Transformations of the Beautiful: Beauty and Instability in

Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Arthur K. Salvo

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2015

© 2015 Arthur K. Salvo All rights reserved

ABSTRACT

Transformations of the Beautiful: Beauty and Instability in

Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Arthur K. Salvo

Transformations of the Beautiful reexamines a problem that emerges during the mid- eighteenth century: the devaluation of the aesthetic category of the beautiful. In opposition to accounts that identify this problem with the rediscovery of the sublime, this dissertation emphasizes the crucial yet underexamined role that historicization played in the destabilization of beauty’s normative status in German aesthetic discourse.

Additionally, I demonstrate that literary discourse became a key mode through which the beautiful’s problematic status was negotiated. Assembling literary texts from 1759-1817 that thematize beautiful objects or phenomena in terms of their historicity or instability, and transform them, I argue that these moments constitute discrete instances in which literature responds to the precarious position of beauty in modernity. With recourse to texts by Winckelmann, Schiller, Jean Paul, Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann and

Eichendorff, I focus on the specific literary techniques employed by different genres— description, elegy, and narrative fiction—and how they reconfigure the relationship between the modern subject and the beautiful. In so doing I demonstrate how literary texts intervene in aesthetic discourse to reevaluate and generate alternative conceptions of the beautiful.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Description and Recovery in Winckelmann’s “Torso” 12

Chapter 2. Beauty Irrecoverable: Elegy after Geschichtsphilosophie 65

Chapter 3. The Other Side of the Statue: Narrative Fiction Reconfigures the Beautiful 149

Conclusion 236

Bibliography 244

i Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, Dorothea von Mücke, for her unending support, enthusiasm and insight. From the inception of this project to its end, I found in her a mentor and champion of my work. She patiently guided this dissertation through its most challenging phases and improved it infinitely with constructive criticism and eye-opening questions. To Stefan Andriopoulos, my second advisor, I owe thanks for his generous intellectual support and advice. My writing benefitted greatly from his careful eye, comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Oliver Simons, Eva

Geulen, and to my first teacher, Paul Fleming, whose vigorous engagement with my arguments at the defense fostered an immensely productive and rewarding exchange. To

Kelly Barry I am also indebted; her courses “Goethe and Myth” and “Literature and

Anthropology in the 18th Century” awakened interests that I pursued in the dissertation and her wisdom has served me well. For the duration of my graduate career at Columbia

University the Department of Germanic Languages was my intellectual home. I’d like to thank Andreas Huyssen, Bill Dellinger and Peggy Quisenberry for their support and guidance. My fellow graduate students, especially Johanna Urzedowski, Christoph

Schaub, Alexis Radisoglou, Patrick Walsh and Alexander von Thun helped me during many stages of the project.

A significant portion of this dissertation was completed during a yearlong stay at the Freie Universität Berlin. I would like to acknowledge the Berlin Program for

Advanced German and European Studies and the German Studies Association for supporting my dissertation in the form of a research fellowship. During my time in Berlin

I participated in an interdisciplinary colloquium where I benefited from constructive

ii dialogue with my fellow colleagues. I am particularly grateful to Karin Goihl, who helped make my time in Berlin so productive.

Last but not least I would like to express my gratitude to my family and friends.

Irina Dumitrescu and Tim Albrecht offered their friendship and shared their experiences with the dissertation process; Tim, especially, was a sympathetic reader, a source of energy and a conversation partner throughout the project. I thank my aunt and uncle,

Nona and Peter Mullen, for great company, distractions when I needed a break, and for always welcoming me into their home. My sister, Adelaide Davids, and my parents,

Harriet and Kemble Salvo, have been a wellspring of support, love and encouragement throughout my entire graduate career and especially during the dissertation phase. Finally,

I thank my wife, Sophie Salvo, who has patiently read every word of this dissertation, served as a sounding board for new ideas, inspired me with her intellect and buoyed me with her love, care and humor. To her and to my parents I dedicate this dissertation.

iii Introduction

“Sublimity Triumphant over Beauty?”

In January 1983, Jean-François Lyotard presented a lecture at the

Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Later published as “Das Erhabene und die Avantgarde” in

Merkur, and reprinted in French and in English translation, the essay was to inform nearly three decades of philosophical-aesthetic and art-theoretical inquiry.1 In the lecture,

Lyotard constructs a relationship between the aesthetic category of the sublime and avant-garde abstract expressionist art, tracing the origins of the latter to the rediscovery and re-theorization of the sublime during the eighteenth century by Burke and Kant. In the sublime’s ability to exceed pure sensual apprehension, its resistance to representation,

Lyotard sees the seeds of conceptual art, which gestures towards the unrepresentable.2

Lyotard’s connection of avant-garde visual art with the sublime has contributed to a very specific understanding of the history of aesthetics. This account proceeds from the following proposition: if eighteenth-century theories of the sublime contain the origins of avant-garde modernism and abstract expressionism, and if the latter artistic movements articulate a manifest aversion to the beautiful, then a departure from or subordination of the beautiful can be found retroactively in the eighteenth-century sublime as well. In short, Lyotard’s essay on the avant-garde has given rise to the notion that the eighteenth-

1 Here I refer to its English translation, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in: Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

2 As Lyotard writes, summarizing his own argument, “I have tried to suggest that at the dawn of romanticism, Burke’s elaboration of the aesthetics of the sublime, and to a lesser degree Kant’s, outlined a world of possibilities for artistic experiments in which the avant-gardes would later trace out their paths.” Ibid., 101.

1 century reconceptualization of the sublime precipitated a devaluation of the aesthetic category of beauty.3 The prevalence of this account in contemporary scholarship is evidenced by works that—despite offering vastly different evaluative appraisals of the beautiful—nevertheless explicitly assign a usurpatory role to the sublime: Carsten Zelle’s

Die Doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne (1995) refers to the emergence of the sublime as the

“Krise des Schönen”4; Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) attributes beauty’s de-potentialization to a conceptual differentiation from the sublime during the eighteenth century; and Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003) states that “Beauty had been put on the defensive as early as the eighteenth century, when the concept of the sublime first entered Enlightenment consciousness

[…]”5. It is precisely this notion that I wish to complicate in my dissertation.

If we return to Lyotard’s essay, however, and examine the prime example supporting his thesis, we can also observe another means of explaining the deflation of the beautiful. Lyotard, as well as Danto after him, structures his argument around Barnett

Newman’s works of visual art and, above all, his programmatic essay “The Sublime is

Now” (1948). The essay title itself is an assertion of the sublime’s timeliness, a call for its

3 Although Lyotard never formulates this precise claim about the beautiful in this essay, he approaches it, employing similar formulations such as “classical poetics,” which suggest an aesthetic of the beautiful. “Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe this contradictory feeling—pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression—was christened or re-christened by the name of the sublime. It is around this name that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that aesthetics asserted its critical rights over art, and that romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed.” Ibid., 92.

4 Carsten Zelle, Die Doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne: Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1995), 7.

5 Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle: Carus Publishing Company, 2003), 147.

2 centrality in contemporary artistic production. In Lyotard’s reading of Barnett’s body of work, the “now” is also expanded to incorporate a theory of the sublime as “event.” But the key question that should be posed to Newman, and by extension to Lyotard, is this:

Given the sublime’s conceptual origins in ancient rhetoric, or even its re-theorization in the eighteenth century, what allows this aesthetic category to be aligned with the now of

1948 America, or, more importantly, “the now” in the abstract sense, as the temporal present? The answer, I propose, lies less in the concepts of the sublime itself (as Lyotard and Danto argue) than in the historical positioning of the sublime’s counter-concept in

Newman’s text, the beautiful.

In his essay, Newman makes a claim about the beautiful, its historical position in aesthetics, and its (ir)relevance for contemporary artistic production. “The invention of beauty by the Greeks,” Newman writes, “that is their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies.” 6 Here,

Newman’s alignment of the beautiful with “the Greeks” serves an express purpose: it allows him to render the beautiful untimely and to thereby provide a foundation for the advancement of a new aesthetic program based upon the counter-concept of the sublime.

The remainder of Newman’s short text collapses the history of Western visual art into a single narrative: the struggle to liberate art from the confines of the beautiful and to create the sublime in art. Newman’s arguments here are also rearticulated in critical discourse. In The Abuse of Beauty, for example, Arthur Danto cites this very passage from Newman’s essay, reproduces an image of Newman’s Onement I, and poses the

6 Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now” in Art Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 580-582, here 580. 3 following rhetorical question: “Sublimity Triumphant over Beauty?”7 The implication, of course, is yes. Although Newman asserts the timeliness of the sublime for modern art in

“The Sublime is Now,” this claim is not entirely self-supporting. As we observed above, it is instead contingent upon a historical positioning of the beautiful in the ancient past.

The precondition for the sublime’s close alignment with the “now”—both in the sense of enduring topicality (i.e. its supposed centrality for ever new avant-gardes) and temporality (its conceptualization as event)—is that the sublime does not undergo a form of historicization to which the beautiful is subjected. Despite distinct differences in historical semantics and conceptuality 8 —that is, for example, between the ancient rhetorical use of the term in Longinus, Burke’s grounding of this term in psychology and anthropology, and Kant’s use of this term for nature and architecture, but never for arts understood as representational—the discursive framework in Newman’s text allows for a reconciliation of the sublime with the now, or present, which is withheld from the beautiful.

Newman’s form of historicizing the beautiful in this text—although it escapes

Lyotard and Danto, and to a certain extent persists as a subtext in critical discourse—is by no means new. In explicitly aligning the beautiful with ancient Greece—that is, in enacting a form of historicism that engenders a problematic relationship between the beautiful and the (modern) present—Newman’s text uncritically participates in a discursive practice of historicizing the beautiful that can be traced back to eighteenth-

7 Danto, iv.

8 For a particularly insightful critique of Lyotard’s appropriation of Kant’s concept of the sublime, see Jacques Ranciere’s “Lyotard and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: a Counter-reading of Kant” in: Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 88-105. 4 century German aesthetic discourse. Flushing out the contours of this discourse, its emergence in the wake of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, the way in which it destabilizes the viability of the beautiful in the present, is one of the goals of this dissertation. While this dissertation concurs that the eighteenth century is a crucial turning point for understanding the decline of the beautiful, it takes issue with the account of the sublime’s “triumph” over it, as outlined above.

Transformations of the Beautiful

My dissertation, Transformations of the Beautiful, contributes to intellectual history, to the history of aesthetics and to literary studies by reexamining the devaluation of the aesthetic category of beauty in the eighteenth century. As outlined above, whereas current scholarly accounts locate the origin of this problem in the rediscovery of the aesthetic category of the sublime, this dissertation complicates our understanding of this problem. With recourse to eighteenth-century theoretical texts, it illuminates the crucial, yet underexamined role that historicization played in the destabilization of beauty’s normative status in aesthetic discourse. Furthermore, selectively assembling a corpus of literary texts ranging from 1759–1817, this dissertation also demonstrates that beauty’s embattled status is also taken up by literary discourse, and examines specific poetic responses to this problem. By identifying these literary strategies, Transformations of the

Beautiful underscores the pivotal role of literary discourse as an arbiter of aesthetic issues; my dissertation identifies interventions in aesthetic discourse and argues for its own legitimacy as a conceptually innovative discourse. In doing so, Transformations of the Beautiful provides a corrective to the privileging of theoretical texts in accounts of the 5 history of aesthetics. Furthermore, within a literary-historical context, it illustrates how the problem of beauty’s status also led to generic innovation in literary discourse.

Methodologically, Transformations of the Beautiful employs the critical tools of discourse analysis, literary anthropology, and close reading, examining both aesthetic and literary discourses in all three chapters. Instead of offering a Begriffsgeschichte, re- theorizing the beautiful9, or providing an ideology-critical examination of this category, my dissertation distinguishes itself in its foregrounding of a different set of questions. In its interrogation of theoretical texts, the dissertation asks: What kinds of relationships are constructed in aesthetic discourse between the modern subject and the beautiful? And how are these relationships supported? Examining aesthetic discourse in light of categories such as proximity and remoteness, it argues that a disjuncture occurred between the positioning of the aesthetic category of the beautiful and the contemporaneous present that led to a destabilization of beauty’s status. Specifically, I argue that the rise of historical consciousness and historical thinking during the mid- eighteenth century, a product of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, disrupted continuities between the epochs of antiquity and modernity.10 I show that, because the

9 The most recent re-theorizations of the beautiful emerge from an exegesis of Stendhal’s De l’Amour in particular, his dictum that beautiful is a “promesse du bonheur.” See, for example: Winfried Menninghaus. Das Versprechen der Schönheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in the World of Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007); Christoph Menke, Die Kraft der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013).

10 The term “modernity,” as it is used in this dissertation, refers not to an era defined by industrial or technological modernization, but rather to a contemporaneous present that understands itself as distinct from classical antiquity and classical culture. Arising out of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, the terms “modern” or “the moderns”—the latter, often taking the form of “die Neuern” in the primary texts examined here—thus describe a belongingness to a new era in which aesthetic paradigms, such as imitation of the ancients, cease to serve as self-legitimizing 6 beautiful is identified with antiquity in aesthetic discourse, this aesthetic category’s relationship to the contemporaneous present, to modernity, becomes highly precarious.

Historicization, I thus argue, contributes to the instability of the beautiful. Each chapter then examines how beauty’s problematic status is also instantiated in a host of different claims about the relationship of the beautiful to the contemporaneous present: for example, that the moderns have difficulty recognizing beauty itself or producing it in art

(Winckelmann); that modern literature is defined by a crisis of taste, a marked departure from beauty as an aesthetic norm (Friedrich Schlegel); that beauty has lost its ability to move the modern subject (Schiller); and that the most important artistic embodiment of beauty, the ancient statue, is incongruous with the modern age, its sensitivities and the sensual perception of the modern subject (Herder).

Transformations of the Beautiful furthermore argues that, more than simply registering beauty’s problematic status, German literary discourse during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century reflects, responds to and compensates11 for it. Literary

norms. In the entry for “Modern, Modernität, Moderne,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht identifies three different, diachronically emergent meanings for the term “modern.” Whereas the first corresponds to the “present” [gegenwärtig] in its opposition to what is “prior” [vorherig], the second definition conceptualizes modernity as an epoch separate from antiquity. This definition describes the notion of modern used in this dissertation and the texts it examines: “In dieser Bedeutung bezeichnet das Prädikat ‘modern’ eine als Epoche erlebte Gegenwart, welche durch bestimmte, sie in ihrer Komplexität als homogen erfassende Eigenschaften von Epochen der Vergangenheit (meist innerhalb eines wertenden geschichtsphilosophischen Modells periodischer Veränderung) abgesetzt wird.” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Modern, Modernität, Moderne,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. IV (Stuttgart: Cotta Verlag, 1978), 92-131, here 96.

11 By focusing in particular upon compensatory practices in literary discourse, my dissertation draws upon the research paradigm of philosophical anthropology. “Compensation” is one of the key concepts employed by Arnold Gehlen, Helmut Plessner, Joachim Ritter and Odo Marquard, among others. In his essay “Homo compensator: Zur anthropologischen Karriere eines metaphysischen Begriffs,” Marquard offers a Begriffsgeschichte of the term, specifying that the 7 discourse is thus shown to be a key mode through which the modern subject’s relationship to the beautiful was addressed. Selecting literary texts that explicitly thematize beautiful objects or phenomena in terms of their temporality and instability, I demonstrate how these texts constitute concrete instances in which literature acknowledges beauty’s fragile position. Furthermore, my analysis, in particular, focuses on moments of transformation within the text—moments in which the beautiful takes on another form or is reconfigured—in order to understand how these literary texts seek to renegotiate and redefine beauty’s relationship to the present. This inquiry also extends to the role of genres; accordingly, each chapter addresses a different one—description, elegy, and narrative fiction—and the specific strategies they employ. Description, elegy, and narrative fiction, in addition to their generic distinctions, are shown in the course of this dissertation to be literary techniques that aid in the rethinking, re-imagination and reconstitution of this relationship. Rather than reconfirming the classicist ideal (and caricature) of the beautiful as self-sustaining and internally tranquil, this dissertation demonstrates how literary discourse reveals the beautiful to be in need of immense imaginative management: restoration, rescue, remembrance and mourning, reinvention and reconfiguration, in a word: transformation. In addition, each chapter also demonstrates how literature’s engagement with this problem led to literary innovation: modern usage of this concept denotes “relief” from man’s ontological deficiencies, as opposed to moral ones: “Im Unterschied zum alten Kompensationsbegriff, der Vergeltung meint, bezieht sich der moderne Kompensationsbegriff, der Entschädigung meint, also auf Übel, die wir nicht tun, sondern, die uns—als schicksalhafte Mängel und Leiden—widerfahren: es sind dies die nicht moralisierbaren Übel.” Odo Marquard, Philosophie des Stattdessen: Studien (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2000), 22. My dissertation adopts the term “compensation” not to make a claim about the human, or as an ontological assertion of what art, or aesthetic experience is. Instead it uses the term more narrowly to describe what Marquard calls “ersetzende oder wiederersetzende Leistungen,” here, specific cultural techniques and practices in literary discourse that are designed to unite the modern viewer and the beautiful in the temporal present. Ibid., 30. 8 new forms of description, a new theory of elegy and its creative potential, and the links between the beautiful and the shock aesthetics of the fantastic tale.

Outline of Chapters

My first chapter, “Description and Recovery in Winckelmann’s ‘Torso,’” introduces the problem of the historicization of the beautiful by examining

Winckelmann’s “Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke” from 1754.

In my reading, I show how the historical and geographic localization of the beautiful in

Ancient Greece results in a gap between the modern viewer and the beautiful object. My chapter also demonstrates that this problem evidences itself in Winckelmann’s descriptions of statuary, specifically his text “Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu

Rom” from 1759. I argue that the statue’s maimed condition exemplifies the problem of history’s destruction of ancient beauty as well as its compromised status in the present. It is an issue, I show, that Winckelmann seeks to resolve in his description of the Belvedere

Torso. Drawing upon eighteenth-century reviews in literary and scholarly journals, I demonstrate how Winckelmann’s technique of description departs markedly from contemporary norms by employing poetic language as well self-depiction in the descriptions themselves. In my reading of Winckelmann’s Torso description, I show how

Winckelmann describes himself imagining the restitution of the statue, transforming it into a state of wholeness. While Winckelmann’s description is unable to recuperate the statue itself, it seeks to transform the reader into a beholder capable of visualizing the statue’s beauty by modeling a new way of seeing—in Winckelmann himself.

The second chapter, “Beauty Irrecoverable: Elegy after Geschichtsphilosophie,” 9 examines explicit formulations of, and responses to, beauty’s diminished status between

1790 and 1800. It begins by considering a claim made by Friedrich Schlegel in his essay

Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie (1795/97), namely, that “das Schöne” is no longer the ideal of modern poetry, and demonstrates that its theoretical origins lie in

Winckelmann, as opposed to a championing of the sublime. After examining Friedrich

Schiller’s attempts to prevent Schlegel’s concept of the “das Charakteristische” (a counter-concept to the beautiful) from gaining currency in aesthetic discourse, it turns to a discursive shift in Schiller’s own works. Whereas the beautiful had been an express concern of Schiller’s theoretical writings from 1792-1795, the chapter argues that around

1795, literary discourse, specifically the elegy, becomes the mode through which Schiller addresses the relationship between the modern subject and beauty. Tracing a line from

Schiller’s re-theorization of elegy in “Ueber naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung” to the elegies “Der Spaziergang” and “Nänie,” the chapter argues that elegy becomes the poetic genre through which Schiller addresses a rediscovery and leaving-behind of the beautiful that is characteristic of modernity and sentimental poetry.

My third chapter, “The Other Side of the Statue: Narrative Fiction Reconfigures the Beautiful” examines the paradoxical status of ancient sculpture in eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse and its reconfiguration in early nineteenth-century literary texts.

While ancient statuary functions as a privileged site of beauty, embodying the values and assumptions associated with this aesthetic category, I argue that it also presented problems to the modern beholder. With recourse to theoretical texts and travelogues I show how torchlight viewing became a cultural practice that compensated for medial and historical impediments, providing for ideal viewing of the statue’s beauty. This chapter 10 then focuses on three literary texts—Jean Paul’s Titan (1800/03), Klingemann’s Die

Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (1804) and Eichendorff’s “Das Marmorbild” (1817)— that adapt and subvert the cultural practice of torchlight viewing of statuary. In close readings, I demonstrate how literary reworkings of torchlight viewing in narrative fiction temporalize ancient sculpture, relieving it of its exemplarity, thereby seeking to rescue the beautiful for the present by severing its connection to the past. Additionally, the chapter demonstrates how a reconceptualization of the beautiful in these texts is accompanied by literary shock aesthetics, contributing to the literary genre of the fantastic tale.

11 Chapter 1. Description and Recovery in Winckelmann’s “Torso”

Part I. Aesthetic Alternatives versus Historical Necessity

When Johann Joachim Winckelmann first published his defense of Ancient Greek art and classical beauty “Gedancken über die Nachahmung” in 1754, aesthetic alternatives to the beautiful had long been a topic in philosophical-aesthetic discourse in

England and France. The era of beauty’s absolute rule—if it ever truly existed—had already begun to wane.

Although the role of beauty in contemporary and future artistic production has been a point of contention during the past twenty years, there is general agreement that, historically, beauty’s relevance—both as a defining characteristic of art and as a conceptual tool for understanding and evaluating it—has declined since at least the eighteenth century. The more complicated issue, however, has been how this came to pass.

Recent scholarship in art criticism and the history of aesthetics has sought to account for beauty’s diminished importance by linking it to a particular development in

European intellectual history: the reemergence of the sublime as an aesthetic concept at the end of the 17th century and its increasing theorization during the eighteenth century.

According to this hypothesis, the rediscovery of the sublime as an aesthetic phenomenon posed a challenge to beauty’s privileged status. Rather than replacing the beautiful and assuming its position as the object of the discipline of aesthetics and the primary subject of art, the sublime came to function as a viable alternative. This was enough to dethrone

12 the beautiful and jeopardize its normative status. If the sublime never ascended to the heights enjoyed by the beautiful when it all but encompassed the aesthetic itself, the sublime became, at the very least, a valid option: as a subject that art could represent, as a feeling it could evoke, and as an aesthetic phenomenon worthy of philosophical reflection.

In short: after the arrival of the sublime, beauty was forced to share the stage.

Proponents of this explanation of beauty’s decreasing importance, unsurprisingly, describe the relationship between the beautiful and the sublime in oppositional terms. For them, the sublime amounts to a critique, or a crisis even, of the beautiful. Carsten Zelle, for example, in Die Doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne thus refers to the sublime as “Krise des Schönen” and sees the duality between the two aesthetic categories as being constitutive of a “doppelte Moderne”—a modernity that is shaped and defined by a tension between the beautiful and the sublime.12 Arthur Danto, who argues in The Abuse of Beauty that modern visual art is predicated upon the destruction of beauty, states that of all aesthetic qualities, “none of them poses quite the challenge to beauty as the sublime does […]”.13 Before advancing my own idea about a more fundamental threat to beauty’s relevance, I would like to examine an argument—specifically Danto’s—for why, precisely, the sublime presented such a great challenge to beauty’s authority and constituted a veritable alternative.

Although Danto identifies multiple reasons for beauty’s increasing irrelevance, he regards the eighteenth-century rediscovery of the sublime as noteworthy because it

12 Carsten Zelle, Die Doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne: Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1995), 7.

13 Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle: Carus Publishing Company, 2003), 143-144. 13 represents an initial and authoritative challenge to beauty’s importance. Danto writes,

“Beauty had been put on the defensive as early as the eighteenth century, when the concept of the sublime first entered the Enlightenment consciousness through the translation by Boileau of a text on the subject by […] Longinus […].”14 Danto is correct in emphasizing Longinus’s significance. Following Boileau’s translation in 1674, the sublime, indeed, became the subject of influential eighteenth-century treatises by John

Dennis, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, among others. But of greater importance to

Danto’s argument and to our understanding of how the sublime could become such a powerful counterpoint, is the specific way in which this concept was re-theorized.

During the mid-eighteenth century, the sublime became the focus of an

Enlightenment discourse—specifically, an empiricist one—that explored aesthetic phenomena with regard to their psychological effects. A measure by which this discourse differentiated the sublime from the beautiful was in terms of the intensity of the experiences they engendered. Whereas contemplation of the beautiful was understood to yield pleasure, the sublime was thought to evoke more intense emotions: ecstasy, awe and astonishment. This disparity between lower and higher levels of experiential intensity, between pleasure and astonishment, provided the foundation for the sublime’s challenge to beauty at this time. To the eighteenth-century reader acquainted with the notion of the sublime, according to Danto, “Grace and beauty all at once seemed paltry and

14 Ibid., 147.

14 insufficient.”15 The sublime proved not only to be an alternative, but a formidable one, precisely because it rendered the beautiful underwhelming in comparison.

The notion that the sublime could offer a more intense, and consequently more desirable, experience than the beautiful is compelling, yet far from axiomatic. If we consider Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful from

1757, for example, we see that this assertion rests upon contemporaneous anthropological assumptions: the primacy of self-preservation and the relative dominance of pain over pleasure. Here, Burke identifies the sublime with pain and danger—primary motivators of self-preservation, and names the sublime as a cause of the “strongest emotion.”

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.16

Although Burke attributes the sublime’s strength to the invocation of danger and pain, this does not mean the sublime cannot be pleasurable. Rather, he states that “at certain distances and with certain modifications, they [danger and pain] may be, and they are delightful.”17 Representations of the sublime both unsettle and give us immense pleasure, because we do not find ourselves in clear or present danger. Pleasant or unpleasant, real or imagined, because the sublime activates our sense of self-preservation and triggers our

“strongest emotion,” it eclipses the experience that the beautiful can provide.

15 Ibid., 147.

16 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 86.

17 Ibid., 86. 15 The sublime’s initial challenge to beauty—as we have read in Danto, and seen illustrated in Burke—lies in its comparatively stronger force. If one accepts the premise that the purpose of aesthetic experience, of aesthetic objects even, is to move us, as eighteenth-century aestheticians such as Jean-Baptiste Dubos18 indeed did, then the beautiful is clearly at a disadvantage. Beauty—at least under these parameters—cannot be as moving as the sublime. Consequently, its hitherto privileged status as the quality that one sought in art and in nature, the quality for which one wished to develop a more refined taste, was jeopardized. It is also easy to see further implications of this argument.

With the rediscovery of the sublime, space was cleared for the validation of ever-new aesthetic options such as the characteristic, the ugly, the disgusting19 and the abject. The re-arrival of the sublime, one could say, announces the fading of beauty’s relevance.

Although I agree, with Danto, that the sublime endangered beauty’s privileged position, I submit that it offered, at best, a relative critique of beauty, as opposed to a fundamental one. If the existence of and renewed interest in the sublime suggested that there were instances in which the beautiful was not the most desirable aesthetic option, it did not, in principle, invalidate beauty as an option. I contend that during the eighteenth century the most acute challenge to beauty’s relevance, the most fundamental questioning of its validity, was posed not by the sublime or any other aesthetic category, but by a strand of philosophical-historical thought. Whereas the sublime could offer an alternative

18 “Le sublime de la Poësie & de la Peinture est de toucher & de plaire, comme celui de l’éloquence est de persuader. Il ne suffit pas que vos vers soient beaux, dit Horace en style de Législateur, pour donner plus de poids à la decision; il faut encore que ces vers puissant remuer les coers […]”. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Reflexions critiques sur la Poësie et sur la Peinture: Seconde Partie, 4th edition (Paris: Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1740), 1-2.

19 See Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999). 16 to the beautiful, philosophical-historical thinking possessed the argumentative tools to situate the beautiful in the irrevocable past and thereby render its relationship to the present precarious, if not incongruent.

Perhaps the first and likely most influential texts in German letters to apply a philosophical-historical argument to the beautiful and relegate it to the distant past are

Winckelmann’s “Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der

Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst” from 1754 and his “Erläuterung der Gedanken Von der

Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst” from 1756.

These writings will be the initial focus of this chapter. While Winckelmann’s ideas here and his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums influenced more overt challenges to beauty’s relevance—I’m thinking, in particular, of Friedrich Schlegel’s “Über das

Studium der Griechischen Poesie” and Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik—it is not my objective here to document a chain of influence within philosophical aesthetics.

Rather, I wish to examine the impact Winckelmann’s philosophical-historical account of beauty had for a newly emerging discourse at the time: what we now call literary discourse.

My thesis is that an anxiety concerning beauty’s relationship to modernity, which

I trace to Winckelmann’s early theoretical texts, informed contemporaneous representations of the beautiful in German literature. Within the larger schema of the dissertation, which concerns itself with how different literary forms respond to the problem of beauty’s ‘lostness’ to the past, this chapter is specifically concerned with description as a genre and mode of representation. In focusing on Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso, my aim is to understand and assess the relative 17 strengths and weaknesses of description. Through an analysis of Winckelmann’s literary descriptions of statuary, in particular his “Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom,”

I will show how Winckelmann’s text responds to the problem of beauty’s anachronicity by depicting the beautiful in states of transformation. I argue that by staging representations of the beautiful that transform both the beautiful object and its beholder,

Winckelmann’s description creates a space—its own—to recuperate beauty from history’s harsh judgment.

This chapter is comprised of two parts. In part one I examine Winckelmann’s

“Gedancken” and “Erläuterung” as theoretical texts and clarify the philosophical- historical problem they pose to beauty. In part two I offer a brief account of the eighteenth-century genre of description and argue that contemporaneous reviews of

Winckelmann’s descriptions of statuary indicate an awareness of its literary quality. I then analyze Winckelmann’s “Beschreibung” as a literary text and document the strategies of representation it employs to respond to the problematic relationship between modernity and beauty outlined in the first part of the chapter.

From Winckelmann’s Model of History to Beauty’s Irrelevance

“Der eintzige Weg für uns, groß, ja, wenn es möglich ist, unnachahmlich zu werden, ist die Nachahmung der Alten […].”20 With this statement advocating the imitation of the ancients as the only means of creating great art, Johann Joachim

Winckelmann adopts an unambiguous position in the German extension of the Querelle

20 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke” in Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, ed. Walter Rehm, 2nd edition (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 27-59, here 29. Hereafter: “Gedancken.” 18 des anciens et des modernes. The quality of ancient Greek art, he asserts, so exceeds what the modern artist can achieve, that his only avenue for creating it is to imitate the ancients.

It is a bold statement, an uncompromising expression of normative aesthetics and one that will soon become obsolete.

In the years following the publication of his “Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke” in 1754, Winckelmann’s argument in favor of imitation will be critiqued and rejected by Johann Gottfried Herder, Karl Phillip Moritz, Friedrich

Schlegel, among others. Newer theories will supplant the imitation of ancient art as models for contemporary aesthetic production. Herder will advocate emulation

(nachbilden/nacheifern), Moritz formative imitation (bildende Nachahmung) and

Schlegel will argue for producing art that responds to the demands of its own historical time. As literary history would have it, Winckelmann’s “Gedancken” issues one of the last full-throated invocations of imitatio (Nachahmung)—a paradigm soon to be overtaken by inventio. As a result, the influence of Winckelmann’s text would appear to be confined to an earlier era, one concerned more with the art of the past than that of the future.

If Winckelmann’s “Gedancken” is burdened by its advocacy of imitation, it has survived as a foundational text of German classicist theory—albeit one that also relies upon a syncretism of two inherently incompatible theoretical positions. In

Geschichtsphilosophie und Poetik, Peter Szondi identifies two contradictory modes of thought that operate in Winckelmann’s “Gedancken”: normative aesthetics and historical thought. The confluence of these two irreconcilable approaches exemplifies, according to

Szondi, a contradiction inherent in classicism, which will ultimately lead to its demise. 19 Commenting on a passage at the beginning of “Gedancken über die Nachahmung” in which Winckelmann describes the origin of good taste under the ancient Greek sky,

Szondi notes the following:

Wohl spiegelt sich in dem Spannungsverhältnis, das zwischen dem Begriff des guten Geschmacks und der Vorstellung vom griechischen Himmel besteht, nicht so sehr eine kühne Synthesis Winckelmanns als eine Inkonsequenz, ein Anachronismus, welche die Ästhetik der Aufklärungszeit kennzeichnen. Diese Inkonsequenz jedoch drückt einen prinzipiellen Widerspruch des Klassizismus in seiner gleichsam postnormativen Phase aus, eine Aporie, an der die klassizistische Kunstauffassung schließlich zerbrechen wird.21

“Post-normative” classicism, as Szondi sees it epitomized in Winckelmann’s text, presents classical Greek art as the measure of taste (and thus asserts an a-historical norm with universal claims) while simultaneously historicizing and localizing such art. Szondi persuasively argues that this model, from a methodological standpoint, is inherently self- contradictory. A-historical normativity and historicist relativism cannot be reconciled and thus classicism’s own claims cannot be upheld. Winckelmann’s “Gedancken,” we see once again, seems to stand at the endpoint of a tradition. The text is representative of a classicism that has incorporated historicism into its own model, yet in so doing, has become internally inconsistent.

In my view, there is no means of extricating Winckelmann’s “Gedancken” from the methodological contradiction that Szondi identifies; it is inscribed into the text’s very architecture. And yet, despite this argumentative weakness, there is one organizing pattern of thought in the “Gedancken” that will exert influence well beyond the historical

21 Peter Szondi, “Antike und Moderne in der Ästhetik der Goethezeit” in Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I, ed. Jean Bollack et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 26. 20 and aesthetic borders of classicism. It is Winckelmann’s philosophical-historical account of the relationship between art and beauty. As I will show, it represented the greatest threat posed to beauty’s relevance during the eighteenth century and provoked a literary response—one that I shall explore in the third section of this chapter. This philosophical- historical model can be summarized thusly: Winckelmann superimposes the aesthetic code ‘beautiful/not beautiful’ onto the historical categories ‘ancient/modern.’ In so doing, he constructs a speculative philosophy of history in which the beautiful is located in the ancient past and the not- or less-than-beautiful is situated in the present.

To grasp the major implications that such a model of history holds for the question of beauty’s relevance, we need look no further than the first study of Friedrich

Schlegel, himself an admirer of Winckelmann. Written between 1795 and 1797,

Schlegel’s “Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie” builds upon Winckelmann’s philosophical-historical model and pronounces in the preface from 1797 that the beautiful is not a crucial category for modern poetry: “Das Schöne ist also nicht das Ideal der modernen Poesie und von dem Interessanten wesentlich verschieden.” 22 Schlegel’s conclusion—one of the strongest expressions of art’s decoupling from the beautiful in the late eighteenth century—is virtually unthinkable without the mapping of the oppositions

‘beautiful/not beautiful (or, in Schlegel’s case, “the interesting”)’ onto the dualism

‘antique/modern.’ In his Athenäum, published in 1798, Schlegel explicitly credits

Winckelmann with clarifying the “absolute difference” between the antique and

22 Friedrich Schlegel, “Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie” in Studien des Klassischen Altertums, vol. 1, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn, München, Wien: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1979), 213.

21 modern.23 Schlegel’s conclusion in the “Studium” makes the following clear: once the beautiful is situated within the historical realm of antiquity, and the modern era is presumed to be a fundamentally different one, then art of the modern era—if it is to respond to the demands of its own time—must deviate from the beautiful and find a new ideal.24 For Schlegel, this new ideal of art was the “interesting”—a category he sees exemplified in Shakespeare, and one defined by its deviation from beauty. In the example of Schlegel, we thus see how Winckelmann’s philosophical-historical model, his dual mapping of ‘beautiful/not beautiful’ and ‘antique/modern’, could lead to the conclusion that the beautiful is an artifact of the past—by virtue of historical necessity—and that the future of poetry lies elsewhere.

That such a clear pronouncement of beauty’s inconsequentiality emerges from

Winckelmann’s model of history is a supreme irony. For whereas Schlegel has no investment in beauty and its relevance for modern art, Winckelmann consistently points

23 In Athenäum fragment #149, Schlegel credits Winckelmann with clarifying the essential differences between antiquity and modernity: “Der systematische Winckelmann, der alle Alten gleichsam wie Einen Autor las, alles im ganzen sah, und seine gesamte Kraft auf die Griechen konzentrierte, legte die Wahrnehmung der absoluten Verschiedenheit des Antiken und des Modernen, den ersten Grund zu einer materialen Altertumslehre.” Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. II: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I, 1796-1801, ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), 188-189.

24 Hegel, like Friedrich Schlegel, will accept Winckelmann’s alignment of antiquity with the beautiful, yet he draws entirely different consequences. In his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Hegel sees art reaching its zenith in classical art and beauty. The consequence that Hegel draws, however, is not that art must abandon beauty (Schlegel), but that art itself no longer fulfills the function it once did: not only beauty is anachronistic, but art itself. As Frederick Beiser writes, “While Hegel agreed with the romantics against Winckelmann that classical values could not be restored in the modern age, he still believed with Winckelmann against the romantics that classicism was the epitome of artistic achievement; Hegel’s end of art thesis was simply Winckelmann’s classicism without his doctrine of imitation.” Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 286. In this sense, we can see Winckelmann’s localization of the beautiful to antiquity as a precursor to Hegel’s notion of the end of art.

22 to beauty’s universal importance. 25 In his “Gedancken,” Winckelmann states that beauty—ideal beauty, to be precise—is the reason for Greek art’s superiority over that of the moderns. Paradoxically, the thinker for whom beauty is the measure of art is also responsible for a philosophical-historical model that ultimately undermines beauty’s relevance.

