[Rome-Europe. A Meeting Point of Cultures: 1780-1820]
Edited by Paolo Chiarini and Walter Hinderer
With the contribution of Alexander von Bormann, Gerhart von Graevenitz, Gerhard Beumann, Günter Oesterlee and Dagmar Ottmann
Foundation for the Study of Romanticism
Würzburg, Königshausen and Neumann, 2006, 446 pages
Review by Francesco Mazzaferro
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| Fig. 1) The proceedings of the 2002 conference, published by Königshausen and Neumann in 2006 |
The
relationship between Rome and Europe in the period covering first the birth and
consolidation of classicism and then the gradual transition to romanticism is
the theme of a conference - with interventions in German and Italian - held at the
Italian Institute of Germanic Studies in Rome on October 17-20, 2002. The proceedings were published in 2006 [1].
During these forty years, Rome played a central role in the German aesthetic
culture, first because of the legacy left by Winckelmann and Mengs, then with
the presence of Goethe and finally with the settlement in town of the Brotherhood
of St. Luke by the Nazarenes. Thereby, it was born in the German world the idea
of a second Rome, which was the location hosting ancient art, but also
the seat of the renewal of German art. The Italian-German conference aimed
however at going beyond the strictly bilateral dimension by taking into
account of the presence in Rome, in those days, of artists from France and Germany belonging to the same art stream: first neo-classicistm and later on the Nazarenes. At
the same time, the volume is not silent on certain aspects that today should
make us reflect: the absence, for example, of almost any relationship of the
majority of these foreign guests with the Roman artists of their time, a sign
that living in a place does not mean at all to be integrated.
Rome as a spiritual myth
To
understand the relationship between Rome and the visitors from across the Alps
(and in particular of those from Germany) it is critical to identify the
psychological attitude of those who arrived in Rome in those years. Today,
those who are visiting a city of art have certainly had many opportunities to
examine the most famous works through books and media before the trip,
especially those that capture the eye for grandeur (for example, in Rome, the
Colosseum and St. Peter's Square). This was not the case of men and women
between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Helmut Schneider
helps us to understand the psychological status of the travellers in that time,
and the aesthetic implications of their spiritual attitude.
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| Fig. 2) Laurent Pécheux, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1784 |
For the
German at the turn of two centuries, for instance, Rome was first of all a spiritual place,
more than a physical place. To visitors from across the Alps of those years, Rome often appeared as an idealized space, outside of history. Rome was an idea, a
myth, a phantom or rather the equivalent of one single art work [2]. The
visitor was not interested in identifying the sequencing of Roman history (Republic,
Empire etc.), in reconstructing the stages of development of art (the styles of
each era), in investigating the diverse relationship between ancient art and the
art of the periods nearer to him (Renaissance, Baroque): he was looking at Rome
as a symbol of the antique, in an attitude of real loving and sensual trance.
He created therefore a mental image of Rome which was intermediate between his
personal previous knowledge (often based solely on etchings), his personal
expectations and the reality of things.
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| Fig. 3) Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Pygmalion, 1786 |
The
spiritual intermediation between emotion and reality was, moreover, the privileged
way through which this age conceived the relationship between artist, artwork
and viewer: to understand it, one has to refer to the dissemination, all over
Europe in those years, of the ancient Ovidian myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, or
the Cretan artist who fell in love with an ivory statue and finally saw it turn
into a real woman, precisely Galatea. In those years, the myth experienced
again a huge success across Europe. The visitor arriving in Rome felt himself
as Pygmalion, and fell in love with Rome as a single statue that assumed the
physical features of a real city. In fact, Rome was for him the monumental
space housing a now irrecoverable ancient past, which in his mind was however
turning back to become reality. Think of the literature on the subject by
Herder, who visited the city in 1778, as it can be deduced from the title of
his essay: "Plastic: some considerations on the shape and on the figure after
Pygmalion’s dreams on sculpture" [3].
