s Tableau Vivant For once, the arabesque seems to originate without doubt in its pinnacle, an imposing portrait of Albrecht Dürer, who fixates the viewer with a stark, unwavering gaze (figure 22.1). His stern facial expression, however, gives immediately way to an airy, undulating rhythm of thick hair, waves of locks that mirror the marginalia’s flowing flourishes as they pour down, with gurgling pleasure, at the left and right borders. Admittedly, the arabesque’s scrolls are rather neat, a vivacious but carefully clipped growth that does not even allow the fantastical beasts skirmishing around its rich leaves to escape the bower’s confines. Thus, we enjoy the wild fights of dragons and lindworms, the frenzied flights of bats and owls, and the mysterious presence of animals, mythical and real (a phoenix, a heron, a pair of griffins), with the aesthetic pleasure of a perfectly patterned design, as we imagine the sounds of the rooster’s crowing and the melancholic cry of a majestic swan. The two medallion portraits of Raphael and Giotto, who interrupt the marginalia’s animated mayhem, heightened the comforting sense of stability and order of this enchanted border work. This is the arabesque as its most pleasing (and domesticated). Yet the ornamental frame is not the only tribute that the album’s frontispiece pays to the Romantic arabesque and its Düsseldorf legacy. The drawing’s composite quality, the additive accumulation of different types of imagery (veduta—allegory— devotional image), various modes of meaning production, and oscillating degrees of naturalism display the same compositional technique at work in Der moderne Vasari. This is hardly coincidence, as its maker, Caspar Scheuren, was part of Schadow’s close circle. His drawing thus seems an apt ending to an arabesque that has grown from a belated Romantic novel. Caspar Scheuren and Wilhelm Schadow certainly looked at the same models. The three portraits of Raphael, Dürer, and Giotto in the anniversary arabesque emulate the

274 A Satirical Finale

Figure 22.1 Caspar Scheuren, Dedication [frontispiece of album by various Düsseldorf artists in honor of Schadow’s twenty-fifth work anniversary], 1851. Pen and ink with wash and watercolor, heightened with gold and silver, 43 × 57 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

vignettes of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite and thus link the album’s frontispiece directly to Der moderne Vasari’s title and decorative scheme. The choice of the Gothic font, the popular Fraktura, first created for Dürer’s Emperor Maximilian I, emphasizes the medievalist perspective taken here on the selected Renaissance heroes (see figures 4.1, 4.2, 5.2, and 6.2; also 12.1 and 13.1). Schadow’s elaborate initials, looming large above all remaining lettering, heighten this historicist sensibility. Woven together from wildly knotted tracery, the two letters, here a W, there an S, evoke at once France’s sublime cathedrals and the colorful tradition of illuminated manuscripts. On the left, Christ, rigidly frontal and firmly inscribed in the W’s left pointed angle, greets us as the Salvator Mundi, his portrait taken by a rather Düreresque St. Luke, who, pencil firm in hand, has perched himself in the initial’s second V-niche, his bull at his feet. A tribute to Schadow’s membership in the Brotherhood of St. Luke, the Evangelist joins here, at least metaphorically, the congratulatory artists as they draw up the portfolio for their master. A bit farther to the right, the protective figure of St. George appears, his large shield decorated with the coat of arms bestowed upon Wilhelm Schadow on January 20, 1843, when he was the first Prussian artist knighted. From now on, he was no longer simply an artist’s son but Ritter von Schadow-Godenhausen, bequeathing

