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Francesco Mazzaferro
Gustav Friedrich Waagen and his Two Reviews of the Artists’ Letters by Ernst Karl Guhl
Part Two
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| Fig. 28) Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin, the first seat of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, inaugurated in 1830 and directed by Gustav Friedrich Waagen between 1830 and 1864. Coloured engraving, 1830 |
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Reading the review of the second volume of Ernst Guhl’s Artists’s Letters, which Waagen published in January 1857, a few
months after its publication in 1856, I had an occasion to reflect on how much
the assessment on the art of the second part of the sixteenth and the seventeenth
century has changed over the years (in particular on the Italian art, although
in those years Rembrandt was also re-discovered, after he had been relegated
for decades in the category of painters of regional interest only). In the
introduction to the second part of his Artist’s
Letters, Guhl had expressed a trenchant opinion on the Italian Mannerism,
had expressed some appreciation, but also a few reserves on Caravaggio and the
naturalists and had voiced many appreciations on the Carraccis and their
classical school, assigning them the capacity to renew Italian art, as an aesthetic
repercussion of the religious revival of Catholicism after the Council of Trent.
After all, we were in the Kingdom of Prussia, so much dominated by conservation
and restoration, that the Counter-Reformation was read in a positive way even by
the Protestant world [14].
In his
review, Waagen was even much more pronounced in the negative judgments on the Italian
art of the period, which he identified as the expression of an age of serious
cultural crisis, compared to the great art of the sixteenth-century
(interestingly, in this regard, Waagen conferred on Correggio a leading role
throughout the Italian painting of the following decades, putting him on a par with
Michelangelo and Raphael). On the Mannerists, Waagen used the term widrig, which means ‘negative, adverse, and
unfortunate’: he said that the works of this style had neither form nor
substance, and did not represent "neither
truth nor true ideals". The judgment on Caravaggio was a substantially
rejection: his breach of formal rules, especially in religious paintings, was
still felt in the mid-nineteenth century as a crime of lèse-majesté. As for the Carraccis, he did not
share their praise by Guhl: their art had been negatively marked as ‘eclectic’,
a charge which had been formulated for the first time by Winckelmann and
therefore also reflected deep German views. Waagen even wrote that works which consciously
combined the characteristics of the different schools could not be considered
more than "a residue, composed by
the artist combining characteristics extraneous to him." Also the
Italian Baroque was completely dismissed by him, and indeed Waagen spoke of
Bernini in substantial contempt terms: that sculptor was riding the wave of his
time, devoting himself to every flattery, and it was no surprise that he had
been covered with gold. The seventeenth century was instead the period of the
Dutch and especially the French artists, who had the merit of the discovery of
genre painting (and here one would think that, when this review was published,
the Genremalerei or genre painting,
was considered very actual and modern, as it dominated the art scene in the
German-speaking world). The seventeenth-century heroes of Waagen were Rubens,
Rembrandt and especially Poussin.
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| Fig. 29) Jan Steen: The World Upside-down, 1663 |
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| Fig. 30) Friedrich Friedländer, The inconvenient quartering, 1871 |
Of course, Mannerists,
Caravaggio and Caravagesques and Baroque artists all met these difficulties throughout
most of the nineteenth century. The revaluation of the Baroque, long considered
as the negation of art, would begin at the end of the nineteenth century with
Wölfflin, who interpreted it as a new stylistic synthesis based on motion,
and would continue in the early twentieth century with Riegl. On mannerism, art
critics would continue to speak in more negative terms for decades, and even
open-minded art critics, from Justi (1892) up to Weisbach (1919), would use the
adjective "entartet", or
degenerated, against mannerism. They would even refer to Mannerist art as a
product of obsessions and neuroses. This would be the first case in which one
would speak in German of "degenerate
art", and this term would also be made by Jewish critics, including
Weisbach, who would certainly not suspect that, some years later, the Nazis would
take over their terminology, which simply denoted a radical disapproval of a
style, to condemn the entire modern art in racial sense [15]. Only after World
War II, art critics like Max Dvořák, Walter Friedländer and Nikolaus Pevsner
revisited positively Mannerism as an anti-classical, spiritualist and
anti-materialist movement, and indeed just saw it as a precursor stream of contemporary
art (think of what Dvořák wrote on El Greco as a forerunner of Kokoschka, and on
Tintoretto as a precursor of the Impressionists [16]). As demonstrated by the
current exhibition at the Städel Gallery in Frankfurt these days, that positive
opinion on Mannerism is still widely shared in the German world, which has continued
to see in it a form of expressionism avant la lettre, despite generations of critics,
inside and outside Germany, addressed later on objections against a too 'actualist'
interpretation of ancient art.