 |
| Fig. 4) Johann Gottfried von Herder, Plastic: some considerations on the shape and on the figure, after Pygmalion’s dreams on sculpture, 1778 |
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| Fig. 5) Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Essay on the ability to see beauty in art, and how to teach the same topic, 1763 |
The role of
statuary is crucial in the appreciation of the city. To be precise, since
Winckelmann’s essay of 1763 on the "Ability
to see beauty in art" [4], Rome has been placed at the centre of
modern aesthetics, not so much as the place hosting remarkable ruins, but
above all as the space within which one can admire the antique sculptures in
their original size. In Rome, moreover, one can not only see the representation
of the body according to the canons of classical beauty, but can also identify himself
with this body itself. It is the Apollo
Belvedere in the Vatican gardens to become the attraction for a whole
generation, to follow the call of Winckelmann: "Here there is nothing mortal nor anything that requires human meanness.
There are no veins or tendons that warm up these bodies, but only a celestial
spirit that, spreading as in sweet streams, filled the surfaces of these
figures." It is this expectation of "a journey at the search of the body" [5] to attract Goethe,
Moritz, Herder, Heinse and Wilhelm von Humboldt in the eternal city [6]. There was
obviously also a pure aesthetical component in the contemplation of the statues
(as Goethe wrote, "the beauty of the
classical statue is the most sublime which has come to us from antiquity"
[7]). But travellers came to Rome especially in the hope for a spiritual rebirth
thanks to their personal consideration of the re-born classic beauty canons. It
is no accident that Goethe also wrote: "I can say that only in Rome I understood what a person is"
[8].
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| Fig. 6) Apollo Belvedere, second half of the second century BC |
Rome and the cult of Raphael
Ernest
Osterkamp is offering us a compelling contribution on "Rome as the city of Raphael". It is
an issue that may seem very strange at the eyes of today. However, just read
the writings of the German artists of those years (both classic and romantic)
and you will immediately notice that Raphael was given more attention than any other artist (Michelangelo included). Osterkamp explains that "the travels to Rome in the 18th and 19th
century were always trips to visit Raphael" [9]. That artist was seen by experts and the
public in those years as the culmination of the history of art, and Rome was
always the favourite destination to admire him. Later on, the systematic seizure by the Napoleonic troops of the works of Raphael and their shipping to Paris, where they were placed in the Grande
Galerie of the Louvre as the centre of the Musée Napoleon, changed things, making Paris the new travel
destination for those who wanted to enjoy the art of the painter.
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| Fig. 7) Benjamin Zix, The wedding procession of Napoleon and Marie-Louise of Austria, 1810. At the centre of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, Raphael’s Transfiguration |
Even the
return of stolen works to Italy in 1815 did not restore the initial situation,
and Rome lose the palm of exclusive home of Raphael's works [10]. There were now structural factors that
contributed to this. With the publication in 1839 of Passavant’s essay on
Raphael - the first real monograph of the history of art criticism, translated
into all major languages (in French in 1860, in English in 1872, and in Italian
in 1889) - there was a new phenomenon: one no longer needed to travel to Italy
to understand the greatest artist of the history of art. Meanwhile, in Germany,
art taste changed deeply and, with the transition from the classicist to the
romantic interpretation of painter (by Friedrich Schlegel and the Nazarenes), it
was no longer the classic Raphael in the Vatican Rooms, but the young intimate
and religious Raphael of the Madonnas and Holy families to capture the hearts
of the German public. And the Madonnas by Raphael are dispersed throughout
Europe and can be seen without necessarily travelling to Rome.