Dual Coding in Winckelmann’s Historical Model

Winckelmann’s philosophical-historical model, which I have summarized abstractly in terms of two codes, arises from a series of speculative assertions made in his

“Gedancken” and “Erläuterung.” Collectively, they construct a self-consciously idealized image of ancient Greece that was, even in Winckelmann’s own time, highly questionable.26 My interest here lies not in critiquing the claims his texts advance about ancient Greece. Rather, my goal in briefly reconstructing them is to show how they produce the overriding pairings—antiquity with the beautiful, modernity with lack of beauty—that define Winckelmann’s influential philosophical-historical model and ultimately pose a grave challenge to beauty’s relevance.

25 In his “Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen” from 1763, for example, Winckelmann identifies beauty as “die höchste Absicht der Kunst.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen,” Kleine Schriften, 211-233, here 213.

26 Renate Reschke, for example, convincingly argues that the ‘constructed’ quality of Winckelmann’s portrayal of ancient Greece was obvious to a contemporary audience: “Schritt um Schritt zeichnete Winckelmann das Bild einer Antike, hin zu einer Idealität, deren offensichtlicher Konstruktcharakter von den Zeitgenossen zwar bemerkt wurde, der sie aber nicht abhielt, sich von ihm begeistern zu lassen.” Renate Reschke, “Idealische, vernünftige Schönheit: Johann Joachim Winckelmanns Antikenbild zwischen Aufklärung und Klassizismus. Das Beispiel Apollon” in Vernunft der Aufklärung—Aufklärung der Vernunft, ed. Konstatin Broese et al (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 105-120, here 105. 23 Winckelmann’s coupling of the beautiful with antiquity is grounded in interdependent claims about ancient Greek geo-climatic conditions, cultural practices and artistic production—each of which I will address in the following paragraphs. As we move from Winckelmann’s portrayals of ancient Greek nature to culture to artistic production, I will highlight the continuity between these three layers; each one also progressively intensifies the relationship between antiquity and the beautiful. But beyond establishing the identity between antiquity and the beautiful, these claims accomplish something else. Each level of specificity that identifies the beautiful with the geographic and historical domain of ancient Greece simultaneously serves as a limiting factor. Each

‘locating-in’ also functions as a ‘limiting-to,’ further entrenching the beautiful in ancient

Greece and thereby distancing it from Winckelmann’s own historical place and time. As I will show, at each level of Winckelmann’s argument, the pairing ‘antiquity/beautiful’ in fact generates the corresponding pairing ‘modernity/not beautiful.’

To begin, we will consider Winckelmann’s first general claim, which establishes a natural relationship between beauty and ancient Greece via particular claims about its climate. In his “Gedancken,” Winckelmann first asserts that the climate and geography of ancient Greece were unique:

Der gute Geschmack welcher sich mehr und mehr durch die Welt ausbreitet, hat sich angefangen zuerst unter dem Griechischen Himmel zu bilden. Alle Erfindungen fremder Völker kamen gleichsam nur als der erste Saame nach Griechenland, und nahmen eine andere Natur und Gestalt an in dem Lande, welches Minerva, sagt man, vor allen Ländern, wegen der gemässigten Jahres-Zeiten, die sie hier angetroffen, der Griechen zu Wohnung angewiesen, als ein Land, welches kluge Köpfe hervorbringen würde.27

27 “Gedancken,” 29. 24 For Winckelmann, the moderate climate of ancient Greece—encapsulated here in the metonym “Greek sky”—was extraordinary because its precise conditions fostered exemplary cultural and intellectual production. “Good taste,” according to him, has a definite origin, and it can be traced to these environmental circumstances. But how, precisely? If Winckelmann’s “Gedancken” broadly alleges a direct relationship between climate and cultural achievement, his “Erläuterung” of 1756 provides a much more detailed account. Here he launches a specific ethnogenetic argument linking the climate of ancient Greece to Greek physical beauty—a natural precursor, one might say, to the cultural bloom mentioned above. In the “Erläuterung,” Winkelmann asserts that ancient

Greece’s moderate climate resulted in people whose physical and emotional constitutions were harmonized and who, more importantly, possessed exceptional beauty: “Ein solcher

Himmel, sagt Hippocrates, bildet unter Menschen die schönsten und wohlgebildetesten

Geschöpfe und Gewächse, und eine Uebereinstimmung der Neigungen mit der Gestalt.”28

Here, Winckelmann establishes that the connection between the ancient Greeks and beauty is not arbitrary, but a natural one: climatic environment—nature itself—is responsible for the remarkable beauty manifest in the Greek physique. Elsewhere in the same text he speculates that the Greeks’ relationship to beauty was verifiable down to

28 Here, Winckelmann is most likely alluding to Hippocrates’ “On Airs, Waters and Places.” But Winckelmann’s climatological argument also follows precedents established in a more contemporary source: Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws from 1748. In the fourteenth chapter, titled “Of Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate,” Montesquieu posits that the human body consists of fibers that are influenced by temperature and climate. Customs and laws of peoples are attributable to the climatically determined elasticity and strength of their fibers. Winckelmann’s account differs from Montesquieu insofar as he mobilizes this ‘fiber theory’ to account for the aesthetic and physiological distinctness of the Greeks. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Erläuterung der Gedanken von der Nachahmung” in Kleine Schriften, 97-144, here 100. Hereafter: “Erläuterung.”

25 their muscle fibers and sees further confirmation of it in specific the characteristics of the

Greek language.29

If Winckelmann’s climatological argument constructs a natural relationship between ancient Greece and beauty, it does so at the necessary exclusion of other, especially later civilizations. For Winckelmann, the possibility of reestablishing a privileged relationship to beauty is precluded by nearly insurmountable historical limits.

This we can see in his portrayal of the Greece of his day. Greece would seem to be the one location where the felicitous natural conditions could be replicated and the relationship to beauty thus recuperated. Winckelmann, however, excludes this very possibility. In a poignant passage of the “Erläuterung” concerning contemporary Greece, he states that its modern inhabitants retain only traces of what their ancestors once were30, and that the once-prized geographic regions have long succumbed to ruin from lack of stewardship.31 With this, the beautiful is localized in and confined to ancient Greece.

Implicit as well is that modernity’s relationship to the beautiful is defined by deficiency

29 “Wenn die Natur bey dem ganzen Baue des Körpers, wie bey den Werkzeugen der Sprache verfähret, so waren die Griechen aus einem feinen Stoffe gebildet: Nerven und Muskeln waren aufs empfindlichste elastisch, und befördern die biegsamsten Bewegungen des Körpers.” “Erläuterung,” 102.

30 Here, Winckelmann continues his enthnogenetic argument. He states that although the modern inhabitants of Greece retain recognizable traces of their ancient ancestors, this connection has been historically weakened: “Die heutigen Einwohner in Griechenland sind ein Metall, das mit dem Zusatz verschiedener andern Metalle zusammen geschmolzen ist, an welchen aber dennoch die Hauptmasse kenntlich bleibt.” Ibid., 105.

31 “So gar die Natur des Landes hat durch Nachlässigkeit seine erste Gestalt verlohren. Die Pflanzen in Creta wurden allen andern in der Welt vorgezogen, und itzo siehet man an den Bächen und Flüssen, wo man sie suchen solte, nichts als wilde Ranken und gemeine Kräuter.” Ibid., 105.

26 and distance. Winckelmann’s account of beauty’s emergence is thus simultaneously a narrative of its own disappearance.

Whereas Winckelmann’s first general claim establishes a natural relationship between ancient Greece and beauty, his second one asserts that culture intensifies this connection. Winckelmann argues that the ancient Greeks—extending and improving upon the preexisting natural relationship32—developed a culture whose entire energies were directed toward the production and observation of physical beauty:

Überhaupt war alles, was von der Geburt bis zur Fülle des Wachsthums zur Bildung der Cörper, zur Bewahrung, zur Ausarbeitung und zur Zierde dieser Bildung durch Natur und Kunst eingeflößet und gelehret worden, zum Vortheil der schönen Natur der alten Griechen gewürckt und angewendet, und kan die vorzügliche Schönheit ihrer Cörper vor den unsrigen mit der grösten Wahrscheinlichkeit zu behaupten Anlaß geben.33

Out of its origins in nature, Greek culture emerges with the task of promoting schöne

Natur, that is, bringing about beauties that nature alone cannot realize. In his

“Gedancken,” Winckelmann identifies cultural practices—gymnastics exercises, beauty competitions and the donning of non-restrictive clothing, to name a few—that advance this goal by refining and presenting beautiful human form. And yet physical conditioning

32 In Winckelmann’s accounts of ancient Greece in the “Gedancken” and “Erläuterung,” the categories of nature and culture do not have an oppositional relationship. Rather, culture is portrayed as an extension or refinement of natural predispositions. In the “Gedancken,” for instance, gymnastic exercises lend ‘noble form’ to the already naturally beautiful bodies: “Der Einfluß eines sanften und reinen Himmels würckte bey der ersten Bildung der Griechen, die frühzeitigen Leibes-Uebungen aber gaben dieser Bildung die edle Form.” “Gedancken,” 31. Likewise in the “Erläuterung,” nature alone is not responsible for the Greeks’ positive attributes; rather, it informs culture: “Diese Vorzüge der Griechen scheinen sich vielleicht weniger auf die Natur selbst, und auf den Einfluß des Himmels, als auf die Erziehung derselben zu gründen.” “Erläuterung,” 99.

33 “Gedancken,” 37.

27 is but one aspect of the ancient Greek culture of beauty, according to Winckelmann. He also emphasizes the equally important role that techniques of observation and visualization fulfilled. Referencing Aristotle, Winckelmann submits that Greek children were instructed in drawing, a practice that—through visual apprehension and artistic representation—taught students to recognize and observe beauty.34 Taken in aggregate, this mobilization and direction of ancient Greek culture toward the realization of beauty resulted in bodies that were objectively superior to modern ones. If natural conditions engender an initial, biologically-based discrepancy between the beauty of ancient Greek and modern bodies, culture is responsible for a widening and intensification of this gap.

Together, these natural and cultural conditions account for the disparity between “die vorzügliche Schönheit ihrer Cörper vor den unsrigen.” Winckelmann’s account of ancient

Greek culture thus reiterates the dual coding ‘ancient/beautiful’, ‘modern/lack of beauty’.

It strengthens the connection between ancient Greece and beauty, and explicitly marks the modern or contemporary in terms of lack.

In Winckelmann’s third claim, which concerns artistic practices, the identification of ancient Greece with beauty reaches its zenith; accordingly, the gap between antiquity and modernity’s access to beauty is also at its most magnified. This intensification is due to the fact that, in Winckelmann’s portrayal of ancient Greece, aesthetic production builds upon an edifice that nature and culture have pre-established. The very locations where the Greek physique is trained, displayed and judged, also function as an

34 For Winckelmann, this aesthetic pedagogy had supplementary benefits: it produced informed judges who were schooled in adjudicating and evaluating beauty. “An gründlichen und gelehrten Richtern konte es in diesen Spielen nicht fehlen, da die Griechen, wie Aristoteles berichtet, ihre Kinder im Zeichnen unterrichten liessen, vornemlich weil sie glaubten, daß es geschickter mache, die Schönheit in den Cörpern zu betrachten und zu beurtheilen.” Ibid., 32. 28 educational site for Greek artists and philosophers: “Die Schule der Künstler war in den

Gymnasien, wo die jungen Leute, welche die öffentliche Schamhaftigkeit bedeckte, gantz nackend ihre Leibes-Uebungen trieben. Der Weise und der Künstler giengen dahin

[…]”.35 What the ancient Greek artists and philosophers see, of course, are beautiful bodies that nature and culture have produced—bodies that are qualitatively superior to those of beautiful moderns.36 However, just as important, they observe them within a naturalized cultural context. Contrast this with Winckelmann’s depiction of the modern artist, who inhabits an artificial space, his atelier, and views an emotionally unmoved model affecting different poses.37 The disparity between what the ancient Greek artist viewed (and the environmental context in which he viewed it) versus that of his modern

35 Ibid., 33.

36 In his “Gedancken,” Winckelmann consistently emphasizes that the beauty of the ancient Greek body is superior to that of a beautiful modern one: “Der schönste Cörper unter uns wäre vielleicht dem schönsten Griechischen Cörper nicht ähnlicher, als Iphicles dem Hercules, seinem Bruder, war.” Ibid., 30. Winckelmann also emphasizes this difference when comparing what an ancient Greek artist would have seen at a gymnasium, versus what a modern artist views in his studio: “Das schönste Nackende der Cörper zeigt sich hier in so mannigfaltigen, wahrhaften und edlen Ständen und Stellungen, in die ein gedungenes Model, welches in unseren Academien aufgestellet wird, nicht zu setzen ist.” Ibid., 33.

37 In the following passage, Winckelmann characterizes the problem facing the modern artist, who inhabits a world of artificiality. Anticipating Schiller’s description of the sentimental, Winckelmann describes the improbability of the modern artist producing art equivalent to that of the ancient Greeks: “Die innere Empfindung bildet den Character der Wahrheit, und der Zeichner, welcher seinen Academien denselben geben will, wird nicht einen Schatten des wahren erhalten, ohne eigene Ersetzung desjenigen, was eine ungerührte und gleichgültige Seele des Models nicht empfindet, noch durch eine Action, die einer gewissen Empfindung oder Leidenschaft eigen ist, ausdrücken kan.” Ibid., 33. Later in the “Gedancken,” Winckelmann once again emphasizes the context in which artistic observation takes place. In contrast to the modern artist, the Greeks had the opportunity to observe the beautiful in its natural (and in this case cultural) habitat: “Der Unterschied aber zwischen ihnen [die Griechen] und uns ist dieser: Die Griechen erlangeten diese Bilder, wären auch dieselben nicht von schönern Cörpern genommen gewesen, durch eine tägliche Gelegenheit zur Beobachtung des Schönen der Natur, die sich uns hingegen nicht alle Tage zeiget, und selten so, wie sie der Künstler wünschet.” Ibid., 37.

29 counterpart has far-reaching consequences. The ancient Greeks’ frequent observation of beauty within a naturalized environment leads to their discovery of more abstract forms of beauty not existentially present in nature itself:

Diese häufigen Gelegenheiten zur Beobachtung der Natur veranlasseten die Griechischen Künstler noch weiter zu gehen: sie fiengen an, sich gewisse allgemeine Begriffe von Schönheiten so wohl einzelner Theile als gantzer Verhältnisse der Cörper zu bilden, die sich über die Natur selbst erheben solten; ihr Urbild war eine blos im Verstande entworfene geistige Natur.38

Once again, we see a reinforcement of the relationship between ancient Greece and beauty—this time at the level of artistic imagination (and later, production). Nature and culture provide the ancient Greek artist with empirical instantiations of beauty. These he observes and later synthesizes, arriving at ideal (yet non-Platonic) forms of beauty.39

Precisely because the modern artist lacks the same empirical basis, because he observes qualitatively inferior forms of beauty in a de-naturalized context, he is unable to gain immediate access to the aforementioned ideal beauties. In contrast, the ancient Greek

38 Ibid., 34.

39 For Winckelmann, the ancient Greeks’ observation of empirical forms of beauty did not lead to slavish imitation of an object in its singularity; rather, a collection of observations provided the material for a synthesis. The result is an idealization based upon the general, as opposed to individual details. Furthermore, the imitation of the singular alone, the reproduction of the characteristic and not the ideal, is what defines modern painting, as exemplified in the genre of the portrait and in Dutch painting: “Die Nachahmung des Schönen der Natur ist entweder auf einen einzelnen Vorwurf gerichtet, oder sie sammlet die Bemerckungen aus verschiedenen einzelnen, und bringet sie in eins. Jenes heißt eine ähnliche Copie, ein Portrait, machen; es ist der Weg zu Holländischen Formen und Figuren. Dieses aber ist der Weg zum allgemeinen Schönen und zu Idealischen Bildern desselben; und derselbe ist es, den die Griechen genommen haben.” Ibid., 37.

30 artist, who conceives these ideal beauties in his mind, imbues them in his works of art.40

The ancient Greek work of art has the status of a portal to the past and to ideal beauty.

In summarizing Winckelmann’s claims about ancient Greek climate, culture and artistic production, we have observed how they align the beautiful with antiquity, more specifically ancient Greece, and thereby define the modern in terms of its distance from beauty. I have described this earlier in terms of a dual coding that Winckelmann’s early texts create. The fundamental question is—apart from Winckelmann’s specific claims and his rhetoric—what story does this overriding dual code tell us? Is it a narrative of modern art’s inability to fulfill its purpose in the production of beauty; or, is it an account of beauty’s increasing disappearance, distance and irrelevance—an account that history itself has seemingly written? This conceptual framework forces a choice between two different values. One must either side with beauty (and therefore privilege ancient art), or modernity (and therefore regard art as separate from beauty); there is no easy accommodation of the two.

Because Winckelmann chooses beauty—a category that his philosophical- historical model partitions from his own time—he must devalue modernity and modern art in order to render it inadequate. On a rhetorical level, Winckelmann therefore encourages the reader to view modern art—due to its distance from the beautiful—as impoverished, errant from its aesthetic purpose (presentation of beauty). He therefore also persuades contemporaneous artists to emulate ancient Greek works of art and

40 “Die Kenner und Nachahmer der Griechischen Werke finden in ihren Meister-Stücken nicht allein die schönste Natur, sondern noch mehr als Natur; das ist, gewisse Idealistische Schönheiten derselben, die, wie uns ein alter Ausleger des Plato [Proclus] lehret, von Bildern bloß im Verstande entworffen, gemacht sind.” Ibid., 30. 31 thereby re-secure a (mediated) relationship to beauty and produce what he defines as great art: that is, beautiful art. The only “modern masters” [neuerer Meister] who

Winckelmann praises, are those who, he argues, created great works of art—by emulating the ancient Greeks.41

Nevertheless, Winckelmann’s rhetorical maneuvers betray the fundamental weakness of his argumentative position. He presents the modern artist as one who lacks access to sufficiently beautiful bodies, who inhabits the synthetic space of “Academien,” and whose models are incapable of even emitting “einen Schatten des wahren.” He deploys the rhetoric of artificiality in order to undermine the legitimacy of contemporary art that deviates from his normative position. And yet this charge of artificiality is applicable to the very art he prescribes. Artistic production based upon emulation of the ancients is equally susceptible to the charge of artificiality insofar as it is removed from demands of its own time, and ignores history’s judgment of beauty. Winckelmann thus appropriates the rhetoric of artificiality in order to ward off from his own position this line of attack. Furthermore, Winckelmann devalues the modern artist in order to distract his reader from a more relentless foe: history itself and its marginalization of beauty.

Winckelmann’s theoretical framework—and the disastrous implications it holds for beauty’s relevance—exceeds the very rhetoric he mobilizes to contain it.

In my estimation, it is not modernity and modern art that occupy the disadvantaged position in this philosophical-historical model, but rather beauty itself.

Beauty is isolated in the ancient past and—absent a total recalibration of modern

41 Artists from post-antiquity that Winckelmann includes in this group, for example, are Michelangelo, Raphael and Poussin. 32 culture—can only be replicated via study and emulation of past exemplars. The requirement for beauty’s contemporary reintroduction is thus the production of art whose gaze is directed towards the past and maintains an inauthentic relationship to the present.

It is art as ancestral worship. As we have seen in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, since the ancients have already territorialized the terrain of the beautiful, the moderns must seek to create art with an ideal that is beyond that, or different from, beauty. In the example of

Schlegel, we thus see one who reads Winckelmann’s dual coding as a narrative of beauty’s increasing irrelevance. According to this reading, history necessitates that modern art abandon beauty; history necessitates, hastens, and proclaims beauty’s demise.

To assess the novelty of Winckelmann’s model of history, one need only compare him with one of his contemporaries, Charles Batteux, whose Les Beaux-arts réduits à un même principe was published in 1746, just nine years before Winckelmann’s

“Gedancken.” Here Batteux develops a concept of “la belle nature,” or beautiful nature, the theoretical predecessor of schöne Natur that Winckelmann employs. With this,

Batteux attempts to show that all art can be traced to the same rational principle: imitation of beautiful nature. Batteux retroactively attributes this rational organization of art around beauty to the ancients as well. In his text, Batteux describes a fundamental continuity between the ancients and the moderns:

Il me suffit d’avoir marqué quel est le véritable objet des Arts, d’avoir montré qu’il a été le même dans tous les tems; & que d’ailleurs tous les hommes polis l’ont toujours reconnu par la voix du sentiment qui, dans ce genre, va beaucoup plus vîte & plus sûrement que la plus subtile Métaphisique. Homere, Virgile, Terence, Raphaël, Corneille, Le Brun, Racine, malgré la différence des tems, des gouts, des génies, des

33 gouvernemens, des climats, des moers, des langues, se sont tous réunis dans le point essentiel, qui est de peindre la Nature & de la choisir.42

Whether the artists are ancients such as Homer or Vergil, or moderns like Racine, the principal of their art is the same. As we have seen, Winckelmann adopts the notion of beautiful nature, but he localizes it in the ancient past. Because of a discontinuity between it and modernity, beautiful nature is not readily accessible to the modern artist. According to Winckelmann, the sole viable option for the modern artist is to imitate the ancients, but this, too, has its problems. As Winckelmann lays out in the beginning of the “Gedancken,” moderns, because of their lack of proximity to beauty, are unable to readily perceive it, hence Winckelmann’s citation of Nichomachus “Nimm meine Augen…”43 In the next section, I will show how Winckelmann, in his descriptions, seeks to both recuperate a relationship to the beautiful that has been lost by showing contemporary readers how to see it.

42 Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-arts réduits à un même principe (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), pg. 91.

43 “Gedancken,” 30. 34 Part II. Description vs. History: The Belvedere Torso and Winckelmann’s Recuperation of Beauty

Traurig ist es, wenn man das Vorhandne als fertig und abgeschlossen ansehen muß. Rüstkammern, Galerien und Museen, zu denen nichts hinzugefügt wird, haben etwas Grab- und Gespensterartiges; man beschränkt seinen Sinn in einem so beschränkten Kunstkreis, man gewöhnt sich, solche Sammlungen als ein Ganzes anzusehen, anstatt daß man durch immer neuen Zuwachs erinnert werden sollte, daß in der Kunst, wie im Leben, kein Abgeschlossenes beharre, sondern ein Unendliches in Bewegung sei. —Goethe, “Winckelmann”44

In 1764, less than 10 years after the second printing of his “Gedancken,” the first edition of Winckelmann’s magisterial Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums was published. Winckelmann’s exhaustive study of ancient art and culture was met with great acclaim. It challenged the antiquarian approach to art and offered a new paradigm for understanding it within a vast historical context. And yet, early reviews in learned

German-language journals contain not only adulation, but also expressions of puzzlement, which I shall later relate in detail. The subject of the reviewers’ bemusement: several vivid, self-contained descriptions of ancient statuary, which Winckelmann incongruously situates amongst his more rhetorically reserved accounts of historical periods such as the

Peloponnesian War. Elizabeth Prettejohn, in Beauty and Art: 1750-2000, offers a summary of how these descriptions rupture the continuity of the historical narrative established in the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums:

Winckelmann interrupts the smooth chronological flow at intervals to introduce a striking description of an existing work of ancient art, or more precisely a dramatic account of his own experience of such a work.

44 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Winckelmann” in Werke, vol. 12, Schriften zur Kunst und Liteatur, Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994), 96-129, here 116. 35 Abruptly, at these points, the perspective shifts away from scholarship, from history, from the past tense, from third-person narrative. Suddenly the emphasis is on the visual, on the present, on the singularity of the work rather than its position in a historical sequence, on the way ‘I’ (Winckelmann) experience it rather than on its objective properties.45

Within the context of the Geschichte der Kunst, Winckelmann’s descriptions enact a break in the pre-established narrative, temporal, perspectival and discursive orders. And yet these formal discrepancies are, most likely, not the sole reason why eighteenth- century readers were surprised by the descriptions. As Alex Potts has pointed out, “we still must not let drop from view that these descriptions were very different, both in character and function, from anything that would normally pass as scientific or scholarly description at the time.”46 Even as descriptions, they deviate from historical norms.

Coincidental with the growth of historical epistemology as a research paradigm today, Winckelmann’s descriptions of statuary have been the subject of renewed critical attention. Accounting for their unconventional style and literary qualities and relating them to a broader cultural phenomenon or project has been a central question that scholarship has sought to address. Katherine Harloe, for example, has highlighted various allusions to classical literature in the Paris manuscript of Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Apollo, and argued that said allusions “aim at recreating the visuality of an ancient viewer of the statue by constructing an imaginative context in which attitudes

45 Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art: 1750-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 18- 19.

46 Alex Potts, “Disparities between Part and Whole in the Description of Works of Art” in Regimes of Description, ed. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 135-150, here 137.

36 appropriate to its ancient mode(s) of reception would be evoked.”47 In this way, despite their disturbance of the narrative in the Geschichte der Kunst, the descriptions seek to restore an ancient form of visuality and are thus reconcilable with the goals of

Winckelmann’s project itself. Although Alex Potts—correctly, in my view—has emphasized the disparities between Winckelmann’s descriptions and contemporaneous descriptive practices, he has shown how an internal tension in the genre of description resounds in Winckelmann’s stylized description of the Belvedere Torso. Focusing on the complex relationship between part and whole, Potts points to “an anxiety which surfaced from time to time in eighteenth-century culture, one concerning a possible disparity in

‘exact’ empirical description between attending to and articulating individual details, and apprehending a larger totality.”

Whereas Potts detects in Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso an anxiety about the epistemological status of the genre of description, it is Helmut

Pfotenhauer who connects Winckelmann’s descriptions, in particular that of the

Belvedere Torso, to a much broader problem. Pfotenhauer—referencing a self-reflection of Winckelmann at the end of the 1776 Vienna edition of the Geschichte der Kunst— argues that, for Winckelmann, art history has compensatory function: it compensates for the loss and destruction of art. “Die Kunstgeschichte als der Schwanengesang von der

Kunst ist Kompensation des Verlusts, ist eine imaginäre Komplettierung, ein liebender

Traum.”48 Art history, as a historicizing enterprise, therefore recognizes not only the

47 Katherine Harloe, “Allusion and Ekphrasis in Winckelmann’s Apollo Belvedere,” The Cambridge Classical Journal 53 (January 2007): 229-247, here 246.

48 Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Zerstückelung und phantasmatische Ganzheit: Grundmuster ästhetischer Argumentation in Klassizismus und Antiklassizismus um 1800 (Winckelmann, Moritz, Goethe, 37 pastness of what is past, but the impossibility of its being brought back: “[…]

Historisierung steht im Zeichen des Nicht-Mehr—eines Nicht-mehr nicht nur als

Vergangenes, sondern auch als im Grunde Unwiederbringlichen. Diese Historisierung ist bei allem Gegenstandsbezug immer auch Literarisierung, Konstruktion, ist nie bloße

Rekonstruktion eines Gegebenen.”49 For Pfotenhauer, because Winckelmann’s art history has a compensatory function, it is never simply a reconstruction, but necessarily has a literary component. From this position, whereby Pfotenhauer relativizes the distinction between historical and literary discourses, he is able to situate Winckelmann’s descriptions as an extension—as opposed to an interruption—of the project of the

Kunstgeschichte and of classicism in general. Pfotenhauer then refers to Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso, the completion of its damaged parts, and the apotheosis of Hercules as performing classicism’s attempt to triumph over historical destruction via a phantasm: “Man sieht: Klassizismus ist der phantasmatische Triumph

über die Hinfälligkeit der sinnlichen Welt, deren hermeneutische Wendung ins

Übersinnliche.”50

Pfotenhauer’s approach, his connection of Winckelmann’s descriptions to an underlying, perhaps unsolvable problem—in his case, the loss of art (Kunst)—is elucidating, and similar to the argument I will advance here. And yet I part company with him on several issues. In contrast to Pfotenhauer, I join Harloe and Potts in emphasizing the peculiarity of Winckelmann’s descriptions, the difficulty of integrating them within a

Jean Paul)” in Der Fragile Körper: Zwischen Fragmentierung und Ganzheitsanspruch, ed. Elena Agazzi and Eva Kocziszky (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2005), 121-131, here 122.

49 Ibid., 123.

50 Ibid., 124. 38 contemporary conception of the genre of description, or within the narrative of the

Geschichte der Kunst.

The first part of my argument thus consists in establishing what an eighteenth- century reader might have expected from a description as well as its epistemic value as an alternative to conceptual knowledge. Second, I will consider early reviews of

Winckelmann’s 1764 version of the Geschichte der Kunst in order to isolate the particular elements of his descriptions that depart from contemporaneous readers’ expectations. As I will show, the elements that most confounded readers are the use of

“poetic” language as well as representations of a viewer—often read by contemporaneous readers as Winckelmann himself—who, in contemplating ancient Greek statuary, is overcome by a state of enthusiasm. These two elements, I will argue, illustrate that

Winckelmann’s descriptions not only possess a self-consciously literary style, but that it is deployed in order to address the problematic relationship between beauty and modernity, as I have described it earlier.

In the face of a modern subjectivity that is no longer accustomed to recognizing ancient beauty, in the face of history that has destroyed ancient Greek statuary,

Winckelmann offers an enthused beholder. My reading will focus on his “Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom,” published in the Bibliothek der schönen

Wissenschaften in 1759. Third, in my reading of this text, I will show how the first- person narrative depiction of the beholder offers a contemporaneous viewer a model for how to recognize and respond to the beauty of ancient Greek statuary. Moreover, in describing the beholder’s imaginative reconstitution of the statue—and thus departing from the generic demand that description reproduce what is existentially present— 39 Winckelmann seeks to recover the beauty that has been lost to history. Transformed within the literary text is thus both the statue itself (it is restored to a whole) as well as the viewer, who is moved by its beauty. Whereas Pfotenhauer sees art history as well as

Winckelmann’s descriptions as compensating for the loss of art, I maintain that

Winckelmann’s descriptions attempt to recuperate a lost connection to beauty. Tracing the literariness of Winckelmann’s descriptions to anxiety about the problematic relationship between modernity and beauty is also what distinguishes my position from

Harloe, with whom I have much in common. Last, I will consider the limits of description as a form by examining Karl Philipp Moritz’s critique of Winckelmann and consider to what extent his own theoretical text, “Die Signatur des Schönen,” borrows from

Winckelmann’s transformation as a means of engaging beauty.

Description as a Genre in the Eighteenth Century

In the German context, Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Grosses vollständiges

Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, published between 1731 and 1754, provides a general overview of description and distinguishes it from definition. Whereas a definition provides all the essential concepts [conceptus essentiales] of the thing being defined, a description includes non-essential elements [accidentia] in its account and thus functions as an imperfect definition [imperfecta defintio].51 The description, according to

51 “Description, es ist dieselbe eine Art der Definition, und wird solche der Definitioni in specie entgegen gesetzet. Bey der Definition müssen alle conceptus essentiales vorhanden seyn; bey der Description nehmen wir nur die Accidentia, damit wir in Mangel einer nähern Erkänntniß, doch nur in etwas das [illegible, illegible] lernen. Sie ist also imperfecta definitio: deswegen wir auch dieselbe nicht eher als im Nothfalle gebrauchen müssen. Mit der Definitione nomina kan sie nicht verglichen werden, indem diese das gantze Object vorstellen muß, welches doch bey der Definition nicht ist.” Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon, Cited 40 Zetler’s Universallexicon, therefore necessarily imparts imperfect knowledge. Although there is a clear epistemological hierarchy that privileges conceptual knowledge and thus definition over description, the entry in Zedler’s portrays description as a flawed, but not un-useful, form of knowing.

The very same exclusion of description from conceptual knowledge will also be asserted in Diderot’s Encyclopédie entry for description in the belles-lettres, written by the theologian Edmé Mallet. For Mallet, description “tries to know a thing” by identifying “properties” and “situations that are particular to it” yet “the thing described cannot be completely known because a description does not fully contain or fully expose the essential attributes of the thing.” The latter, total knowledge of a thing’s essence, is achieved by conceptual knowledge alone and is the goal of philosophy: “Grammarians are content with descriptions; philosophers demand definitions.” Descriptions, according to Mallet, fail to isolate the “essential attributes” and include attributes that are

“incidental.” Yet if they fail in capturing a pure and general truth about something, it is because they have a different function: to “convey singularity or individuality.” If description necessarily falls short of the concept’s ability to convey knowledge of a whole class of things, it still has value in presenting the single case.52

from the online version provided by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (http://www.zedler- lexikon.de/)

52 Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de, and Edme-François Mallet. "Description." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Victor Lenthe and Ana Lincoln. Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0002.595 (accessed August 10, 2013). Originally published as "Description," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 4:878–879 (Paris, 1754). 41 The practice of description during the eighteenth century in England, France, and

Germany, is complicated. If its status was subordinate to that of the definition, it still had an important function: to accurately represent in words bodies of knowledge and things.

Eighteenth-century description can be said to consist of two crucial elements: an implicit truth-claim, and a linguistic means of conveying said truth, which often had an aesthetic value. These two elements, however, existed in uneasy relationship to one another.

Joanna Stalnaker, in her book The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia, shows how the genre as a whole was “[…] a site of methodological tensions and completing truth claims that resulted in epistemological and linguistic experimentation and transformation.”53 She argues that during the late Enlightenment, a division between scientific and literary description began to emerge, which later resulted in what we now regard as scientific and literary discourses; eighteenth-century description as a genre is thus, for her, a locus where the tensions that lead to this eventual discursive differentiation emerge.54 A key stage of her argument—and of particular interest to me—is her challenge to Foucault’s assertion that the classical episteme is dependent upon the erasure of language external to the regime of representation.55

53 Joanna Stalnaker, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 212.

54 “Although we generally think of the Enlightenment as a time when the sciences (rather than science) and belles-lettres (rather than literature) were not yet distinct discourses, I argue that in the late Enlightenment it became necessary to think about description in terms of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in our modern distinction between literature and science.” Ibid., 6.

55 “From the Classical age, language is deployed within representation and in that duplication of itself which hollows itself out. Henceforth, the primary Text is effaced, and with it, the entire, inexhaustible foundation of the words whose mute being was inscribed in things; all that remains is representation, unfolding in the verbal signs that manifest it, and hence becoming discourse.” 42 Stalnaker argues that if Foucault were correct, eighteenth-century descriptions would not include the describer—that is, the producer of the description—in the description itself.56

In showing the presence of the describer in eighteenth-century descriptions, Stalnaker offers a differentiated and corrective account of this cultural practice.

It is in this broader context that I wish to situate Winckelmann’s descriptions of statuary. In the 1764 edition of his Geschichte der Kunst, Winckelmann includes lengthy descriptions of four statues (the Laocöon, the Apollo Belvedere, the Belvedere Antinous and the Belvedere Torso), one of which includes a first-person beholder, or describer in the description: the Apollo Belvedere. If we consider early reviews of the Winckelmann’s text, there are two recurring elements that appear: bewilderment at the emotional state of the describer (who they take to be Winckelmann himself) and at the “poetic” language employed. For example, in his review of the Geschichte der Kunst in the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künsten in 1764, Christian Felix Weiße writes the following of Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Apollo: “Dieser Apollo ist das höchste Ideal der Kunst, unter allen uns übriggebliebenen Werken. Hr. W. ist von dessen Schönheit so gerührt, daß er in der prächtigen Beschreibung desselben fast in eine

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 79.

56 “If, as Foucault argued in his famous chapter on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the representation regime characteristic of the classical episteme depends upon the effacement of the figure responsible for its representation, the classical episteme should emerge with the emergence of the describer. But a closer look at the Enlightenment describers who adopted that identity demonstrates how inextricable it was from the representational practices and epistemological grounding Foucault took to be characteristic of the classical episteme.” The Unfinished Enlightenment, 9-10.

43 dichterische Begeisterung geräth.”57 The next year, an anonymous review (thought to be written by Christian Gottlob Heyne) published in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen states that there isn’t room enough to present “all the oddies” [alles merkwürdige] in Winckelmann’s text:

Aber wie viel würden wir nicht noch zu sagen haben, wenn wir alles merkwürdige, das in beyden Theilen enthalten ist, auch nur kurz hätten anzeigen wollen! Noch einiges müssen wir hinzusetzen [.] Der Hr. V. hat mit einer ganz besondern Beredsamkeit die Beschreibung der Denkmähler der alten Kunst verfertiget, und er scheinet von der Betrachtung derselben oft begeistert, und zu der erwünschten Höhe des Geistes erhoben worden zu seyn. Mit einem so mächtigen Schwunge erhebt sich auch bisweilen seine Rede zu dem poetischen, in Bildern und Ausdrucke.58

Common to both reviews are the identification of the descriptions’ first-person beholder with Winckelmann himself and the characterization of his psychological and emotional state as “begeistert,” enthused. It is a term that would seemingly clash with the sobriety that knowledge production demands. Both also refer to the language of Winckelmann’s descriptions as poetic—“dichterisch” or “poetisch.” Rather than explicitly question the epistemological value of the descriptions or address in what ways they support or undermine the historical argument presented in the Geschichte der Kunst, both reviewers offer distanced, or skeptical appraisals and deem it necessary to relate those qualities— poetic language, an enthused beholder—that depart from their expectations. In short: the very uniqueness of Winckelmann’s descriptions provokes second-order descriptions.

57 Christian Felix Weiße, “Joh. Winckelmanns Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums,” Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künsten, vol. 11 (1764), 268-289, here 282.

58 [Anonymous], Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen unter der Aussicht der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, issues 33, 34 (18. & 21. March, 1765), 265-272; 273-279, here 275-276. 44 There are a few important points I wish to extract from these two reviews. First, given Stalnaker’s account of description as a site of methodological tension that would eventually give way to literary and scientific discourses, the reviewers’ explicit references to Winckelmann’s poetic language confirm that there was a contemporary awareness of a linguistic shift in Winckelmann’s descriptions themselves. Winckelmann appropriates the genre of description and, I would argue, places it in an ambiguous or liminal zone. His descriptions, insofar as they appear within the context of an art- historical study, seemingly retain claims to epistemological weight. At the same time, as I will show, they incorporate elements that are recognizable as literary discourse. In other words, the very discursive dissociation that Stalnaker identifies emerges in

Winckelmann’s descriptions—and his tilt decidedly in the direction toward literary discourse.