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| Fig. 31) The catalogue of the exhibition on Florentine Mannerism to the Städel in Frankfurt |
Moreover,
these difficulties were not specific to the German world; in Italy one would
need to wait for the entry ‘Maniera and mannerism’ in the Treccani Encyclopedia
by Giulio Carlo Argan (1934) to read something positive on Mannerists, while
the rediscovery of Caravaggio took place only with the Milan exhibition organised
by Longhi on "Caravaggio and Caravagesques" in 1951, and that of the
Carraccis materialised even later, with the Bologna exhibition of 1956, curated
by Denis Mahon and Cesare Gnudi.
At the time
of Waagen, we were at a much earlier stage than all these revaluations. His
judgment was particularly negative on Italy, precisely because this was seen by
him as the cultural sphere (in 1857 we were not yet a united country) which had
hosted the culmination of arts in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century.
The absolutely negative interpretation of Waagen on that art was also reflected
in his tough judgment on the artists’ letters: "In this situation it is not surprising that the letters of the Italian
artists of this period, in relation to those of the fifteenth and sixteenth
century (which make up the content of the first volume) are - although with
some exceptions - insignificant. They are not satisfactory texts by themselves, but rather certifications characterising
an era of decline for Italy." The tone of the letters was described as
intentionally "decorative and
flattering". For Waagen, even the best letters were nothing but the
pure testimony of good feelings (Domenichino). On the artists, they almost
never revealed their secret difficulties (Annibale Carracci was reduced to
despair by the Farnese; Agostino Carracci died of a broken heart because his
brother Annibale was envious of him) or specific aspects of the character
(Guido Reni’s gambling addiction) over which he would have liked to discover
new perspectives from their hand-written writings. Moreover, in an age when
everything natural had vanished from art and the artists’ fortune depended on luck and
subterfuge, it was certainly not surprising - Waagen wrote - that the letters did
not reveal the personalities of artists: a disgusting camouflage dominated.
There is no doubt that the seventeenth-century writing style was stilted and
verbose, but one wonders, in fact, if the same did not happen everywhere, and
therefore not only in Italy. And indeed Waagen claimed against a way of drafting
which was "pedantic and lacking in taste" for the majority of the
French, Flemish and German artists, filling praises only for those few ones who
managed to avoid falling into that trap.
For the
first time in his collection, therefore, Guhl discussed letters of artists from
the rest of Europe, although for many of them (such as Rubens and Poussin) the emotional
link with Italy remained strong. Even with regard to the non-Italian art
schools of this time, one must think that, in years when Guhl and Waagen wrote,
criticism was rapidly evolving, both in terms of method and merit. In 1833 Waagen
had drawn up a long article on Rubens in the Historisches Taschenbuch (a new magazine, founded in 1830 by
Friedrich von Raumer, the liberal art historian, which was published until 1869
[17]). It was one of the first examples of a modern monographic essay on a
painter's biography in the German culture, in line with the idea later on practiced
by Guhl to make sure that art history should also be based on the history of
biographies, and not only of styles [18]. At the beginning of the decade,
Gachet had published the first collection of letters by Rubens, in Brussels in
1840. Although this volume reflected a still incomplete knowledge of the
sources [19], the letters published by Gachet documented the many-sided role of
Rubens, not only as an artist but also as intellectual and official [20]. While
Guhl decided to exclude the letters of mainly political interest, in his review
Waagen sifted again the letters selected by Guhl for their artistic interest,
in order to draw conclusions also on the humanist, and not only on the artist.