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| Fig. 8) Passavant’s essay on “Raphael from Urbino and his father Giovanni Santi” is considered the first monograph on an artist in art criticism |
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| Fig. 9) Raphael, St. Michael and the Dragon, 1504-1505 |
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| Fig. 10) Raphael, St. Paul delivers the sermon in Athens, 1515 |
To
understand the importance of Raphael, one must keep in mind that - as of the
end of the seventeenth century - he was no longer merely regarded as an Italian
painter, but as a truly universal artist. There was a cult of Raphael in France
at least since the creation of the Royal
Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648, followed after twenty years by
the foundation of the Académie de France in Rome by Colbert. There was a cult of Raphael
in London since 1699, when the cartoons of his tapestries were displayed in a
room of the Hampton Court Palace specially designed by Sir Christopher Wren,
the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral. There was a German worship of Raphael
when Augustus III of Saxony acquired the Sistine Madonna and carried it to
Dresden in 1754 [11]. Osterkamp even explains that in the aesthetic narrative
of the three countries, Raphael was now considered (separately) also a French,
English and German painter in an attempt to take possession of his nationality
as a founding act of the respective national painting. If the tomb of Raphael
at the Pantheon thus became a venerable place of pilgrimage from all over
Europe, it is interesting to note that in the three cultural areas the reasons for
that cult were different, and also linked to the celebration of artworks held
in their respective countries: the formal classicism of Saint Michael and the dragon, i.e. the painting in the Louvre on
which Charles Le Brun set his theory of painting in 1667, in his first lesson
at the Royal Academy; the history painting of the cartoons of the Saint Paul cycle
in Britain and the composed and dreaming religiosity of the Sistine Madonna in Germany
[12].
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| Fig. 11) Raphael, Sistine Madonna, 1513-1514 |
The
writings of German travellers to Rome on Raphael also translated the evolution
of taste. Goethe's Italian Journey of
1816-1817 was a real anti-romantic manifesto and it is obvious that, in this writing, the
classical interpretation of Raphael's art prevailed, with the exaltation of the Rooms of the Vatican, the frescoes in the Villa Farnese and the tapestries [13].
That taste, however, was too close to French classicism in order to please the next
generation of Germans, who were fighting against Napoleon in the name of their
freedom. They therefore referred not to Goethe, but rather to Wackenroder and
Tieck. Since 1796, they had launched the new proto-romantic theory of religious
art (and indeed of art priesthood), which was directly opposite to the
anti-clerical culture promoted by the French Revolution in the previous decade.
The Transfiguration, to which the Musée Napoleon had given the place of
honour, and which was considered by the Parisian critics as Raphael's absolute
masterpiece of Raphael and even a 'French' work for its classical composition, was
now sharply criticized by the poet Wilhelm Waiblinge as spiritually cold and
devoid of religiosity [14]. The Nazarenes then invented a new Raphael, in many
ways a German Raphael: to the hated
Transfiguration they now opposed the young Raphael, as an expression of an
intimate and spiritual art [15]. It is a new cult of Raphael which was thus
inaugurated, where the painter from Urbino was directly correlated with Beato
Angelico, as interpreter of a concept of art supporting the task of religion.
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| Fig. 12) Raffaello Sanzio, Transfiguration, 1518-1520 |
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| Fig. 13) Raffaello Sanzio, Madonna del Granduca, 1504 |
Osterkamp
notes that this fracture between a classical and a romantic Raphael did not
characterise the French world. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the
French Academy in Rome between 1806 and 1820, preserved continuity in the
classicist interpretation of Raphael. French artists continued to travel to
Rome to copy the frescoes of the Vatican Rooms. Still in 1831, Stendhal wrote:
"Without a trip to Rome you cannot
understand Raphael." [16]
The German vision of Rome at the end of the
eighteenth century
Steffi
Roettgen, in a contribution written in Italian, raises an important question:
why the many German artists living in Rome did almost never integrate with the
artistic world of the city? What is the reason for which they rather represented
a kind of separate outer colony of the German world? And finally: what were their
relationships with the artists of other nationalities?
Part of the
reason of the self-segregation that the Germans imposed on themselves was due to
their attitude in the confrontation of Roman Catholicism, which governed the
city. In the Protestant world there was a total ideological closure against
Papal Rome, which was also reflected in a rejection of Roman art of the last
centuries, in particular the post-Bernini Baroque Rome; the German Catholic
world – which of course considered Rome as the centre of Christianity – however
also regretted that Papal Rome was so badly managed. But this cannot be the
only reason.