The key element that I believe validates my designation of Winckelmann’s descriptions as “literary” is the fact that they break with a central aim of description: presentation of knowledge about an object. In Winckelmann’s case, his descriptions deviate from this norm not by omission, but by addition. Winckelmann not only includes a describer in his descriptions, but also the describer’s subjective experience of the statue itself. As the reviewer in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen remarks, the enthused beholder or describer, who he takes to be Winckelmann, “erhebt [sich] auch bisweilen seine Rede zu dem poetischen, in Bildern und Ausdrucke.” This elevated, poetic language transcends a mere difference in discourse insofar as it provides extra content: poetic images [Bilder]. The inclusion of the poetic images imagined by the enthused describer as he contemplates the object is crucial to the literariness of 45 Winckelmann’s texts. Not because they contribute a supplementary layer of meaning, but because they transform the objects themselves. This departure from an objective account of the characteristics of object, this inclusion of images that are purely imagined, is what qualifies Winckelmann’s descriptions as literary. Insofar as they self-consciously attribute these images to the imagination of a beholder, they offer themselves as accounts that possess a fictive element.

Winckelmann’s Belvedere Torso

If the reviewers cited above recognize a poetic element in Winckelmann’s descriptions and help us establish the extent to which his descriptive practices depart from a historical norm, they do not venture a guess at why Winckelmann does this.

Perhaps the most discerning contemporary reader and critic of Winckelmann’s descriptions was Denis Diderot—a describer of art in his own right. It is Diderot, in his

Salon of 1765, who most clearly thematizes the discrepancy between the actual work of art described and Winckelmann’s description of it. More importantly, by implicitly comparing Winckelmann to Cervantes’ character Don Quixote, Diderot intimates that

Winckelmann’s descriptions can be understood as a response, albeit a quixotic one, to historical change:

I’m fond of fanatics, not the ones who present you with an absurd article of faith and who, holding a knife to your throat, scream at you: “Sign or die,” but rather those who, deeply committed to some specific, innocent taste, hold it to be beyond compare, defend it with all their might, who go into street and household, not with a lance but with syllogistic decree in hand, calling on everyone they meet to either embrace their absurd view or to avow that the charms of their Dulcinea surpass those of every other earthly creature. […] Such a one is Winckelmann when he compares the production of ancient artists with those of modern artists. What doesn’t he 46 see in this stump of a man we call the Torso? The swelling muscles of his chest, they’re nothing less than the undulations of the sea; his bent shoulders, they’re a great concave vault that, far from being broken, is strengthened by the burdens it’s made to carry; and as for his nerves, the ropes of ancient catapults that hurled large rocks over immense distances are mere spiderwebs in comparison. Inquire of this charming enthusiast by what means Glycon, Phidias, and the others managed to produce such beautiful, perfect works, and he’ll answer you: by the sentiment of liberty which elevates the soul and inspires great things; by rewards offered by the nation, and public respect; by the constant observation, study, and imitation of the beautiful in nature, respect for posterity, intoxication at the prospect of immortality, assiduous work, propitious social mores and climate, and genius… There’s not a single point of this response one would dare contradict. But put a second question to him, ask him if it’s better to study the antique or nature, without the knowledge of and study of which, without a taste for which ancient artists, even with all the specific advantages they enjoyed, would have left us only mediocre works: The antique! he’ll reply without skipping a beat; The antique! … and in one fell swoop a man whose intelligence, enthusiasm, and taste are without equal betrays all these gifts in the middle of the Toboso.” 59

Here, Diderot clearly satirizes Winckelmann’s privileging of ancient art as well as his directive that artists should study it instead of nature itself. Winckelmann is presented as an eccentric who is gifted with “intelligence, enthusiasm, and taste,” but who compromises these very virtues once he engages in prescriptive aesthetics. At the same time, Diderot’s comparison of Winckelmann with Don Quixote also transcends satire and offers a penetrating analysis.

Underneath Winckelmann’s “enthusiasm,” his imaginative descriptions of ancient statuary, Diderot perceives a subjectivity that is unsatisfied with the present, with modern art, and who seeks through transformation to recover what has been lost to history— however impossible or improbable it might be. Diderot’s analogy between Don Quixote and Winckelmann is predicated upon a fundamental similarity: both find ideals in the

59 Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1765 in Diderot on Art, Volume I, trans. John Goodman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 156-157. 47 past and seek to overcome their historical erosion by imaginatively transforming the present. Don Quixote transforms windmills into giants, demands that his interlocutors swear to the incomparable beauty of Dulcinea de Toboso—all in an effort to revive knight errantry and its values, which survive only in works of chivalric romance. So, too,

Winckelmann imaginatively transforms the Torso from a “stump of a man” into a body with much grander implications and evangelizes for the primacy of ancient Greek art.

Diderot seems to suggest that Winckelmann seeks to revive the values—“the sentiment of liberty which elevates the soul and inspires great things; […] rewards offered by the nation, and public respect; […] the constant observation, study, and imitation of the beautiful in nature, respect for posterity, intoxication at the prospect of immortality, assiduous work, propitious social mores”—that produced the ancient works of art and that have been lost to history. But whereas Don Quixote’s quest is pursued through the syllogistic reconfiguration of daily life, Winckelmann’s takes place in the space of imaginative literature, in his descriptions.

Diderot’s identification of the Belvedere Torso statue as a key figure for understanding Winckelmann’s complex relationship to history is also substantiated in

Winckelmann’s publication history. The Belvedere Torso is the only description of statuary that he published multiple times: a first version in the Bibliothek der schönen

Wissenschaften und freyen Künste in 1759; the second, an abridged version, in the

1764/1776 editions of the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums; a third version, similar to the first, was published in his treatise on allegory, Versuch einer Allegorie in 1766. In my

48 reading, I will concentrate on the earliest and lengthier “Beschreibung des Torsos im

Belvedere zu Rom” from 1759.60

Winckelmann’s continued interest in the Torso, I suggest, can be attributed to the fact that it embodies several problems, and thus demands Winckelmann’s attention more than other comparable works. Famously, Winckelmann confers to it the highest distinction: in the 1759 description he refers to it as the most beautiful work of its kind to survive, and in his later description in the Geschichte der Kunst, Winckelmann attributes it to an even greater age of artistic production than the Apollo Belvedere.61 If the

Belvedere Torso represents one of the most beautiful and greatest pieces of statuary, there are two impediments to its appreciation by a modern audience, both of which have been brought about historically. As I have sought to establish in the first section of this chapter, the modern viewer, according to Winckelmann, is presumed to lack the requisite techniques of observation necessary to identify and value beauty. Second, on an abstract level, the maimed condition of the Torso—the very fact that the Torso is a torso—points to history’s destruction of the beautiful and its incongruity with modernity.

Winckelmann’s description, I argue, is an attempt to counteract these two problems—the

60 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom,” Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künsten,” vol. 5 (1759), 33-41. Subsequent citations of the “Beschreibung” will be from Kleine Schriften edition.

61 In the description from 1759, Winckelmann refers to it as “das schönste in seiner Art, und unter die höchste Hervorbringung der Kunst zu zählen ist, von denen, welche bis auf unsere Zeiten gekommen sind.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom,” Kleine Schriften, 169-173, here 170. Hereafter: “Torso.” In the Geschichte der Kunst, he asserts “ja, man könnte sagen, daß dieser Herkules einer höhern Zeit der Kunst näher kommt als selbst der Apollo.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, ed. Wilhelm Senff (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1964), 293. 49 modern viewer’s impaired ability to register beauty and history’s physical destruction of beauty itself—in the realm of literature and thus recover the lost connection to beauty.

The strategy by which Winckelmann pursues this end is to first craft a beholder who addresses his readership in intimate terms and guides them to the statue. This beholder has a pedagogical function: in describing the statue he provides instruction in how to visualize its beauty. Additionally he serves as an exemplar, relating his aesthetic experience of the statue so that the readers themselves might use it as a model. Second, the scene of aesthetic experience detailed in Winckelmann’s description takes the form of a transformative event, whereby the beholder imagines the progressive restoration of the damaged statue to a former state and the beholder’s insight into the beautiful statue is completed. By making the completed statue present through the temporality of an unfolding narrative, the description seeks to overcome the distance between modernity and beauty. As I have argued earlier, insofar as Winckelmann’s description relates an imagined scene, it qualifies as literature. And yet there is a further reason why this text may be considered literary. As the beholder relates his experience of the damaged statue, he performs an allegoresis. Each step of the description becomes an exercise in writing on top of the body: the beholder extends the body via his recollection of Hercules’ deeds, via recourse to myth and its literary transmission. From this perspective, Winckelmann’s text, as a literary text, reflects upon and performs its ability to recuperate historical loss, by recourse to literary technique and memory.

From the outset of the description, Winckelmann makes clear that one of its goals is to explain the beauty of the Torso: “Denn es ist nicht genug zu sagen, daß etwas schön

50 ist: man soll auch wissen, in welchem Grade, und warum es schön sey.”62 Each step of the description is therefore not only dedicated to presenting the statue, but developing an argument for its beauty. The beholder in Winckelmann’s description constructs an ideal reader, who is addressed with the informal you. In so doing, he prepares him for the intimate mode of interaction required for understanding the sculpture. Equally important is that he prepares them for the problematic condition of the statue:

Ich führe dich itzo zu dem so viel gerühmten, und niemals genug gepriesenen Trunk eines Herkules; zu einem Werke, welches das schönste in seiner Art, und unter die höchste Hervorbringung der Kunst zu zählen ist, von denen, welche bis auf unsere Zeiten gekommen sind. Wie werde ich dir denselben beschreiben, da er der zierlichsten und der bedeutendsten Theile der Natur beraubet ist! So wie von einer mächtigen Eiche, welche umgehauen und von Zweigen und Aesten entblößet worden, nur der Stamm allein übrig geblieben ist, so gemißhandelt und verstümmelt sitzet das Bild des Helden; Kopf, Brust, Arme und Beine fehlen.63

Here, the beholder in Winckelmann’s text reflects upon the difficulty of the task before him. On the one hand, he argues for the superiority of the statue’s quality; on the other, he must acknowledge that it is materially compromised. The objective of the description is thus not to describe what is existentially present, but to offer what he refers to as an

“Idealische Beschreibung”: an ideal description not of that which is, but what should be.64

62 “Torso,” 169.

63 Ibid., 170.

64 At the beginning of the description, Winckelmann writes, “Diese Beschreibung gehet nur auf das Ideal der Statue, sonderlich da sie idealisch ist, und ist ein Stück von einer ähnlichen Abbildung mehrerer Statuen.” At the end he also closes by referring to it as an “Ideale Beschreibung.” Ibid., 169, 173.

51 Winckelmann’s beholder then proceeds to describe each part of the statue, relating it to a different labor that Hercules undertook: “In jedem Theile dieses Körpers offenbaret sich, wie in einem Gemählde, der ganze Held in einer besondern That, und man siehet, so wie die richtigen Absichten in dem vernünftigen Baue eines Pallastes, hier den Gebrauch, zu welcher That ein jedes Theil gedient hat.”65 What follows is a meditation on and transposition of different bodily regions of the statue—the shoulders, chest, muscles, etc.—into distinct narratives of Hercules’ ordeals. If history has inscribed itself in the statue in the form of destruction, Winckelmann’s beholder writes on top of this, recalling literary accounts of Hercules’ deeds. The Hercules that the beholder presents, the one originally embodied in the sculpture itself, is a post-apotheosis

Hercules: his “immortal body.” Piece by piece the beholder glides over each region until, in the moment of contemplating the missing head, the beholder begins to imagine the progressive completion and extension of all the missing extremities:

Mich deucht, es bilde mir der Rücken, welcher durch hohe Betrachtungen gekrümmet scheinet, ein Haupt, welches mit einer frohen Erinnerung seiner erstaunenden Thaten beschäfftiget ist; und indem sich so ein Haupt voll von Majestät und Weisheit vor meinen Augen erhebet, so fangen sich an in meinen Gedanken die übrigen mangelhaften Glieder zu bilden: es sammlet sich ein Ausfluß aus dem Gegenwärtigen und wirket gleichsam eine plötzliche Ergänzung.66

Winckelmann’s beholder will also invite the reader to use his imagination in encountering the statue: “Der erste Anblick wird dir vielleicht nichts, als einen ungeformten Stein sehen lassen: vermagst du aber in die Geheimniße der Kunst einzudringen, so wirst du ein Wunder derselben erblicken, wenn du dieses Werk mit einem ruhigen Auge betrachtest. Alsdenn wird dir Herkules wie mitten in allen seinen Unternehmungen erscheinen, und der Held und der Gott werden in diesem Stücke zugleich sichtbar werden.” Ibid., 170.

65 Ibid., 170.

66 Ibid., 172.

52 As the beholder’s sentences unfold in the present, so does the rest of the ideal body conjured during the aesthetic experience. Once the head, the vessel containing Hercules’ mind, appears, the beholder begins to perceive the lost whole. If Winckelmann’s description amounts to an act of hermeneutic reconstruction, a reforming of the destroyed statue by recalling the myths that correspond to the different regions of the corpus, then the ultimate act of divination, of re-creation in the spirit of the original artist, would be to gain access to the idea that preceded the physical creation of the statue: the idea of the ideal statue. This proves to be a step beyond the capabilities of description itself:

O möchte ich dieses Bild in der Größe und Schönheit sehen, in welcher es sich dem Verstande des Künstlers geoffenbaret hat, um nur allein dem Ueberreste sagen zu können, was er gedacht hat, und wie ich denken würdig zu beschreiben. Voller Betrübnis aber bleibe ich stehen, und so wie Psyche anfieng die Liebe zu beweinen, nachdem sie dieselbe kennen sollte! Mein großes Glück nach dem seinigen würde seyn, dieses Werk gelernet; so bejammere ich den unersetzlichen Schaden dieses Herkules, nachdem ich zur Einsicht der Schönheit desselben gelanget bin.67

If description is incapable of accessing and communicating the original image of the statue in the mind of the artist, it does provides the beholder with “insight into the beautiful.” Winckelmann’s description, instead of striving for conceptual knowledge, seeks to understand the beautiful in terms of its relationship to history. In response to history’s destructive transformation of a statue embodying beauty and its distancing of modern man from the beautiful, Winckelmann’s description seeks to transform them both again and thereby recover a connection that has been lost.

In my reading, I have sought to show how Winckelmann’s description—

67 Ibid., 173. 53 insofar as it incorporates events imagined by a subjectivity—employs a literary mode of representation. And yet, despite its literary qualities, the precise status of this text still eludes easy classification. What is the result of this discourse? Is it a different kind of description that has literary aspirations as a work of art in its own right? And if so, what epistemological weight, if any, does it carry with respect to knowledge of the Torso itself? As I have shown earlier, these are the same questions that Winckelmann’s contemporaries raised when they first read his descriptions. But by 1805, Goethe, in his essay “Winckelmann,” recognizes the literary character of Winckelmann’s descriptions of statuary and on that basis pronounces him a poet—regardless whether he understood himself to be one or not.68 Nevertheless, in lieu of the poetry-or-knowledge opposition, I propose a more productive question. If we hold that Winckelmann’s description of the

Torso employs literary discourse (and I do), what is literature’s position vis-à-vis visual art (represented in this case by the Torso itself)? Further, given the onset of what one might call the issue of beauty’s ‘pastness,’ is there a resulting hierarchy of verbal and visual arts? What roles do the different ‘sister’ arts, as they were then known, occupy?

At first glance, Winckelmann’s description of the Torso would appear to be subordinate to the actual sculpture of the Torso itself. The description, in this view, serves merely as a medium for representing the Torso to an audience that could not see it first-hand, or who sought instruction on how to view it. This view is, to some degree,

68 “Die Poeten der Vorzeit scheinen ihn früher als Dokumente der alten Sprachen und Literaturen, später als Zeugnisse für bildende Kunst interessiert zu haben. Desto wunderbarer und erfreulicher ist es, wenn er selbst als Poet auftritt, und zwar als ein tüchtiger, unverkennbarer, in seinen Beschreibungen der Statuen, ja beinahe durchaus in seinen spätern Schriften. […] Er muß Poet sein, er mag daran denken, er mag wollen oder nicht.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Winckelmann” in Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Maximen und Reflexionen, vol. 12, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, ed. Erich Trunz (München: C.H. Beck, 1994), 120-121.

54 supported by the specific context in which the “Torso” essay was first published.

Winckelmann’s “Torso” description was one of four articles that he wrote from Italy for a

German-speaking audience and which were published in the fifth volume of the

Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künsten.69 Furthermore, in the text itself, Winckelmann also expresses the need for descriptions of the best statues, so that they might benefit young artists and travelers interested in art.70 Once again, we see that the role of such descriptions is to be merely a means of acquainting an audience with the visual art itself, the main concern. Beyond the specific circumstances that surround the

“Torso” and its publication we also find within the text itself a more general hierarchy that privileges the visual arts over the verbal ones. Winckelmann writes, for example, that in the case of the Torso, it is the artist (Künstler) who takes over where the poets

(Dichter) have left off. Whereas the poets’ song goes silent after the apotheosis of

Hercules, the visual artist is able show us the apotheosized Hercules in his immortal body.71 And in a later passage, Winckelmann also states that it is the artist who can create a monument to the perfection of Hercules’ soul after his deification, whereas the poet can

69 Winckelmann’s other three contributions to this issue were: “Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst,” “Von der Grazie in Werken der Kunst,” and “Nachrichten von dem berühmten Stoßischen Museo in Florenz.”

70 “Es wäre zu wünschen, daß sich jemand fände, dem die Umstände günstig sind, welcher eine Beschreibung der besten Statuen, wie sie zum Unterricht junger Künstler und reisender Liebhaber unentbehrlich wäre, unternehmen und nach Würdigkeit ausführen könnte.” “Torso,” 169.

71 “Da, wo die Dichter aufgehöret haben, hat der Künstler angefangen: Jene schweigen, so bald der Held unter die Götter aufgenommen, und mit der Göttin der weigen Jugend ist vermählet worden; dieser aber zeiget uns denselben in einer vergötterten Gestalt, und mit einem gleichsam unsterblichen Leib, welcher dennoch Stärke und Leichtigkeit zu den grossen Unternehmungen, die er vollbracht, behalten hat.” Ibid., 170.

55 only praise the strength of his arms.72 The subordinate position of the verbal arts vis-à-vis the visual arts is not only thematized, but also reinforced in Winckelmann’s text. And more specifically, the verbal arts appear impoverished, unable to access and relate beautiful subjects—the immortal body, the perfect soul of Hercules—that are taken up by the visual arts.

This self-effacing gesture is consistent with the paradigm of representation. Since the objective of the description is to represent the Torso and to therefore not call attention to the means of representing it, the medium of language is systematically de-emphasized in the text. All the same, what a text purports to do is not the same as what it indeed does.

As I have argued earlier, Winckelmann’s description, in my view, is not engaged in mere representation, but in recovery—a project that, in this case, requires re-imagination.

Winckelmann does not merely present the statue in its deficient state; rather, his text models a subjectivity that is able to perceive the statue’s beauty and to imagine its progressive restoration to a former state. Despite the text’s thematic subordination of the medium of language, literary discourse is the very means by and in which the Torso is transformed, its beauty imaginatively restored, and the means by which a readership might learn how to see the Torso as Winckelmann would have wished.

Precisely because the visual arts were thought to possess a comparative advantage in presenting beauty (a position espoused by Winckelmann as well as other contemporaries such as Lessing), these arts are therefore rendered especially vulnerable

72 “Durch eine geheime Kunst aber wird der Geist durch alle Thaten seiner Stärke bis zur Vollkommenheit seiner Seele geführet, und in diesem Stücke ist eine Denkmahl derselben, welches ihm kein Dichter, die nur die Stärke seiner Arme besingen, errichtet: der Künstler hat sie übertroffen.” Ibid., 172. 56 as a consequence of beauty’s precarious position in modernity. In the example of

Winckelmann’s “Torso,” we thus see literary discourse performing a particular role: coming to the aid of visual art and enacting a recuperation of what has been lost.

Beautiful ancient art would seem to require literature to support it, to restore it—if only via imagination—and to reacquaint a modern audience with the luster lost during the course of history.

At the same time, the means by which Winckelmann’s text undertakes this recovery are equally instructive as to its limits. First, its immediate sphere of efficacy is confined: it is only within the description itself, i.e. within the space of literature, that the statue’s completeness and its beauty are recovered—and even so, only momentarily.

Second and more importantly, it is the beholder’s allegorical reading and writing-over of the statue’s regions and extremities that occasions the imagined restoration of the statue’s wholeness. The condition of the possibility of this allegoresis lies outside the statue itself: in the mythical stories of Hercules’ deeds, i.e. in literature, to which the beholder (and

Winckelmann) take recourse. In the end, Winckelmann’s description does not, of course, restore the statue to its pre-destruction form. Instead, body becomes text; description describes literature; literature reproduces itself. What one can hope for from such a description is therefore not the recovery of a statue that is permanently damaged, but the creation of a way of experiencing beauty in which the beholder takes an active role in its very constitution—a mode of experience that is dependent upon literature. And in this sense, ‘recovery’ or ‘recuperation,’ as I have called it here, is less concerned with rescuing an ancient mode of viewing from the past, than with encouraging a new, sentimental mode of observation that is sensitive to problems of historical destruction and 57 that actively seeks to counteract them. Winckelmann’s description responds to beauty’s marginalization by attempting to produce a new beholder.

Belvedere Torso or Apollo Belvedere: Moritz vs. Winckelmann

When we consider the impact of Winckelmann’s descriptions on contemporaneous aesthetic theory, there is one particular response that stands out. It is from Karl Philipp Moritz, who saw the Apollo Belvedere in 1787 with the aid of

Winckelmann’s description from the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. It should be mentioned that the Torso and the Belvedere Apollo occupy distinct positions in

Winckelmann’s canon: whereas the Torso was the most beautiful, the Apollo is “das höchste Ideal der Kunst unter allen Werken des Alterthums, welche der Zerstörung derselben entgangen ist.”73 One statue embodies historical loss, the other survival.

Common to Winckelmann’s descriptions of both statues, however, is his allegorical transposition from body to text, from sculpture to narrative. In his travel journal, Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien, Moritz relates his encounter with the Apollo Belvedere and offers a devastating critique of Winckelmann’s method of description.

Wer diese Worte lieset indem er den Apollo betrachtet, der wird viel zu sehr dadurch gestört, und auf Nebendinge geführt, als daß die reine Schönheit des Ganzen ihn noch rühren könnte. –Er [Winckelmann] muß nach dieser Beschreibung sich die Schönheiten des hohen und einfachen Kunstwerks eine nach der andern gleichsam aufzählen, welches eine Beleidigung des Kunstwerks ist, dessen ganze Hoheit in seiner Einfachkeit besteht.74

73 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Beschreibung des Apollo im Belvedere,” Kleine Schriften, 267-269, here 267.

74 Karl Philipp Moritz, Reise eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788 in Werke, ed. Horst Günther, vol. 2, Reisen, Schriften zur Kunst und Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1993), 414. 58

Moritz’s commentary redeploys arguments from Lessing’s Laokoon, namely, that physical beauty must be perceived instantaneously as a whole, and that the representation of it is therefore the province of visual art.75 Winckelmann’s description of the Apollo— insofar as it advances from one attribute to another, enumerating and relating them to myths—exacerbates problems inherent in verbal representation of physical beauty. The resulting temporalization of the statue, according to Moritz, inhibits one’s ability to perceive it instantaneously as a whole and to therefore appreciate its beauty. Rather than a tribute to the sculpture, Moritz pronounces Winckelmann’s description an “insult.”

Moritz’s observations of Winckelmann’s Apollo description will eventually form the basis of his theoretical treatise from 1788, “Über die Signatur des Schönen.” This text goes beyond Lessing’s media-specific arguments concerning the differences between the verbal and visual arts and instead broadly asserts that all description, in principle, fundamentally fails to reproduce the beautiful in its totality. And to support his theory,

Moritz uses Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Apollo as a prime example.76

75 “Körperliche Schönheit entspringt aus der übereinstimmenden Wirkung mannigfaltiger Teile, die sich auf einmal übersehen lassen. Sie erfordert also, daß diese Teile neben einander liegen müssen; und da Dinge, deren Teile neben einander liegen, der eigentliche Gegenstand der Malerei sind; so kann sie, und nur sie allein, körperliche Schönheit nachahmen.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie in Werke in drei Bänden,” vol. 3, Geschichte der Kunst, Theologie, Philosophie, ed. Joseph Kiermeier-Debre (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), 130.

76 Moritz references Winckelmann’s description of the Apollo Belvedere twice at the end of “Über die Signatur des Schönen” as an example of how description can damage art: “Winckelmanns Beschreibung vom Apollo im Belvedere zerreißt daher das Ganze dieses Kunstwerks, sobald sie unmittelbar darauf angewandt, und nicht vielmehr als eine bloß poetische Beschreibung des Apollo selbst betrachtet wird, die dem Kunstwerke gar nichts angeht.” Karl Philipp Moritz, “Die Signatur des Schönen: Inwiefern Kunstwerke beschrieben werden können?” in Werke, ed. Horst Günther, vol. 2, Reisen, Schriften zur Kunst und Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1993), 588. Hereafter: “Signatur.” 59 Moritz offers an important corrective to what I have argued are the implicit goals of

Winckelmann’s descriptions. In his view, Winckelmann’s method of description, which I have argued is invested in recovery, can also invert itself into an unintentionally destructive endeavor. Moritz writes: “Diese [Winckelmann’s] Beschreibung hat daher auch der Betrachtung dieses erhabenen Kunstwerks weit mehr geschadet als genutzt, weil sie den Blick vom Ganzen abgezogen, und auf das Einzelne geheftet hat, welches doch bei der nähern Betrachtung immermehr verschwinden, und in das Ganze sich verlieren soll.”77 The wholeness that Winckelmann sought to recover in the Torso is what his description disrupts in the case of the Apollo; the means by which the Belvedere Torso undergoes imagined restoration are the very same that inhibit one’s perception of the

Apollo Belvedere. Moritz’s critique calls into question whether description in general, and Winckelmann’s descriptions in particular, can at all enhance perception of visual art and beauty.

The precondition for Moritz’s critique of Winckelmann is that the Belvedere

Apollo comprises a whole [das Ganze] in which one can lose oneself and that instantaneous perception of this beautiful totality is, in fact, possible. The insistence on this possibility as a ground for critique is underwritten by a conception of the symbol that

Walter Benjamin contrasts with allegory in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels from 1925. Here, Benjamin uses Winckelmann’s description of the Torso in his Versuch einer Allegorie to illustrate the difference between baroque allegory78, into which history

77 “Signatur,” 588.

78 In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin argues that in allegory, the beholder is confronted with the “facies hippocratica of history;” that is, Benjamin develops an ontological 60 is inscribed, and the plastic or classicist symbol, which claims transcendent access to a totality:

Wo die Romantik in dem Namen der Unendlichkeit, der Form und der Idee das vollendete Gebilde kritisch potenziert, da verwandelt mit einem Schlage der allegorische Tiefblick Dinge und Werke in erregende Schrift. Eindringlich ist ein solcher Blick noch in Winckelmanns “Beschreibung des Torso des Hercules im Belvedere zu Rom.”: wie er Stück für Stück, Glied für Gleid in unklassischem Sinne ihn durchgeht. Nicht umsonst vollzieht sich das am Torso. Das Bild im Feld der allegorischen Intuition ist Bruchstück, Rune. Seine symbolische Schönheit verflüchtigt sich, da das Licht der Gottesgelahrtheit drauf trifft. Der falsche Schein der Totalität geht aus. Denn das Eidos verlischt, das Gleichnis geht ein, der Kosmos darinnen vertrocknet. In den dürren rebus, die bleiben, liegt Einsicht, die noch dem verworrenen Grübler greifbar ist. Unfreiheit, Unvollendung und Gebrochenheit der sinnlichen, der schönen Physis zu gewahren, war wesensmäßig dem Klassizismus versagt. 79

The conflict between Winckelmann and Moritz, their differing views on description, and the sculptures they choose to focus on, exemplify a fissure between baroque allegory and the classicist symbol. Winckelmann, conscious of historical loss, makes the Belvedere

Torso a centerpiece of his reflections, and regardless which statue he describes, employs an allegorical mode of writing. For Winckelmann, beauty is remote and must be rescued

conception of allegory, whereby allegory, in contrast to the classicist symbol, contains within itself reference to history as a history of suffering [Leidensgeschichte]. “Während im Symbol mit der Verklärung des Unterganges das transfigurierte Antlitz der Natur im Lichte der Erlösung flüchtig sich offenbart, liegt in der Allegorie die facies hippocratica der Geschichte als erstarrte Urlandschaft dem Betrachter vor Augen. Die Geschichte in allem was sie Unzeitiges, Leidvolles Verfehltes von Beginn an hat, prägt sich in einem Antlitz — nein in einem Totenkopfe aus. Und so wahr alle ‘symbolische’ Freiheit des Ausdrucks, alle klassische Harmonie der Gestalt, alles Menschliche einem solchen fehlt — es spricht nicht nur die Natur des Menschendaseins schlechthin, sondern die biographische Geschichtlichkeit eines einzelnen in dieser seiner naturverfallensten Figur bedeutungsvoll als Rätselfrage sich aus. Das ist der Kern der allegorischen Betrachtung, der barocken, weltlichen Exposition der Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt […].” Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 145.

79 Ibid., 154. 61 via allegorizing description, even if the results of such a project are limited. Moritz, however, for whom the beautiful is not historically marginalized, focuses his attention on the Apollo Belvedere, the immediacy of its beauty (and, strikingly, never makes reference to the Torso in Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien). For Moritz, beauty requires not recovery, but contemplation—without the interruption of description.

Moritz’s critique of Winckelmann’s description presupposes that the Apollo

Belvedere comprises a beautiful totality that can be contemplated instantaneously. The implication is that the statue’s beauty is immediate, not remote, and that description distracts, introducing temporality into what should be an a-temporal experience and thus preventing perception of the whole. And yet in a section titled “Apollo im Belvedere” in

Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien, Moritz contradicts himself, suggesting that perception of the totality does not occur spontaneously, but instead requires the aid of a specific cultural practice: viewing the statues by torchlight.

Es ist hier allezeit ein Fest für uns, wenn eine Gesellschaft sich vereinigt, um die Statüen in Belvedere des Abends bei Fackelschein zu betrachten. — Man versäumt diese Gelegenheit nie, weil einem jede dieser Betrachtungen ein sichrer Gewinn und Erwerb für den Geist ist, der einem nachher durch nichts geraubt werden kann.

Und der Unterscheid ist so auffallend, daß man fast nicht sagen kann, man habe diese höchsten Werke der Kunst gesehen, wenn man sie nicht auch zum öftern in dieser Art von Beleuchtung sähe. — Die allerfeinsten Erhöhungen werden dem Auge sichtbar, und in dem, was sonst noch einförmig schien, zeigt sich wiederum eine unendliche Mannigfaltigkeit.

Weil nun alle dies Mannigfaltige doch nur ein einziges vollkommenes Ganze ausmacht, so sieht man hier alles Schöne, was man sehen kann, auf einmal, der Begriff von Zeit verschwindet, und alles drängt sich in einen Moment zusammen, der immer dauern könnte, wenn wir bloß betrachtende Wesen wären.80

80 Reisen eines Deutschen, 414. 62

Moritz’s comments independently confirm the existence of a desire for a more immediate, more intimate experience of beautiful statuary during the late eighteenth century. They express a yearning to perceive the beauty of statues in a transcendental moment, outside of time, “that could last forever.” This very wish presupposes a distance between the beautiful and the contemporary viewer, as well as the intrusion of temporality—both of which must be overcome in order for immediate apprehension of the beautiful totality to transpire. Here, Moritz’s account relates how a specific technique of observation, viewing statues by torchlight, enables this. In the flickering torchlight, a statue’s unity and variety dissolve into one another, forming a perfect whole, temporality disappears, and everything beautiful (alles Schöne) is visible at once, according to Moritz.

The ideal aesthetic experience that Moritz relates here—instantaneous perception of a beautiful totality, the one on which his critique of Winckelmann is based—is no

‘natural’ or unmotivated occurrence, but is instead the product of contrived circumstances.

Paradoxically, for Moritz, immediate perception of the beautiful totality is therefore possible only via the mediation of artificial lighting. Instantaneous perception of the whole is an effect, an illusion.81 In this sense, Moritz’s ideal approaches what Benjamin

81 The relationship between illusion and perception of the whole is not unique to Moritz. In his Laokoon, Lessing describes how the senses apprehend an object in three stages, only the last of which is perception of the whole. According to Lessing, this occurs with such speed that one does not perceive the separate stages of the process: “Wie gelangen wir zu der deutlichen Vorstellung eines Dinges im Raume? Erst betrachten wir die Teile desselben einzeln, hierauf die Verbindung dieser Teile, und endlich das Ganze. Unsere Sinne verrichten diese verschiedene Operationen mit einer so erstaunlichen Schnelligkeit, dass sie uns nur eine einzige zu sein bedünken, und diese Schnelligkeit ist unumgänglich notwendig, wann wir einen Begriff vom Ganzen, welcher nichts mehr als das Resultat von den Begriffen der Teile und ihrer Verbindung ist, bekommen sollen.” Laocoon, 111. For Lessing, the notion that the whole is perceived instantaneously is already illusion. Moritz’s account, by contrast, is all the more remarkable because sensory perception and 63 refers to as “der falsche Schein der Totalität.” Seen in this light, Winckelmann’s description does not interrupt a naturally occurring process of perception, or “tear apart the whole of [the] artwork,” for perception of the whole requires supplementary intervention, modification, medial enhancement.

If the conflict between Moritz and Winckelmann casts doubts upon description and its possibilities, it also highlights commonalities between these two authors. For both, viewing beautiful statuary involves a transformational moment. Yet this transformation also requires a supplement: be it recourse to literature or to other medial aids. For both, ancient statuary—the reference point for eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse on the beautiful— and its beauty cannot be perceived by simply being beheld. For the modern viewer is deficient, compromised. If Winckelmann and Moritz are optimistic that the gap between the beautiful and the modern viewer can be corrected, Schiller’s elegies will chart out a course in which the role of literature is not to recuperate what is lost, but to mourn its loss and to preserve it in memory.

its processes alone do not suffice. Instead, the viewer requires artificial illumination provided by a torch. 64 Chapter 2.

Beauty Irrecoverable: Elegy after Geschichtsphilosophie

Part I. Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Taste

Introduction

Listening to a lecture by Immanuel Kant in 1771, Hermann Ulrich Freiherr von

Blomberg notes the following statement concerning Georg Friedrich Meier: “es ist aber falsch, dass er [Meier] schön und Ästhetisch vor einerley hält, denn zur Ästhetic gehöret nicht nur das Schöne, sondern auch das Erhabene.”82 Kant’s criticism of Meier illustrates a fundamental change that took place in German aesthetic discourse after the mid- eighteenth century. In his Aesthetica from 1750, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten had defined the new discipline of aesthetics in the following terms: “DIE ÄSTHETIK

(Theorie der freien Künste, untere Erkenntnislehre, Kunst des schönen Denkens, Kunst des Analogons der Vernunft) ist die Wissenschaft der sinnlichen Erkenntnis.”83 For

Baumgarten as well as for Meier, the proper subject of aesthetics (sensate cognition) was both beautiful thinking and thinking about the beautiful. But by 1771, the discipline of aesthetics encompassed not only the beautiful, but also the sublime. The inclusion of the latter as a distinct category in German aesthetic discourse can be traced to publications such as Mendelssohn’s Über das Erhabene und das Naïve (1758), among others. Kant’s

82 As cited in Carsten Zelle’s “Von der Ästhetik des Geschmacks zur Ästhetik des Schönen,” in Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik, 1760-1820, ed. Horst Albert Glaser and György M. Vajda (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2000), 371-398, here 377.

83 Alexander Baumgarten, Ästhetik: Lateinisch-deutsch, vol. 1, ed. Dagmar Mirbach (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007), 11. 65 Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen in 1764 and his Kritik der

Urteilskraft in 1790 mark the solidification of the aesthetic category of the sublime in

German aesthetic discourse.

As I showed in my first chapter with the example of Arthur Danto, scholars have argued that the inclusion of the sublime in aesthetic discourse during the eighteenth century had a significant consequence: it precipitated a devaluation of beauty. In On

Beauty and Being Just, written in 1999, four years prior to Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty,

Elaine Scarry argues that “the demotion of beauty […] has come about as a result of its juxtaposition with the sublime,” yet she offers a slightly different account. Rather than describing the eighteenth-century emergence of the sublime as a “rediscovery” as Danto later will, she argues that the sublime was not—initially—a phenomenon distinct from the beautiful. According to Scarry, during the eighteenth century, a functional differentiation of the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful took place, dividing into two categories what was previously understood under the broad term “beauty.” Focusing primarily on Kant’s pre-critical Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und

Erhabenen, Scarry writes:

At the end of the eighteenth century, writers such as Kant and Burke subdivided the aesthetic realm (which had previously inclusively called beauty) into two realms, the sublime and the beautiful. Kant’s early work, the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, gives so straightforward a list that it can be recited, nearly verbatim, as a shorthand, even though it does not convey the many complications of Kant’s own later writing on the subject, nor of the important writings following it. In the newly subdivided aesthetic realm, the sublime is male and the beautiful is female. The sublime is English, Spanish, and German; the beautiful is French and Italian. The sublime resides in mountains, Milton’s Hell, and tall oaks in a sacred grove; the beautiful resides in flowers and Elysian meadows. The sublime is night, the beautiful day. [...]