While he did not fail to criticize some too emphatic aspects of his art work, and
indeed devoid of good taste in his view (such as the cycle of twenty paintings
on the life of Maria de'Medici in the Louvre) he had words of praise on the politician
and diplomat, and on the openness of his mind-set, which he revealed for
example in his positive judgments vis-à-vis England, the historical enemy of
the Habsburgs. If Rubens in fact represented as a diplomat the interests of the
latter, England was the country for which the Waagen had the greatest
admiration.
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| Fig. 32) Peter Paul Rubens, The Landing of Maria de 'Medici in Marseille, 1622-1625 |
Rembrandt’s
letters - that Waagen did not considered of great interest as such - witnessed
the attention for the artist who had just been rediscovered by Eduard Kolloff
(1811-1879), a German follower of Mazzini’s republican movement (he was a
member of Young Germany) who fled to
France, from where he signed articles on the Deutsches Kunstblatt and on the Historisches
Taschenbuch, sometimes
in his own name and sometimes under the name of Ed. Callow. In 1854 Kollof published
an article on the Historisches Taschenbuch which marked a re-appraisal of
Rembrandt, until then considered to be (although it may seem strange today) a
minor artist of local interest only [21].
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| Fig. 33) Nicolas Poussin, The Empire of Flora, 1631 |
It has
already been said that Waagen’s judgment on Poussin and his letters were
extremely appreciative. Despite his constant references to classicism, Poussin was
seen as a modern painter, for his taste of the composition and his ability to
escape from the constraints of the religious world. In an era dominated by
appearance, Waagen praised Poussin as the painter of the essential; and that is
why he defended him from a then prevailing criticism, notably on a certain lack
of empathy. Yet this positive view was not at all the result of a rationalist
attitude, or a secularist propensity, as it would have been the case in the
eighteenth century Enlightenment. The assessments by Guhl and Waagen, in fact, mirrored
some typical aspects of the taste of this phase of the century in conservative
Prussia: that of Poussin was an etheric and stable world, far from the brutal concerns
of reality, and therefore a naturally aristocratic domain. We were in an era
(that of restoration) in which the concept of the natural ‘nobility’ of the
artist’s feelings and of his creative gesture was not only an abstract aesthetic
reference to the ideal beauty (and thus a distancing from the realism à la Courbet,
Weibl or Menzel), but reflected a value judgment on the qualities of the best artists,
that had to be noble in thought, morale attitude, behaviour and art. This
approach was present in both Waagen’s reviews, in 1854 and 1857, but almost
became obsessive in his considerations of Poussin’s letters. It is no surprise:
today the term 'noble' smells of ridiculous, but the society of those times,
anchored to a social framework where to the nobles belonged both the task of
serving as an example and the privilege to exercise their prerogatives, had to
be defended against every revolutionary temptation. If it was the natural
nobility of spirit to move arts, it was also art, ultimately, to provide noble individuals
the ultimate justification to exercise a spiritual guide on the society.
What
conclusions to draw, in conclusion, from the reading of the reviews by Gustav
Friedrich Waagen of the two volumes of Guhl? All in all, he willingly accepted the
arrival of art literature in the world of Berlin's criticism in mid-nineteenth
century. This new entry happened in a period full of contradictions, while
judgments on some great artists (Rembrandt) were revised and the evaluation of
others (Caravaggio, Bernini) was still marked by prejudices. Waagen really
liked the two volumes of Guhl and considered their publication as a tangible
enrichment for German-speaking art history. Reading the two reviews, it is
clear that Waagen looked at his younger colleague with great
sympathy, supported the motivations of his work, shared his system and method,
and appreciated their novelty. There were no serious slating (at most, a few
clarifications on specific points), while praise abounded. Waagen often offered
more information about the paintings that were held in the British art collections, which
he knew perfectly. The readers of the Deutsches Kunstblatt, spread throughout the German
world, were therefore definitely encouraged to purchase the two volumes.
Even for
those readers who did not buy the work, the two long reviews offered an impression
as far as possible representative of Guhl’s theses, both for his assessment of
historical periods and on the letters which were considered most interesting.
It remains perhaps ultimately a doubt to be mentioned: whether Waagen really
drew all possible conclusions from the text of Guhl in terms of method, or not.