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nobility to his children and thus to a son eager to pursue (fiercely supported by a loving if bewildered and somewhat troubled father) a splendid military career. Beneath the large letters of the master’s name, two allegorical figures flank a wreath with the anniversary’s date: Father Rhine lounges on the left, holding the Prussian coat of arms, while Pictura, doubling as the maiden Düsseldorf, sits with the city’s coat of arms on the right. The scroll at her feet maps Schadow’s path “Roma/Düsseldorf,” although we miss any mention of his hometown of Berlin. Perhaps Scheuren considered the Prussian capital a detour not worth mentioning. The lowest level, finally, belongs to the story’s “novella”: a realistic framework (of print and biography alike) that, materializing here in three cityscapes, adds a spatial dimension to the 1851 arabesque of Schadow’s life and art; to the left we see the marketplace, followed by the city park at the center and, to the right, the court of the academy building. Beneath these three public spaces, which formed such an important, integral part of Schadow’s daily routines, appears the date of his arrival: 1826. The dedication frontispiece of the 1851 album incarnates the late Romantic version of the arabesque as practiced, in word and image, in Düsseldorf. Repeated only a few years later by Der moderne Vasari, its meandering logic forges connections between conceptually and spatially distinct elements, which otherwise would have remained isolated from each other. At the same time, the juxtaposition of fantastic marginalia, historicist evocation, and realistic veduta reflects the two sides of Schadow’s novel. The depicted personifications and religious personage function like a shorthand for the master’s artistic practice and art-theoretical convictions (as discussed at length in his 1854 novel). On the other hand, the topographic exactitude of the cityscapes recalls the novel’s autobiographical quality and nature as a romans à clef. The visual and literary arts come together, as they are interwoven by a gentle arabesque. As such, Scheuren’s title page would have made a perfect beginning to Schadow’s 1854 novel.

Act Three: The Arabesque as Lived Experience Pars pro toto of a massive collaborative project, Scheuren’s frontispiece embodies the very essence of the arabesque’s taming à la Düsseldorf. The drawing is both metaphor and mechanism for a reunion of unlike minds, brought together in and through the arabesque. As such, the title page and the commemorative album it introduces validate our earlier observation that it was the intense investment in an ideal of community and a harmonious sociability that motivated Schadow to embrace genres and forms of artistic expressions far removed from his Nazarene aesthetic, be it the tableau vivant (as social practice) or the arabesque (as organizing principle). Both spoke to the quintessential Romantic desire for a fusion of life and art, a fusion that the Nazarenes had hoped to realize on a grander scale, with fresco as a national and religious histories as church art, with devotional pictures serving as each and very home’s omnipresent decoration. In its sublimity, however, this vision was condemned to live as mere utopia or, as was the case in Düsseldorf, in the brief moments of suspending daily existence on the stage, in a living picture (or in art itself). The artists knew this. Last but not least, the Biedermeier arabesque, whether written or drawn, reflects the deep-seated desire for neat and thus happy endings. This might strike the modernist as escapism. But at the end of this book, I want to grant Schadow his wish, and join, together with him and the celebratory crowd, this moment of suspended disbelief. In 1851, the arabesque enjoyed its taming and delivered a snug vision of peaceful and prosperous living.

276 A Satirical Finale If the exquisite but ephemeral nature of Scheuren’s frontispiece points to the fugitive temporality of the Romantic dream it conjures up, it nonetheless testifies to the power of Romanticism’s artistic manifestations as concrete experience. If fleeting, the utopian still crystallized—even if only for a few precious minutes—in the real. Apart from the stage, the arabesque proved a much more pliable format than traditional media, genres, and aesthetic concepts to bring together life and art, dream and reality. As such, it touched upon the core of Schadow’s Romanticism in ways he himself would never fully comprehend. This is true for the most salient aspect of his 1854 Moderne Vasari as well, which delivers a glowing testimony to the role of the arabesque as lived experience. For all its belatedness, the autobiographical novel proves the Romantic point that art can indeed shape the structure of our existence. Behind the metaphor is an expressive truth that makes sense of the senselessness called life. We might not wish the Lie to be our monarch; but his sister, Chance, is certainly a ruler we simply cannot oust. There was a reason why the ancients called her Fortuna.