66 Why should this bifurcation have dealt such a blow to beauty (a blow not intended by the original authors of these treatises nor by later writers on the sublime)? The sublime occasioned the demotion of the beautiful because it ensured that the meadow flowers, rather than being perceived in their continuity with the august silence of the ancient groves (as they had when the two coinhabited the inclusive realm of beauty), were now seen as a counterpoint to that grove. Formerly capable of charming or astonishing, now beauty was the non-astonishing; as it was also the not-male, the not-mountainous, the not- righteous, the not-night. Each attribute or illustration of the beautiful became one member of an oppositional pair, and because it was always the diminutive member, it was also the dismissible member.84

Scarry’s schematic account consists of three stages. In the first stage, she posits the existence of a pre-differentiated notion of beauty that encompassed what would later become the separate categories of the beautiful and sublime. In the second stage, she argues that a bifurcation of this prior took place, differentiating it into two different categories. This process of differentiation occurred in binary fashion: complementary pairings of attributes—relating to activity, gender, or power—were associated with the two terms. In the third stage, Scarry argues that this conceptual differentiation lead, inadvertently, to a form of hierarchization. The beautiful, because it always occupied the

“diminutive” half of the oppositional pairing, was dominated by the sublime. Much like later Danto will, Scarry argues that the sublime became more desirable than the beautiful, because greater strength was accorded to it.

This chapter complicates our understanding of the history of aesthetics by offering an alterative to the argument advanced by both Danto and Scarry, namely, that beauty’s decline in importance is attributable to the rise of the sublime during the eighteenth century. Continuing a line of argument that I established in Chapter I, this chapter shifts focus from the 1750s to the 1790s—that is, to a period after the sublime

84 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 83-84. 67 had long become an established category in German aesthetic discourse. With recourse to theoretical texts by Friedrich Schlegel (Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie) and

Friedrich Schiller (Ueber naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung), it demonstrates that the most explicit questioning of beauty’s status at this time emerged from the Querelles des anciens et modernes—not the privileging of the sublime. After demonstrating how

Schlegel and Schiller independently conceive of a dislocation between the post-classical present and the aesthetic category of beauty, the chapter then examines how Schiller’s elegies of this period respond to this problem.

This chapter is comprised of three parts. Part I examines Friedrich Schlegel’s theoretical text, Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie from 1795-1797. I argue that

Schlegel’s text attests to beauty’s problematic position in modernity. Drawing parallels to

Winckelmann’s dual coding of historical and aesthetic categories, I show that the central premise of Schlegel’s essay—that “das Schöne” is no longer the ideal of modern poetry—both presupposes and expands upon Winckelmann’s historico-philosophical model, which situates beauty in the ancient past, creating a gap between it and present- day modernity. In Schlegel’s text I see a radicalization of this temporal and aesthetic fissure. I argue that whereas Winckelmann advocated for mimesis of the ancients as a remedy for this problem, Schlegel, writing after Sturm und Drang’s break with the paradigm of mimesis, instead relinquishes beauty to the past. According to Schlegel, the ideal of the moderns is “das Interessante”—literature that is preoccupied with exploring a philosophical problem or idea, rather than fulfilling the aesthetic ideal of beauty. While ancient literature is beautiful, Schlegel develops a counter-concept—“das

Charakteristische”—which describes the aesthetic of the interesting. 68 Part II of this chapter demonstrates contemporaneous awareness of the implications of Schlegel’s Studium essay by focusing on Friedrich Schiller’s reception of it. While acknowledging the personal and professional strains between Friedrich Schlegel and Schiller beginning in 1796, I situate Schiller’s disagreements with Schlegel within the context of contemporaneous aesthetic discourse. Starting with an analysis of

Schiller’s letter to Goethe on July 7, 1797, I show that Schiller is troubled by Schlegel’s concept of the beautiful in this essay—its conceptual purity and particular relationship to antiquity—as well as the possibility that the essay might influence aesthetic discourse. I then argue that Schiller’s publication of Aloys Hirt’s essays in subsequent issues of Die

Horen constitutes an attempt to counteract the influence of Schlegel’s intervention in aesthetic discourse, in particular, his concept of the “das Charakteristische” as the defining aesthetic of modernity. By publishing Hirt’s essays, which offer an alternative concept of the “characteristic” and show its existence in ancient art, Schiller attempts to disrupt Schlegel’s dichotomy of antiquity and the beautiful, modernity and the characteristic.

Part III of this chapter considers the evolution of Schiller’s own discursive practices concerning the beautiful and its relationship to the present. I argue that a discursive shift occurs in Schiller’s own writing about the beautiful. Between 1792 and

1795, Schiller examines beauty through the discourses of philosophical aesthetics and anthropology: his “Kallias-Briefe” propose a novel definition of beauty as “Freyheit in der Erscheinung;” Über Anmut und Würde addresses a false opposition that Schiller locates in Kantian aesthetics; and Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen examines beauty’s ability to harmonize an imbalance in modern man. Yet starting in 69 1795, Schiller begins to address beauty in literary discourse, particularly through the form of the elegy. Referencing his essay Ueber naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung from

1796, I argue that after his foray into Kantian transcendental philosophy, Schiller eventually reaches the conclusion that the modern human’s experience of beauty is fundamentally different from that of the ancients. Moderns’ experience of beauty no longer moves, as it once did. Schiller, too, then places beauty in the past—but for very different reasons than Winckelmann did and Schlegel will later do. Schiller’s poetic response to this distance from beauty—one brought about by a new form of aesthetic experience—is to take recourse to the poetic form of the elegy. Focusing on Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung I show how Schiller designates the form of the elegy as properly belonging to the moderns, precisely because they have something to mourn. I then close the chapter by focusing on two different elegies—“Der Spaziergang” and

“Nänie”—in which poetry accounts for and mourns the loss of beauty to the past, while endeavoring to preserve its memory in verse.

Schlegel’s Studium essay

After a series of fits and starts lasting two years, Friedrich Schlegel’s groundbreaking essay Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie is finally published in

January 1797 as part of a volume titled Die Griechen und Römer. Versions of Schlegel’s essay had already circulated prior to this date, yet each of them bore the marks of incompletion or editorial negligence. In the spring of 1796, for example, the first 10 sheets of Schlegel’s finished manuscript were printed, only for production to halt due to the illness of the typesetter and the financial troubles of the publisher, Salomon Michaelis. 70 Two versions of the essay, each with its own deficiencies, were later published in 1796 as articles in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s magazine Deutschland. The first version, mistitled “Göthe. Ein Fragment. Von A.W. Schlegel,” included only a portion of the essay praising Goethe and misattributed the text to Schlegel’s brother, August Wilhelm.

The second publication of the essay in Deutschland correctly identified the author as

Friedrich Schlegel and preserved the essay’s title, yet the article excerpted the original essay so extensively that Schlegel referred to it as “schrecklich entstellt.”85 The 1797 publication was thus the first version to contain the two-year-old essay in its entirety.86

In addition to presenting an unabridged version of the essay, Die Griechen und

Römer also contained a new preface to the text. Written in 1797, two years after the essay was first penned, the preface accounts for the intervening years by reframing the essay’s objectives and offering newer conclusions, which I shall return to later. In one key passage of the preface, Schlegel writes the following:

Diese Abhandlung über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie is nur eine Einladung die alte Dichtkunst noch ernstlicher als bisher zu untersuchen; ein Versuch […] den langen Streit der einseitigen Freunde der alten und der neuen Dichter zu schlichten, und im Gebiet des Schönen durch eine scharfe Gränzbestimmung die Eintracht zwischen der natürlichen und der künstlichen Bildung wieder herzustellen; ein Versuch, zu beweisen, daß das Studium der Griechischen Poesie […] eine notwendige Plicht aller Liebhaber […]”.87

85 Letter from Friedrich Schlegel to Christoph Martin Wieland dated 10. October, 1796. See the Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. XXIII: Bis zur Begründung der Romantischen Schule, 15. September 1788-15. Juli 1797, ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1987), 336-37. Hereafter the Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe will be referred to as KFSA.

86 For more on the complex publication history of Schlegel’s Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie see Ernst Behler’s commentary in KFSA, vol. II: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I, 1796- 1801 (1967).

87 KFSA II, 207.

71 Here, Schlegel outlines two concerns of his essay: the merits of studying ancient Greek

Poesie 88 (Schlegel’s expansive term for literature) and—referencing the “long quarrel between the partial friends of ancient and modern poets”—the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. Rather than regarding both as separate issues, Schlegel’s preface proposes that historical study of ancient Greek literature is capable of resolving the dispute between partisans of ancient and modern art. According to Schlegel, in uncovering the defining principles that underlie ancient—and via comparison—modern cultures, historical study of ancient Greek poetry clarifies a fundamental difference between the two that extends to their respective artistic sensibilities. By revealing the difference—or incommensurability, even—of these two cultural-historical eras (represented in the quote above by the terms natürliche and künstliche Bildung), the study of ancient Greek literature simultaneously demonstrates the legitimacy of both and thus offers a resolution to the Querelle. I will show, however, that this solution comes at a cost. Schlegel’s insistence upon an absolute difference between the cultural contexts of antiquity and modernity, together with his identification of the former with beauty, amplifies the problematic status of beauty in modernity that I showed in the previous chapter on

Winckelmann. Friedrich Schlegel’s Studium essay, I thus argue, inherits and intensifies a historico-philosophical line of argument that renders beauty incongruent with modernity and represents one of the most acute documents of beauty’s waning influence in the context late eighteenth-century German letters. No longer simply distant, as in the case of

88 I will render Schegel’s term Poesie in translations or quotations as “poetry;” in my own arguments and commentary I use the term “literature.”

72 Winckelmann, Schlegel’s Studium essay reveals beauty to be an ideal that was—and, indeed, had to be—abandoned by modern literature.

The very idea of examining cultural artifacts within a broader context, viewing cultural history as unfolding systematically, and presenting it in a rigorous manner, as

Schlegel calls for in the preface, dates to Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des

Alterthums. Published in 1764, it introduced a new paradigm for the historical study of the visual arts and set the precedent for Schlegel’s project of a “Geschichte der

Griechischen Poesie.” Schlegel’s aspiration was to compose an equally exhaustive study of ancient Greek literature, in short, to be what Stefan Matuschek calls a “Winckelmann der Poesie.” 89 Already in 1794 Schlegel had published an essay in the Berliner

Monatsschrift titled “Von den Schulen der griechischen Poesie,” which applies

Winckelmann’s schematic of Aufstieg, Blüte, Verfall to Greek literature, isolating and hierarchizing four different poetic “schools”: the Ionic, Doric, Athenian and Alexandrian.

And just three years after the publication of the Studium essay, in 1800, he announced in the Jenaische Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung that the second volume of Die Griechen und

Römer was to be published in August, “welches für die Kunst der Poesie dasselbe leisten

89 For more on this see Stefan Matuschek’s article, “Winckelmänner der Poesie: Herders und Friedrich Schlegels Anknüpfung an die Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte vol. 77, issue 4 (Dec., 2003): 548-563. If Schlegel mentions Winckelmann only once in the Studium essay—in fact, it is Herder who is honored here—it is because his influence is so transparent. In his Sämtliche Werke, published in 1823, Schlegel makes the following additions to the Studium essay, acknowledging Winckelmann’s importance: “Vor allen aber muß Winckelmann als derjenige genannt und gepriesen werden, welcher zuerst die Geschichte der Kunst und eben dadurch auch die Wissenschaft des Altertums ganz neu begründet hat.” And later, “Denn wiewohl sein Unternehmen zunächst nur auf bildende Kunst gerichtet war; so kann die Anwendung davon auf die Poesie und auf die gesamte geistige und sittliche Bildung des Altertums, nach dem gleichen hohen Schönheitsgefühle und großem Kunstverstande, von dieser festen Grundlage aus, nunmehr leichter gefunden und auch zur allgmeinen Anerkennung gebracht werden.” KFSA I, 365.

73 soll, was Winckelmann für die bildende versuchte; nämlich die Theorie derselben durch die Geschichte zu begründen.”90 Ultimately, Schlegel never completed this empirical study of the history of ancient Greek poetry. Nevertheless, the Studium essay, which was intended as an introduction to the study, in a sense presupposes its completion insofar as it operates with a theory of ancient Greek literature and the cultural context out of which it arose. Proceeding from this premise, the essay offers a theoretical account of the difference between ancient and modern literature. What interests me here is that

Schlegel’s account is structured around a narrative of beauty’s diminishing role in poetic production—one that is precipitated by a disjuncture between antiquity and modernity, rather than the rise of the aesthetic category of the sublime.

Part polemic, literary-historical diagnosis of modernity, and programmatic treatise calling for an “aesthetic revolution,” Schlegel’s essay resists simple summary.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of my argument I will provide a brief synopsis of its main points relating to the different historical stages that Schlegel identifies as well as their relationship to beauty. The portion of the text written in 1795 begins with the observation that modern literature’s “höchstes Ziel und erstes Gesetz der Kunst” 91 could be anything—“nur nicht das Schöne.” This statement is remarkable in that it testifies, in simple and transparent terms, to a contemporary awareness in the late eighteenth century that a gap has arisen between modern literature and the aesthetic category of beauty.

Determining why modern literature is not beautiful (and what its future direction should

90 Friedrich Schlegel, [Ankündigung der geplanten Übersetzung des Platon], KFSA, vol. III: Charakteristiken und Kritiken II, 1802-1829, ed. Hans Eichner (1975), 334.

91 KFSA II, 219. 74 be) are the crucial questions motivating the essay. Schlegel accounts for why this has occurred by means of historico-philosophical argumentation. The essay provides a narrative of historical development, wherein each historical era (antique, modern, and a future stage he calls the romantic) correlates to a different principle of cultural formation, or Bildung. Specifically, he posits the existence of two distinct types of cultural formation

[Bildung] that arose historically and prophesizes the future arrival of a third. These different types of cultural formation condition the art forms proper to each historical era.

Schlegel situates the first type, “natürliche Bildung,” in ancient Greece. Ancient

Greek literature is “objective” insofar as it is faithful in its representation of nature and does not proceed from a prior theoretization. In this sense, Schlegel’s concept of objektive Poesie is analogous to Schiller’s concept of das Naïve. The ideal of ancient

Greek literature, according to Schlegel, is the aesthetic presentation of beauty. The second principle of cultural formation, “künstliche Bildung,” becomes dominant during the post-classical (e.g. modern) era and is preoccupied with the depiction of philosophical problems or issues, which Schlegel calls “the interesting” (das Interessante). Whereas ancient poetry is defined by the beautiful, its modern counterpart is defined by what

Schlegel calls “das Charakteristische”—that is, aesthetic qualities depart from beauty and idealized forms, that attend to the presentation of the singular, the individual. Finally,

Schlegel prophesizes “eine ganz neue Stufe der ästhetischen Bildung,”92 where beauty and objective poetry are recuperated via philosophical reflection.

92 In KFSA II, 262.

75 To assess the radicality of Schlegel’s claims, it is helpful to compare his arguments—their continuities and discontinuities—with those of Winckelmann.93 Like

Winckelmann’s “Gedancken über die Nachahmung,” Schlegel’s essay also presents a historico-philosophical model that employs what I have described as ‘dual coding.’ By this I mean that it associates aesthetic categories with entire historical eras; chiefly, it identifies beauty with antiquity. Yet, there are significant differences in how this identity is justified theoretically. In the case of Winckelmann’s “Gedancken,” the identity antiquity-beauty is supported by climatological arguments and claims about concrete practices that cemented, advanced and enshrined beauty’s importance for ancient Greek culture. Schlegel’s essay perpetuates the identity between beauty and antiquity, yet it has an entirely different theoretical edifice. Schlegel introduces the notion of natürliche

Bildung, a more abstract and expansive concept referring to the conditions out of which aesthetic production arises. Rather than being a conscious goal of ancient Greek literary production, for Schlegel, the beautiful quality of Greek literature is a product of the natural emersion of poetic practice out of engagement with the world.

The identification of the aesthetic category of beauty with ancient Greek antiquity has a similar consequence in the texts of Winckelmann and Schlegel: beauty’s viability as aesthetic norm in post-classical modernity is called into question. All the same, there is still a qualitative difference between status of beauty in Winckelmann, where it is no longer easily at hand, and in Schlegel, where it has become irrelevant. Situating the two

93 In this case, the crucial reference point is not the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, which focuses on shifts in artistic production within antiquity, but instead Winckelmann’s “Gedancken über die Nachahmung,” which foregrounds antiquity and the question of it relevance for modern aesthetic production. 76 texts chronologically, one can thus speak of an erosion of beauty’s normative status. This discrepancy owes to the different theoretical foundations that underwrite Winckelmann and Schlegel’s identification of beauty with antiquity, as well as their different understandings of historical difference and its implications. In both the “Gedancken” and

Studium essay, beauty’s specific relationship to modernity is a function of the difference between antiquity and modernity.

In his Athenäumfragment number 149, written shortly after the Studium essay,

Friedrich Schlegel praises Winckelmann’s role in perceiving the “absolute difference” between the ancients and moderns:

Der systematische Winckelmann, der alle Alten gleichsam wie Einen Autor las, alles im ganzen sah, und seine gesamte Kraft auf die Griechen konzentrierte, legte durch die Wahrnehmung der absoluten Verschiedenheit des Antiken und des Modernen, den ersten Grund zu einer materialen Altertumslehre.94

Schlegel is correct to attribute historical consciousness to Winckelmann, who indeed recognized a fundamental difference between the antiquity and modernity. Nevertheless, to speak of an “absolute difference”—one that would preclude any continuity of norms— would overstate Winckelmann’s position. In his “Gedancken,” Winckelmann recognizes that moderns inhabit vastly different climatic, geographic and cultural landscapes than the ancient Greeks. Yet, this does not result in the negation of beauty as an aesthetic norm in the modern era. Rather, Winckelmann creates a framework in which different historical eras stand in different levels of relative proximity to beauty. While beauty’s relationship to modernity is a fraught one for Winckelmann, it is a problem of historical remoteness, not one of relevance. Modern artists should aspire to beauty, despite its relative inaccessibility. For Winckelmann, historical distance and difference can be mitigated

94 KFSA II, 188-189. 77 through study and mimesis of ancient art, in which beauty is most highly concentrated, hence pleading for a hermeneutics of intimacy. The promise of such a project is that historical difference can be assuaged; beauty, born of the past, can be brought into and reborn in the contemporaneous present.

By the time Schlegel writes his Studium essay in 1795, however, mimesis of ancient art, as a dominant paradigm of aesthetic production, had long since eroded. In between Winckelmann and Schlegel lies a series of intellectual and artistic developments that initiate a break with this model: genius aesthetics and its rejection of rules, the

German literary movement of Sturm und Drang, and more importantly, a new understanding of historicity’s implications for both understanding and producing art.

Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Shakespear” from 1773, published as part of the essay collection Von deutscher Art und Kunst, marks a watershed moment in this evolution.

Here, Herder argues that all works of art are conditioned: they emerge out of a specific cultural and historical context. Because of this cultural-historical embeddedness, normative rules or poetics possess no transhistorical validity. Thus, just as Shakespeare’s tragedies should not be understood or evaluated on the basis of Aristotle’s Poetics, so too artistic imitation of the ancients must be regarded as an inferior practice, insofar as it is does not meet the challenges of its own historical time and cultural specificity.

Writing after Herder’s explication of historicity, Schlegel too does not view ancient art as exemplary for the moderns, as Winckelmann did. But whereas Herder rejects normative poetics—or, to be more precise, a French neoclassical (mis)reading of

Aristotle—Schlegel will adopt an even more radical position of historical relativity. In the 1797 preface to the Studium essay, Schlegel writes the following: 78

Gibt es reine Gesetze der Schönheit und der Kunst, so müssen sie ohne Ausnahme gelten. Nimmt man aber diese reinen Gesetze, ohne nähere Bestimmung und Richtschnur der Anwendung zum Maßstab der Würdigung der modernen Poesie: so kann das Urteil nicht anders ausfallen, als daß die moderne Poesie, die jenen reinen Gesetzen fast durchgängig widerspricht, durchaus gar keinen Wert hat. Sie macht nicht einmal Ansprüche auf Objetivität, welches doch die erste Bedingung des reinen und unbedingten ästhetischen Werts ist, und ihr Ideal ist das Interessante d.h. subjective ästhetische Kraft.—Ein Urteil, dem das Gefühl laut widerspricht! Man hat schon viel gewonnen, wenn man sich diesen Widerspruch nicht läugnet. Dies ist der kürzeste Weg, den eigentlichen Charakter der modernen Poesie zu entdecken das Bedürfnis einer klassischen Poesie zu erklären, und endlich durch eine sehr glänzende Rechtfertigung der Modernen überrascht und belohnt zu werden.95

Like Herder, Schlegel questions the universal applicability of “pure laws of beauty and art.” For, if one evaluates modern literature based upon criteria such as “objectivity” and

“pure unconditioned aesthetic value”—that is, criteria that ancient literature is presumed to embody and that modern literature consistently contradicts—one reaches the conclusion that modern literature has “no value whatsoever.” Rather than proving the latter to be true, this exercise instead illustrates that these “pure laws of beauty and art,” are neither pure, nor universally valid, but in fact historically conditioned as well, and thus not proper measures of modern literature. This juxtaposition of ancient literature

(and its qualities) with modern literature leads to an awareness of their fundamental incommensurability. Instead of leading to a static dichotomy, a dialectical relationship emerges, wherein modern and ancient literature—modernity and antiquity—elucidate each other reciprocally vis-à-vis their absolute difference. According to Schlegel, this comparison holds the promise of leading to an explanation of the “necessity of classical

95 KFSA II, 208.

79 poetry,” the “actual character of modern poetry,” and most importantly, providing a

“gleaming justification of the moderns.”

Schlegel provides a justification for the modern literature by tracing it to its own discrete principle of cultural formation, künstliche Bildung, just as the literature of ancient Greece emerges from natürliche Bildung. Both principles, and the forms of literature to which they give rise, are absolute in their difference; both are justified. The crucial question therefore becomes: what qualities or criteria do not comport with the

“actual character of modern literature” and its origins in künstliche Bildung? Rather than identify specific poetic practices or doctrines—such as the ‘three unities’ that Herder argues are inapplicable to Shakespeare—Schlegel cedes an entire aesthetic category, beauty, to the ancients, and argues that it is not relevant to modern literature.

Nun ist es aber selbst nach der Meinung der Majorität der Philosophen ein charakteristisches Merkmal des Schönen, daß das Wohlgefallen an demselben uninteressiert sei; und wer nur zugibt, daß der Begriff des Schönen praktisch, und spezifisch verschieden sei, wenn er ihn auch nur problematisch aufstellt, und seine Gültigkeit und Anwendbarkeit unentscheiden läßt, der kann dies nicht läugnen. Das Schöne ist also nicht das Ideal der modernen Poesie und von dem Interessanten wesentlich verschieden.96

We observe here, in the affirmative statement that “beauty is therefore not the ideal of modern poetry,” a fundamental decoupling, in late eighteenth-century German aesthetic discourse, of beauty from modernity and modern literature. My point is that this clear formulation of beauty’s untimeliness is not grounded in claims about the superiority of the sublime.97 It instead emerges from Schlegel’s understanding of the distinctness of

96 KFSA II, 213.

97 In this respect, my position is aligned with that of Dietrich Mathy, who remarks that “die romantische Ästhetik in ihrer frühen, theoretischen Version keine qualitative Differenz zwischen 80 historical eras, the cultural impulses that define them, and their relationship to particular aesthetic categories. For Schlegel, beauty is the product of natürliche Bildung and thus is identified with antiquity. Because modernity is a distinctly different historical era, with its own principle of cultural formation, künstliche Bildung, it follows that the artistic ideals applicable to antiquity—“objectivity” and beauty—are not essential to modern literature. Yet Schlegel diagnosis of beauty’s status transcends mere claims to irrelevance.

Beauty not only isn’t the ideal of modern literature: its true ideal—the interesting—and beauty are “fundamentally different.” Schlegel’s rhetoric thus implies a certain irreconcilability of beauty and modern literature’s internal goals. We can therefore say that the identification of antiquity with beauty precludes its compatibility with modernity.

The Crisis of Taste

As I have sought to show, this discourse—in which beauty’s relationship to modernity becomes a problem—can be traced to Winckelmann, where we observe an alignment of historical eras with aesthetic codes. In Schlegel’s adaptation of this discourse, beauty’s position becomes even more jeopardized, because the functional differentiation between antiquity and modernity (and the implications of historicity itself) are more acute than in the case of Winckelmann. Yet there is additional innovation in

Schönem und Erhabenem kennt […]”. Dietrich Mathy, “Zur frühromantischen Selbstaufhebung des Erhabenen im Schönen” in Das Erhabene: Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn, ed. Christine Pries (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humanoira, 1989), 143-160, here 143. For account that aligns the sublime with the ugly, thereby pitting the beautiful against the sublime in Schlegel’s Studium essay, see Günther Oesterle, “Entwurf einer Monographie des ästhetisch Häßlichen: Die Geschichte einer ästhetischen Kategorie von Friedrich Schlegels Studium-Aufsatz bis zu Karl Rosenkranz’ Ästhetik des Häßlichen als Suche nach dem Ursprung der Moderne” in Literaturwissenschaft und Sozialwissenschaften 8: Zur Modernität der Romantik, ed. Dieter Bänsch (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1977), 217-297. 81 Schlegel’s perpetuation of the dual-coding model that is of equal importance. Whereas

Winckelmann identifies beauty with antiquity and modernity with a lesser form of beauty,

Schlegel develops a positively defined counter-concept to the beautiful—one that is not the sublime. Schlegel’s opposition functions according to the pairs antiquity/beauty and modernity/the interesting (along with its aesthetic analogue, “the characteristic”).

Modernity in Schlegel’s model is thus not associated with a lesser form of beauty, but instead possesses its own internal value: the interesting. It is a term that I wish to discuss in detail.

The interesting, Schlegel’s counter-concept to the beautiful, is important both rhetorically and as a specific stage in Schlegel’s historical narrative of the evolution of aesthetic forms. As I mentioned earlier, as an artistic ideal, the interesting refers to the intellectual determinedness of modern literature after the shift from natürliche Bildung to künstliche Bildung, where poetic practice no longer arises naturally, but is preceded and accompanied by conceptual thought. While the interesting and its aesthetic analogue, the characteristic, become the central categories of modern literature, it is important to emphasize that this represents an intermediate stage in Schlegel’s dialectical model.

According to Schlegel, the interesting, as a disruption of the beautiful, cannot lay claim to objectivity or universal validity, and as a result, cannot offer resolution. For Schlegel, beauty alone is capable of this. In a dialectical reversal, the very dominance of the interesting in modernity simultaneously creates the desire for that which it cannot itself fulfill—resolution—thus eventually giving way to a future stage, where a new form of beauty is the dominant aesthetic category. This time, however, rather than occurring naturally, beauty’s dominance is achieved through philosophical reflection. As Schlegel 82 writes in 1795, “Das Übermaß des Individuellen führt also von selbst zum Objectiven, das Interessante ist die Vorbereitung des Schönen, und das letzte Ziel der modernen

Poesie kann kein andres sein als das höchste Schöne, ein Maximum von objektiver

ästhetischer Vollkommenheit.” 98 History unfolds teleologically and aesthetically for

Schlegel, and the beginning—and end—of this narrative is defined by beauty. Beauty thus belongs to both the ancient past as well as to a not-yet-arrived-at future.

This leads to the question of the contemporaneous present, of modernity, which is epitomized in the dominance of the interesting. How is this interlude to be assessed?

Schlegel, I would like to suggest, describes a new historical position with respect to beauty, one that is defined by paradox and unsettledness. On the one hand, beauty is incompatible with modernity; this is expressed in literature’s attachment to beauty’s counter-concept, the interesting. At the same time, beauty’s very untimeliness makes it desirable, insofar as it promises what the present cannot offer. Ultimately, beauty always lies beyond the grasp of modern literary production. Beauty lies in literature’s ancient past, yet is unreachable, because mimesis no longer can serve as a valid means of its recovery. There is also a sense that beauty—in a hitherto unknown form—inevitably belongs to the future, yet as the future becomes the present, beauty abides ever on the horizon. Modernity’s relationship to beauty is therefore defined by irreconcilable, irresolvable tension: modernity both follows and precedes beauty, occupying an unstable middle position, defined by an extended state of provisionality.

98 KFSA II, 253.

83 Schlegel seizes upon the instability and unsettledness of modernity, the transitoriness of the period in which the interesting reigns, and refers to it on more than one occasion in his essay as a “crisis.” In his words, “Die Herrschaft des Interessanten ist durchaus nur eine vorübergehende Krise des Geschmacks […]” and “So ist die höchste

ästhetische Erschlaffung in dem Zusammenhange unsres Zeitalters ein offenbar günstiges

Symptom der vorübergehenden wohltätigen Krise des Interessanten, welcher nur die schwache Natur unterliegt.”99 In invoking this term, Schlegel’s essay, more than simply diagnosing the current state of modern literature, engages in a rhetorical endeavor.

Declaring a crisis is a performative act; a crisis exists only after it is consciously recognized as such. By drawing attention to the Krisenhaftigkeit of the current state,

Schlegel’s essay discursively brings a crisis into being. For Schlegel, künstliche Bildung, the interesting and modernity itself constitute an aesthetic crisis—more specifically, a crisis of taste. It is only via consciousness of the crisis and subsequent philosophical intervention that a new principle of cultural formation can emerge and sublate the prior one. Schlegel’s essay thus enacts a critical intervention in aesthetic discourse, proclaiming the crisis of taste in modern literature and, in the very same gesture, calling for its overcoming. To invert Schlegel’s famous Athenäum fragment “Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet,” one might say that here Schlegel plays the role of the prophet as a historian facing forwards.

99 KFSA II, 254 and 258. 84 Immediate responses to Schlegel’s Studium essay and its proclamation of a crisis of taste are mixed, ranging from outright dismissal to earnest concern.100 Consider, for example, the response of seventy-three-year-old Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, who dispenses with Schlegel’s essay in a mere six lines. In an epigram written around

November 18, 1797, titled “Guter Rath,” Klopstock offers “advice” to the younger

Schlegel, urging him in elegiac couplets to consult the Greek works themselves before disseminating groundless claims about them:

Neu sey das Bild, ihr wolt es ja! das von den Griechen ihr aufstelt, Aber verlanget nur nicht, daß es das ihrige sey. Wenn ihr zu fragen verstündet; so würd’ ich euch rathen, der Griechen Werke zu fragen, bevor von den Verkanten ihr schreibt. Lasset doch endlich euch die Geschichte lehren, daß nie noch Schief gesehenes wahr wurde durch Modegeschwäz.101

Klopstock dismisses Schlegel’s essay as mere “fashionable claptrap,” because its portrayal of the Greeks is too idealizing to be to be taken seriously. His mockery of the

Studium essay here also echoes an earlier epigram he wrote, “An die Ausleger der Alten,” wherein young writers are cautioned not to fall under the spell of Winckelmann and his fabulous imagination of the Greeks: “Doch gewarnet seyd vor Einem auch: Lasset / Euch nicht, wie Winkelmann, von dem wachenden Phantasos täuschen”. 102 Because the premises of Schlegel’s essay are so fanciful, the image of the Greeks so far-fetched,

Schlegel’s argument collapses, leaving behind little more than inflated rhetoric. If

100For a more thorough account of the publication history of the Studium essay, and how each version led to different readings of Schlegel’s position—as a partisan of the ancients, or as a partisan of the moderns—see Ernst Behler’s commentary in KFSA I.

101 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “Guter Rath,” Werke und Briefe, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, Abteilung Werke, vol. II: Epigramme, ed. Klaus Hurlebusch (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1982), 41.

102 Ibid., 55. 85 Klopstock is able to mock Schlegel’s essay, it will receive a much more earnest response from Friedrich Schiller.

Part II.

“Die Charakteristik” vs. “das Charakteristische”: Schiller’s Proxy War

Literary scholarship has long viewed displays of reciprocal acrimony in the texts of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller through the prism of biographical criticism.

And for good reason: theirs is a story of potential cooperation that gradually developed into mutual antagonism. The younger Schlegel—who as late as July 1796 sought

Schiller’s approval and assistance, only to be ignored—eventually aligned himself with

Schiller’s archrival, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, publisher of the republican journal,

Deutschland. Under his own name, Schlegel penned a review, “An den Herausgeber

Deutschlands, Schillers Musenalmanach betreffend,” appearing at the end of July 1796, which criticized Schiller’s poetry in Musen-Almanach auf das Jahr 1796. In retaliation,

Schiller wrote several Xenien, which appeared in Musen-Almanach auf das Jahr 1797, satirizing Schlegel’s review and the highly excerpted version of his Studium essay “Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie von Friedrich Schlegel. Neustreliz,” which had appeared in Deutschland. One of the Xenien, for example, titled “Die zwei Fieber,” compares Schlegel’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution and the Greeks in terms of a fever: “Kaum hat das kalte Fieber der Gallomanie uns verlassen, / Bricht in der

86 Gräkomanie gar noch ein hitziges aus.”103 Schiller’s response to the review, although mocking in tone, does not suggest a reaction rising above irritation, although Christian

Gottfried Körner will try to comfort Schiller in a letter dated July 22, 1796.

Nevertheless, for the greater part of the following year, until around May 1797, most installments of Deutschland, which appeared every two months, will contain a new review of Die Horen—without an identified author. After reading a review in the seventh edition of Deutschland, which most likely appeared in October 1796, Schiller writes to

Goethe, expressing his extreme displeasure with Reichardt, the presumed reviewer: “Sie müssen doch das neue Stück vom Journal Deutschland lesen. Das Insekt hat das Stechen wieder nicht lassen können. Wirklich, wir sollten es noch zu Tode hetzen, sonst ist keine

Ruhe vor ihm.”104 Schiller, however, was mistaken: the author of the article was instead

Friedrich Schlegel. By May 1797 Schiller had become aware of Schlegel’s role as the author of the reviews. The definitive break between Schlegel and Schiller came after the publication of twelfth and final installment of Deutschland, which included Schlegel’s reviews of the eighth through the twelfth Stück of Die Horen. In his review of the twelfth

Stück of Die Horen, Schlegel asserted that an essay by the Jena historian Karl Ludwig von Woltmann was plagiarized and also remarked that the second year of the publication consisted mainly of translations, which indicated an overall decline in quality. This

103 Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke (Nationalausgabe), vol. I: Gedichte in der Reihenfolge ihres Erscheinens, 1776-1799, ed. Julius Petersen and Friedrich Beißner (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1943), 348. The epigramm cited above is number 320. The epigramms concerning Schlegel specifically are numbers 320 – 331. Hereafter, all texts cited from Schiller will be from the Nationalausgabe, which I will refer to as NA.

104 Letter from Schiller to Goethe on 16 October 1796. NA XXVIII: Schillers Briefe 1.7.1795- 31.10.1796, ed. Norbert Oellers (1969), 311.

87 incensed Schiller, leading him to pay Friedrich’s elder brother, August Wilhelm, for his contributions to Die Horen and to sever their business relationship in a letter dated May

31, 1797.105 In this letter, and in another one written to August Wilhelm one day later,

Schiller would complain of a breach of trust and the “insults of your brother.”106

The discord between Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller that I have outlined above is a convenient reference point for scholarship insofar as it supports literary-historical distinctions between the aesthetic projects of Goethe and Schiller, on the one side, and the Schlegel brothers on the other, between Klassik and Frühromantik, as well as their respective programmatic organs, Die Horen and Athenäum. In Part II, I will discuss Schiller’s response to Schlegel’s Studium essay, focusing on a letter he writes to Goethe on July 7, 1797 as well as his interventions in the republic of letters, chiefly,

105 “Es hat mir Vergnügen gemacht, Ihnen durch Einrückung Ihrer Uebersetzungen aus Dante und Shakespear in die Horen zu einer Einnahme Gelegenheit zu geben, wie man sie nicht immer haben kann, da ich aber annehmen muß, daß mich H Frid Schlegel zu der nehmlichen Zeit, wo ich Ihnen diesen Vortheil verschaffe, öffentlich deßwegen schilt, und der Uebersetzungen zuviele in den Horen findet, so werden Sie mich für die Zukunft entschuldigen. Und um Sie, einmal für allemal, von einem Verhältniß frey zu machen, das für eine offene Denkungsart und eine zarte Gesinnung nothwendig lästig seyn muß, so lassen Sie mich überhaupt eine Verbindung abbrechen, die unter so bewandten Umstanden gar zu sonderbar ist, und mein Vertrauen zu oft schon compromittierte.” Schiller to A. W. Schlegel on May 31, 1797. NA XXIX: Schillers Briefe 1.11.1796-31.10.1798, ed. Norbert Oellers and Frithjof Stock (1977), 80.

106 “Sehr ungern, seyen Sie versichert, entschloß ich mich zu dem unangenehmen Schritt, aber die Umstände foderten ihn längst Ihnen mache ich keinen Vorwurf, und ich will Ihrer Versicherung, daß Sie Sich gegen mich nichts vorzuwerfen haben gerne glauben, aber dadurch wird leider nichts verändert, weil bei den großen Ursachen zum Mißvergnügen, die Ihr Herr Bruder mir gegeben hat und noch immer zu geben fortfährt, das gegenseitige Vertrauen zwischen Ihnen und mir nicht bestehen kann. Ein Verhältniß, das durch eine natürliche Verbindung von Umständen unmöglich gemacht wird läßt sich mit dem beßten Willen nicht erhalten. In meinem engen Bekanntschaftskreise muß eine volle Sicherheit und ein unbegränztes Vertrauen seyn, und das kann, nach dem was geschehen, in unserm Verhältniß nicht statt finden. Beßer also wir heben es auf, es ist eine unangenehme Nothwendigkeit, der wir, beide unschuldig wie ich hoffe, nachgeben müssen; dieß bin ich mir schuldig, da niemand begreifen kann, wie ich zugleich der Freund Ihres Hauses und der Gegenstand von den Insulten Ihres Bruders seyn kann.” Schiller to A.W. Schlegel on July 1, 1797. NA XXIX, 81. 88 his publication of Aloys Hirt’s essays in Die Horen. While recognizing the intensely personal nature of the acrimony between Schlegel and Schiller, in what follows I will argue that Schiller’s letter and his interventions as a publisher are also rooted in a fundamental concern with the contemporaneous discourse on beauty. In Schiller’s letter, I locate a critique of the very foundations of the crisis of taste that are announced in the

Studium essay. In the same letter, I also identify plans to neutralize this crisis by publishing Hirt’s essays and thereby altering the operative terms in this discourse.