The latter understood the letters as a horizontal instrument for the historical
interpretation of entire periods of the history of art, to search for and
identify in the words of major and minor artists the existence of uniform behavioural
trends in their interaction with other artists, with buyers, with the art
market, with culture, religion and the new political entities entering the
power struggle. It was a sort of social interpretation of history of art. For Guhl
the study of biographies was therefore functional to establishing a new art
history method, which could be also applied in other phases and situations. In Waagen’s
reviews, instead, one has sometimes the impression that - while not denying
Guhl’s efforts - the study of biographies rather had become a sort of moralizing
analysis of the personality and character of the artists. It was like if Waagen
wanted to combine Guhl’s analysis of the beauty of the artists’ letters with an
analysis of the nobility of their soul, in terms of good feelings.
Review of the Second Volume of the 'Artists' Letters' by Ernst Karl Guhl (1853)
The book review appeared on January 15, 1857 [22]. The present is - as far as I know - the first English translation.
The second volume of this work, whose first
part I have already discussed in the Deutsches Kunstblatt, contains mainly
letters of Italian artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Few
artists of other nations are represented, but frankly two of them are present
with such an important series of letters to largely overcome Italians by
interest of their substance. And this can be well understood. Since, while I am
even willing to recognize the great merits of the Carraccis and their school,
as well as the smaller merits of Michelangelo da Caravaggio and his school,
however I believe that this phase of Italian painting is to be considered a
kind of creative addendum behind schedule, instead of a new phase. Moreover, among
the new genres of art, Italy can only list the development of landscape
painting at this stage.
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| Fig. 34) Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601-1602 |
Conversely, there should be full agreement that
the painting of the seventeenth century in the Low Countries fully merits the
epithet of 'second flowering' (whatever opinion one can have on the van Eyck
brothers and their school), since it has not only dealt with the issues related
to earlier times, in a way which is so remarkable and full of wit, but also extraordinarily
expanded the scope of painting, thanks to a masterful development in several
new areas: genre painting, as well as painting of landscape, marine landscape,
architecture painting and still life. By an even greater extent this is true for
French painting, although there is no doubt (as I have already experienced a
long time ago with the miniatures by Jean Fouquet, and I hope to confirm with
new elements, after having viewed his tables) that France had already
experienced a great flowering of painting in the fifteenth century. In this
situation it is not surprising that the letters of the Italian artists of this
period, in relation to those of the fifteenth and sixteenth century (which make
up the content of the first volume) are - although with some exceptions -
insignificant. They are not satisfactory texts by themselves,
but rather certifications characterising an era of decline for Italy.
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| Fig. 35) Nicholas Poussin, The Holy Family, 1630 |
Therefore, the author's contribution is in my
opinion even more important in this second volume, both in his introduction and
in his characterization of the individual artists. The observations that he
proposes in the introduction on the relationship between fine arts and the time
in general and on the relationship with the arts of the previous period are
indeed very well managed. With good reason, on the former aspect, he emphasizes
the new religious zeal that shakes the Catholic Church since the Council of
Trent onwards: ultimately, a conscious reflection on religion replaced a naive
enthusiasm, while at the same time rules of general value substituted individual
standards. Rightly so, the author (comparing him with the unfortunate Mannerist
works of the second half of the sixteenth century, which neither represent truth
nor true ideals) identifies the merits of the leading naturalist, i.e. Michelangelo
da Caravaggio, in his vitality, in the good colouring and the solid performance,
although the overall level of his religious paintings remains very modest. The
author testifies to the close relationship of the Carraccis with Counter-Reformation
Catholicism, pointing out that both they and their followers were supported in
particular by those Popes, like Paul V and Gregory XV, which strongly
emphasised counterreformation in art. In the appreciation of their performance
as artists, one must differentiate between two points of view. In relation to
the work of their immediate predecessors, in other words the Mannerists, the
Carraccis deserve great recognition and admiration. The author, in this regard,
particularly underlines the ethical aspect: to swim against a severely contrary
stream, for the simple conviction to do the best, enduring ridicule and
hardship, as the Carraccis did, shows a positive energy that was rare at that
time and deserves the utmost respect. However, if, despite everything, they
remained at a much lower level than the masterpieces of the masters of the
greatest art flowering in the previous century, this is due in large part to
the completely different zeitgeist, as the author rightly points out. The
spirit of the time pushed them along the road of eclecticism, for which they
received their fame in art history. The strength of the great masters of the
sixteenth century was primarily based, instead, on certain subjective characteristics.