Epilogue: The First Cut Is the Deepest “The legacy of the past . . . is too much for the artist of the present to overcome.”12 This snide remark refers to the black silhouette of a woman in midair, a life-size cutout, much too large for the medium’s traditional intimacy (and for our comfort as well), of a body taut and elongated, slightly curved, the arms stretched out as if to reach the sky but falling back as life drains from the wrist that the young woman, her face but a faint outline, has slit open with the razor blade she still clutches in her left hand (figure 22.2). The violence of the gesture is nearly unbearable, both hands almost completely severed from her wrist. Perhaps we pause for a second to wonder how she might have managed such an act of self-mutilation, to amputate both of her own hands herself; yet we are catapulted out of our contemplative mood when we hear the click of her heels, look at the daintily clad shoes put together in what the modern viewer might perceive as a Mary Poppins–like fashion, and our attention returns to the ornamental verve with which her blood shoots through the air, part Rococo arabesque, part Romantic silhouette. This is neither the time nor the place to add another reading to Kara Walker’s 1998 Cut, laden with the history of American slavery and the fate of the black female artist in the modern art market.13 Nor is my choice of a new beginning at the end of my story the only logical conclusion. Above all, why suddenly jump to the United States? Of course, such noncoherence is in the nature of the arabesque, as we know all too well, and I could have easily ended with more Nordic examples, perhaps with Edvard Munch’s woodcuts and his iconic canvas The Scream or the dreamscapes of Max Klinger, which seem so modern in their psychoanalytic rendition of suppressed desires and our death wish.14 But, as the German proverb goes, “Das Chaos hat System,” which admits that chaos has its own logic. So I want to end on the other side of the Atlantic, and not merely for personal circumstances, as I am writing this book on the East Coast. Rather, the new beginning of my ending points to an arabesque analogy that brings out its interpretive power beyond an immediate genealogy. The neoRomanticism of Walker’s work points to the arabesque’s persistent power to articulate what weighs heavily on us as ornament, to make bearable the unbearable, to voice the unspeakable precisely in its state of prolegomenon, of marginalia, of that which is not perfected in itself. It also reminds us of the arabesque’s untamable nature, which defies

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Figure 22.2 Kara Walker, Cut, 1998. Cut paper and adhesive on wall, 223.5 × 137.2 cm (overall installed). Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Gift of Donna Macmillan, 2013 © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

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278 A Satirical Finale the desperate attempts of a Wilhelm Schadow or a Caspar Scheuren to establish paradise on earth through the artifice of an ornamental sociability. On the other hand, we might also understand better, looking at the pain in Walker’s work, why that yearning, that nostalgia was so powerful, and why the arabesque was its preferred format. It does not matter much in this context whether or not Kara Walker has actually looked at her Romantic ancestors, who, by the way, would have merely shrugged at the observation that the past’s legacy cannot be overcome in the present. Of course not, any German Romantic would have responded matter-of-factly (if anguished) to this observation; otherwise, why would the arabesque have been (and still be) so imperative? What matters is that the example of Walker’s Cut affirms the persistence of the arabesque as a means to render visible trauma, shame, history, the workings of the unconscious, artistic practices and aesthetic debates, biography, autobiography and identity politics, to name just a few of its themes, and to do so at the border. In short, what matters is the persistence of the arabesque as lived experience and its power as a litmus test for our times. Hegel might have declared the death of art with a painter like Wilhelm Schadow (and his 1826 canvas Mignon) in mind.15 But the arabesque has proven resilient to the repeated declarations of its demise. It keeps returning, in different forms but as the same challenge: as an artistic experiment charged with testing the past as much as the present.