Schiller publishes these essays, I argue, because they challenge the contemporary notion that beauty was the ideal of ancient Greek art and because they also offer an alternative definition of the “characteristic” to the one espoused by Schlegel. In supplying a new concept of the characteristic and demonstrating its existence in ancient art, Hirt offers

Schiller a means of dissolving the antiquity/beauty; modernity/characteristic oppositions that Schlegel employs and that also form the foundation of the crisis of taste. Furthermore,

I argue that Schiller’s response to Schlegel occurs at a transitional moment in his engagement of beauty. Whereas Schiller had explored the issue of beauty via theoretical discourse in the early 1790s, he will shift to literary discourse, specifically the form of the elegy, as mode of engaging this topic. Schiller’s shift to the elegy is the subject of Part III of this chapter.

From the Crisis of Taste to a Crisis of Art

In turning from Schlegel to Schiller, I would like to pose an initial question: what are the broader repercussions of a crisis of taste outside of aesthetic discourse; that is, what additional ramifications does a crisis of taste entail beyond those pertaining to a 89 ‘purely aesthetic’ quality attributable to art? Unlike Schlegel and, to a certain extent,

Winckelmann, Schiller participates in an eighteenth-century intellectual tradition that assigned extraordinary—that is to say, not merely ‘aesthetic’—value to beauty. By examining Schiller’s response to Schlegel’s crisis of taste, we therefore confront the collateral damage in other spheres of life that would accompany an escalation of beauty’s precarious position in modernity. In eighteenth-century English and Scottish moral philosophy, for example, particularly in the works of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, beauty and virtue stand in analogical relationship to one another. Refining one’s “sense of beauty”

(Hutcheson) also holds promise as a means of moral improvement independent of religious belief. This intellectual tradition, in which the borders between aesthetics and ethics are porous, also found fertile ground in the German philosophy. We see its influence, for instance, in Kant’s notion of “Schönheit als Symbol der Sittlichkeit” in §59 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft107 as well as in Schiller’s essay, “Ueber Anmut und Würde,” where grace (as beauty in motion) is linked to grace (as unmotivated morality).108

In 1795—the very same year in which Schlegel first wrote the Studium essay—

Schiller publishes his programmatic treatise, “Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des

Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen” which accords rehabilitative powers to the experience of beauty. Here, Schiller develops an argument that proceeds from “Kantische

Grundsätze,” namely Kant’s notion that in judging an object to be beautiful, we take pleasure in the harmonic constitution of our own faculties—in Kant’s terms, “Lust an der

107 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Heiner F. Klemme (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009), 253.

108 For more on this, see Robert Norton’s The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

90 Harmonie der Erkenntnisvermögen”—which have been set into free play.109 Whereas

Kant’s argument about free play pertains to different faculties (the imagination and the understanding), Schiller posits the existence of two different imperatives, or “drives,” at work in the human being. The first is Formtrieb, the formal drive, which corresponds to rationality and conceptual thought; the second is der sinnliche Trieb (occasionally referred to as der Stofftrieb), the sensuous drive, which corresponds to sensuous perception and desire.

Schiller will further develop this transcendental claim, albeit within an anthropological context. In his own three-stage historico-philosophical model, Schiller argues that in modernity, man’s two drives have fallen into a state of disequilibrium, where one dominates the other, leading to a loss of internal wholeness. Schiller holds

“culture” at large responsible for this asymmetricality: “Die Kultur selbst war es, welche der neuern Menschheit diese Wunde schlug.” 110 He identifies one of the most fundamental processes of modernity—functional differentiation, in all its various manifestations—as occasioning the internal disharmony that afflicts modern humanity. In the sixth letter, he specifically references greater intellectual precision, differentiation of fields of knowledge, bureaucratic specialization, dissociation of social classes, and, anticipating Marx’s concept of Entfremdung, separation of enjoyment from economic

109 “Diese bloß subjective (ästhetische) Beurteilung des Gegenstandes, oder der Vorstellung, wodurch er gegeben wird, geht nun von der Lust an demselben vorher, und ist der Grund dieser Lust an der Harmonie der Erkenntnisvermögen; auf jener Allgemeinheit aber der subjektiven Bedingungen der Beurteilung der Gegenstände gründet sich allein diese allgemeine subjective Gültigkeit des Wohlgefallens, welches wir mit der Vorstellung des Gegenstandes, den wir schön nennen, verbinden.” Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §9, 68.

110 NA XX: Philosophische Schriften: Erster Teil, ed. Benno von Wiese (1962), 322.

91 production.111 In Schiller’s words, “so zerriß auch der innere Bund der menschlichen

Natur, und ein verderblicher Streit entzweyte ihre harmonischen Kräfte.”112

In the face of modern man’s internal antagonism, Schiller theorizes that the experience of beauty offers a means by which to reconcile the two drives and re- harmonize man. According to Schiller, when we contemplate the beautiful, the two drives are brought into a reciprocal relationship (Wechselverhältniß), where neither one dominates: “Da sich das Gemüth bey Anschauung des Schönen in einer glücklichen Mitte zwischen dem Gesetz und Bedürfniß befindet, so ist es eben darum, weil es sich zwischen beyden theilt, dem Zwange sowohl des einen als des andern entzogen.” 113 This harmonization of the drives resulting from contemplation of the beautiful Schiller calls the “Spieltrieb,” the play drive, and the state it engenders, “der ästhetische Zustand,” wherein man is freed from both cognition and sensuous desire.114 Insofar as beauty engages the play drive, thereby regulating the two competing drives and offering a means of restoring harmony and wholeness, Schiller postulates that it can be seen as a necessary

111 “Sobald auf der einen Seite die erweiterte Erfahrung und das bestimmtere Denken eine schärfere Scheidung der Wissenschaften, auf der andern das verwikkeltere Uhrwerk der Staaten eine strengere Absonderung der Stände und Geschäfte nothwendig machte, so zerriß auch der innere Bund der menschlichen Natur, und ein verderblicher Streit entzweyte ihre harmonischen Kräfte.” NA XX, 322. “Auseinandergerissen wurden jetzt der Staat und die Kirche, die Gesetze und die Sitten; der Genuß wurde von der Arbeit, das Mittel vom Zweck, die Anstrengung von der Belohnung geschieden.” NA XX, 323.

112 NA XX, 323.

113 NA XX, 357. It should be noted that Schiller, unlike Kant, understands beauty to be a property of an object, rather than product of a judgment of taste.

114 “Der Gegenstand des Spieltriebes, in einem allgemeinen Schema vorgestellt, wird also lebende Gestalt heißen können; ein Begriff, der allen ästhetischen Beschaffenheiten der Erscheinungen, und mit einem Worte dem, was man in weitester Bedeutung Schönheit nennt, zur Bezeichnung dient.” NA XX, 355.

92 condition of humanity: ““Die Schönheit müßte sich als eine nothwendige Bedingung der

Menschheit aufzeigen lassen.”115

Schiller’s notion of an “aesthetic education” builds upon these premises and proposes, as a program, the further development and refinement of man’s capacity to experience beauty—both on the level of culture and individually—as a remedy to humanity’s condition in modernity. Of central importance in this project is art, as it is the primary (if not sole) vehicle through which beauty is experienced.116 The relationship between beauty and art is intensely interwoven in Schiller’s text. If beauty is “unsre zweyte Schöpferin” 117 then art, as a medium in which beauty appears, is a

“Werkzeug”118; whereas beauty is “der einzig mögliche Ausdruck der Freyheit in der

Erscheinung,”119 art (Kunst) is “eine Tochter der Freyheit.”120 Although it cannot result in purely aesthetic effect,121 art gives rise to the same disposition as beauty does.122

115 NA XX, 340.

116 Although it is not the sole instantiation of beauty that Schiller mentions—nature is also a source—art is primary the one detailed here. In the first letter, Schiller states that the purpose of treatise is to present “die Resultate meiner Untersuchungen über das Schöne und die Kunst.” NA XX, 309.

117 NA XX, 378.

118 NA XX, 333.

119 NA XX, 386.

120 NA XX, 311.

121 “Da in der Wirklichkeit keine rein ästhetische Wirkung anzutreffen ist, (denn der Mensch kann nie aus der Abhängigkeit der Kräfte treten) so kann die Vortrefflichkeit eines Kunstwerks bloß in seiner größern Annäherung zu jenem Ideale ästhetischer Reinigkeit bestehen, und bey aller Freyheit, zu der man es steigern mag, werden wir es doch immer in einer besonderen Stimmung und mit einer eigenthümlichen Richtung verlassen.” NA XX, 380.

93 Given the paramount role of beauty and beautiful art in Schiller’s aesthetic and cultural program, it is not difficult to discern the acute problems posed by Schlegel’s essay. The stakes could not be higher. In declaring a crisis of taste and asserting that modern literature is neither beautiful, nor “satisfying” (befriedigend), Schlegel denies to modern literature the very quality that secures its larger cultural and anthropological value in Schiller’s framework. Literature or art divested of beauty cannot compensate for man’s shattered state in modernity and thus cannot fulfill its vital restorative function. A crisis of taste is equivalent to art’s loss of its raison d’être in modernity. For Schiller, to agree to Schlegel’s premise would mean accepting that art has lost its external social function, that art therefore finds itself in its own existential crisis, and that an anthropological predicament that arose with the onset of modernity is potentially without an answer.

Schiller’s Letter to Goethe on July 7, 1797

It is against this background that I now turn to Schiller’s letter, dated June 7, 1797, to Goethe. Although Friedrich Schlegel is never mentioned by name here, the letter positions itself against “unsre allerneuesten Ästhetiker,” which has been regarded as an oblique reference to Schlegel and his recently published Studium essay.123 Another clear

122 In letter 22, after describing the “Genuß ächter Schönheit” and the state that it engenders, Schiller attributes the very same capabilities to art: “Diese hohe Gleichmütigkeit und Freyheit des Geistes, mit Kraft und Rüstigkeit verbunden, ist die Stimmung, in der uns ein ächtes Kunstwerk entlassen soll, und es giebt keinen sicherern Probierstein der wahren ästhetischen Güte.” NA XX, 380.

123 See, for example, Hans-Georg Dewitz’s commentary in: Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Hans-Georg Dewitz (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2005), 418. See also, Martin Dönike, Pathos, Ausdruck und 94 indication that Schlegel is the intended target is the letter’s appropriation of a key conceptual opposition mobilized in the Studium essay: between the beautiful and the characteristic.124 Despite being written scarcely a month after Schiller had dismissed

August Wilhelm Schlegel from Die Horen in retribution for Friedrich’s disloyalty, the letter is strikingly devoid of personal animus. What we observe here, I would like to argue, is an intellectual agenda: a direct response to the crisis of taste in Schlegel’s essay and its theoretical foundations. The letter’s object, from beginning to end, is the contemporaneous discourse on beauty. No mere communication of information, it is a manifesto with outsized ambitions. Separable into two key aims, it mounts a critique of the discourse on beauty in Schlegel’s essay and in aesthetic discourse generally, and also lays out a broader strategy for intervening in said discourse and thereby engineering a dissolution of the crisis. A testament to the timeliness—urgency, even—of the topic of beauty in 1797, Schiller’s letter identifies the present historical moment as the opportune time to intervene in aesthetic discourse and to correct current misconceptions about beauty:

Es wäre däucht mir, jetzt gerade der rechte Moment, daß die griechischen Kunstwerke von seiten des Charakteristischen beleuchtet und durchgegangen würden, denn allgemein herrscht noch immer der Winckelmannische und Lessingische Begriff, und unsre allerneuesten Ästhetiker, sowohl über Poesie als Plastik, lassen sichs recht sauer werden, das Schöne der Griechen von allem Charakteristischen zu befreien, und dieses zum Merkzeichen des Modernen zu machen. Mir däucht, daß die neuern Analytiker durch ihre Bemühungen, den

Bewegung: zur Ästhetik des Weimarer Klassizismus, 1796-1806 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2005), 27, 88.

124 The fact that Schiller uses the term “das Charakteristische” as opposed to “die Charakteristik”—the term used by Aloys Hirt, who I will address later—further underscores that Friedrich Schlegel was the intended target. In his Xenien, Schiller caricatured Schlegel’s use of the term in “Neueste Behauptung” (#324): “Völlig charakterlos ist die Poesie der Modernen, / denn sie verstehen bloß charakteristisch zu sein.” NA I, 349. 95 Begriff des Schönen abzusondern und in einer gewissen Reinheit aufzustellen, ihn beinah ausgehöhlt und in einen leeren Schall verwandelt haben, daß man in der Entgegensetzung des Schönen gegen das Richtige und Treffende viel zu weit gegangen ist und eine Absonderung, die bloß der Philosoph macht, und die bloß von einer Seite statthaft ist, viel zu grob genommen hat.

Viele, finde ich, fehlen wieder auf eine andere Art, daß sie den Begriff der Schönheit viel zu sehr auf den Inhalt der Kunstwerke als auf die Behandlung beziehen, und so müssen sie freilich verlegen sein, wenn sie den vatikanischen Apoll und ähnliche, durch ihren Inhalt schon schöne Gestalten, mit dem Laokoon, mit einem Faun oder andern peinlichen oder ignobeln Repräsentationen unter Einer Idee von Schönheit begreifen sollen.

Es ist, wie Sie wissen, mit der Poesie derselbe Fall. Wie hat man sich von jeher gequält und quält sich noch, die derbe, oft niedrige und häßliche Natur im Homer und in den Tragikern bei den Begriffen durchzubringen, die man sich von dem griechischen Schönen gebildet hat. Möchte es doch einmal einer wagen, den Begriff und selbst das Wort Schönheit, an welches einmal alle jene falsche Begriffe unzertrennlich geknüpft sind, aus dem Umlauf zu bringen und, wie billig, die Wahrheit in ihrem vollständigsten Sinn an seine Stelle zu setzen.125

Broadly speaking, Schiller identifies what one might call a logic of “purity”

(Reinheit) at work in the contemporaneous discourse on beauty, one that has lead to simplistic conclusions. For Schiller, the usage of the very word “das Schöne,” the beautiful, has come to exemplify a drive to isolate beauty at its most pure and essential, to dissociate it from other contexts and thereby create a conceptually pure term. This term as an isolated phenomenon, however, has come to lack descriptive power; in Schiller’s telling, it is purely philosophical abstraction with no clear referent, a sound signifying nothing. Similar to this, Schiller also takes aim at discussions of visual and verbal arts that understand beauty as a content to be represented, as opposed to a formal quality of a cultural product that is well wrought or fitting. This, and the notion that beauty should be the content of art, he argues, has lead to a litany of inelegant arguments and dubious rationalizations. Consider, for example, the second chapter of Lessing’s Laokoon,

125 NA XXIX, 98.

96 wherein Lessing declares “daß bei den Alten die Schönheit das höchste Gesetz der bildenden Künste gewesen sei.”126 However, when confronting the Laocoön statue—one that does not objectively seem to exemplify a “law of beauty”—Lessing is forced to make the brilliant, if somewhat contorted argument that the statue’s beauty lies precisely in its veiling of a facial expression that would have been ugly: “Was er nicht malen durfte, ließ er erraten. Kurz, diese Verhüllung ist ein Opfer, das der Künstler der Schönheit brachte.”127

In isolation, neither of Schiller’s arguments is particularly novel. Already in the seventeenth century, in his Art Poétique, Bolieau had written of the ability to take pleasure in literary representations of the ugly: monsters, serpents and the ugly Thersites from Homer’s Iliad.128 Likewise, Martin Dönike129 argues convincingly that Schiller’s points here are, in fact, inspired by Aloys Hirt’s essay “Versuch über das Kunstschöne,” which Schiller had read beforehand, would later publish, and that I will soon address.

What is consequential, however, is that Schiller traces these general fallacies in aesthetic discourse, as well as a specific argument in Schlegel’s Studium essay, to the influence of

Winckelmann and Lessing, whose ideas about beauty still held sway at the turn of the eighteenth century: “denn allgemein herrscht noch immer der Winckelmannische und

126 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie in Laokoon, Briefe Antiquarischen Inhalts, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007), 9-322, here 26.

127 Ibid., 29.

128 See Herbert Dieckmann, “Das Abscheuliche und Schreckliche in der Kunsttheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 3: Die nicht mehr schönen Künste, ed. Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968), 271–317.

129 Dönike, 86-90. 97 Lessingische Begriff.” Winckelmann—and to a much lesser extent Lessing—identified the aesthetic category of beauty with the antiquity. This identity, however, became so absolute in aesthetic discourse that it came at the exclusion of other aesthetic categories from conceptions of ancient Greek art. Ancient art was thought to exemplify beauty only.

Schiller—and this is his insight alone—recognizes that the identity “antiquity/beauty,” which Winckelmann established, has inexorably lead to Schlegel’s counter-conceptual identity “modernity/characteristic.”130 The cost of beauty’s total association with the past has become its preclusion from the present; to each age its own exclusive aesthetic category. Schiller accuses Friedrich Schlegel, one of (“Unsre allerneuesten Ästhetiker”), of whitewashing ancient art of the characteristic in order to crown this term the category that defines aesthetic modernity. He argues that the time is therefore ripe to disabuse others of these beliefs and to fundamentally reconfigure the discourse on the beautiful.

Before elaborating upon Schiller’s corrective agenda, it bares mentioning that he had earlier espoused the very views concerning beauty criticized here.131 In 1784, for example, Schiller’s “Brief eines reisenden Dänen. Der Antikennsaal zu Mannheim” is published in Neue Thalia, which offers a first-person narrative account of a viewer’s

130 Although Hirt critiques Winckelmann and Schlegel at length in his essay “Versuch über das Kunstschöne”—the source of many of Schiller’s ideas here—Friedrich Schlegel is never mentioned in essay. The connection between Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of “das Charakteristische” and its dependence upon the identification of beauty with antiquity (inherited from Winckelmann and Lessing), is thus Schiller’s own insight. Even a year later, in an essay titled “Ueber die Charakteristik, als Hauptgrundsatz der bildenden Künste bey den Alten,” published in November 1798, Hirt defends himself at length against the criticisms of the Schlegel brothers. Not once, however, does he mention Friedrich Schlegel’s own concept of “das Charakteristische” from the Studium essay.

131 See Werner Frick, “Schiller und die Antike” in Schiller-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2011), 95-119, here 100.

98 encounter with plaster cast reproductions of ancient statuary at the Mannheim Gallery of the Antiquities. It is as if Winckelmann himself had trained the narrator’s viewing practices. Preceded by Schiller’s own visit to the gallery in 1783, the text reproduces

Winckelmann’s evocative descriptions of the statues; it registers the fictional beholder’s emotive, even quasi-religious responses to them; and, most importantly, it celebrates beauty as the prime value embodied in ancient Greek statuary. Of the Laocoön group the narrator relates, “noch immer werden sie Muster der höchsten Wahrheit und Schönheit sein.”132 And of the Torso: “das Auge erkennt die Schönheit, das Gefühl die Wahrheit.

Die letztere ist der ersteren untergeordnet […]”.133 Likewise, whereas Schiller’s letter finds fault with the conceptual isolation of beauty in the term “das Schöne,” we see the same impulse at work in Schiller’s theoretical text, “Ueber Anmut und Würde,” from

1793. Here, Schiller recounts the mythological image of Venus and her belt, interpreting it as a pre-rational allegory of the relationship between beauty (Venus) and grace (her belt).134 Schiller isolates the belt and develops from it a concept of grace (Anmut): “Ich habe mich bis jetzt darauf eingeschränkt, den Begriff der Anmut aus der griechischen

Fabel zu entwickeln, und, wie ich hoffe, ohne ihr Gewalt anzutun.”135

132 NA XX, 103.

133 NA XX, 104.

134 “Entkleidet man die Vorstellung der Griechen von ihrer allegorischen Hülle, so scheint sie keinen andern als folgenden Sinn einzuschließen. Anmut ist eine bewegliche Schönheit; eine Schönheit nämlich, die an ihrem Subjekte selbst notwendig gegeben ist. Ihren Grürtel kann Venus abnehmen und der Juno augenblicklich überlassen […] Dieser Gürtel, als das Symbol der bewegenden Schönheit, hat aber das ganz Besondere, daß er der Person, die damit geschmückt wird, die objective Eigenschaft der Anmut verleiht […].” NA XX, 252.

135 NA XX, 255.

99 In this light, Schiller’s critique of Schlegel and contemporaneous aesthetic discourse also amounts to a form of self-criticism, a distancing from his previously held positions, a Selbstgericht. But beyond what significance it holds for Schiller’s oeuvre, the letter also has representative status within the broader context of late eighteenth-century

German letters. It illustrates an interrogation and reappraisal—on the threshold of the nineteenth century—of premises that had been broadly held since the late 1750s.136 As this emphasis of ancient beauty morphed into a problem for modernity and its art forms, the general premises became subject to scrutiny, as exemplified by Schiller’s letter.

Returning to the letter itself, beyond critique, Schiller also details a publishing agenda—part of which involves rescuing beauty for modernity. Schiller’s first key insight into the crisis of taste is his recognition of its discursive nature, and he sets out to challenge its very foundations. Because the problem of beauty arose through an increasingly absolutist identification of beauty with the ancient past in aesthetic discourse,

Schiller aims to sever this exclusive relationship by fundamentally altering the dominant

136 Concentrating specifically on Aloys Hirt’s prominent role in this reevaluation, Martin Dönike also writes of the late 1700s as period in which the influence of Winckelmann, Mengs and Lessing still remained strong: “Zugleich wird aber auch deutlich, daß die ästhetische Diskussion seit den 1760er Jahren, als die einflußreichen Schriften Winckelmanns, Mengs und Lessings erschienen waren, keine wirklich neuen Impulse mehr erhalten hatte. Zwar lag Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft bereits seit 1790 vor, doch sollte ihre breitere Rezeption erst in den Jahren nach 1800 einsetzen.” Dönike, 18. The display of ancient statuary and reproductions in German museums, the excavations of the Herculaneum in Italy as well as the establishment of aesthetics as an independent discipline contributed to a larger cultural and intellectual framework in which beauty—its relationship to the ancient past and worthiness as a subject of philosophical reflection—was paramount. Winckelmann’s visits to the Antiken-Kabinett in Dresden formed the basis of his ideas in “Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildauer-Kunst,” which in turn propagated a mode of appreciating and understanding ancient statuary that emphasized its epitomization of beauty. In visiting the Mannheimer Antikensaal, guided by the ideas in Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Althertums, Schiller participated in a cultural rite that had been completed before him by none other than Lessing, Goethe, Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, among others. Jean Paul, Novalis Friedrich Schlegel would do the same in Dresden. Schiller is, in a sense, an anomaly in that he, unlike his German peers, did not make a pilgrimage to Italy to experience the remnants of ancient culture firsthand. Cf. Frick, 96. 100 conception of what ancient Greek art was, and what aesthetic categories it encompassed.

As he writes, “Es wäre däucht mir, jetzt gerade der rechte Moment, daß die griechischen

Kunstwerke von seiten des Charakteristischen beleuchtet und durchgegangen würden

[…] und unsre allterneuesten Ästhetiker […] lassen sichs recht sauer werden, das Schöne der Griechen von allem Charakteristischen zu befreien, und dieses zum Merkzeichen des

Modernen zu machen.” By demonstrating that the characteristic indeed existed in ancient

Greek art, Schiller endeavors to diffuse the simplistic code—antiquity/beauty; modernity/characteristic—that identifies historical eras with entire aesthetic categories and that is constitutive of the crisis of taste announced by Schlegel. In so doing, Schiller would demonstrate that the beautiful and characteristic, the ancient and the modern, are, in fact, false oppositions, thereby providing for a more differentiated view of artistic production in antiquity, one that would embrace a wider palette of representational possibilities and ultimately open up a space for beauty in the contemporary present. The saving of beauty would thus be predicated upon falsifying its predominance in antiquity.

Parenthetically, it is worth mentioning that Schiller’s rescue project is also accompanied by an unsettling scenario at the end of the passage cited above. Not for the first time137 Schiller indulges a power fantasy. Here it is one in which an individual, most

137 In his “Erinnerung an das Publikum,” a flyer passed out at the premiere of Die Verschwörung des Fiesko in Mannheim on January 1, 1784, Schiller imagines the poet, i.e. himself, as a powerful figure capable of directing the audience’s emotions. It is analogous to the image he presents of the editor in the letter to Goethe from July 7, 1797, in which he is able to exert total control over the terms of aesthetic discourse: “Heilig und feierlich war immer der stille, der große Augenblick in dem Schauspielhaus, wo die Herzen so vieler Hunderte, wie auf den Allmächtigen Schlag einer magischen Rute, nach der Phantasie eines Dichters beben—wo herausgerissen aus allen masken und Winkeln der natürliche Mensch mit offenen Sinnen horcht—wo ich des Zuschauers Seele am Zügel führe, und nach meinem Gefallen einem Ball gleich dem Himmel oder der Hölle zuwerfen kann […].” NA IV: Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, ed. Edith Nahler and Horst Nahler (1983), 272. 101 likely himself, could remove a term, beauty—and all the erroneous assumptions adherent to it—from circulation in language and in the republic of letters, replacing it with a more comprehensive truth. It is an image of dogma being replaced by truth; but it also implicates the one in control, presumably an editor, in a totalitarian role as the gatekeeper who determines which words and concepts may enter into the discursive flows of society, and which must be barred entry, or forcibly extracted. As the editor of Die Horen,

Schiller entertains the wish that he could singlehandedly exert such control.

Schiller’s vehicle for this discursive recalibration would be a series of essays by the German cicerone, archeologist and art historian, Aloys Hirt. Immediately after voicing his agenda to reengineer discourse on beauty, Schiller states, at the beginning of the very next paragraph of his letter to Goethe, his desire to publish an essay by Hirt

(most likely his “Laokoon”): “Den Hirtischen Aufsatz hätte ich recht gern in den

Horen.”138 By publishing this and other texts by Hirt, Schiller would thus aspire to replace “das Schöne” and its problematics with “die Wahrheit in ihrem vollständigsten

Sinn.”139 Prior to writing the letter to Goethe Schiller had already received a copy of

Hirt’s first essay, “Versuch über das Kunstschöne.” Schiller later published the text— without Hirt’s approval—in the 3rd Jahrgang, 7th Stück of Die Horen. In this essay Hirt develops his concept of “die Charakteristik” and argues that it—and not the beautiful—is the “Hauptgrundsaz des Kunstschönen.” In his second essay, “Laocoon,” Hirt considers this sculpture, against which contemporaneous aesthetic theories were tested, in light of

138 NA XXIX, 98.

139 NA XXIX, 98. Martin Dönike reaches the same conclusion: “Offenbar war es also Schillers Absicht gewesen, Hirt gegen Schlegel ins Feld zu führen.” See his Pathos, Ausdruck und Bewegung, 27. 102 his theory of the characteristic and seeks to demonstrate its validity over those of

Winckelmann and Lessing. Hirt’s last essay to be published in Die Horen, “Nachtrag

über Laocoon” responds to Goethe’s critique of his prior essay in his own “Laocoon” essay.

As we can see from this brief summary, Hirt’s essays offered multiple opportunities to demonstrate that the “characteristic” not only existed in, but also was the central category of ancient Greek statuary. As Schiller would have it, these essays would therefore refute Schlegel’s claim that “das Characteristische” was specific to modern literature only, and with it, his simplistic binary pairings of antiquity with the beautiful and modernity with the characteristic. Although Schiller frames his agenda in terms of introducing “truth in it most comprehensive sense,” it is by no means devoid of cynicism.

For, although both Hirt and Schlegel use virtually the same term—“das Charakteristiche”

(Schlegel) or “die Charakteristik” (Hirt)—in their essays, their conceptualizations of it are fundamentally different. In suggesting that Hirt’s essays could serve to undermine

Schlegel’s claims, Schiller is thus relying upon readers’ possible conflation of the two. At this juncture it is essential that we differentiate between these two concepts.

“Die Charakteristik” versus “das Charakteristische”

In “Versuch über das Kunstschöne,” Aloys Hirt defines “Charakteristik” in the following terms:

Unter Charakteristik verstehe ich nemlich jene bestimmte Individualität, wodurch sich Formen, Bewegung und Geberde, Miene und Ausdruk – Lokalfarbe, Licht und Schatten, Helldunkel und Haltung – unterscheiden, und zwar so, wie der vorgelegte Gegenstand es verlanget.

103 Charakteristik muß überall hervorleuchten. Die Erreichung des Eigenthümlichen in allen Theilen zum Ganzen ist der Endzwek der Kunst, das Wesen des Schönen, der Prüfstein von der Fähigkeit des Künstlers, und die Quelle des Wohlgefallens für jeden, der das Kunstwerk ansieht und betrachtet.140

There are several important points to be made here. For Schlegel, as we recall, the characteristic refers to that aesthetic quality of modern literature, which marks its departure from, and incongruity with, beauty and ideality. For Hirt, by contrast, the characteristic and the beautiful are not a true opposition—quite to the contrary. For him, the characteristic—that is, the way in which individual features of an artwork exist in accordance with what a specific object or circumstances demand—is, in fact, the very essence of beauty itself. The characteristic is thus the very foundation of the beautiful.

For Hirt, the term also therefore also functions as a criterion for evaluating the beauty of a work of art:141 the more each aspect of work of art reflects the individual nature of the object and circumstances being presented, the more fitting it is as a whole, ergo the more beautiful it is.

This is not to say that Hirt’s concept of the characteristic did not conflict with contemporaneous claims about ancient Greek art, namely, that beauty was its express content, or the law that determined what could be represented. This difference is perhaps best exemplified in Hirt’s innovative interpretation of the Laocoön, which contrasts with those of his predecessors. Winckelmann, for example, famously argues that although pain

140 Hirt, “Versuch über das Kunstschöne,” Die Horen, 3. Jg. 7. Stück, ed. Friedrich Schiller (1797), 1-37, here 34-35.

141 “Nach meinem Sinne besteht die Basis zu einer richtigen Beurtheilung des Kunstschönen und Bildung des Geschmakes in dem Begriffe Charakteristik.” Ibid., 34.

104 is registered in Laocoön’s body, his face expresses “eine grosse und gesetzte Seele.”142 In

Winckelmann’s reading, physical beauty is an allegory of spiritual beauty, and since the soul withstands physical suffering, the latter is not represented facially. 143 Lessing, on the other hand, views beauty as the supreme law pertaining to the visual arts, arguing that that the sculptor desired to achieve “die höchste Schönheit, unter den angenommenen

Umständen des Körperlichen Schmerzes.” 144 Since the two (pain and beauty) are irreconcilable, the ‘law of beauty’ prevails: “er [the artist] mußte Schreien in Seufzen mildern; nicht weil das Schreien eine unedle Seele verrät, sondern weil er das Gesicht auf eine ekelhafte Weise verstellet.”145 According to Lessing, the law of beauty demands the suppression of visual expressions of pain, which would be disgusting: screaming is replaced by sighing. For Hirt, however, the Laocoön statue neither represents the beauty of a soul, nor does it reflect beauty’s demands as a regime governing representation.

Rather than refraining from screaming because of the soul’s strength (Winckelmann), or sighing instead, because the laws of beauty demand it (Lessing), Hirt argues that statue represents Laokoon in a state of pain so severe that he no longer can scream: “Kein

Schmerz, kein Widerstreben, kein Entsezen kann den Ausdruk schreklicher mahlen:

142 Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, second edition, ed. Walther Rehm (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2002), 43.

143 “Der Schmertz, welcher sich in allen Muskeln und Sehnen des Cörpers entdecket, und den man gantz allein, ohne das Gesicht und andere Theile zu betrachten, an den schmertzlich eingezogenen Unter-Leib beynahe selbst zu empfinden glaubet; dieser Schmertz, sage ich, äussert sich dennoch mit keiner Wut in dem Gesichte und in der gantzen Stellung. Er erhebet kein schreickliches Geschrey, wie Virgil von seinem Laocoon singet […].” Winkelmann, 43.

144 Lessing, 29.

145 Lessing, 29.

105 Laokoon schreiet nicht, weil er nicht mehr schreien kann.”146 Thus, using the Laocoön as a test case, Hirt demonstrates how assumptions about beauty—as content or as law governing representation—have restricted the range of interpretations of ancient Greek art and hindered their comprehension. Hirt thus reads ancient Greek art as adhering to a principle of realism rather than idealism and views beauty—rather than being a prescriptive principle—as emerging out of faithful representation, what he calls the characteristic: “Daß, was die Alten unter Vollkommenheit oder Schönheit der Kunst verstanden, nichts anders war, als Karakteristik [...]”.147

Given the difference between Schlegel’s concept of “das Charakteristische” and

Hirt’s concept of “Die Charakteristik,” it is difficult to imagine all but the most unsophisticated of readers viewing Hirt’s essays as evidence that the characteristic (as the modern, non-beautiful) existed in ancient art. In other words, the success of Schiller’s agenda, using Hirt as a means of ‘disproving’ Schlegel on his own terms, is doubtful.

Nevertheless, there are two key ways in which Hirt’s essays do, indeed, subvert

Schlegel’s arguments as well as his project. By seeking to demonstrate that his own notion of the characteristic is the core principle of ancient Greek art, Hirt undermines the central premise that Schlegel inherits from Winckelmann and that motivates his diagnosis of modernity: that ancient Greek art was defined by the beautiful. Second, Hirt’s use of

146 Hirt, “Laokoon,” Die Horen, 3. Jg. 10. Stück, ed. Friedrich Schiller (1797): 1-26, here 8.

147 The full quote reads: “Daß, was die Alten unter Vollkommenheit oder Schönheit der Kunst verstanden, nichts anders war, als Karakteristik, das heißt, sie suchten für jeden Gegenstand aus der Natur die körperlichen Formen bedeutend und übereinstimmend auf: sie erfanden oder abstrahierten vielmehr aus der Natur die individuellsten Formen für jedes Alter, für jedes Geschlecht, für jeden Stand, für jede Verrichtung—kurz, für jeden individuellsten Karakter. War der Gegenstand Porträt, so geschah die Nachbildung eben so individuell.” Hirt, “Laokoon,” 23.

106 the term “Charakteristik”—despite a history of the term’s usage prior to Schlegel— amounts to a form of semantic encroachment or territorialization. The greater the reception that Hirt’s concept of “Charakteristik” receives, the less likely Schlegel’s specific use of the term would have of becoming an established concept in aesthetic discourse. In other words, Schlegel’s intellectual legacy, his attempt to define and assert the core principle of modern literature, is threatened or crowded out by Hirt’s use of the term.

A close examination of the Schlegel brothers’ responses to Hirt’s essays confirms an awareness of both the vulnerabilities listed above. Reviews by A.W. Schlegel in

Athenäum systematically attempt to discredit Hirt’s claims, and more importantly, his concept of “Charakteristik.” They assert that instead of advancing new knowledge about ancient art, Hirt’s concept merely reiterates obvious.148 Rather than engaging Hirt as worthy intellectual opponent, the Schlegels seek to compromise his concept of the

“Characteristik” via caricature.149 In Athenäum fragment #310, from 1798, for example,

A.W. Schlegel portrays the concept as a restatement of the self-evident:

Charakterisieren will wohl alle menschliche Bildnerei bis auf die hölzernen Götzen der Kamtschadalen hinunter. Wenn man aber den Geist einer Sache in Einem Zuge fassen will, so nennt man nicht das, was sich von selbst versteht,

148 The three publications in Athenäum are: Fragment #310 from 1798; “Notizen” and “Ueber Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxman’s Umrisse” from 1799.

149 See Friedrich Schlegel’s letter to A.W. Schlegel on April 13, 1798, concerning the latter’s intention to discredit Hirt in Athenäum. Both this letter and the reviews are marked by a sense of entitlement: that the Schlegel brothers have license to participate in and define aesthetic discourse as they see fit and that Aloys Hirt does not. “Mit den Kunstfragm.[enten] das ist zwar prächtig für die Synfonie, auch daß Du Hirt über die Nase hauen willst, denn so ein Lümmel muß nicht von Kunst mitreden wollen dürfen.” KFSA XXIV: Die Periode des Athenäums (25. Juli 1797-Ende August 1799), ed. Raymond Immerwahr (1985), 120.

107 und was sie mit andern gemein hat, sondern was wesentlich ihre Eigentümlichkeit bezeichnet.150

Again in 1799, in a section of Athenäum titled “Notizen,” the Schlegels reduce Hirt’s concept, and its claims of realism at work in ancient art, to absurd banality:

[…] so wird eine vollständige Geschichte der bildenden Künste bey den Alten geben, worin er [Hirt] zeigen wird, daß die Charakteristik der Hauptgrundsatz derselben gewesen sey. Dieses merkwürdige Prinzip, welches er während seines vieljährigen Aufenthalts in Italien entdeckt, und bis jetzt nur noch in drey Abhandlungen eingeschärft hat, besteht darin, daß in der alten Kunst ein Pferd völlig wie ein Pferd, ein Centaur wie ein Centaur abgebildet wurde […]151

The reviews are marked by a sense of entitlement: that the Schlegel brothers have license to participate in and define aesthetic discourse as they see fit, and that Aloys Hirt should not. This sense is also confirmed in a letter from Friedrich Schlegel to A.W. Schlegel on

April 4, 1798, in which Friedrich supports his brother’s efforts to discredit Hirt in

Athenäum: “Mit den Kunstfragm.[enten] das ist zwar prächtig für die Synfonie, auch daß

Du Hirt über die Nase hauen willst, denn so ein Lümmel muß nicht von Kunst mitreden wollen dürfen.”152 Hirt’s greatest ‘impropriety’ we can surmise, is his ‘illegitimate’ use of the term “Charakteristik,” which confuses and dilutes its specific usage by Friedrich

Schlegel.