This specificity was rarely as pronounced as in Titian (who in the famous group
of monkeys surrounded by snakes, a parody of the Laocoon, derided the deference
with which especially the Florentine and Roman schools, aiming at the
development of the form, had venerated the ancient sculptures, and the
influence that these statues had on their work).
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| Fig. 36) Niccolo Boldrini and Titian, Caricature of the statue of Laocoon, about 1540 -1545 (source: http://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/stampe/schede/H0080-03360/) |
Yet even Raphael, for which the world order had
traced an orbit as first magnitude star in the sky of fine arts, became
distracted by Sebastiano del Piombo. Sebastiano’s influence on Raphael’s colouring
is evident in several of his works, including ... the so-called portrait of the
Fornarina in the Tribune of Florence [translator's note: the Uffizi]. In turn
Correggio was influenced by the brilliant Sistine Madonna [translator's note: by
Raphael] that, no doubt, he saw in nearby Piacenza, when he received the
assignment for the great frescoes of Parma. That visit had an immediate effect on
Correggio, pushing him to a great and noble assessment of the forms, as you can
see from the Parma frescoes. Yet this feeling of the independence of a big
genius, even in the face of a superior painter, is expressed in unique way in Correggio’s
famous maxim: "I too am a painter". He said it, after he saw for the
first time a picture of Raphael. CONTINUES
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| Fig. 37) Raffaello Sanzio, Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514 |
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| Fig. 38) Correggio, The Christ at the centre of the dome of St John in Parma, about 1520-1524 |
End of Part Two
NOTES
[15] Braungart, Wolfgang - Manier und Manierismus (Maniera and Manierism). Universität Bielefeld. Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung, Tubingen, M. Niemeyer, 2000.
[16] Dvořák, Max - Max Dvořák, Tintoretto und die Moderne (Tintoretto and the Modern), in: Wiener Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte, 1996, pages 9-40
[17] Waagen, Gustav Friedrich – Über den Maler Petrus Paulus Rubens (On the Painter Petrus Paulus Rubens), in: Historisches Taschenbuch, founded by Friedrich von Raumer, Year IV, Leipzig, 1833, pp. 183-282.
[18] Hellwig, Karin - Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiographie, (From the Life to the Biography of the Artist), Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2005, 200 pages.
[19] See: https://archive.org/stream/lettresinditesd00rubegoog#page/n7/mode/2up
[20] The publication of the Codex Diplomaticus Rubenianus was initiated in Antwerp by Charles Louis Ruelens in 1877. It offered the entirety of the documents relating to the life and work of Rubens. At his death, the work - sponsored by the City of Antwerp - was restarted in 1887 and completed in six volumes in 1909 by Max Rooses (Codex Diplomaticus Rubenianus. Documents relatifs à la vie et aux œuvres de Rubens. 6 tomes. Antwerp , J.-E. Buschmann Publisher, 1887-1909). The Volume 2, 3, and 5 are available online at the addresses https://archive.org/stream/correspondanced02roosgoog#page/n4/mode/2up, https://archive.org/details/correspondanced01roosgoog and https://archive.org/details/correspondanced00roosgoog). In 1881 was released the German edition of the first book of 1877 (the German version is also available online: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/rosenberg1881/0001?sid=4caf28713939f13906c557d6f32e02d4) edited by the same Adolf Rosenberg who had just edited the second, expanded edition of the Artists’ Letters by Guhl in 1880. This explains why, in the new edition, the original section section by Guhl on Rubens’ letters was fundamentally reviewed. See: Rosenberg, Adolf – Rubensbriefe (Lettere di Rubens, Verlag von E.A.Seemann, 1881, 346 pages.
[21] Kolloff, Eduard - Rembrandt's Leben und Werke, in: Historisches Taschenbuch, Leipzig, 1854
[22] See: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/dkb1857/0031?sid=4517c5f5d31aaec5032a3393971f15c3
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