Notes 1. “Aschenbrödels Hochzeitsfeier. Dargestellt im Maskenfest der Gesellschaft ‘Malkasten’ zu Düsseldorf am 14. Februar 1852,” unpublished play, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Düsseldorf; in Theissing, “Romantika und Realistika,” 198. 2. Theissing, “Romantika und Realistika,” 186. 3. Ibid., 196. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Erwin Speckter, in Theissing, “Romantika and Realistika,” 190. 7. Translation of Caspar Scheuren’s 1851 dedication by author (see figure 22.1). 8. Müller von Königswinter, Düsseldorfer Künstler, VII. 9. Grewe, Wilhelm Schadow, nos. 28 and 19, 61–66; nos. 52 and 53, 114–22; no. 64, 136–43. 10. Hübner, Schadow, 26. 11. For a reproduction, see Bott, Das Schadow-Album. 12. Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable, 131. 13. For a discussion of the cutout’s reception, see Bidler, “Suicide.” 14. Bhogal, Details of Consequence; Morton, Max Klinger. 15. Grewe, “Beyond Hegel’s End”; idem, Wilhelm Schadow, nos. 36–38, 83–89, and 305–7.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate an illustration on the corresponding page. abstraction 11, 70, 75, 236, 241; and Hübner 215; and Neureuther 146; and Runge 126–28; and Schwind 230–31; see also nonobjectivity; nonrepresentationality aesthetics 5–6, 21–22, 32, 75–77, 253–54; Autonomieästhetik (aesthetics of autonomy) 67–69, 77; Gehaltsästhetik (aesthetics of content) 67; Wirkungsästhetik (aesthetics of effect) 22, 67–69, 73n12, 73n18 allegory 22–24, 57–58, 61–62, 65–70, 201–3, 206–7, 273–75; allegorese 22, 170; and Cornelius 93–94; and Hübner 219–20; and Kaulbach 104–8; and Neureuther 145–49; and Runge 126–31; and Schadow 170–71; see also symbol antiquity 10–11, 65–69, 96–97, 210–12 appropriation 31–32, 83–84, 147–49; see also emulation; epigonality; imitation Arnim, Achim von 138–41, 155; MusicMaking Couple 139, 140 art philosophique, l’ 98; see also Gedankenkunst; ideational art author: authorship 14–15, 135, 221; as concept 15 autonomy 20–22, 67, 69–71, 189–90; and Dürer 46; and Kant 75–77, 79, 82–83; and Runge 127–30; and Schwind 231–32 avant-garde 6, 19–21, 191–92, 269 Baroque 65–66, 92, 102, 110, 138, 197, 205 Beethoven, Ludwig von 229–32; Choral Fantasy (Fantasy for Piano, Orchestra, and Choir in C Minor, op. 80) 225–28, 232; Eroica 233 Bible 36, 42, 52–55, 61–62, 110–12, 197–99, 218 Biedermeier 19, 24, 183–84, 199, 203–4, 239–41, 275; and Busch 257; and Cornelius 95; and Schwind 225–27; and Schadow 170, 175

Bilderwitz: image-pun 31; pictorial wit 30–31 Bildung 97–99, 114, 197; Bildungsbürger 99; Bildungsroman 13, 171; Volksbildung 99 Brentano, Clemens 17, 48–50, 55, 129–31, 133n19, 135–39; frontispiece to Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) 136–38, 137, 139; Godwi: Ein verwilderter Roman (A Novel Grown Wild) 12–13, 29, 136, 143, 220; Romanzen vom Rosenkranz 48, 126, 131 brethren of St. Luke see Lukasbund Bürkner, Hugo 175, 221; after Julius Hübner, Asmus [Jacob] Carstens 177; after Julius Hübner, Chapter 4. “O Connoisseurship! O Connoisseurship!” 214; after Julius Hübner, “No offense!” 211; after Julius Hübner, The Old Man 2, 168; after Julius Hübner, title vignette 4; Picture Breviary 209 Busch, Werner Die notwendige Arabeske (The essential arabesque) 7, 141 Busch, Wilhelm 6–7, 24–25, 146–47, 231, 257; The Fatal End of Jack Crook, Bird of Evil 262–63, 263; From “Crystal Cluster” to “Frozen Porcupine” 267; Ice-Peter’s Dissolution into Gruel 266, 267; The Miller’s Bold Daughter 268, 269; The Seventh Boyish Prank of Max and Moritz 25, 262–66, 269; The Seventh Boyish Prank of Max and Moritz (The Fowl’s Fodder) 265; The Seventh Boyish Prank of Max and Moritz (Into the Mill) 264; Sorglos (Carefree) 259–62, 260; symbolic inversions 259; Venus 269–70 calligraphy 36, 47, 145, 155, 197 Cham (Amédée Charles Henri de Noé): Mr. Cryptogame Fleeing with Elvire and the Abbé in Pursuit (Anonymous) 254–55, 255 classicism 70–71, 109, 175