Directly proportional to the scorn visited upon Hirt is the unqualified reverence shown to Winckelmann and Lessing. There are, of course, the requisite references to

“Schönheit,” “edle Einfalt” and “stille Größe,” that serve as a counterpoint to and context

150 KFSA II, 217-219, here 218.

151 August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Notizen” in Athenäum: Zweiten Bandes, Zweites Stück (Berlin: Heinrich Fröhlich, 1799), 332.

152 KFSA XXIV, 120.

108 for Hirt’s claims. But we also find unequivocal affirmation of Winckelmann and Lessing.

Consider this reference, in Fragment #310, to Lessing’s doctrine of “Milderung”: “Auch bei der Wahl schrecklicher Gegenstände kommt ja noch alles auf die Behandlung an, welche den mildernden Hauch der Schönheit verbreiten kann, und in der griechischen

Kunst und Poesie wirklich verbreitet hat.”153 This is not reverence for its own sake, but a response to Hirt’s provocation. In the face of a more differentiated view of antiquity,

A.W. Schlegel reasserts the identity between antiquity and beauty that he and Friedrich find precedent for in Lessing and Winckelmann—and which is also the precondition for

Friedrich Schlegel’s notion that “das Interessante” and “das Charakteristische” are central to modern literature. Lessing is thus used here in the service of upholding the absolute identification of antiquity with beauty, in order to support Schlegel’s claims concerning modern aesthetic production. 154 Likewise, in “Ueber Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und

John Flaxmans Umrisse,” another text appearing in Athenäum that attacks Hirt, A.W.

Schlegel hails Winckelmann for his insights into ancient art—and poetry: “er war dem

153 KFSA II, 218.

154 A.W. Schegel’s reading of the Laokoon is strikingly lacking in naunce, insofar as it glosses over Lessing’s medial distinctions between the different demands of poetry and visual arts. Whereas Lessing does, indeed, argue for “Milderung” with regard to “Mahlerey” (the visual arts), which possesses a comparative advantage in representing physical beauty, the same principle is not applicable to the verbal arts, as Schlegel suggests here. This convenient omission, or suppression even, underscores the degree to which beauty is reasserted as the defining principle of all the ancient arts. As David Wellbery writes, if Lessing upholds beauty as the supreme law governing visual art, it is not because he believes that representation of the beautiful should be the goal of visual art, but because of “the narrowly circumscribed limits of the plastic arts.” “Beauty is the supreme value in the plastic arts not because it is intrinsically of great worth, but because it is the only form of the sensually present that does not overwhelm us on the existential level of sensation.” David Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 164, 166.

109 Genius der bildenden Kunst und Poesie zugleich auf die Spur gekommen.”155 Succeeded by a favorable reference to Winckelmann’s principles of “Schönheit” and “edle Einfalt und stille Größe,” Schlegel’s invocation of Winckelmann has the function of reinforcing beauty’s absolute centrality for the plastic arts and poetry. The most telling response to

Hirt’s essays, however, involves the comparison of how comical or tragic subjects were rendered in antiquity, and how they are represented in postclassical modernity. In miniature, this example demonstrates the intellectual ties between the Schlegel brothers and their predecessors:

Wenn komische oder tragische Darstellungen ein Einwurf gegen dies allgemeine, durchgängige Streben nach Schönheit wären, so läge er zu nahe, als daß er Kennern des Altertums wie Mengs und Winckelmann hätte entgehen können. Man vergleiche die gröbste Ausgelassenheit antiker Satyren und Bacchantinnen mit ähnlichen Vorstellungen aus der flamädischen Schule, und man müßte selbst ganz unhellensch sein, wenn man nicht dort noch das Hellenische fühlte.156

The comparison here of ancient Greek art and that of the “Flemish School” is not by chance. A.W. Schlegel reactivates an antithesis common to both Winckelmann and

Lessing. Whereas ancient Greek art is beautiful and idealizes, the art of the Dutch is ugly and based in realism. This prototypical opposition contains within itself the essential elements leading to Schlegel’s historico-philosophical model and to the crisis of taste itself. In asserting that the ancients indeed represented satyrs and bacchants in a fundamentally different way than the Dutch painters, by implicitly insisting that ancient

Greek art truly was grounded in the fundamental principle of beauty, the comparison simultaneously points back to Winckelmann and Lessing as well as ahead to the Schlegel

155 August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Ueber Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxman’s Umriss” in Athenäum: Zweiten Bandes, Zweites Stück (Berlin: Heinrich Fröhlich, 1799), 226.

156 KFSA II, 218. 110 brothers, creating a line of intellectual inheritance and successorship. The Schlegels thus attack Hirt by reasserting and appropriating Winckelmann and Lessing’s ideas in order to install themselves as their inheritors and to claim their own legitimacy.

Conclusion

Although Hirt’s contributions play a decisive role in the trajectory of the

“characteristic” as a concept—and thus also in beauty’s place in aesthetic discourse at the end of the eighteenth century—it is important to distinguish his intellectual motivations from those of Schiller. Hirt’s essays arise out of a familiarity with ancient statuary in

Rome and are spurred by a desire to correct what, in his view, are contemporary mis- readings of the statues themselves. His essays are thus first and foremost preoccupied with the proper understanding of the ancient past as such; they are the work of an archeologist and an observer of art. Schiller, by contrast, is concerned with ancient visual art not for its own sake, but insofar as it impinged upon contemporaneous aesthetic discourse; his primary concern thus lies with the present. In this constellation, Hirt appears as a scholar, Schiller a strategist. By championing Hirt’s usage of the term,

Schiller aims to neutralize the threat posed to beauty by Schlegel’s concept of the characteristic. The result of Schiller’s instigation of this semantic war is that Hirt’s concept of “characteristic,” even if it possessed points of conflict with the beautiful, released antiquity from its beholdenness to beauty and its limitations. With the severing of this bond of exclusivity, beauty’s existence in the present becomes a possibility rather than a subject of a crisis.

111 Part III. Elegy as Poetry for the Unglückliches Geschlecht

Introduction

The eighteenth century’s conflicting attitudes toward beauty—its optimism about beauty’s potential to improve humanity, as well as an increasing perception that beauty had become remote, out of reach—converge in the lyrical production of Friedrich

Schiller. In the year 1788, for instance, both positions—those of exuberant optimism and reluctant resignation—are voiced in two of Schiller’s most prominent poems. The first version of “Die Götter Griechenlandes” laments the closure of an ancient “schöne Welt,” a world in which the modern subject cannot reside. Accompanying the end of this age is a shift from a polytheistic worldview, wherein the gods (“schöne Wesen”) are immanent in the world, to a monotheistic one, characterized by an abstract transcendental god, rational-scientific explanations of the world and a now “entgötterte Natur.”157 In this poem, the beautiful world thus recedes with the onset of what Max Weber will later call

“die Entzauberung der Welt.”158 However, “Die Künstler,” also written in 1788 and completed in 1789, adopts a fundamentally different position. Here, humanity on the threshold of the nineteenth century is depicted as both beautiful and poised to make epistemic progress—but not without the aid of beauty, humankind’s past and present guide. “Wie schön, o Mensch, mit deinem Palmenzweige / Stehst du an des Jahrhunderts

Neige,” begins the poem’s famous opening line. Rather than disappearing with the rise of rationality, the poem reminds the reader that beauty was the very precondition for

157 NA I, 194.

158 Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1919).

112 knowledge acquisition: “Nur durch das Morgenthor des Schönen / Drangst du in der

Erkenntniß Land.”159

This ambivalence about beauty’s relationship to the contemporaneous present—is beauty still a guide; is it readily at hand, or remote?—will eventually give way to a more consistent position in Schiller’s lyrical texts from the mid-1790s onward. In 1793, briefly interrupting a six-year period during which he composed almost no poetry (1789-1795),

Schiller writes a second version of “Die Götter Griechenlandes,” which is published in

1800. While the new poem excises the controversial portrayal of monotheism that appeared in the 1788 version, its stance with regard to beauty remains almost entirely unchanged. A consequence of the gods’ leave-taking is the departure of “everything beautiful” from the world: “Ja, sie kehrten heim, und alles Schöne,/ Alles Hohe nahmen sie mit fort.”160 The traces of the “schöne Welt” exist “nur in dem Feenland der Lieder,” the home (Heim) of the gods, the “Dichterland.” 161 Seven years later, beauty’s endangered status is rearticulated in Schiller’s poem “Der Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts:

An ***” from 1801, a bitter rejoinder to the hopefulness of “Die Künstler.” Written in the wake of the reign of terror and the Napoleonic Wars, the text portrays the turn of the century. Rather than fulfilling its promise of freedom and progress, it is an era defined by violence: “Das Jahrhundert ist im Sturm geschieden, / Und das neue öffnet sich mit

Mord.” At this threatening historical juncture, beauty thrives not in the world itself, but only in the artificial refuge of song: “In des Herzens heilig stille Räume/ Mußt du fliehen

159 NA I, 201, ln. 1-2 and 34-35.

160 NA II 1: Gedichte in der Reihenfolge ihres Erscheinens: 1799-1805, ed. Norbert Oellers (1983), 367, ln. 121-122.

161 NA II 1, 366. 113 aus des Lebens Drang, Freiheit ist nur in dem Reich der Träume,/ Und das Schöne blüht nur im Gesang.”162

“Die Götter Griechenlandes” and “Der Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts” account for beauty’s vulnerability in the present using vastly different explanatory modes and fields of view. Exceedingly broad in scope, the former constructs a myth about the downfall of myth itself and the rise of what one might call logos, illustrating the manifold consequences of this fundamental shift. In short: beauty’s at-home-ness in the world was severed in the deep past; it is the consequence of a massive cultural development. The latter poem, by contrast, examines how a contemporaneous political-historical framework conditions aesthetic possibilities in the present. Beauty cannot flourish because the environment has made it impossible. Despite these (by no means mutually exclusive) differences, it is nevertheless possible to identify a common poetological principle at work in both texts. Both insist that song—that is, lyric poetry—has a special role in responding to beauty’s predicament. In their meta-textual self-references, the poems call attention to their own agendas: preserving a memory of beauty, lest it disappear entirely from cultural recollection; and serving as an autonomous space, a bulwark against historical realities, where beauty’s position can be reflected. Song thus points to itself as a repository, a site of negotiation, and an exceptional, poetic space—“[das] Feenland der

Lieder,” “Dichterland” or “Gesang”—where beauty may, perhaps, be performed. While poetry’s ability to commemorate is as ancient as Homer’s Iliad, it is difficult not to perceive a strong connection between the specific claims of these two texts and contemporaneous theories of aesthetic autonomy. In calling attention to itself as a

162 NA II 1, 362, ln. 3-4 and 363, ln. 33-36. 114 sovereign space that is exempt from—and aims to negate—historical constraints, literary discourse here self-consciously stages its own distinctness and, at the same time, inscribes its own historicality as a new discourse that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century.

I have used the two poems above to demonstrate a continuity in attitude towards, and means of reflecting upon, beauty in Schiller’s poems after 1793. For the remainder of this chapter I will argue that this gesture reaches its utmost formal coherence in Schiller’s elegies penned between 1795 and 1800, specifically his “Elegie,” later renamed “Der

Spaziergang” as well as “Nänie.” At stake here are two questions: first, what does it mean for Schiller to adopt the elegy, and how does the use of this ancient literary form coincide with a problem particular to modernity; second, beyond their ability to memorialize a memory of the beautiful, as mentioned above, how do the elegies engage the issue of beauty, and how does this differ from the positions of Winckelmann and Schlegel?

Ambitious Appropriations: Schiller’s Renewal of Ancient Forms

On May 19, 1800, Johann Wilhlem Süvern sends Friedrich Schiller a letter that includes a copy of his recently-published analysis of “Wallenstein”: Über Schillers

Wallenstein in Hinsicht auf griechische Tragödie. As Lieselotte Blumenthal notes,

Schiller will take issue with a particular argument Süvern makes here.163 Applying a terminologically idiosyncratic reading of Aristotle’s Poetics to Schiller’s tragedy, Süvern argues that “Wallenstein” differs markedly from ancient Greek tragedies as well as

163 NA XXX: Briefwechsel: Schillers Briefe, 1.11.1798-31.12.1800, ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal (1961), 390.

115 Goethe’s “Egmont.” In the case of the latter, according to Süvern, the viewer’s/reader’s desire (Sehnsucht) is initially raised, but this state of excitement eventually terminates in

“die Stimmung, welche ein gedeihliches fröhliches Menschenleben macht.” 164 This ultimate mood is achieved through tragedy’s moderation of the emotions through

“Anmuth und Schönheit.”165 For Süvern, grace and beauty are thus constituent elements of ancient tragedy and key to the state of resolution that it achieves. According to Süvern, however, Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” by contrast, summons the viewer’s/reader’s emotions, but such moderation does not occur; they remain in a sustained state of excitement without resolution.

Im Wallenstein sehn wir nur Verheerung, der Geist entschwindet nicht leicht in seine heimischen Regionen, keine von ihm verklärte Gestalt, wie im Egmont, steigt schwebend auf mit der Palme der Unsterblichkeit, welche den Eindruck des grausigen Werkes mildert und uns das Leben wieder lieb macht. Nur unsre Sehnsucht ist gewaltig aufgeregt, nicht die Brust wieder in Liebe und Ruhe verschmolzen.166

Süvern’s response to “Wallenstein” is restrained in comparison to that of Hegel, who was famously appalled by the philosophical implications of the drama’s third and final section,

“Wallentsteins Tod.”167 Both Süvern and Hegel adopt the a-historical position that

Schiller’s tragedy is qualitatively deficient insofar as it does not engender the same

164 Johann Wilhelm Süvern, Über Schiller’s Wallenstein in Hinsicht auf griechische Tragödie (Berlin: Buchhandlung der Königlichen Realschule, 1800), 161.

165 Ibid., 161.

166 Ibid.,160.

167 “Leben gegen Leben; aber es steht nur Tod gegen Leben auf, und unglaublich! abscheulich! der Tod siegt über das Leben! Dies ist nicht tragische, sondern entsetzlich! Dies zerreißt (s. Xenien) [das Herz], daraus kann man nicht mit erleichterter Brust springen!” Here, Hegel protests the utter lack of consolation in Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [Über Wallenstein], Werke, vol. I: Frühe Schriften, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 618-620, here 619. 116 aesthetic response as ancient tragedy allegedly did. What interests me here is not so much

“Wallenstein” itself as the issues it raises about the modern usage of ancient literary forms, ones that we will soon reencounter when we examine Schiller’s elegies. To whom and to what age do literary forms belong; need modern adaptions elicit the same responses, as their ancient examples supposedly did; and what implications does the historicity—of both aesthetic experience and artistic forms—hold for modern adaptation?

In a cogent response to Süvern, Schiller argues that historicity of literary form and aesthetic experience license his appropriation of tragedy for a modern audience:

Ich theile mit Ihnen die unbedingte Verehrung der Sophokleischen Tragödie, aber sie war eine Erscheinung ihrer Zeit, die nicht wiederkommen kann, und das lebendige Produkt einer individuellen bestimmten Gegenwart einer ganz heterogenen Zeit zum Maaßstab und Muster aufdringen, hiesse die Kunst, die immer dynamisch und lebendig entstehen und wirken muß, eher tödten als beleben. Unsere Tragödie wenn wir eine solche hätten, hat mit der Ohnmacht, der Schlaffheit, der Charakterlosigkeit des Zeitgeistes und mit einer gemeinen Denkart zu ringen, sie muß also Kraft und Charakter zeigen, sie muß das Gemüth zu erschüttern, zu erheben, aber nicht aufzulösen suchen. Die Schönheit ist für ein glückliches Geschlecht, aber ein unglückliches muß man erhaben zu rühren suchen.168

In his response, Schiller constructs an opposition between two historical audiences, ancients and moderns, whose differences are so stark that they are referred to metaphorically in terms of separate “races” (Geschlechter). Corresponding to each race is a different historical instantiation of literary tragedy with its own aesthetic principles. On the one hand, Schiller posits a “happy race” (glückliches Geschlecht), the ancients. With this group Schiller associates Sophoclean tragedy and the aesthetic category of beauty.169

Emerging out of ancient culture, Sophoclean tragedy moves the “glückliches Geschlecht”

168 Schiller’s letter to Süvern on July 26, 1800. NA XXX, 177.

169 Wherein Sophoclean tragedy’s beauty precisely resides is not explicated, but we can presume that it lies in its ability to (ultimately) lead to a post-cathartic form of resolution and restoration. 117 via beauty; that is, it raises their emotions, yet eventually leaves them purified, in a state of harmony. In contrast to this, Schiller describes a contemporaneous audience, the

“unhappy race” (unglückliches Geschlecht), whose historical and cultural context is marked by negative attributes: powerlessness, a lack of a character, and an intellectual climate devoid of acuity. With the precise purpose of counteracting this malaise, Schiller prescribes “unsere Tragödie”—a hitherto unrealized type of tragedy of which

“Wallenstein” could be seen as a prototype—intended to move the disposition of the modern audience via the sublime. To each race Schiller thus accords a different type of tragedy that in turn fulfills a historically distinct cultural function.

Schiller’s comparison has significant implications that I wish to detail here. While

Sophoclean tragedy, and the cathartic resolution it engenders, was sufficient to move an ancient audience (the “happy race”), the same cannot be said of a modern one. Schiller’s reason: moderns do not experience beauty as the ancients once did; beauty has lost its power to move the modern subject, and has therefore become impotent. Schiller thus emphasizes the historicity of aesthetic experience, insofar as the subjectivities that experience an aesthetic phenomenon are historically conditioned. If tragedy is to move the modern subject and intervene in a specifically modern cultural context, it must employ other aesthetic means: hence Schiller’s recourse to the sublime and its mobilization in a new, modern form of tragedy—tragedy as shock therapy, without cathartic resolution.

It is worth pausing here to briefly distinguish Schiller’s position from contemporary scholars’ accounts of the rise of the sublime during the eighteenth century.

Rather than exemplifying a (re)discovery of an aesthetic category that possessed greater 118 power (Danto, Scarry), Schiller’s turn to the sublime is instead a compensatory response to a de-potentialization of the beautiful that unfolded historically. Whereas his

“Ästhetische Erziehung” from 1795 emphasizes the restorative power of beauty—a power Schiller believes should be harnessed—by 1800 Schiller acknowledges that cultural-anthropological changes have made the successful mobilization of the beautiful in modernity all but impossible. Schiller’s choice of the sublime thus does not emerge from a-historical comparison; quite to the contrary, the sublime is required because the beautiful has failed: it is an aesthetic option of last resort.

On a superficial level, Schiller’s turn from the beautiful to the sublime might seem to coincide with premises embraced by Winckelmann and Schlegel. However, if

Schiller indeed associates ancient Greece with beauty, he does not do so as the aforementioned authors did, nor does this identity carry the same consequences. For

Winckelmann as well as Friedrich Schlegel, the connection between beauty and antiquity has the status of fact: one they see evidenced in ancient artifacts such as statuary and poetry. For Winckelmann, the intensity of this relationship means that the modern artist can only produce the beautiful via imitation. Likewise, for Friedrich Schlegel, the identification of beauty with ancient Greek poetic production comes at the cost of its relationship to modern poetry, where it is absent. In both Winckelmann and Schlegel we can thus say that this exclusive identification leads inexorably to a problem of beauty in modernity, a problem defined by historical distance. Schiller’s association of beauty with antiquity, by contrast, differs both in terms of epistemic status as well as consequences.

His depiction of the ancients, particularly the Greeks, self-consciously points to itself as a construct; this notion of the ancients, much like his concept of the “naïve,” is the 119 production of a modern consciousness and sensibility; it is a heuristic with which to interrogate modernity. For this reason, the Greeks, for Schiller, are a “glückliches

Geschlecht,” a product of myth themselves. This means that the association between beauty and antiquity is not an exclusionary one: in contrast to Winckelmann and

Friedrich Schlegel, Schiller leaves open the possibility that moderns can indeed produce beauty, too. Schiller instead emphasizes a problem of efficacy. Beauty remains an aesthetic option, albeit one whose power has eclipsed. What we thus encounter in Schiller is a conscious acknowledgment that the relationship between beauty and antiquity is more conjecture than fact. At the same time, however, there is a sense that beauty must have had a more rooted relationship to culture in antiquity, but this fortunate coincidence has passed and cannot recur.

Schiller’s conclusion that aesthetic experience is historically conditioned also has implications for the adaptation and appropriation of literary forms. In writing a tragedy that experiments with a Wirkungsästhetik of the sublime, Schiller eschews strategies of emulation that would seek to replicate the cathartic restoration attributed to Attic tragedy, thereby abandoning the ameliorating effects of beauty. He instead refashions an ancient literary form, modernizing it to suit the demands of his own historical age. While the ancient Greeks invented the dramatic form of tragedy, Schiller’s gesture points to the possibility that moderns might, in fact, improve upon ancient exempla and develop a dramatic form even more tragic that of its originators, thereby becoming masters of tragedy themselves. 170 In this light, the historicity of literary form and aesthetic

170 The possibility that tragedy presents a more level playing field between the ancients and moderns is a notion already explored in Schiller’s essay “Über die tragische Kunst,” published in 120 experience reveals itself to be a two-way street: if historicity forecloses upon specific forms and intensities of aesthetic experience, it also opens up new possibilities of formal innovation. In this way, Schiller, as a modern, can been seen claiming an ancient form for himself as well as his own age.

In what follows I will use my discussion of tragedy above as a framework for understanding Schiller’s elegy production, where I see similar dynamics at work. I want to propose that Schiller’s attempt, in 1800, to lay claim to tragedy and modernize it, also holds true for his appropriations of the literary form of the elegy between 1795 and 1800.

Moreover, I submit that Schiller’s experimentations with both tragedy and elegy can be understood as a response to beauty’s decline in power. Whereas tragedy is the literary form through which Schiller seeks to compensate for the loss of beauty’s puissance by mobilizing the sublime, elegy can be seen as the literary form that Schiller adapts in order to mourn beauty’s leave taking. Tragedy, which ushers in the new (the sublime) and elegy, which mourns and remembers what once was (the beautiful), are thus two sides of the same coin. They are two ancient literary forms through which Schiller interrogates and clarifies the historic conditions and aesthetic limits of modernity. As I argued with tragedy, when Schiller writes his elegies, he enters into a competitive relationship with the ancients, laying claim to a form they developed. Schiller’s embrace of the elegy suggests the following: it is the moderns, not the ancients, who need elegy, for they are

1792. “Müssen wir Neuern wirklich darauf Verzicht tun, griechische Kunst je wieder herzustellen, da der philosophische Genius des Zeitalters und die modern Kultur überhaupt der Poesie nicht günstig sind, so wirken sie weniger nachteilig auf die tragische Kunst, welche mehr auf dem Sittlichen ruhet. Ihr allein ersetzt vielleicht unsre Kultur den Raub, den sie an der Kunst überhaupt verübte.” NA XXI: Philosophische Schriften: Zweiter Teil, ed. Benno von Wiese (1963), 176. Cf. Frick, 112-119.

121 the ones whom beauty has failed and who need to mourn; it is they who are the unglückliches Geschlecht.

From Theory to Poetry: Schiller’s Turn to Elegy

On December 17, 1795, Schiller writes the following in a letter to Goethe: “Wie beneide ich Sie um Ihre jetzige poetische Stimmung, die Ihnen erlaubt recht in Ihrem

Roman zu leben. Ich habe mich lange nicht so prosaisch gefühlt, als in diesen Tagen und es ist hohe Zeit, daß ich für eine Weile die philosophische Bude schließe. Das Herz schmachtet nach einem betastlichen Objekt.”171 Schiller’s decision to return to poetry is preceded by a six-year period in which he devotes himself to the study of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft and to the production of theoretical treatises. The driving force of this endeavor: to capture, in the precision of philosophical discourse, beauty—despite its notorious resistance to definition.172 Following his readings of Kant in 1792, Schiller writes a series of letters to Gottfried Körner in 1793, collected under the title “Kallias oder über die Schönheit.” Here, Schiller develops his famous definition of beauty:

“Schönheit also ist nichts anders als Freyheit in der Erscheinung.”173 This is followed by

171 NA XXVIII, 132.

172 One of the definitions of beauty given in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (derived from the 2nd moment) makes nonconceptuality part of its very features: “Schön ist das, was ohne Begriff gefällt.” Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 70. Schiller, in the first of his “Kallias-Briefe,” dated January 25, 1793, frames the issue of conceptualizing beauty as one of the central challenges he wishes to undertake: “Die Schwierigkeit, einen Begriff der Schönheit objektiv aufzustellen und ihn aus der Natur der Vernunft völlig a priori zu legitimieren, so daß die Erfahrung ihn zwar durchaus bestätigt, aber daß er diesen Ausspruch der Erfahrung zu seiner Gültigkeit gar nicht nötig hat, diese Schwierigkeit ist fast unüberschaubar.” NA XXI, 212.

173 NA XXVI: Briefwechsel: Schillers Briefe, 1.3.1790-17.5.1794, ed. Edith Nahler and Horst Nahler (1992), 183. 122 “Ueber Anmut und Würde” from the same year, which takes up the ethical dimensions of beauty, culminating in the ancillary concept of grace, which he defines as “die Schönheit der durch Freyheit bewegten Gestalt.”174 From this transcendental foundation, Schiller finally develops his project of beauty-as-a-cultural-program in “Über die ästhetische

Erziehung des Menschen” from 1795. Insofar as they attempt to isolate beauty, these texts, as a theoretical enterprise, tacitly evidence a need for its very stabilization; transcendental philosophy, which brackets out both history and experiential epistemologies, provides a means. However, with Schiller’s closing of the

“philosophische Bude” in 1795, this issue of beauty’s status, once latent, becomes manifest in his literary writing. With the turn from philosophical to literary discourse, we also see a change in the motivating questions: the issue of beauty’s nature (an ontological question) is replaced with the question of its relationship to the modern subject in lyric poetry, specifically elegy.

Schiller’s transition in 1795 from philosophical to literary discourse, as outlined above, is also mirrored in a movement from poetic theory to praxis. His composition of elegies at this time, in other words, is prefaced by a theoretization of the genre itself. This conceptual work is undertaken in the groundbreaking essay, “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung,” begun in 1793 and completed in 1795, which, in Schiller’s words, served as “eine Brücke zu der poetischen Production.”175 Insofar as beauty

174 NA XX, 265.

175 Letter from Schiller to Körner on 10.4.1793. Schiller writes, “Daneben arbeite ich an einem Aufsatz über Natur und Naivheit, der mich immer mehr fesselt, und mir vorzüglich zu gelingen scheint. Ich schreibe hier mehr aus dem Herzen, und mit Liebe. Es ist gleichsam eine Brücke zu der poetischen Production.” NA XXI, 240. 123 becomes a subject of elegy in his subsequent poems, it is imperative to first flush out

Schiller’s claims about elegy and the elegized as these constraints will determine the framework into which beauty is placed.

One of the hallmarks of Schiller’s concept of the elegy is that it is defined neither in terms of a specific meter (elegiac couplets), historical periods in which the form emerged and flourished (ancient Greece and Rome), nor even a specific content. Instead,

Schiller examines elegy, as well as other poetic forms, in light of their relationship to two different poetic sensibilities (Empfindungsweisen) that he posits—“the naïve” and “the sentimental.” Specifically, Schiller designates elegy as belonging to the sentimental—his term for a mode of poetry that emerges out of reflection and presentation (Darstellung), as opposed to the naïve, which is the result of perception and imitation (Nachahmung).176

The boldness of Schiller’s claim lies in asserting that elegy, at its most essential, engages in a poetic procedure that is distinctly modern. 177 As Thomas Pfau notes, the essay is

176 “Da der naive Dichter bloß der einfachen Natur und Empfindung folgt und sich bloß auf Nachahmung der Wirklichkeit beschränkt, so kann er zu seinem Gegenstand auch nur ein einziges Verhältnis haben, und es gibt, in dieser Rücksicht, für ihn keine Wahl der Behandlung. […] Ganz anders verhält sich mit dem sentimentalischen Dichter. Dieser reflektiert über den Eindruck, den die Gegenstände auf ihn machen, und nur auf jene Reflexion ist die Rührung gegründet, in die er selbst versetzt wird und uns versetzt. Der Gegenstand wird auf eine Idee bezogen, und nur auf dieser Beziehung beruht seine dichterische Kraft.” NA XX: Philosophische Schriften: Erster Teil, ed. Benno von Wiese (1962), 440.

177 Schiller’s association of the naïve with the ancient, the sentimental with the modern, is not limited by historical periodization. In a footnote, he is quick to point out that there are examples of sentimental poetry from the antiquity and naïve poetry in modernity—although they are rare. Nevertheless, the pairings naïve-ancient, sentimental-modern are systematically reinforced throughout the entirety of the essay, and the terms are often used as substitutes for each other. Consider, for example, the following quote where the terms are used interchangeably: “Man hätte deswegen alte und modern—naïve und sentimentalische—Dichter entweder gar nicht oder nur unter einem gemeinschaftlichen höhern Begriff (einen solchen gibt es wirklich) miteinander vergleichen sollen.” NA XX, 439. For a complex account of the dialectical relationship of the two terms, and the emergence of the concept of “das Naïve” out of the “das Sentimentalische,” 124 “arguably the first text in which the elegy assumes a critical role for modern aesthetics.”178 Schiller’s literary-critical insight is based on the following reasoning. At the core of sentimental (that is, modern) poetry is intellectual reflection. Reflection gives rise to two essential components: an object being presented, and an idea that said object gives rise to (Schiller often uses the terms Eindruck and Wirklichkeit for the former and

Idee, Ideal, even Natur for the latter). The crucial point is that reflection itself, for

Schiller, leads to a disjuncture between a certain finite ‘given’—whether that be a sensory impression that is transformed into poetic content, or the content of poem itself—and an ideational element that is infinite. Rather than a mark of deficiency, this internal tension—between the ideal and the real, the idea and the object, nature and art—is the very engine of sentimental poetry. Elegy, according to Schiller, is a specific form of sentimental poetry that thematizes or exploits this disjuncture in order to mourn the passing of “nature”179 or to lament a hitherto unrealized ideal.180 Instead of bemoaning

see Peter Szondi, “Das Naïve ist das Sentimentalische: Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schiller’s Abhandlung” in Lektüren und Lektionen (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), 47-99.

178 Thomas Pfau, “Mourning Modernity: Classical Antiquity, Romantic Theory and Elegiac Form,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 546-564, here 554.

179 Schiller’s concept of “nature” (Natur) requires brief elaboration here. For the most part, in this essay, Schiller uses this term to refer to an initial stage of human development (both onto- and phylogenetic) that is defined by a lack of reflection. The term “nature” in this essay thus has descriptive rather than normative value. The philosophical-historical model at work here involves three different stages: nature, culture, ideal. For Schiller, “naïve” poetry corresponds to the stage of “nature,” sentimental poetry to stage of “culture.” The ideal is an unrealizable stage: “Jene [alte Dichter] rühren uns durch Natur, durch sinnliche Wahrheit, durch lebendige Gegenwart; diese [moderne Dichter] rühren uns durch Ideen. Dieser Weg, den die neueren Dichter gehen, ist übrigens derselbe, den der Mensch überhaupt sowohl im einzelnen als im ganzen einschlagen muß. Die Natur macht ihn mit sich eins, die Kunst trennt und entzweiet ihn, durch das Ideal kehrt er zur Einheit zurück. Weil aber das Ideal ein Unendliches ist, das er niemals erreicht, so kann der kultivierte Mensch in seiner Art niemals vollkommen werden, wie doch der natürliche Mensch es in der seinigen zu werden vermag.” NA XX, 438. 125 the end of a concrete reality that has come to an end, the elegy addresses the absence of an ideal that never existed, yet treats as if it had: “Der elegische Dichter sucht die Natur, aber als eine Idee und in einer Vollkommenheit in der sie nie existiert hat, wenn er sie gleich als etwas Dagewesenes und nun Verlorenes beweint.”181 Elegy is thus a tool for mourning not what was, but what never could have been. In this sense, elegy is not simply preoccupied with loss; rather, it creates an ideal within the temporality of the poem itself, which it then erases and mourns.

In his essay, Schiller notes several examples of ideals that could serve as subjects of the elegy: “Die Trauer über verlorne Freuden, über das aus der Welt verschwundene goldene Alter, über das entflohene Glück der Jugend, der Liebe usw.”182 What might it mean to add beauty to this list? There are two conclusions we can draw. First, insofar as elegy, in all its various instantiations, mourns the idea of “nature” (Natur), to make beauty the subject of elegy is to imply that it, too, can fulfill this role. This claim, although never explicitly stated in Schiller’s essay, amounts to a provocative re- theorization of how beauty is experienced. In addition to offering aesthetic pleasure, which is disinterested, Schiller implies that beauty—insofar as it reminds us of “nature”- as-idea—awakens a moral (that is, intellectual) interest; beauty reminds us of a “nature”

180 For Schiller, the general class of the “elegiac” (das Elegische) can be split into two subgroups: elegy and idyll. While both focus on an ideal, elegy mourns it, while the idyll celebrates it: “Entweder ist die Natur und das Ideal ein Gegenstand der Trauer, wenn jene als verloren, dieses als unerreicht dargestellt wird. Oder beide sind ein Gegenstand der Freude, indem sie als wirklich vorgestellt werden. Das erste gibt die Elegie in engerer, das andere die Idylle in weitester Bedeutung.” NA XX, 448.

181 NA XX, 451.

182 NA XX, 450.

126 we imagine could have existed, but never did. Beauty thus becomes a symbol of “nature.”

This connection between beauty and nature is reinforced throughout the essay: “das verlorene Glück der Natur” is also described in terms of its “naïv[e] Schönheit”;183 “die alten Griechen,” likewise, are thought to have been surrounded by “schön[e] Natur”. The important point is that this form of experiencing beauty—in which pleasure engendered by form is supplemented by moral interest—is specific to modern subjectivity. The modern takes a sentimental interest in (actual) nature and beauty, precisely because both represent something that is irrevocably past and that cannot be taken for granted.184

Second, making beauty a topic of elegy also has implications for the how the relationship between beauty and the modern subject is conceptualized. In the cases of

Winckelmann and Schlegel, the gap between the two—if practically insurmountable— can be understood in terms of a finite historical distance. For them, beauty is localized in a specific geographic space and historical time period: classical antiquity (and for

Schlegel only, it is associated with a future stage, ever on the horizon). Schiller, by contrast, has an entirely different frame of reference. For him, the gap between beauty and the modern subject becomes infinite, because the ideal’s identification with a prior

183 “Aber wenn du über das verlorene Glück der Natur getröstet bist, so laß ihre Vollkommenheit deinem Herzen zum Muster dienen. Trittst du heraus zu ihr aus deinem künstlichen Kreis, steht sie vor dir in ihrer großen Ruhe, in ihrer naiven Schönheit, in ihrer kindlichen Unschuld und Einfalt; dann verweile bei diesem Bilde, pflege dieses Gefühl, es ist deiner herrlichsten Menschheit würdig.” NA XX, 428.

184 We might contrast this sentimental sensibility of the moderns with the naïve one of the ancients, who, according to Schiller, take no sentimental interest in nature precisely because they are familiar with it: “Wenn man sich der schönen Natur erinnert, welche die alten Griechen umgab, wenn man nachdenkt, wie vertraut dieses Volk unter seinem glücklichen Himmel mit der freien Natur leben konnte [...] so muß die Bemerkung befremden, daß man so wenige Spuren von dem sentimentalischen Interesse, mit welchem wir Neuere an Naturszenen und an Naturcharaktere hangen können, bei demselben antrifft.” NA XX, 429.

127 age is always already a product of modern consciousness itself; it is conjecture rather than fact. What Schiller says of “nature” can thus also be said of beauty: “Sie liegt hinter dir, sie muß ewig hinter dir liegen.”185 This is where elegy’s theoretical operations and its poetic practices converge. Precisely because beauty lies eternally and infinitely in the past, it cannot be restored; precisely because it cannot be restored, it must be mourned.

Neither hermeneutics nor mimesis, neither critique nor idealism, can bring it back. Elegy thus becomes the literary form that both announces and responds to beauty’s irretrievability.

There are perhaps two ways of responding to this predicament. One is to offer an account of how this came to pass and to ask what follows beauty. The other is to dwell upon beauty’s distance itself and to respond to the magnitude of this circumstance. These two gestures are undertaken by Schiller’s poems “Der Spaziergang” (1795/1799) and

“Nänie” (1800), respectively, which shall be the subject of the end of this chapter.

Transforming Landscapes: Elegy and the Transition from the Beautiful to the Sublime

First written in 1795 under the generic title “Elegie,” Schiller edited the poem in

1799, shortening it by 16 lines and renaming it “Der Spaziergang.” Because the second version has been the primary subject of critical attention, my remarks will concern “Der

Spaziergang.” There are two reasons for my selection of this particular elegy. First, as

Theodore Ziolkowski demonstrates in his study The German Classical Elegy: 1795-1950,

Schiller’s “Der Spaziergang,” along with Goethe’s “Euphrosyne,” became an exemplar

185 NA XX, 428.

128 for elegy writing in German letters around 1800.186 “Der Spaziergang” was thus not only widely read by Schiller’s peers, but was emulated by them as well, which accords the poem a legitimate claim to representativity. Second, and of greater importance, is the fact that “Der Spaziergang” combines the two issues at the heart of this chapter: the modern subject’s relationship to beauty and Geschichtsphilosophie. In what follows I offer a brief summary of the poem followed by an explicit statement my argument, which guides the close reading.