The authoress
adds: "Even during the mid-late nineteenth
century advanced, the lack of interest on the German side for the cultural
events of modern Rome will remain a staple in the comments: this leads us to
think that the effort to escape the ephemeral dimension of everyday life and
current events was considered the way to select and collect the artistic
baggage that after returning to his homeland could be preserved in order to
feed and exalt the memory of Italy as a «real Arcadia»" [17].
I agree.
Let me add that, having now read numerous writings of German artists in the
twentieth century, it seems to me that this is not just a problem of the
eighteenth or the nineteenth century. There is a structural issue in the
relationship between the two cultures, a misunderstanding that is replicated
steadily until the early twentieth century (perhaps futurism was the event that
broke the spell, opening the German eyes to contemporary Italian art during the
Weimar Republic). From the memoirs and letters they have left, the German
artists in Italy (even those culturally open to the French or Scandinavian
world) always and only search a relationship with the past, and instead ignore
art of their days: of Italy they adore, in general, the lifestyle, the climate,
the landscape and the common people, but they do not look for artistic
inspiration from their contemporary colleagues. They do not know them, do not
meet them, and do not visit their exhibitions. In the early 1900s a highly
cultivated artist like Karl Hofer, free from any chauvinistic aesthetic prejudices
and linked by a network of close ties with French painters and intellectuals,
resided five years in Italy, but he gloried that he had never known a single
Italian artist. Even Pechstein and Klee - despite the differences of
temperament, one open and jovial, and the other highly sophisticated and rich
in musical culture - did not seem to seek contact with the Italians artists.
Pechstein had many and sincere friends in Italy, but he wrote he enjoyed not
to attend any of the Roman artists at the Aragno Coffee (although he participated
once in an exhibition of Roman Secession). Klee left us in his Memoirs a critique of concerts and
theatrical works that he enjoyed daily throughout Italy. As to contemporary
art, however, he visited in passing only the Exhibition of Rome in 1902, to note that there was nothing
important, if not some Rodin drawings.
But back to
the late eighteenth century. Anton Raphael Mengs (1779) had just passed away.
He was indeed an artist who had instead met great success and awards from both
the Italian and German-speaking worlds. In the footsteps of Winckelmann (who had
no interest in Rome outside of ancient art, and indeed manifested a certain
intellectual contempt for the Romans of his day), young German artists and
intellectuals were converging to the city, which seemed to offer them stability and
peace, at least until the Napoleonic conquest. Goethe arrived in 1786: in his Journey to Italy (written in 1816), he
gave an image of Rome as 'capital of the world', but ignored almost completely
the Roman art of those years: Ms Roettgen speaks of real blindness. The choice
of Goethe was quote intentional: "I
want to see Rome, the Rome that remains, not the one that disappears every ten
years." [18] Here, too, the
rule seems to work that Germans look at France as an interlocutor for
contemporary art, but ignore instead Italy. Goethe enjoyed, for example, the
French neoclassical art exhibitions in Rome, and in particular the Oath of the Horatii by Jean-Louis David
[19], but ignored Antonio Canova (who was a friend of several foreign sculptors
resident in Rome) and Pompeo Batoni, very known in the German-speaking world. The
Journey contained no reference also
to the younger generation: Domenico Corci, Giuseppe Cades, Antonio Cavallucci
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| Fig. 14) Jean-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1785 |
"The behaviour of Goethe is not a singular
case, as the artistic production in Rome is not reflected even in the
testimonies offered by other Germans in Rome in those years" [20].
Herder theorized that attitude: "First
of all I would like to grasp, at least up to a certain point, the dead Rome,
and I'm still far from it. Rome is so big and rich, here you can search and
find a world of three and a half millennia. [...] It is easy to forget then popes and cardinals" [21]. There
were two exceptions. During the three years in Rome (1780-1783), the writer Wilhelm
Heinse aimed at introducing the literature and visual arts of those years to
the public, in a number of articles in German journals. The scholar Basilius
von Ramdohr published in 1787 a Rome guide in three volumes, which did not
ignore contemporary art. For this he was harshly criticized by Goethe.