Index comic strip 5, 184–90, 242, 248–49, 257–58, 269; cartoon 24–25, 105, 113, 181, 217, 258; graphic novel 6–7, 158, 207, 242, 254, 257–58, 269; littérature en estampes 252; see also doodle connoisseurship 43 copyright law (Urheberrecht) 15 Cornelius, Peter 91–93, 102–6, 109–14, 119–20, 143–45; and arabesque metaphysics 93–94; and Bildung 97–99; The Crusades 98; Faust cycle 89–90, 94, 154; The Founding of the Campo Santo in Pisa 96; and Kaulbach’s countervision 99–100; and the modern art museum 87–88; Nibelungen suite 94, 197; and ornament’s emancipation 94–95; and the Pinakothek’s rebellious roots 88–91; and the Pinakothek’s second loggia 95–97; Religion’s Union with the Arts 92 Darnstedt, Johann Adolph: after Philipp Otto Runge, Day 123; Night 125 deconstruction 14, 172, 269 doodle 47, 249, 252–56, 258 Dürer, Albrecht 22, 33–38, 89, 129, 145–47, 154–55, 273–74; acheiropoietic image 43, 45; calligraphy 36, 47, 145, 155, 197; Dürer revival 37, 46–47; Erasmus of Rotterdam 39–43, 40, 46; fantasia 45–47, 50, 55, 128, 147, 159; Four Apostles 111; Marginal Drawings to the Benediction (“Matutin”) 56; Marginal Drawings to the Prayer De Sancta Apollonia 34; Marginal Drawings to Psalm 92/93 (“Laudes”), incl. the Sudarium Held by Two Putti 44; Meisterstiche 42, 45; ornament of the gaze 39–45, 46–48; penmanship 45, 89, 145; The Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian 34, 36–37, 43–48, 44, 55, 56, 69, 94, 197, 274; Schreibmeisterschnörkel 45; Schriftbild 41; überphantasieren 48–50, 131 Düsseldorf Academy 25, 171–73, 181–83, 186, 194, 215, 258 écriture automatique 255 ekphrasis 154 emblem 3, 5, 7n1, 127, 169–71, 192, 216–17 emulation 23, 36, 65–66, 82, 181, 273–74; see also appropriation; epigonality; imitation Enlightenment 8, 66–67, 79, 110, 186 epigonality 97, 183; see also appropriation; emulation; imitation ergon 14, 52, 54, 71–72, 79, 82–83; see also parergon Ernst, Julius: after Moritz von Schwind, A Symphony 237

297

Ettling, [Johann Jacob?]: after Wilhelm, Busch, “Up the Fireplace” 270; after Wilhelm, Busch, “Venus is perdue” 269, 270 folk and fairy tales 12–14, 149, 155–58, 203, 207, 212; folk song 138, 143, 156, 186; folktale 12, 14, 194; One Thousand and One Nights 12; Volkslied 155, 162; volkstümliche Kunstform 143 folk costume 138 formalism 22, 70, 75, 119, 129, 243 fragment 11–12, 80–81, 136–38; fragmentation 46, 55, 141–43, 191, 199, 220, 269 Gedankenkunst 98; see also art philosophique, l’; ideational art Gesamtkunstwerk 16, 121, 230, 234n16, 240, 272; Gesamt-Ornament 16 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 69–70; “Von Arabesken” (Of arabesques) 69–70; Elective Affinities 70; Winckelmann and His Age 70 Grimm, Ludwig Emil: after Achim von Arnim, Music-Making Couple 139, 140; after Clemens Brentano, The Magic Horn 137 grotesquarabesque (Groteskarabeske) 8–11, 17, 141, 156; see also Romantic arabesque grotesques 10–12, 16–17, 31, 142–43, 196–97; and Busch 257–59; and Dürer 45; grotteschi 94; and Kant 83 hermeneutics 12, 15, 60, 80, 83; negative 15 hierarchy of genres 19–23, 135, 174, 190, 229, 231, 242 hieroglyph 33, 80, 126, 131–33 Hübner, Julius 209–10, 211, 214; allegory and illegibility 219–20; bees, flies, and shadowy inversions 215–17; the blind connoisseur 213–15; collaboration and arabesque bricolage 220–21; a fly’s mimesis 217; meaning and play 218–19; outlines, parlor games, and the origins of painting 215; St. Luke’s vision 217–18; the vignettes’ parodic intervention 210–13 hybridity 11 idealism 111–14, 170–74, 180–83, 199–200, 217–19; Romantic 170, 183; see also naturalism ideational art 98; see also art philosophique, l’; Gedankenkunst illusionism 69, 155, 197, 215, 218, 271; bas-reliefs 175; realist figuration 145; trompe l’oeil 10, 41, 217