At the opening of Schiller’s 200-line poem, the lyrical subject has left the “prison of [his] room” and greets elements of the landscape before him: a mountain, the sun, a plain (Flur), linden trees and a blue sky. He then wanders along a path through an unmistakably pastoral landscape: a blooming meadow (blühende[r] Au) populated by bees, butterflies and larks. After passing through a woods, emerging at the foot of a mountain and observing its peak above and a ravine below, the subject falls into a reverie, in which he visualizes a series of four different stages187 of humanity’s relationship with nature. In the movement from one stage to the next, a dialectical realignment occurs, wherein nature and humanity co-determine each other in new ways.

The first stage—what we might call the stage of pre-differentiation—is situated on the specific biotopes of the plain (Flur) or field (Gefilde), where man lives in nature

186 In his chapter “The Generic Norm,” Ziolkowski writes the following: “Summarizing our findings, we are now in a position to abstract from ‘Der Spaziergang’ and ‘Euphrosyne’ certain common characteristics that I should like to call the generic norm of the classical German elegy.” See “The Generic Norm,” in The German Classical Elegy: 1795-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 89-134, here 99. In the balance of the chapter, Ziolkowski traces the influence of Schiller’s “Spaziergang” on later elegy writing, citing poems by Karl Ludwig Knebel and, more importantly, Hölderlin.

187 My reading of Schiller’s poem in terms of four stages—as opposed to the more traditional triad of culture, nature, ideal—is informed by Ziolkowski. 129 either as a shepherd or a farmer. This stage is characterized by harmonic relationship between humanity and nature: “Glückliches Volk der Gefilde! Noch nicht zur Freiheit erwachet, / Teilst du mit deiner Flur föhlich das enge Gesetz.”188 If not identical with nature, man shares in and lives by its rhythms. In the second stage, which could be described in terms of heroic culture, humanity begins to order nature as well as itself, forming communities with specific identities and social hierarchies. What was once an undifferentiated whole splits into more regulated forms of variety. Instead of residing in meadows, man develops “die thürmende Stadt,” the polis, which in turn, creates a new notion of nature as “wilderness” (Wildniß) (68-69). Different elements of the natural world also become associated with specific deities, who rule them. In the third stage, which we could call classical culture, humanity develops more refined forms of techne; this, once again, transforms humanity as well as its relationship to nature. Here, nature— even its more remote reaches, such as cliffs and canyons—becomes transformable into a useable economic resource. Markets and international trade develop, as does plenitude.

And for the first time in the poem, the term “freedom” is affirmatively used. Freedom gives rise to “die Künste der Lust,” the arts (122). In addition to this, humanity develops forms of rational enquiry as well as more refined systems of writing that preserve intellectual and cultural achievements throughout the ages. The fourth stage, which we might call the stage of liberation, marks the dawning of a new day, where humanity, for the first time, frees itself from “der Nebel des Wahnes” (137). This new freedom brings with it reason (Vernunft) as well as “uncontrolled desire” (wilde Begierde), which break

188 “Der Spazierang,” NA II 1, 308-314, here 310, ln. 55-56. Hereafter all line numbers for “Der Spaziergang” will be cited parenthetically. 130 free from “holy nature”: “Freiheit ruft die Vernunft, Freiheit die wilde Begierde, / von der heiligen Natur ringen sie lüstern sich los” (141-142). A la Rousseau, this decisive break from nature gives rise to a general state of disorientation—spiritual, epistemological, ethical and moral. Absent their prior grounding in nature, cultural signifiers become dislodged from what they heretofore signified; freedom from nature begets artificiality and false legitimacy. From this mummified state, humanity awakens with revolutionary zeal and seeks “in der Asche der Stadt […] die verlorene Natur” (170). In its newfound freedom, humanity has become a prisoner (Gefangen[er]) and the lyrical subject pleads that humanity be granted return to the plain (Flur) it once occupied: “O, so öffnet euch,

Mauren, und gebt den Gefangenen ledig, / Zu der verlassenen Flur kehr er gerettet zurück”

(171).

After this last nightmarish image, the speaker emerges from his daydream to find himself near the peak of the mountain, without a path before him. He is surrounded by a sublime and barren landscape: a crashing waterfall, an untouched stone cliff, with no signs of humanity; the only animal creature is an eagle in flight. Asking himself whether he truly is alone, he perceives that his reverie was indeed that, a dream, and that nature, ever young, lies before him. The same blue heavens, the same green, even Homer’s sun—that is, the continuity of nature—unites him, a modern, with “distant races” (fern[e]

Geschlechter, 199).

In the context of our discussion of beauty’s relationship to the moderns, Schiller’s poem represents a significant departure from what we have observed in Winckelmann and Schlegel. ancient Greece—the prime historical reference point for natural beauty, cultural attention to beauty and beautiful artistic production—while acknowledged, is 131 deemphasized in the “Der Spaziergang.” Here, we see it subsumed and folded into a much more expansive narrative of humanity’s relationship to nature. Nature—as a historical stage in the infinite past, as humanity’s origin, and as a world that, in modernity, becomes transformable into landscape—replaces ancient Greece as reference point. The supposition is this: if we are truly to understand our relationship to beauty, we must imaginatively explore forms of interaction with the outside world that preceded representation and mimesis, that preceded beauty’s explicit reflection in culture; hence antiquity, as a reference point, is already too late—it is but one episode in a more comprehensive story. Schiller’s “Spaziergang,” I would thus argue, proposes the following: instead of in terms of its historical distance to Ancient Greece, humanity’s relationship to beauty can be understood as a function of its evolving relationship to nature. Insofar as the poem depicts the trajectory of humanity’s relationship to nature in

Sprachbilder, it also visualizes humanity’s relationship to beauty. In my reading of the

“Spaziergang” I discern the following pattern: a movement from an initial position in which humanity’s relationship to beauty is defined by immediacy, to one gradually defined by increasing distance, followed by a final phase in which the sublime predominates over the beautiful. This turn to the sublime results not from an inherent superiority of this category, but from a problem particular to beauty itself. Inexorably bound up with nature, as well as our sensual experience of it,189 beauty becomes

189 The history of philosophy is replete with examples of super-sensual beauty, the most prominent being Plato’s Form of the Beautiful (“Symposium”) or Plotinus’ notion of “intellectual beauty” (Enneads). Nevertheless, as the concept of beauty is relocated from the domain of metaphysics to branch of aesthetics—particularly in the eighteenth-century German context, where aesthetics became a discipline unto itself—super-sensual beauty, as a notion, ceases to be a dominant concept.

132 increasingly associated with the past as humanity dissociates itself historically from nature. The sublime becomes a new option because it offers a form of aesthetic experience that itself mirrors humanity’s onto- and phylogenetic path out of nature. What begins with an initial sensual experience—that is, surveying a vast expanse from atop a mountain—transitions into super-sensual contemplation. The sublime represents a form of aesthetic experience that is befitting of humanity’s new historical position. And the poem as a whole thus performs the eighteenth century’s turn from the beautiful to the sublime—as well as the assumptions under which this took place.

Although the entire poem consists of one unbroken stanza, we can nevertheless understand Schiller’s “Elegy” in terms of three constituent parts. There are two frame sections, the beginning and the end of the poem, in which the lyrical subject describes nature as an object before him. They present interactions with nature as landscape (Flur and Berg) and concern the present. These two frame sections are separated by a long interlude, in which the lyrical subject relates his imagination of four prior stages of humanity’s relationship to nature. The glance of this middle section is retrospective, peering deep into the past. If we read the poem according to its internal ordering of history, the following sequence results: the imagined stages of human development are first (the daydream), followed by the lyrical subject’s encounter with the landscape of the plain (frame section 1), with the mountain landscape at the end (frame section 2). In what follows I will reconstruct this specific chronology in light of humanity’s relationship to beauty and illustrate how this preconditions a trajectory from the beautiful to the sublime.

The elegy’s four-stage representation of humanity’s relationship to nature draws upon the eighteenth-century genre of the conjectural history. An answer to the problem of 133 understanding human development prior to historical record, the conjectural history offers an account not of what occurred, but what must have occurred in terms of a series of historical stages.190 In so far as Schiller’s poem presents such a narrative within the framework of the lyrical subject’s daydream, the poem self-consciously points to the constructed nature of this ‘history.’ It stipulates that this account of man’s relationship to nature is based in a modern subject’s sentimental mode of understanding the past. But what is both peculiar and revealing about the particular narrative in Schiller’s poem is the design of its first stage. Instead of beginning with a scene loosely modeled on the Garden of Eden (Kant)191 or a notion of natural man prior to the development of sociability

(Rousseau),192 Schiller’s poem initiates its account with the topos of the pastoral setting.

With this the following is emphasized: the rootedness of humanity in nature and the beauty of the nature in which it resides.193 Let us consider the specific scenario offered in the poem. Here, the “Glückliches Volk der Gefilde”194 in the poem are shepherds and farmers who have not yet freed themselves from nature—they are “noch nicht zur

Freiheit erwachet”—and thus reside within it. Rather than regarding nature as a separate

190 Herder’s oft-cited response to the poem confirms that it was also understood in such terms. In a letter to Schiller on October 10, 1795, he writes the following: “Die Elegie ist eine Welt von Scenen, ein fortgehendes, geordnetes Gemählde aller Scenen der Welt und Menschheit.” NA II, 2A: Geschichte 1776-1799: Anmerkungen zu Bd. 1, ed. Georg Kurscheidt and Norbert Oellers (1991), 276.

191 See Kant’s “Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte” from 1786.

192 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes from 1755.

193 Often referred to in scholarship in terms of the locus amoenus, the setting in the poem also corresponds with contemporary examples of natural beauty in aesthetic theory, such as in Burke’s Enquiry.

194 My italics.

134 entity, man lives together with his pastures: “Nachbarlich wohnet der Mensch noch mit dem Acker zusammen […]” (51). At the same time, just as important as man’s proximity to nature is the notion that said nature is also beautiful. In addition to the allusions to the pastoral and its connotations of natural beauty, the entire terrain is defined and unified by a road whose winding path corresponds with Hogarth’s notion of the “line of beauty.”195

“Aber in freiern Schlangen durchkreuzt die geregelten Felder, / Jetzt verschlungen vom

Wald, jetzt an den Bergen hinauf / Klimmernd, ein schimmernder Streif, die Länder verknüpfende Straße” (43-45).

These references to the genre of the pastoral and to eighteenth-century theories of beauty (Burke, Hogarth) are devices that allow the poem to create a specific scenario in which humanity’s proximity to nature allows for a special kind of relationship to beauty.

The poem challenges the reader to consider the following: there must have been a stage prior to humanity’s differentiation from nature, a period in which humanity—because of its proximity to nature and the absence of a strict subject/object relationship—also enjoyed a pre-aesthetic, that is to say, immediate relationship to beauty. There must have been an experience of beauty as immanently present that was eventually lost as humanity gradually left nature. The poem therefore asks us to contemplate a scenario that is un- representable in the sense that the signified (beauty of immediacy) preexists a

195 In the section “Of Intricacy” in his The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth offers the following description of “serpentine lines,” which he claims correspond with beauty: “The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms, as we shall see hereafter, are composed principally of what, I call, the waving and serpentine lines. Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful […]” Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: J. Reeves, 1753), 25.

135 differentiation that is already inscribed in the signifiers in the text (beauty that results from distance). The lyrical subject in the poem must present as landscape and as aesthetically beautiful—hence his description of the scene from a position of physical and historical distance—something that existed prior to nature’s status as object, prior to the cultural practice of artistic representation and prior to the emergence of “aesthetic beauty” as a type of experience that arises out of distant contemplation.196 In essence, the lyrical subject in the poem cannot represent the immediate beauty as it is seen by the

“glückliches Volk der Gefilde,” yet precisely this now-unviewable beauty is what the poem seeks to convey; this beauty and our unrecoverable proximity to it is the object of elegiac anamnesis.197 This speculative stage—and not ancient Greece198—becomes the reference point in the poem for measuring humanity’s changing relationship to nature and

196 At the same time, it is necessary to emphasize that the very notion that a stage like this might even have occurred is the product of a modern subjectivity, like that of the lyrical subject. Hence, Schiller’s poem is inherently ironic in that it presents an account of human prehistory, while at the same time pointing to the fact that said account is a construction, a retroactive projection.

197 In §23 of his Kritik der Urteilskraft, Kant argues that the sublime cannot be contained in any object, or sensible form. Sublimity proper resides in “ideas of reason,” in the mind: “Wir können nicht mehr sagen, als daß der Gegenstand zur Darstellung einer Erhabenheit tauglich sei, die im Gemüte angetroffen werden kann; das eigentliche Erhabene kann in keiner sinnlichen Form erthalten sein, sondern trifft nur Ideen der Vernunft, welche, obgleich keine ihnen angemessene Darstellung möglich ist, eben durch diese Unangemessenheit, welche sich sinnlich darstellen läßt, rege gemacht und ins Gemüt gerufen werden.” Kant, 107. The sublime is thus unrepresentable. One way of circumventing the problem of unrepresentability—in both literature (Jean Paul) and visual art (Caspar David Friedrich)—is the introduction of a human figure that experiences the sublime instead. Indirect representation becomes a solution to unrepresentability. Schiller’s poem, however, demonstrates that the problematics of unrepresentability can also be applied to the beautiful.

198 As we recall, Winckelmann also posits that Greeks enjoyed a privileged relationship to beauty—one that the modern viewer could only begin to discover by relearning to see through observation of ancient Greek art. Schiller’s poem in a sense outdoes Winckelmann by positing an experience of the beautiful that existed prior to the subject-object relationship, a precondition for artistic representation. Insofar as ancient Greece is renowned for the beauty of its art, this already evidences a later, more distanced engagement with beauty.

136 beauty in the poem, in short, for tracking history itself. Conversely, we could say that the poem represents history as the series of stages by which humanity progressively distances itself from nature and this original beauty.

The balance of the poem marks, stage-by-stage, humanity’s departure from nature and—as a consequence—its ever-transforming relationship to beauty. While this account is initially dialectical, as it progresses past the stage of Enlightenment liberation, it becomes increasingly apocalyptic: the historical process leads from origin to absolute loss and the subsequent desire for return. Following the stage of pre-differentiation (the pastoral), the poem details the emergence of the city and religious art during the stage of heroic culture. During the stage of classical culture, the arts, which had heretofore housed the deities on earth, now delight as “Künste der Lust.” Although the realization of beauty is by no means the sole principle at work here, artistic production, both as mimesis and presentation 199, allows for the creation of a second world (art) within the first (nature). It offers a new way in which beauty is reflected and can be encountered, and opens the possibility that the second world can condense and contain within itself a version of the first. During the final stage, the stage of liberation, humanity’s ultimate break with nature is complete.

199 Here, the poem uses the ambivalent term “nachahmende[s] Leben” which simultaneously refers to the mimetic relationship between cultural artifacts and their natural models, as well as a to sui generis legitimacy of these artifacts themselves—their own “life,” as it were. “Da gebieret das Glück dem Talente die göttlichen Kinder, Von der Freiheit gesäugt, wachsen die Künste der Lust. Mit nachahmendem Leben erfreuet der Bildner die Augen, Und vom Meißel beseelt, redet der fühlende Stein, Künstliche Himmel ruhn auf schlanken ionischen Säulen, Und den ganzen Olymp schließet ein Pantheon ein […]” (121-126). 137 Whereas the lyrical subject’s daydream terminates in an undialectical loss of both nature and beauty—that is, in a vision of modernity as the absolute decimation of origin—the two frame sections present a corrective to this account, a counter-narrative of humanity’s relationship to both nature and beauty in modernity. Set in the contemporaneous present, the first frame section of the poem, where the lyrical subject walks out and greets the landscape, illustrates a more nuanced account: that modernity indeed means distance from—but not loss of—nature and that this very distance brings with it new forms of perception and new modes of access. Via analogy, the same can be said of beauty: while modernity means irrecoverable—infinite, even—distance from the speculative beauty of immediacy, this distance will make possible a new relationship to it.

This distanced appreciation both nature and of beauty becomes crystallized in the first frame section, the opening portion of the poem, where the lyrical subject engages with the beautiful pastoral landscape, the Flur.

In his groundbreaking essay “Landschaft” Joachim Ritter describes a new relationship to nature, an “aesthetische Auffassung der Natur”—nature as landscape— that compensates for the loss of nature as kosmos, as a whole. According to Ritter, as man distances himself from nature in modernity—by making nature an object of the natural sciences, a resource to be exploited, and thereby loses the ability to cognize nature as a totality—experience of nature, as landscape, compensates for this, allowing man to experience it as whole aesthetically: “Landschaft wird daher Natur erst für den, der in sie

“hinausgeht” (transcensus), um “draußen” an der Natur selbst als an dem “Ganzen”, das

138 in ihr und als sie gegenwärtig ist, in freier genießender Betrachtung teilzuhaben […]”200

Although, for Ritter, the evidence and examples of this are “zahllos,”201 Schiller’s “Der

Spaziergang” offers a perfect illustration in that it contains all the elements necessary for landscape: “In ihr [der Spaziergang] begegnen zunächst in großer Zusammenfassung alle die Elemente, die konstitutiv für die Natur als Landschaft sind […]”.202 Indeed, in both frame sections of the poem—both parts that take place emphatically in the contemporaneous present—the lyrical subject presents himself encountering nature aesthetically, as landscape. Distance from nature allows for its transformation into something that can be aesthetically appreciated. Likewise in the poem, historical distance from immediate beauty of the first stage eventually flips over into a new form of access: distance becomes the precondition for enjoying aesthetic beauty—that beauty and an attendant form of experience that emerges out of distance.

While Ritter’s essay offers insight into the concept of landscape generally, it does not differentiate—either historically, or functionally—between specific aesthetic categories that landscape can exemplify: “Was sonst das Genutzte oder als Ödland das

Nutzlose ist und was über Jahrhunderte hin ungesehen und unbeachtet blieb oder das feindlich abweisende Fremde war, wird zum Großen, Erhabenen und Schönen: es wird

ästhetisch zur Landschaft.”203 Schiller’s poem, by contrast, does distinguish between

200 Joachim Ritter, “Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft,” Subjektivität: Sechs Aufsätze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 141-189, here 147.

201 Ritter, 148.

202 Ritter, 158.

203 Ritter, 151, my italics.

139 beautiful and sublime landscapes. In The German Classical Elegy: 1795-1950, Theodore

Ziolkowski, referring to Schiller’s essay “Über das Erhabene,” observes that there is a clear element of directionality in the poem: the lyrical subject progresses from the beautiful to the sublime.204 Indeed, if we consider the sequence of the external landscapes that the lyrical subject experiences, there is a topographical and aesthetic trajectory, which leads from the very beginning of the poem to its very last lines, from the enjoyment of the beautiful plain and meadow (frame section 1) to solitary reflection upon the sublime mountain (frame section 2). And clearing the way for the lyrical subject’s progress from one to the other, shaping his itinerary, is the path (Pfad and Steig) (lines 14,

24, 36, 173). The path is the visual representation of the assumptions guiding the subject, the ideas that have become naturalized, in short, the Geschichtsphilosophie inherent in the poem itself.

What then is modernity’s relationship to the beautiful, as articulated by the poem?

As we have seen, modernity is the inheritor of distance—distance that has brought with it access in the form of aesthetic beauty. At the same time, the fundamental arc of the poem illustrates the leaving behind of this, too. The lyrical subject’s climbing of the mountain, thus marks humanity’s departure from beauty for the second time in the poem, mirroring the first, and depicts its movement toward a new aesthetic ideal in the sublime. The

204 Ziolkowski writes: “We see, therefore, that ‘Der Spaziergang’ also represents the poet’s progress from beauty to the sublime inasmuch as he escapes, at the conclusion of the poem, the snares of that nature whose beauty he had so profoundly enjoyed at the beginning of the poem. Only at this point has he been fully liberated by aesthetic education and the process of his Bildung completed” (17-18). While I share Ziolkowski’s view of the poem’s trajectory, my reading of it differs from his in terms of emphasis. Drawing heavily upon Schiller’s essay “Über das Erhabene,” Ziokowski’s reading focuses on the poem’s thematization of the individual’s process of self- formation, Bildung; it views the poem as an illustration of Schiller’s theories of aesthetic education. Mine, by contrast, foregrounds the changing historical relationship to aesthetic categories. 140 experience of the sublime—which first arises in encounter with, and then turns over into a transcendent departure from, nature—symbolizes humanity’s leave-taking from the stage of pre-differentiation, the precondition of its freedom. The sublime and not the beautiful is therefore an aesthetic more coherently aligned with humanity’s historical position and its aspirations to infinitude.

Does this movement to the sublime signify the absolute loss of nature and of beauty, such as we saw illustrated in the nightmarish conclusion of the daydream? No, they have not vanished. The poem instead articulates a much more nuanced position. The ascending of the mountain corresponds to the lyrical subject’s lifting himself above nature, leaving behind “der Gärten, der Hecken vertrauete Begleitung,” “jegliche Spur menschlicher Hände,” and occupying a space proximate to the soaring eagle “im einsamen Luftraum.” But absolute transcendence as absolute separation from nature is not a space inhabitable by man—notwithstanding the fact that it is the telos of his trajectory. The sublime position atop a mountain and the contemplation of the absolute separation of the self flows over into the epiphany that man is never entirely absent from nature: “Bin ich wirklich allein? In deinen Armen, an deinem/ Herzen wieder, Natur, ach!”

(185-186). The poem combines the experience of the sublime with the rhetoric of cathartic reflection; the sublime raises and purges the fears of modern man’s total alienation from nature. While the path to the sublime leads away from nature and beauty, this experience itself facilitates a redirection of the lyrical subject’s attention—this time from above—back to nature and to the beautiful, a re-approach. The sublime thus transforms man’s relationship to the beautiful. Although man now has the option of turning to the sublime—and this aesthetic category is consummate with man’s historical 141 situatedness—nature and beauty are not removed from man: “Aber jugendlich immer, in immer veränderter Schöne/ Ehrst du, fromme Natur, züchtig das alte Gesetz,/Immer dieselbe, bewahrst du in treuen Händen dem Manne, / Was dir das gaukelnde Kind, was dir der Jüngling vertraut, / Nährest an gleicher Brust die vielfach wechselnden Alter”

(193-197). Much like a parent, whose custodial protection an adult son or daughter has outgrown, nature and beauty no longer mark the boundaries of humanity’s sphere; they nevertheless remain a wellspring of inspiration and invigoration. At the conclusion of the poem, the lyrical subject proclaims the sameness of the nature in which the “near” and

“remote races,”—that is, the moderns and ancients—walk: “Unter demselben Blau, über dem nämlichen Grun/Wandeln die nahen und wandeln vereint die fernen

Geschlechter,/Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! Sie lächelt auch uns” (198-200). If the two

“races,” which Schiller will later refer to in 1800 as “glücklich” and “unglücklich,” are united under a same nature, they are nevertheless differentiated from one another in terms of their proximity to this nature; this is why it is “Homers Sonne,” even though it shines upon the race of moderns, too.205 Because beauty is conjoined to nature, and nature’s proximity to humanity exists in the past, there is no ‘new beauty,’—just as there is no new nature—that can become a future ideal. Schiller’s poem thus offers the subtle argument that beauty is simultaneously present before us and yet beholden to the past.

And it also illustrates that the movement to the sublime is preconditioned by beauty’s proximity to the past.

205 As Peter-André Alt writes, but with different emphasis: “Die Sonne Homers ist-darin liegt die elegische Botschaft des Spaziergang—gerade nicht jene Sonne, die Homer beschien; es ist die Sonne desjenigen, der die Strahlen genießt, weil er weiß, daß sie auch Homer erwärmten.” Peter- André Alt, Schiller: Leben, Werk, Zeit: Eine Biographie 1791-1805, vol 2. (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2009), 293. 142 “Nänie” and the Claims of Elegy

As I have sought to show in the course of this chapter, the notion of a disconnection between beauty and modernity—no longer merely symptomatic, as it was in the 1750s—had become an explicit topic in aesthetic discourse by the 1790s. As evidence for this assertion, this chapter referenced as its prime example Friedrich

Schlegel’s “Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie” from 1795/1797, which explicitly states that beauty cannot be the ideal of modern literature. Furthermore, through a close examination of Schlegel’s essay, we observed that the discursive crisis of taste announced therein stemmed not from a preference for the sublime—and this is my contribution to our understanding of the history of aesthetics—but from a strain of historico-philosophical thought that has its origins in Winckelmann. Schlegel’s essay, I demonstrated, adopts Winckelmann’s model and expands it into a Geschichtsphilosophie proper, insofar as it posits a positive counter-concept to the beautiful (the characteristic) and ascribes meaning to history in the form of a return to beauty in the future. This form of historicization I have thus argued—and not mere predominance of the sublime—was the precondition for beauty’s now-precarious position: it is identifiable with the ancient past, its return is prophesized as an ideal to be realized in the future, but it is irreconcilable with the contemporaneous present, that is, modernity.

With recourse Friedrich Schiller’s letter to Goethe, the chapter also showed that the arguments in Schlegel’s essay found a contemporaneous audience that reacted with concern to the instability of beauty’s status in aesthetic discourse. Beauty had thus not only become a problem at this time, but it had also taken on an acute form. Schiller’s letter to Goethe points to—in his view—the necessity of intervening in and reengineering 143 aesthetic discourse. By closely examining Schiller’s publication strategy—that is, the way in which the claims in Aloys Hirt’s essays are instrumentalized—the chapter highlights a critical interrogation of the specific assumptions informing Schlegel’s essay and underwriting the crisis of taste itself. In examining Schiller’s strategy we observed a contemporaneous awareness of the connection between Winckelmann and Schlegel thought, between the identification of beauty with antiquity and beauty’s precarious position in modernity. Only by changing a notion of antiquity and its art—and this is precisely what Hirt’s essays seek to do—would it be possible to free up beauty for the present.

By examining Schlegel’s essay and Schiller’s response to it, the chapter endeavors to complicate our understanding of late eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse and beauty’s complex position in it. The sublime, the ugly and the characteristic may have offered alternatives to the beautiful and thus functioned as irritants or counter- concepts, but they are not unifiable under one self-same principle. In this way, aesthetics at this time is not double—that is defined by the binary code beautiful/sublime—or better yet not merely double, but is instead composed of a variety of aesthetic options. More importantly, we have seen that aesthetic discourse is also conditioned by the structures through which modernity understands itself and its own historical position. During the eighteenth century modernity’s self-understanding is the product of a comparison of itself with antiquity: identity is the product of difference. While this comparison has its roots in the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, during the course of the eighteenth century it developed into Geschichtsphilosophie, where modernity charted out its position at the end of a historical process and projected into the future. The first two sections of this 144 chapter have illustrated how a particular view of antiquity and antique art precluded modernity’s ability to claim beauty for itself.

The third and final section of the chapter demonstrates that the problem of beauty’s relationship to modernity was also registered as a topic in literary discourse. I would like to conclude it here by addressing elegy’s response as well as its claims. The issue at hand therefore is what, exactly, elegy can accomplish. In “Über das Erhabene,”

Schiller writes that in art, we can access the beautiful and the sublime more easily and directly because its essence, unlike nature’s, is that of pure semblance: “Da aber der ganze Zauber des Erhabenen und Schönen nur in dem Schein und nicht in dem Inhalt liegt, so hat die Kunst alle Vorteile der Natur, ohne ihre Fesseln mit ihr zu teilen.”206 As we have seen, a similar claim about the capabilities of literature is made in the poems

“Die Götter Griechenlandes” and “Der Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts.” There, literature both thematizes modernity’s distance to beauty and simultaneously points to itself as a privileged discourse, as special refuge where beauty can be preserved. I’d like to briefly review these specific claims here. The first versions of “Die Götter Griechenlandes” says of “die schöne Welt”: “Ach! nur in dem Feenland der Lieder / Lebt noch deine golden

Spur.”207 In the second version, we read the following concerning the fate of “alles

Schöne”: “Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben, / Muß im Leben untergehn.”208 In “Der

Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts, we also read the following claim: “Und das Schöne blüht

206 NA XXI, 54.

207 NA I, 194.

208 NA II 1, 367.

145 nur im Gesang.”209 From these three poems we can make the following generalization: in literature or song, beauty itself—and not a mere representation of it—is to be found; it lives and thrives there. If beauty in its entirety does not dwell in song, at least its “trace”

(Spur) is to be found there. The claim is that song can report on the passing of beauty, yet is still exempt from this historical development: beauty can still be experienced in literature.

If we accept Schiller’s definition of the genre in “Über naïve und sentimentalische

Dichtung,” “Die Götter Griechenlandes” and “Der Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts” can qualify as elegies. However, if we abide by a more narrow definition of the elegy—in terms of a specific metric form—we are confronted with a more complex development.

We observe that both “Der Spaziergang” and “Nänie” (which I shall examine shortly) conform to both Schiller’s and the meter-based definitions of elegy, thematize beauty’s distance or passing, yet, strikingly, they refrain from claiming the ability to preserve beauty itself. What we see reflected in these two elegies is the tacit admission that literature is subject to—and not exempt from—the historical process and its implications for beauty. Whereas my first chapter demonstrated that description seeks to restore beauty by reassembling it before the viewer/reader, elegy—when considered in light of this strict formal definition—recognizes this gesture as futile. In elegy, beauty lies infinitely in the past and is thus irrecoverable. In the example of the poem “Der

Spaziergang,” which becomes a model of elegiac writing at this time, we observed elegy responding to the problem of beauty’s distance by offering an account of how this might

209 NA II 1, 362.

146 have transpired. It foregrounded its own impossibility of representing some prior, more immediate beauty and offered an alternative in the form of the sublime. In “Nänie” the focus is turns to mourning, memory, and the capabilities of elegy itself.

Comprised of a mere 14 lines, Schiller’s “Nänie” reflects upon the magnitude of what it means to be irrevocably distant from the beautiful. In its opening line it announces and mourns the death of the aesthetic category of beauty—“Auch das Schöne muß sterben!”—as opposed to an individual instantiation of it.210 Written in 1799, at the turn of the 19th century, it, like no other poem, marks the perception that beauty itself has been lost. Its elegiac response to this is a poetics of repetition: the name of the poem itself means “Klagelied”; and the death of beauty is given expression through the examples of

Orpheus’ mourning of Eurydike, Aphrodite’s mourning of Adonis, and Thetis’ mourning of Achilleus. In the poetics of repetition we hear the inability of the poem to transcend its own capabilities—to actually preserve beauty and not simply mourn it; it is the mark of poetry’s frustration with its own limits. The problem of elegy mourning the passing of beauty itself is that this scenario precludes the possibility that beauty could be the means through which elegy would transform a sorrowful event into something pleasing. The repetition in the poem is thus mourning doubled: of beauty and of elegy. Elegy, in this sense, is restricted to preserving a memory of what was lost, but not the thing itself, and can thus only function as allegory. As the last lines of the poem attest, “Auch ein

Klagelied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten, ist herrlich, / Denn das Gemeine geht klanglos

210 NA II 1, 326, ln 1.

147 zum Orkus hinab.”211 Memory becomes consolation, not a resolution. Insofar as “Nänie” mourns beauty’s passing, it mourns the grounds of its own effectiveness. But not without a sound.

211 NA II, 326, ln. 13-14. 148 Chapter 3. The Other Side of the Statue: Narrative Fiction Reconfigures the Beautiful

Introduction

Histories of aesthetics are, by and large, written as histories of aesthetic theory.212

This preoccupation with theoretical texts has profoundly shaped our understanding of the aesthetic category of the beautiful and its historical conceptualization. In critical accounts of eighteenth and nineteenth-century German aesthetic discourse, two works of philosophical aesthetics serve as major coordinates: Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) and Hegel’s posthumously published lecture notes, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (1817-

1829). Less comprehensive studies of aesthetics often omit theoretical texts written in the intervening years, which results either in the creation of a historical trajectory that goes directly from Kant to Hegel, or in a systematic contrast between the two. The privileging of theoretical texts, and of these two texts in particular, has resulted in an all too uniform account of the beautiful—one that warrants critical reexamination.

Despite numerous substantive differences between Kant and Hegel’s aesthetics, their theories of the beautiful can nonetheless be reconciled with a classicist position, broadly defined. By classicist, I mean conceptions of the beautiful that: (1) identify this aesthetic category with a specific set of values, such as harmony, perfection, or unity in variety; (2) that find it ideally embodied in a specific object, the ancient statue; or (3) that

212 Recent examples include: Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Alessandro Giovannelli, ed., Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers (London: Continuum, 2012); Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Reys Gaut and Dominic Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001).

149 presume a stable subjectivity of its beholder. Both Kant and Hegel’s texts align themselves with this general position, albeit via different arguments and claims. Kant’s

Kritik der Urteilskraft, for example, argues that the very act of judging something to be beautiful confirms the harmonious constitution of the human;213 with this argument, Kant affirms the relationship between beauty and harmony. And although judging an object to be beautiful is not a determinate judgment (as there is no concept of beauty under which a representation can be subsumed), Kant nonetheless writes that the human being alone can be the ideal of beauty.214 In Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, the classicist position is even more explicitly represented. Here, Hegel argues that art’s highest determination was fulfilled in the Classical Greek statue, which sensuously revealed the divine in marble, uniting form and content under the category of the beautiful. Studies of aesthetics that focus exclusively on these two texts are thus able to give the beautiful a certain conceptual stability and, offer the impression of a broad consensus.

In addition to the aforementioned texts, the classicist conceptualization of the beautiful furthermore corresponds to, and is crystallized in, a particular ideal: the ancient

Greek sculpture. Winfried Menninghaus has cogently summarized its centrality as follows: “Das Ideal des Schönen, der klassische Statuenkörper und der menschliche

Körper überhaupt, unterliegt vom Kopf bis zu den Füßen einer Topo- und Chronographie

213 In § 9, Kant writes how aesthetic judgment of an object as beautiful precedes the pleasure that felt. The grounds of this pleasure is the harmonic constitution of the faculties of cognition: “Diese bloß subjective (ästhetische) Beurteilung des Gegenstandes [...] geht nun vor der Lust an demselben vorher und ist der Grund dieser Lust an der Erkenntnisvermögen […].” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2009), 68.

214 See § 17, “Vom Ideale der Schönheit,” where Kant writes the following: “dieser Mensch ist also eines Ideals der Schönheit, sowie die Menschheit in seiner Person als Intelligenz des Ideals der Vollkommenheit unter allen Gegenständen in der Welt allein fähig.” Ibid., 89. 150 des ‘Ekels.’”215 By both embodying the ideal of beauty and functioning as an index of what Menninghaus calls “Ekelvermeidungsregeln,” 216 the ancient statue occupies a unique status. It functions as an exemplar of beauty and illustrates the exact opposite of the disgusting—that category which will not be integrated into aesthetics until the mid-

19th century. With the term exemplarity, I refer not to the ancient statue’s suitability as a model for mimesis, but to the fact that it is a profoundly ideological object. It condenses contemporaneous assumptions about what the beautiful is, and how it is to be experienced such that it is understood to be the epitome of the beautiful. The ancient statue is exemplary insofar as it is regarded as the highest instantiation of beauty in art and constitutes an aesthetic ideal.

What changes, however, if we substitute aesthetic discourse with literary discourse, Kant and Hegel’s texts with others from the same periods, and examine how the ancient statue is discussed vis-à-vis the aesthetic category of the beautiful? How might our understanding of the classicist ideal of beauty, and its status, change? And how might this expand our understanding of how the beautiful was conceptualized around

1800? The implications of these questions are not negligible. The consequence, for example, of Hegel’s valorization of classicist beauty, and its embodiment in the Classical statue, is that art, subsequently, no longer fulfills its highest function (thus becoming “a thing of the past”) and that beauty, particularly in post-Romantic art, ceases to be integral

215 Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002), 15.

216 Ibid., 16.

151 to art.217 At stake is thus the fate of the beautiful in aesthetic discourse (and, in Hegel’s philosophy, of art itself). Moreover, given that critical accounts of and interventions in aesthetic discourse presuppose a classicist conception of beauty, 218 how might the identification of alternative conceptions of the beautiful complicate how we write histories of aesthetics? This chapter poses these very questions by assembling three different genres of texts—theoretical texts, travelogues, and literary texts—that all model different ways of understanding and viewing ancient sculpture. Far from confirming the stability of the ancient statue, and hence classicist conceptions of the beautiful, these texts emphasize its very fragility and—in the specific case of the literary texts—facilitate new, alternative ways of conceptualizing the beautiful.

This chapter examines presentations of ancient statuary in aesthetic discourse, in the travelogue and in literary discourse between 1766 and 1817. Part I focuses on an issue raised in Lessing’s Laokoon and complicated in Herder’s Plastik, namely, the specific conditions under which the beautiful is perceivable. Rather than making ideal beauty immediately apprehensible, the ancient statue, I demonstrate, is instead portrayed as a site fraught with historical and medial problems that impede visualization of the beautiful ideal. Turning to Johann Heinrich Meyer’s “Über das Betrachten der Statuen bei der

217 “In allen diesen Beziehungen ist und bleibt die Kunst nach der Seite ihrer höchsten bestimmung für uns ein Vergangenes.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), 25. The connection between Hegel’s thesis on the end of art and its intersection with beauty is elaborated later in the chapter in a section titled “Excursus.” For a thorough account of Hegel’s end of art thesis and its movment through philosophical aesthetics as a “rumor,” see Eva Geulen, Das Ende der Kunst: Lesearten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002).