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| Fig. 15) Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Joseph II and his brother Leopold, 1769 |
A multicultural Rome?
In fact, as
Ms Roettgen writes, the Rome of those years was not at all far behind with the
times. The Church welcomed in Rome artists from around the world, providing
them with "modern structures, open
to all as the Accademia del Nudo (Academy
of Nude) at the Capitol, under the control of the papal government"
[22], and it made it for a precise
political reason: to create and spread a uniform style of classical inspiration
that would serve as a universal language in the Catholic world. In Rome there were
also national colleges and other support structures organized with the
respective administration of the countries of origin (such as the Académie
de France and the
Imperial Academy of Vienna). Contrary to what one might think today, the Papal
Rome often offered artists "freedom
of costumes and liberation from social norms" [23]. The eighteenth century marked the maximum success of this
model: a census in 1787, with the title "The list of the most famous artists living in Rome" signalled
the simultaneous presence of 563 active artists from around the world in that
year: the largest community is the French one (55), while the second is the German
(50) [24]. In Rome there were also real possibilities of success (for the
Germans one could list, in addition to Mengs, also Angelika Kaufmann, and
therefore even a woman). Within national communities, the Roman world was not
necessarily doctrinaire. German artists in Rome did not in fact miss the
opportunity to express even sharply different opinions. Think of the "vehement clash between the different
conceptions of Mengs and Füssli" [25] and the real physical fight
between Arthur Schopenhauer and the Nazarenes, at the Caffè Greco in 1818 [26].
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| Fig. 16) Anton Mengs, Perseus and Andromeda, 1770-76 |
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| Fig. 17) Angelika Kauffmann, Portrait of Winckelmann, 1764 |
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| Fig. 18) Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Artist's Despair Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins (1778-80) |
And yet it
must be said that if the Rome of those years was home to painters like Jacques
Louis David on the French side and Anton Raphael Mengs on the German one, and even
if the classicist mainstream was common to the painters residing there, it also revealed all the possible vagueness in the design of multicultural models. We
cannot speak of real integration between the groups of artists. The Papal
States are home to so many cultures; of course, the goal is that of building up
all of them with the model of classical antiquity and papal Rome model.
However, the national groups hardly spoke to each other and even animated their
prejudices: German painters are picky but unfit; the French ones have expertise
but are academic. French and Germans in Rome were in a state of permanent
competition. Part of the animosity was due to the character of Winckelmann, a
hate agitator, whom Ms Roettgen does not hesitate to judge "a real xenophobic" [27] The Germans
were also jealous of the privileges that France, a great power, was able to
ensure to his subjects at the Villa Medici; as to aesthetics, they contested
"the weaknesses of the French manner"
[28]. But Winckelmann added a real national tone, as Herder wrote in his eulogy
of 1777: "Winckelmann was a German
and remained a German also in Rome. He was one of the few who made sure that
the word «German» is now also
recognized in countries that usually gave us the name of the Goths, and
considered it a compliment being nominated along with Mengs and Wille in this
small circle."
[29] Therefore, the conference offers a reconstruction of the Rome of those
years as a cosmopolitan and multi-cultural world, but also reveals the limits
of that experience.
NOTES
[2] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen, (quoted), p. 16
[3] Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume, Riga, Hartknoch, 1778, 143 pagine.
[4] Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben, Dresden, In der Waltherischen Buchhandlung, 1763, pagine 32.
[5] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 20
[6] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 18
[7] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 25
[8] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 10
[9] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 104
[10] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 106
[11] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 103
[12] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 104
[13] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 108
[14] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 117
[15] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 115
[16] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 112
[17] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p.277
[18] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 77
[19] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 280
[20] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 284
[21] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 287
[22] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 292
[23] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 293
[24] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 295
[25] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 295
[26] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 11
[27] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 296
[28] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 296
[29] Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen: 1780-1820, (quoted), p. 297
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