298

Index

Immermann, Karl Leberecht 189–90; Münchhausen 183–84, 185, 189 intermediality 68–70, 136; word-image relations 129, 220 Kant, Immanuel 71–72, 143, 235; Critik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment) 21, 71; Copernican revolution 46; and the modern ludic field 75–77; new borders 79–80; pulchritudo adhaerens 78; pulchritudo vaga 77, 82; reappropriations 83–84; re-painting 77–79; and the Romantic arabesque 80–83 Kaulbach, Wilhelm 23, 102–3, 108–9, 112–14; The Age of Reformation (with an Arabesque of German Culture) 109; from art to world history 106; Children’s Frieze (segment above the Allegory of Painting) 108, 113; countervision 99–100; The Destruction of the Tower of Babel (with an Arabesque of the Indians) 107–11, 108; The Madhouse 140, 141; a pigtail age 104–5; sardonic scales 103–4; selfironic twists 111–12; The Struggle against Pedantry of Artists and Scientists under the Protection of Minerva 104; universal history as arabesque 106–8 Kretzschmar, Eduard: after Johann Baptist Sonderland, Immermann’s Münchhausen in Bildern 185 Krüger, Ephraim Gottlieb: after Philipp Otto Runge, Day 123; after Philipp Otto Runge, Night 125 Kügelgen, Wilhelm von 52–57, 59–62; God’s Creation 60 legibility 43, 46, 58, 98, 119, 130; visual (il)literacy 219 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 67–69 Lukasbund 59, 89–90, 171, 183, 218, 272 Manet, Édouard: illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” 259–60, 261 masked play see masking/unmasking masking/unmasking 212–13 masquerade see masking/unmasking media crisis 32, 39, 46–48, 52 media history 32, 37 medievalism 24, 33, 37, 89, 138, 141, 154 medium-specificity 67, 119; G. E. Lessing’s dictate of 158 Merz, Caspar Heinrich: after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, The Madhouse 140, 141 metaphysics 23–25, 52, 62, 66–67, 87–88, 93–94, 228–31; metaphysical crisis 8, 48 mimesis 41–42, 70, 170, 213–18, 228–30; nonmimetic 24, 75, 225

Mintrop, Theodor 200–207; König Heinzelmann’s Liebe (King Heinzelman’s Love) 201, 202; A Modern Dance of Death 206; Roses, Sea, and Sun 204 modernism 32–33, 58, 67–68, 143–44; and Cornelius 98–99; and Runge 126, 130–31; and Schwind 230–31 modernity 12, 31–33, 83, 240–41; project of 31 Moritz, Karl Philipp 67, 75–77, 82; “das in sich Vollendete” 71–72 musicalization of art 128–29, 138, 154, 225–31, 239, 241–43; absolute music 229–30, 241; instrumental music 129, 227–30, 235; musical novella 238, 242; synesthesia 31, 228 mysticism 64, 121–28, 135–36, 197, 230, 239 myth 43, 78, 136, 215, 218–19, 233, 273 mythology 35–36, 45–49, 143–45 Nachahmung see imitation narrativity 19, 81, 94, 141 naturalism 107–8, 173, 181–82, 217, 273; see also idealism Nazarenes 89–93, 104–5, 113–14, 173–74, 181–82, 217–20; Nazarene art 97–99, 182, 203; Nazarene movement 89, 171, 217; see also Lukasbund Neoclassicism 64–65, 70–72, 79–82, 89, 105, 112 Neureuther, Eugen Napoleon 186; ballads and romances 143–44; the copied word 154–55; the curse of politics 155–56; The Dance of Death 149–54, 150–53, 159; Erlking 155, 164; friendly takeover 156–59; “Heidenröslein” (Heath Rose) 159–63, 160; incantations 159; lithography’s psychology 163–65; psychosomatic tremors 162–63; Randzeichnungen zu Goethe’s Balladen und Romanzen 143, 150–51, 155, 160, 164; reappropriations 147–49; Self-Portrait 145, 146; Times of Day 145–47, 148, 159; trauma revealed 162; 27, 28, 29 Juillet 1830 représentés en trois tableaux renfermant trois chansons patriotiques 156, 157; Tyrolean Hunter’s Song 76 nonobjectivity 75, 126, 142, 145, 230, 243; see also abstraction nonrepresentationality 64 Orientalism 64 ornament 10–11, 16, 21–22, 39–45, 54–58, 239–42; and allegory 65–67; and ancient rhetoric 64–65; and autonomy 70–71; and border work 67–69; and Busch 266;

Index emancipation of 71–72, 94–95; and fantasia 45–46; and Kant 75–83; and metaphysics 93; and Neureuther 158; redrawing 46–50; and Romanticism’s modernity 32–33; and Runge 121, 127–30; and Schadow 175–76 Ottaviani, Giovanni 8–10; after drawings by Petro Camporesi and Gaetano Savorelli, after Raphael and his circle, Pilaster VII (The Bird Catcher) 9 outlines 5, 19–20, 59–61, 70–72, 200, 242, 253–55; and Cornelius 88–89; and Dürer 43–47; and Hübner 215–17; and Kant 80–81; and Neureuther 145–47 pandemic 25, 250–52, 256; contagious 247, 250; Morbus Diabolus 250–51 parergon 52–54, 58–59, 71–72, 113, 121, 128, 239; the divine as 59–62; parergonality 72, 77–79, 81–83; see also ergon pedagogy 23, 66, 87–88, 100, 106, 114, 182 Piroli, Tommaso: after John Flaxman Jr., Thetis and Eurynome Receiving the Infant Vulcan 20 portraiture 39–46, 102–5, 145–46, 169–78, 186–87, 238, 273–74 postmodernism 32 Prestele, Joseph: after Eugen Napoleon Neureuther, Times of Day 148, 149 public art 91, 98, 114, 174 Rahn, Rudolf: after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, title vignette of The Sixth Canto (from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reynard the Fox) 102, 103 Randzeichnung 23; borderlands 8, 24; border phenomenon 19, 79, 81; border work 15, 24, 59, 67–71, 80–81, 84, 158, 163, 273; liminal space 19, 78–79, 240; marginalia 36, 43–48, 57, 94, 129, 154, 158, 162, 186, 194, 197, 240, 257, 275–76; margins 47, 54, 111, 114, 189; peripheral/periphery 47, 59, 62, 241 Raphael 8–10, 50, 97, 229, 273–74; versus Dürer 129–31; Sistine Madonna 126; Vatican loggia 8, 16, 23, 69, 87–88, 92–94, 97, 119, 129, 141 realism 170–71, 174, 184–86, 207, 218, 238, 257–58 reappropriation see appropriation Reformation 107, 110–12, 209 religion: Babylonian confusion 111; Christianity 36–37, 45–47, 52–57, 60–61, 68, 91, 95, 107–10, 131, 171, 213, 218–19, 239; confessional reconciliation / irenicism 110; Creation 47, 59–62; God 43, 47,

299

50–52, 57–62, 68, 109–11, 127, 131, 147, 206; reenchantment 70, 80; salvational history 91; secularizing/secularization 37; transcendence 80, 112–13, 229; see also Bible Renaissance 10–11, 22, 36–41, 46–48, 93–94, 145, 217–18; finestra aperta 39–40, 163; one-point perspective 8, 41, 47, 163; perspectivism 39; rationality 47–48 reproducibility 33–34, 43; reproduction 33, 36–38, 42, 138, 149 revolution 59, 80, 135, 156; French Revolution 6, 19 Rococo 16, 22, 212–13, 215; ancien régime 22, 212 Romantic arabesque: as biological model 138; as collage 5, 138, 141–42, 191–92, 220–21; definitions 12, 158, 183–84, 249; as fragmentation and reassemblage 141; humorous 24, 180–92; literary 11–12, 23, 93, 141–42, 249; as litmus test 16–17; pictorial 220, 229; rocaille 213; silhouette 213–15; weak 190; as wild growth 6, 22, 141; see also grotesquarabesque Romanticism 5–7, 29–33, 135–36, 190–91, 199–201, 276; and Busch 257–58, 269; and Kant 81–82; and Schwind 230–31; sympoesy 130, 271; The Taming of Romanticism 239; Witz 252 Rubens, Peter Paul: Fall of the Damned 197; The Last Judgment (1617) 88, 93 Runge, Philipp Otto 52–55, 57–59, 61, 135–36, 144, 240, 242–43; Day 57; and Dürer 45, 48, 50; Evening 57, 124; and Hübner 215; and intimacy 119–20; Morning 53, 57, 122, 127, 230; Night 57; Raphael versus Dürer 129–31; and Schwind 229–31; scores 128–29; silenced poetry 131–33; Small Morning 131, 132; structure as form and symbol system 126–27; threats 128; Times of Day 121–30, 141, 147, 238–39 Ruscheweyh, Ferdinand 89–90; after Peter Cornelius, The High Points of Goethe’s “Faust” Arranged in an Arabesque Design 90 satire 24–25, 30–31, 102–5, 111–12, 183–84, 218–19, 249–58; caricature 83, 99, 104, 199, 205, 248–53, 258; farce 30, 103–4, 112, 257 Scallop (Variation on Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus) (Anonymous) 78, 79 Schadow, Wilhelm 180–84, 186, 190–92; the artist-author as arabesque 169–71; the book as material object 175–78; Der moderne Vasari 171–75

300

Index

Scheuren, Caspar 273–76; Dedication 274, 275 Schiller, Friedrich 77, 88, 99; Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man) 21, 91 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 70, 126, 271 Schlegel, Friedrich 11–13, 30–31, 33, 54, 81–83, 93–94; Athenäum 31; Universalpoesie (universal poetry) 81, 84 Schleich, Adrian: after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, title vignette of The Sixth Canto (from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reynard the Fox) 102, 103 Schroedter, Adolph 24, 174, 194–99; The Dream of the Bottle (also The Corkpuller) 195–96, 195; The New Samson 197–99, 198 Schwind, Moritz von 24, 225–34; The Fairy Tale of Cinderella 242–43, 243; and the laws of form 235–44; A Symphony 199, 225–27, 226, 236–38; Symphony no. 3 232–33, 233 script 33, 36, 41, 145, 149, 255; Fraktura 36, 138, 145, 274 self-reflection 16–17, 22–25, 39, 47, 91–93; self-awareness 39, 47, 203 semiotics 33, 58, 253–54 Seyfert, Johann Gottlieb: after Philipp Otto Runge, Evening 124; after Philipp Otto Runge, Morning 53, 122 Sonderland, Johann Baptist 184–90; The Little Gnomes 188; Self-Portrait with Arabesques 187 Speckter, Erwin 272; Arabesques 120 Strixner, Johann Nepomuk 36; Albrecht Dürers Christlich-Mythologische Handzeichnungen (Albrecht Dürer’s Christian-mythological drawings) 35, 36–37, 45–49, 49, 89, 145, 154

structuralism 43; Signifikant (signifier) 33; Signifikat (signified) 33 subjectivity 29, 31, 39, 46–47, 50, 82; selfhood 14, 39, 46–47 symbol 57–58, 69–71; structure as symbol system 126–27 symbolism 25, 75, 197, 219, 259, 266, 269 Teichel, Albert: after Wilhelm Kaulbach, Putti Frieze 111 Thaeter, Julius Caesar: after Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The Origin of Painting 215, 216 theater 182–84, 271; artist fêtes 271; Dürer festival (1833) 271; festival 182, 215, 271; masquerade, also masked play 3, 210, 213, 225–26, 238, 271; tableau vivant 215, 271–75 Töpffer, Rodolphe 24–25, 248–56; The Abbé, The Moors, and The Domestic Animals in Pursuit 249; and Busch 257–59; Elvire in Pursuit 248; The Farm Birds, The Rats, and All Objects on Deck in Pursuit 250; Mr. Cryptogame’s Confession and Elvire’s Unfortunate End 253; Mr. Cryptogame Fleeing 248, 255; A Norwegian Whaling Ship Spinning at a Rate of Eight Revolutions per Second 251; see also Cham überphantasieren 48–50, 131, 133 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor: “die Tücke des Objekts” (the object’s treacherous treachery) 259 Walker, Kara 5; Cut 276–78, 277 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 65–70, 210; dictate of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” 70; Stilgeschichte (history of style) 172