218 As I mention in the dissertation introduction, two important narratives—namely, Lyotard’s notion that the sublime displaces the beautiful (relying upon Burke and Kant); and Danto’s suggestion that beautiful, even ‘aesthetic,’ art comes to an end (relying upon Hegel)—are both underwritten by classicist conceptions of the beautiful. 152 Fackel” (1787) and Karl Philipp Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien: Dritter Teil

(1788), the chapter highlights how this problematic also recurs in the travelogues. In an extended examination of Meyer and Moritz’s texts, and their accounts of viewing ancient statuary by torchlight, this section moreover demonstrates how this lighting technology functioned as a cultural practice that compensated for the very problems outlined by

Herder. By reading these two sets of texts together, the chapter shows that the classicist ideal of beauty is sustained only via illusion, and that stabilizing its fragile status requires hermeneutic and media-technological compensatory measures.

Part II of this chapter shifts to literary discourse and its strategic reception of the cultural technique of torchlight viewing. Constructing a corpus of narrative literary texts—Jean Paul’s novel Titan (1800/03), Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann’s novel

Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (1804) and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff’s novella

“Das Marmorbild” (1817)—the section examines how each draws upon the cultural practice of torchlight viewing as a thematic device. What upheld the exemplarity of the ancient statue in the travelogue is adopted and reworked in these three literary texts in order to undermine the ancient statue’s ability to exemplify beauty. 219 This chapter, in particular, focuses on the literary strategies employed in these texts of narrative fiction— temporalization and literalization—and their destabilization the classicist ideal. In examining these moments of transformation, the chapter demonstrates how literary

219 Thus, rather than constructing a Motivgeschichte, in which any literary representation of statuary could suffice, this chapter employs a more restrictive selection criterion. It assembles three texts of narrative fiction that all articulate a critique via their literary reworking of torchlight viewing, a cultural practice in which the problematics of beauty and the ancient statue are already presupposed. 153 discourse around 1800 played a formative role in reassessing and generating new conceptions of the beautiful.

Part I: The Unviewable Ideal: Strategies of Observing Ancient Statuary

The Instantaneous Whole as Illusion: Lessing’s Presentation of the Problem

In his Laokoon from 1766, Gottfried Ephraim Lessing introduces a claim about beauty and the visual arts that will haunt subsequent discussions of sculpture in aesthetic discourse for the remainder of the century. As I wish to show, Lessing’s claim will create an expectation of a specific form of aesthetic experience—that is, the instantaneous perception of a beautiful whole—that will inform how subsequent aesthetic theories imagine the encounter with sculpture, as well as shape specific cultural practices that seek to realize this expectation in a pragmatic context. In Chapter 20, Lessing claims that physical beauty arises from the “harmonious effect” (übereinstimmende Wirkung) of various parts that can be perceived at once (auf einmal):

Körperliche Schönheit entspringt aus der übereinstimmenden Wirkung mannigfaltiger Teile, die sich auf einmal übersehen lassen. Sie erfordert also, daß diese Teile neben einander liegen müssen; und da Dinge, deren Teile neben einander liegen, der eigentliche Gegenstand der Malerei sind; so kann sie, und nur sie allein, körperliche Schönheit nachahmen. 220

According to Lessing, because the visual arts (Malerei) represent elements next to one another in space, as opposed to sequentially in time, physical beauty can be apprehended in one glance, all at once. Since the verbal arts (Poesie), by contrast, represent through

220 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie in Laokoon, Briefe Antiquarischen Inhalts, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007), 9-322, here 144.

154 arbitrary signs in time, temporality intrudes, and the whole cannot be represented at one moment—it is divided. For this reason, according to Lessing, only the visual arts can legitimately lay claim to imitating physical beauty.

Lessing’s distinctions between the visual and verbal arts are based upon a series of oppositions: natural vs. arbitrary signs, space vs. time, and finally the momentary vs. the sequential. A closer look, however, at how Lessing imagines visual apprehension taking place relativizes the difference between the latter of these three oppositions. In

Chapter 17, Lessing considers how we visualize an object in space:

Wie gelangen wir zu der deutlichen Vorstellung eines Dinges im Raume? Erst betrachten wir die Teile desselben einzeln, hierauf die Verbindung dieser Teile, und endlich das Ganze. Unsere Sinne verrichten diese verschiedene Operationen mit einer so erstaunlichen Schnelligkeit, dass sie uns nur eine einzige zu sein bedünken, und diese Schnelligkeit ist unumgänglich notwendig, wann wir einen Begriff vom Ganzen, welcher nichts mehr als das Resultat von den Begriffen der Teile und ihrer Verbindung ist, bekommen sollen. 221

Rather than occurring instantaneously, perception of “the whole” (das Ganze) is the result of a three-stage process: it is a synthetic product. This operation occurs, however, with such speed that it goes unnoticed. What we see here is that temporality is, indeed, a factor in our apprehension of both verbal and visual representations; its affect is merely reduced in the case of the later. Furthermore, instantaneous apprehension of an ‘objective’ whole never truly takes place: it is instead an illusion.

There are three points that I wish to extract from our consideration of Lessing’s

Laokoon. First, Lessing’s text creates the expectation that physical beauty, in order to be perceived correctly, must be perceived as a whole and at once. Second, the Laokoon not only sanctions illusion as a legitimate means of fulfilling this demand; it also admits to its

221 Lessing, Laokoon, 124. 155 very necessity. Third, while Lessing’s concept of the beautiful is grounded in a notion of unity in variety (the precondition of a whole), it also gestures toward a notion of beauty as something that must be constituted, beauty as an event, as opposed to a property.222

These three issues—the demand of wholeness, the necessity of illusion as a means of achieving said wholeness, and the importance of the subject’s role in bringing about the beautiful—will be inherited by future texts, moving between aesthetic discourse, the travelogue, and finally, literary discourse.

Herder’s Plastik introduces further layers of complexity to the discussion of beauty and sculpture in aesthetic discourse by emphasizing and reflecting upon a medial distinction between painting and sculpture and by reintroducing hermeneutic, as opposed to semiotic, approaches to understanding these artifacts. First I wish to consider the medial aspects. Whereas Lessing’s Laokoon refers generically to all visual arts under the umbrella term “painting” (Malerei), Herder’s Plastik distinguishes between painting and sculpture, emphasizing that sculpture possesses three dimensions instead of two.

Mobilizing his own oppositions—representation vs. presentation, dream vs. truth223, surface vs. form—Herder makes the case that sculpture more fittingly constitutes a

222 In this sense we can see Lessing’s Laokoon as resting on a fault line: although it clearly participates in a tradition that conceives of beauty as the perception of perfection (recalling Baumgarten, for example), it also—insofar as the mind synthesizes the beautiful whole—points to the future situating of the beautiful within the subject.

223 “Endlich die Bilderei ist Wahrheit, die Malerei Traum: jene ganz Darstellung, diese erzählender Zauber, welch ein Unterschied! und wie wenig stehen sie auf Einem Grunde! Eine Bildsäule kann mich umfassen, daß ich vor ihr knie, ihr Freund und Gespiele werde, sie ist gegenwärtig, sie ist da. Die schönste Malerei ist Roman, Traum eines Traumes.” Johann Gottfried Herder, Plastik in Werke: In zehn Bänden, vol. 4: Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774-1787, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 243-326, here 219.

156 “whole” (Eins)224 and thus offers a deeper and more veritable instantiation of beauty than painting.225 Nevertheless, in so doing, Herder reintroduces a problem already presented by Lessing, namely the issue of instantaneous perception—a problem that is even more acute in the case of sculpture.

Precisely because sculpture is three-dimensional and encompasses 360 degrees of surface, it requires being viewed from multiple perspectives. To facilitate this, the

Mannheimer Antikensaal, for instance, developed an innovative means of presenting their plaster replicas of ancient statuary.226 As Goethe recalls in Dichtung und Wahrheit, they were placed on rotatable pedestals in a room with curtained windows, which allowed the

224 Whereas Lessing discusses how objects or signs exist along side one another (neben einander liegen) in space versus in time, Herder maintains that there is no “alongside” (Nebeneinander) when it comes to sculpture. Furthermore, rather than adopting Lessing’s formulation of a “whole” (das Ganze) that comprised of “parts” (Teile), Herder uses the term “Eins” to refer to emphasize the more radical, indivisible unity proper to sculpture. “Bildnerei schafft schöne Formen, sie drängt in einander und stellt dar, notwendig muß sie also schaffen, was ihre Darstellung verdient, und was für sich das steht. Sie kann nicht durch das Nebeneinander gewinnen, daß Eins dem Andern aushelfe und doch also Alles so schlecht nicht sei: denn in ihr ist Eins Alles und Alles nur Eins.” Plastik, 258.

225 In Plastik, Herder connects the beauty of sculpture to “truth” (Wahrheit) and that of painting to the superficiality of a covering (Hülle), or “appearances of truth” (Erscheinungen der Wahrheit). Consider the two following quotes, which employ the aforementioned terms as a means of evaluating the forms of beauty that sculpture and painting offer. Of the beauty of sculpture, Herder writes: “Raum, Winkel, Form, Rundung lerne ich als solche in leibhafter Wahrheit nicht durchs Gesicht erkennen; geschweige das Wesen dieser Kunst, schöne Form, schöne Bildung, die nicht Farbe, nicht Spiel der Proportion, der Symmetrie, des Lichtes und Schattens, sondern dargestellte, tastbare Wahrheit ist.” Plastik, 253. Painting’s beauty receives a decidedly different treatment, occupying a lower ontological status: “Ganz anders verhält sichs mit der Malerei, die, wie gesagt worden, nichts als Kleid ist, das ist, schöne Hülle, Zauberei mit Licht und Farben zur schönen Ansicht. Sie würkt auf Fläche und kann nichts als Oberfläche geben; zu der gehören auch Kleider. Für unser Auge sind diese die täglichen Erscheinungen der Wahrheit, des Üblichen, der Pracht, der Zierde.” Plastik, 264.

226 For description of the Mannheimer Antikensaal, its presentational methods and works displayed, see: Wolfgang Schiering, “Der Mannheimer Antikensaal” in Antikensammlungen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Beck et al (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1981), 257-272.

157 positioning of the statues and the degree of lighting to be manipulated at will.227 Despite such attempts to accommodate a multiplicity of viewpoints, the problem nevertheless remains that each perspective that a viewer adopts necessarily obscures another one. As

Herder writes in Plastik, if we consider sculpture as an object of our visual sense alone, then we must accept that there are an infinite number of positions from which it could be viewed. By extension we can surmise that a statue’s beauty—as a whole—would be unperceivable, because it would be severed into isolated parts separated by temporality:

Lasset ein Geschöpf ganz Auge, ja einen Argus mit hundert Augen hundert Jahr eine Bildsäule besehen und von allen Seiten betrachten: ist er nicht ein Geschöpf, das Hand hat, das einst tasten und wenigstens sich selbst betasten konnte; ein Vogelauge, ganz Schnabel, ganz Blick, ganz Fittig und Klaue, wird nie von diesem Dinge als Vogelansicht haben. 228

According to Herder, the “bird’s eye view” (Vogelperspektive)—his metaphor for the two-dimensional conceptual paradigm dominant in Enlightenment thought and its coherence with visuality—does not meet the theoretical and sensual demands of sculpture; it is insufficient. We can thus understand sculpture as a site in aesthetic discourse that is fraught with paradox: on the one hand, ancient sculpture is upheld as an art form that presents beauty like none other can; on the other, perceiving its beauty—as a

227 “Hier stand ich nun, den wundersamsten Eindrücken ausgesetzt, in einem geräumigen, viereckten, bei außerordentlicher Höhe fast kubischen Saal, in einem durch Fenster unter dem Gesims von oben wohl erleuchteten Raum: die herrlichsten Statuen des Altertums nicht allein an den Wänden gereiht, sondern auch innerhalb der ganzen Fläche durch einander aufgestellt; ein Wald von Statuen, durch den man sich durchwinden, eine große ideale Volksgesellschaft, zwischen der man sich durchdrängen mußte. Alle diese herrlichen Gebilde konnten durch Auf- und Zuziehn der Vorhänge in das vorteilhafteste Licht gestellt werden; überdieß waren sie auf ihren Postamenten beweglich und nach Belieben zu wenden und zu drehen.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols., I. Abteilung vol. 14, Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986), 545-546.

228 Plastik, 253.

158 totality—becomes an unrealizable project. Sculpture thus not only embodies an aesthetic ideal, but also requires an ideal means of being perceived. Furthermore, if we consider the historico-anthropological dimensions of this issue—namely, the fact that the eighteenth-century viewer is aware of his own historical situatedness as a modern as well as the (presumably) ancient origin of the statue being encountered—the stakes are even higher. For the ancient statue not only embodies an ideal of beauty, but also becomes a screen onto which contemporaneous anthropological assumptions are projected, chief among them the notion that the ancient Greek existed as a whole, in a way that moderns could only (and should) aspire to.229 In aesthetic discourse, correctly viewing ancient statuary holds incredible promise, but is weighted with aesthetic, theoretical, historical and anthropological demands. Consider the amount of ink spilled from 1755-1800 in explicating the Laocoön statue alone. The scenario to be avoided is that of the modern, eighteenth-century viewer beholding an ancient Greek statue—a symbol not only of ideal beauty, but of man as whole—only to encounter it in pieces, in disconnected shards that reflect modern beholder’s own status as fragmented being.

229 In the introduction to Der Ganze Mensch, Hans-Jürgen Schings describes the development of anthropology in the mid-eighteenth century. Reacting to the Cartesian split of the subject, anthropology seeks to understand the human as a whole, but also lead to the cultural ideal of the human’s own development as a whole: “[es] bildet sich um die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts eine neue Erfarhung vom Menschen und mit ihr eine ‘Wissenschaft’ vom ‘Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen’, die sich gezielt den Namen ‘Anthropologie’, ‘philosophia anthropologica’, ‘menschliche Philosophie’ gibt. Man hat von der “Erfindung des Menschen” gesprochen. Entschlossen nimmt die neue Anthropologie Tendenzen der Aufklärung auf: Rückgang auf die Empirie, Naturalisierung des Menschen, ‘Rehabilitation der Sinnlichkeit’. Aber auch spekulativ-hermetische Traditionen kommen ins Spiel. Am Ende des Jahrhunderts entwickelt sich aus der ‘Anthropologie’ die Lehre von der Bildung des ganzen Menschen, das Ideal der Humanität.” Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1994), 1.

159 Herder responds to this problem by situating sculpture within specific sensory and historical contexts, asserting the predominance of the sense of touch in ancient Greek culture and its necessity for experiencing sculpture. In so doing, he offers an alternative concept of wholeness to the one envisioned by Lessing and models for the reader a form of aesthetic experience that is particular to sculpture’s unique qualities. In Plastik, Herder argues that whereas painting engages the sense of sight, sculpture is primarily addressed to the sense of touch. Haptic perception, according to Herder, is a precondition for comprehension of three-dimensional figures, of volume and depth, as opposed to surface.230 Sculpture is thus the art form that presents beautiful touch and form, a type of beauty distinct from that of visuality. This distinction in sensorial-address also corresponds to a different concept of the whole and how it is experienced. Whereas

Lessing describes wholeness in terms of instantaneous perception of a unity, Herder reframes this discussion, emphasizing a wholeness that is perceivable in continuity. In sculpture, the haptic sense encounters “ununterbrochene schöne Form”.231 Rather than immediate completion, the hand’s work is infinite: “bei artikulierten Formen und am meisten im Gefühl eines Menschlichen Körpers, selbst wenn er das kleinste Kruzifix wäre, ist sie [die Hand] nie ganz, nie zu Ende, sie tastet gewissermaße immer unendlich.”232

230 Insofar as the haptic sense is a precondition for apprehending sculpture’s fullness, Herder’s references to the hands and to physical touch are metaphorical—to actually feel the cold marble would break the illusion of the presence of a beautiful body. What he instead advocates is a mode of intimate approach reminiscent of Winckelmann and an acknowledgement that sculpture is physically present in a different way than painting.

231 Plastik, 269.

232 Ibid., 316. 160 Herder’s identification of sculpture with haptic perception also has a historical dimension: he subscribes to the historicity of sensory perception and of art forms themselves. The ancient Greeks, in Herder’s view, produced statuary because they possessed a more defined sense of touch, one that predominated over their sense of sight:

“Sie [die Griechen] sahen als Blinde und tasteten sehend […]”.233 While Herder protests against the “erbärmlichen Wahn” of desiring to live “zu einer andern Zeit, unter einem andern Volk und Himmelsstrich,”234 he nonetheless constructs a historical narrative of sensory perception and artistic production. It resembles a degenerative ontology, one where nature, haptic perception and beautiful statuary give way to the dominance of artificiality, sight and the (implicitly) lesser beauty of painting:

Die Natur geht noch immer mit jedem einzelnen Menschen, wie sie mit dem ganzen Geschlecht ging, vom Fühlen zum Sehen, von der Plastik zur Piktur. […] Die Natur ist von uns gegangen, und hat sich verborgen, Kunst und Stände, und Mechanismus und Flickwerk sind da; die sind aber, dünkt mich, weder in Ton noch in Wachs zu bilden.235

Sculpture and its beauty have become foreign in the modern age, where visuality has become both the prime sense and a symbol of Enlightenment-era epistemology.

Furthermore, the forms of artificiality that order and define modern life—social classes,

233 Ibid., 300.

234 Of the “Antikennarr,” Herder writes the following: “Die Nachwelt wird an solchen Schöngeistereien von Werk und Theorie stehen und staunen und wissen nicht, wie uns war? zu welcher Zeit wir lebten? und was uns denn auf den erbärmlichen Wahn brachte, zu einer andern Zeit, unter einem andern Volk und Himmelsstrich leben zu wollen, und dabei die ganze Tafel der Natur und Geschichte aufzugeben oder jämmerlich zu verderben. So viel vom großen Gesetz der häßlichen Schönheit einer Kunst, die Phantasie des Augenscheins und eine Tafel der Welt ist.” Ibid., 275-276.

235 Ibid., 302.

161 mechanical technology, etc.—are not fittingly representable in clay or wax, let alone in marble.236 All the same, Herder is not resigned to accepting the total dissolution of tactile beauty and the difficulty of moderns’ perceiving it. Although he observes that Hogarth’s

“line of beauty”—a concept Herder re-appropriates for touch and form—has seemingly disappeared from the material forms his contemporaries encounter, he believes it is not entirely absent. Instead, the encounter with ancient sculpture offers an opportunity to relearn a now-atrophied sense of engaging the world.237 Plastik, in this sense, is an intervention in aesthetic discourse, a critical response to optical bias. Yet more important: it is an attempt to demonstrate to a reading public how to attenuate themselves to sculpture’s historical, sensory and aesthetic demands and to thereby expand the range of beauty to which they are sensitive.

236 Elsewhere in Plastik, Herder comments on Germany’s national products: “In einem berühmten Garten sind die Nationalprodukte, Alongeperücken, ich glaube mit Panzern, in Töpfteron gebildet—ohne Zweifel, das wahrste Gebilde des Landes.” Ibid., 304.

237 “Doch wozu weiter die unnützen Klagen, die doch auch kein Griechenland schaffen werden? lieber zur lieben Schönheitslinie zurück, die ja ganz unter unsern fühlbaren Formen zu verschwinden schien.—Mit nichten verschwand sie, hier eben finden wir sie wahr und körperlich wieder.” Ibid., 304.

162 “Die Täuschung ist geschehn”: Vivification and the Beautiful Whole

Herder’s text, I hope to demonstrate, is foundational insofar as it models a new mode238 of approaching and experiencing ancient statuary such that its beauty not only becomes apparent, but is experienced—not as representation or presentation—but as ecstatic presence.239 The text’s objective, I would thus submit, is to provide a vocabulary for imagining how the modern subject might momentarily overcome the historical, sensory, even medial impediments to perceiving the statue and its beauty as a whole. My intention here is to isolate how Herder’s Plastik imagines this encounter, that is to specify the precise choreography of this staging of aesthetic experience, in order to then trace its reception and reworking in other narrative modes of aesthetic discourse as well as in literary discourse. At the heart of Herder’s staging is a transformational moment—a moment of illusion distinguishable from what has come to be called Lessing’s

“fruchtbarer Augenblick”—that facilitates and marks the success of this encounter.240

238 Inka Mülder-Bach’s work on the development of a new relationship between the beholder and the beheld, and the relevance of the Pygmalion myth, has been particularly influential. See: Inka Mülder-Bach, “Eine ‘neue Logik für den Liebhaber’: Herders Theorie der Plastik” in Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1994), 341-370. Inka Mülder-Bach, Im Zeichen Pygmalions: Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der “Darstellung” im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998).

239 “Noch jetzt wandelt uns ein Gefühl der Art an in jedem stillen Museum oder Coliseum voll Götter und Helden: unvermerkt, wenn man unter ihnen allein ist und wie voll Andacht an sie gehet, beleben sie sich, und man ist auf ihrem Grunde in die Zeiten gerückt, da sie noch lebten und das Alles Wahrheit war, was jetzt als Mythologie und Statue dastehet.” Plastik, 313.

163 The setting for this experience is in “jedem stillen Museum”—a holy aesthetic space exempt from the culture of artificiality, where sculpture can be encountered on different terms—and where Herder assures the reader that, if he approaches them “wie voll Andacht,” they will come alive. 241

Seht jenen Liebhaber der tiefgesenkt um die Bildsäule wanket. Was tut er nicht, um sein Gesicht zum Gefühl zu machen, zu schauen als ob er im Dunkeln taste? Er gleitet umher, sucht Ruhe und findet keine, hat keinen Gesichtspunkt, wie beim Gemälde, weil tausende ihm nicht gnug sind, weil, so bald es eingewurzelter Gesichtspunkt ist, das Lebendige Tafel wird, und die schöne runde Gestalt sich in ein erbärmliches Vieleck zerstücket. Darum gleitet er: sein Auge ward Hand, der Lichtstrahl Finger, oder vielmehr seine Seele hat einen noch feinern Finger, als Hand und Lichtstrahl ist, das Bild aus des Urhebers Arm und Seele in sich zu fassen. Sie hats! die Täuschung ist geschehn: es lebt und sie fühlt, das es lebe; und nun spricht sie, nicht, als ob sie sehe, sondern taste, fühle.242

Herder’s evocative presentation of this scene serves, of course, as a vehicle for illustrating his own theory of haptic perception. It clarifies, for example, that it is not the

240 With the term pregnant moment, I understand the choice, on the part of the visual artist, to depict a certain moment that is suggestive of a later action. In Chapter 3 of the Laokoon, Lessing writes, “Kann der Künstler von der immer veränderlichen Natur nie mehr als einen einzigen Augenblick, under der Maler insbesondere diesen einzigen Augenblick auch nur aus einem einzigen Gesichtspunkte, brauchen […] so ist es gewiß, daß jener einzige Augenblick und einzige Gesichtspunkt dieses einzigen Augenblickes, nicht fruchtbar genug gewählet werden kann.” Lessing, Laokoon, 32. By contrast, as concerns Herder’s Plastik and the use of torchlight to illuminate statuary (as I will discuss later in this chapter), I do not deem the term pregnant moment applicable. These cases concern techniques of manipulating of the beholder’s sensory apprehension of a work of art, not the selection of a particular motif to be represented. For a more expansive use of this term, see Prägnanter Moment: Studien zur deutschen Literatur der Aufklärung und Klassik: Festschrift für Hans-Jürgen Schings, ed. Peter-André Alt et al (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002).

241 “Noch jetzt wandelt uns ein Gefühl der Art an in jedem stillen Museum oder Coliseum voll Götter und Helden: unvermerkt, wenn man unter ihnen allein ist und wie voll Andacht an sie gehet, beleben sie sich, und man ist auf ihrem Grunde in die Zeiten gerückt, da sie noch lebten und das Alles Wahrheit war, was jetzt als Mythologie und Statue dastehet.” Plastik, 313.

242 Plastik, 254.

164 beholder’s hand itself that touches the statue, but instead the “finger” of his soul. The text, in other words, encourages a form of intimate visual attention to the sculpture that integrates the careful sensory apprehension associated with touch: “schauen als ob er im

Dunkeln taste.” Of greater concern for us, however, is the fact that Herder’s text also thematically stages the subject’s attempt to perceive the beautiful whole, the “schöne runde Gestalt”—as well as the obstacles that statuary’s three-dimensionality poses. With this, the text thus reiterates Lessing’s demand of perceiving the whole at once, yet points out the problem of “dismembering” the roundness of the statue, fracturing it into “ein erbärmliches Vieleck.” Apprehending the beautiful whole results from the subject’s deliberate attempts to overcome distance, to transform himself into an ideal instrument of perception and ultimately vitalize the sculpture with his own life. Adopting the closest proximity to the sculpture, the subject glides across its surface, transforming himself—his eye becomes a hand, a ray of light upon it becomes his finger. He takes on the hermeneutic endeavor of penetrating inside and “grasping” (fassen) the ideal image in the sculptor’s mind before it was imparted to the marble. Finally, the soul of the subject gives the sculpture life. This moment of transformation, the bringing to life of the statue— where it becomes an organic entity, all parts serving a living whole—is, in Herder’s own words, “illusion” (Täuschung). Although Herder clearly states that haptic perception of the statue is an infinite operation, that the statue can never be apprehended “at once” (auf einmal),243 the moment of animation—an illusion—proves to be an exception. The

243 “Die Hand tastet nie ganz, kann keine Form auf einmal fassen, als die Form der Ruhe und zusammengesenkter Vollkommenheit, die Kugel.” Ibid., 316. 165 subject can manipulate himself and the way he perceives the statue, such that he brings about the momentary illusion of feeling the beautiful whole.

There are two main points that I wish to derive from this reading. The first is the assumption that the modern beholder is—as concerns statuary—a deficient one. To compensate for this, a series of intellectual and observational practices are instituted.

Herder’s Plastik, in this sense, can be viewed as a master guide to both. Because the statue and its form are neither self-evident, nor self-explanatory to the modern beholder, they require elucidation and illumination. With elucidation I refer to different hermeneutic procedures—attempts to understand an object within a historical context, as well as techniques of observation that promote intimacy—which serve to narrow the gap between the subject and the statue. With illumination, I refer to specific attempts to manipulate the subject’s perception of the statue—whether it be via self-manipulation, or of external circumstances. Both these types of measures contribute to bringing about the transformational moment, where the statue as a beautiful whole is perceivable. This leads to my second point: to see the statue correctly is to see an illusion. Insofar as illusion is necessary to perceiving the beautiful whole, it takes on a positively coded normative value. It becomes an ideal that the modern viewer should realize.

From Lichtstrahl to Fackellicht: Illumination as Transformative Agent

As we have observed, Herder’s Plastik presents a host of problems specific to the viewing of statuary and illustrates how they can be compensated for through the production of illusion. During the course of the 1780s, this set of assumptions and procedures will inform a different branch of aesthetic discourse concerned with 166 documenting the individual’s subjective aesthetic experience of statues and the material conditions specific to their venues—the travelogue. In what follows, I trace the migration of these issues to the genre of the travelogue and call attention to the contextual adaptations that take place. I want to argue that while the travelogue continues the demand for instantaneous perception of the beautiful whole, the means of fashioning a compensatory illusion thereof shifts: rather than being accomplished through a transformation of the beholder, as we saw in Herder’s Plastik, the cultural practice of torchlight viewing fulfills this function. Torchlight, an external visual aid, becomes a strategy of illuminating the statue and generating illusion.

The practice of viewing sculpture by torchlight has garnered scarce critical attention, 244 which has focused mainly on its relevance vis-à-vis broader viewing practices during the eighteenth century, specifically, a “pygmalionesque” reception of sculpture, in which the beholder imagintatively participates in the construction of the artwork itself, as well as in comparison with the tableaux vivants. Oskar Bätschmann notes that the practice of viewing statuary by torchlight originated in “die seit längerem geübte Praxis des Kunstunterrichts zurück, die Statuen und die Modelle bei künstlichem

Licht zu studieren.”245 Illuminating statues by torchlight, in Bätschmann’s account, later

244 Jonathon Crary’s groundbreaking work, Techniques of the Observer, focuses on theories of vision in the nineteenth century as well as technological aids, such as the camera obscura and the stereoscope. Although Crary discusses theories of light, torchlight, as a lighting technology, falls outside the purview of his study. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992).

245 Oskar Bätschmann, “Belebung druch Bewunderung: Pygmalion als Modell der Kunstrezeption” in Pygmalion: Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur, ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 1997), 325-370, here 354.

167 became part of a culture in which artists would invite viewers to their ateliers.246 In his account, amusement serves as its primary purpose, which he also sees reflected in literary references to the practice as well: “Die literarischen Zeugnisse halten im allgemeinen das

Nützliche und Genusßbringende des Ausleuchtens der Statuen durch Fackellicht fest.”247

And referring to Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting Akademie bei künstlichem Licht,

Bätschmann notes how candlelight allows for the illusionary vivification of the statue.248

Christian Begemann notes that with torchlight, a “vergleichbare Wirkung erzielt wurde wie bei den Tableux vivants und Attitüden.”249 And most recently, Claudia Mattos has situated the cultural practice of torchlight viewing within the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century reception of sculpture, and demonstated how it changed the way in which statuary was exhibited.250 My examination of torchlight viewing’s discussion in

246 “Der Besuch der Museen und besonders der Statuengalierien bei Fackelschein kam im letzten Viertel des 18. Jahrhunderts in Mode. Künstler wie Antonio Canova und Bertel Thorwaldsen gingen auf die Wünsche des Publikums ein, beteiligten sich am festlichen Amusement oder zeigten ihre neuen Statuen in ihren Ateliers bei künstlichem Licht.” Ibid., 354.

247 Ibid., 361.

248 “1769 stellte Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) in der Londoner Society of Artists das bemerkenswerte Bild Akademie bei künstlichem Licht aus. In einem überwölbten Raum ist auf einem Postament eine Figur plaziert, die von einer Gruppe von zeichnenden und schwärmierisch bewundernden Jünglingen umgeben ist. Die künstliche Lichtquelle, die hinter dem Vorhang verborgen ist, beleuchtet die Gruppe mit warmem, rötlichem Licht. […] Durch die Annäherung der Statue an die Lebenden und die schwärmerische Verehrung verknüpfte Wright das Studium mit dem pygmalionischen Verhalten und mit der täuschenden Belebung der Statuen durch künstliches Licht.” Ibid., 355.

249 Christian Begemann, “Poesis des Körpers: Künstlerische Produktivität und Konstruktion des Leibes in der erotischen Dichtung des klassischen Goethe” in German Life and Letters 52:2 (April 1999): 211-237, here 215-216.

250 Claudia Mattos, “The Torchlight Visit: Guiding the Eye through Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Antique Sculpture Galleries” in Critical Exchange: Art Criticism of the Eighteenth and Ninetheenth Centuries in Russia and Western Europe, ed. Carol Adlam and Juliet Simpson (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 129-152. 168 travelogue here, as well as in the next section of this chapter (which examines its literary texts), differs from these accounts in two key ways. My reading attends to discursive differences: how accounts of torchlight viewing in the travelogue differ from their appropriations in literary texts. Furthermore, beyond its clear value as a practice of amusement, I argue that in the travelogue, torchlight viewing is shown to serve a compensatory function. In the German travelogue in the late eighteenth century, this lighting practice is brought into concert with the problems of perceiving the beautiful whole at once, as described by Lessing and Herder. Torchlight viewing allows for an emphatic, yet illusory experience of the beautiful statue that compensates for the inability of the beholder to attain immediate and total access to the ideal when viewing the statue.

One of the prime differences between Herder’s theoretical text and the travelogue concerns the status of the museum. Whereas the museum can function as an ideal space in theoretical texts—a refuge from the constraints of contemporary life, an abstraction that can be invoked and modified in the text at will—the travelogue addresses a set of material circumstances particular to venues where statuary is exhibited. It portrays both the challenges of these environments and means of counteracting them. Johann Heinrich

Meyer’s manuscript, [Über das Betrachten der Statuen bei der Fackel],251 for instance, discusses the practice, common in the larger Roman museums, such as the Vatican

251 Initially intended for publication in Goethe’s Propyläen, the manuscript of Johann Heinrich Meyer’s essay was instead integrated into, and cited in, Part I of Goethe’s Italienische Reise, in the section titled Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt for November 1787. I cite this version here. Johann Heinrich Meyer, [Über das Betrachten der Statuen bei der Fackel] in: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols., I Abteilung: vol. 15/1, Italienische Reise: Teil I, ed. Christoph Michel and Hans-Georg Dewitz (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 470-472.

169 museums and the Capitoline, of viewing statues by torchlight. It is one that he believes was still fairly new “in den achtziger Jahren des vorigen Jahrhunderts,”252 when he was in

Rome with Goethe in 1787. Here, in discussing the advantages of this practice, Meyer foregrounds the specific problems that torchlight mitigates and in so doing also provides us with a notion of what ideal conditions he seeks to simulate:

Vorteile der Fackelbeleuchtung: Jedes Stück wird nur einzeln, abgeschlossen von allen übrigen betrachtet, und die Aufmerksamkeit des Beschauers bleibt lediglich auf dasselbe gerichtet; dann erscheinen in dem gewaltigen wirksamen Fackellicht alle zarten Nuancen der Arbeit weit deutlicher, alle störenden Widerscheine (zumal bei glänzend polierten Statuen beschwerlich) hören auf, die Schatten werden entschiedener, die beleuchteten Teile treten heller hervor. Ein Hauptvorteil aber ist unstreitig der, dass ungünstig aufgestellte Stücke hierdurch das ihnen gebührende Recht erhalten.253

In the context of the museum, viewing is impaired due to the placement of statuary in areas with poor daylight, as well as by the number of sculptures, which disrupts the viewer’s ability to focus on each one individually. Torchlight resolves both the problem of poor lighting and peripheral interference by simultaneously illuminating the desired object and obscuring the surrounding ones. Sculptures receiving only “Widerschein,”

“kein unmittelbares,” “gar kein,” or “schwaches Licht”—Meyer includes nearly all the canonical works in this group: Laokoon, Apollo, Antinous, Phocion—are properly illuminated by torchlight and can be given their “due regard.”254

As for the difficulty of focusing on a single statue, there is anecdotal confirmation of this problem by his peers. Goethe, for instance, writes of his experience at the

252 Ibid., 470.

253 Ibid., 470-471.

254 Ibid., 470-471.

170 Mannheimer Antikensaal, where the viewer is confronted with “ein Wald von Statuen, durch den man sich durchwinden, eine große ideale Volksgesellschaft, zwischen der man sich durchdrängen mußte […].”255 Similarly, Karl Philipp Moritz describes the difficulty of focusing on individual objects at the Belvedere museum in Rome: “Eine Welt von schönen Formen schwimmt, wie ein Meer vor der Seele, und man muß sich in diesem großen Schauplatze erst zu oreintieren suchen, ehe der Blick auf einzelnen Gestalten haftet.”256

What Meyer presents as a pragmatic problem is also illustrative of a theoretical issue. For in addition to serving as a light source, torchlight also functions as a framing device that allows a specific object to be viewed “einzeln” and “abgeschlossen von allen

übrigen.” Artificial lighting thus aids in the artificial construction of a whole, which is dependent upon the blending out of peripheral objects, the generation of borders and the fixing of the beholder’s gaze. In Meyer’s account, we thus observe the recurrence of the same demand that we identified in Lessing and Herder, the demand to experience a beautiful object as a whole. Sculpture thus is both thought to be and should be experienced as a closed system, an organism, where each part contributes to a fully developed whole. Torchlight, by bracketing other objects outside the frame in relative darkness, prevents the supplementary elements from adding to it. Rather than imagining oneself transported to ancient Greece, as the viewers in Winckelmann’s “Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere,” or Schiller’s “Brief eines Reisenden Dänen” do, and enacting a

255 Goethe, Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, 546.

256 See the section titled “Belvedere” in Karl Philipp Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788: Dritter Teil in Werke, vol. 2, Reisen, Schriften zur Kunst und Mythologie, ed. Horst Günther (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1993), 125-486, here 377. 171 form of imaginative re-contextualization, the torchlight instead decontextualizes both the object and the viewing subject. Receding into the darkness, it is as if the museum itself disappears, to the benefit of the viewer’s experience of the sculpture. In reading Meyer’s essay, we intimate its gesturing towards the creation of the purest of museums: one that is utterly featureless.

As for the transformational moment, which makes possible the perception of the beautiful whole via illusion, Meyer does not invoke the same rhetoric of animation as

Herder, nor does he single out the body of the viewer as a transformational agent.

Whereas in Plastik the “Lichtstrahl” becomes the extension of the beholder, a “finger” that glides across the body of the sculpture, in Meyer’s text it is the torchlight itself that brings about an altered form of “appearing” (erscheinen). With Meyer’s text we encounter a shift in emphasis from the beholder to discrete practices of observation and media-technological manipulation. The dynamic effect of the “gewaltigen wirksamen

Fackellicht” is an intensified perceptibility: nuances hitherto barely viewable reveal themselves to the beholder and distracting glare is eliminated. What Meyer in a sense describes is how torchlight creates an idealized body257—minimizing and maximizing, bringing forth and eradicating extraneous elements—such that its beauty is heightened.

257 In this respect, my argument about torchlight viewing and Meyer’s account in particular, differs from that of Norbert Christian Wolf. Whereas I emphasize the constitution of an ideal body, Wolf argues that torchlight merely serves for a more “objective” observation of statuary: “Ziel des Fackellichts ist also keine physiologische Manipulation der Wahrnehmung, sondern im Gegenteil die Ermöglichung eines rezeptiven Erfassens sämtlicher (durch die ungünstige Aufstellung in den zeitgenössischen Museen häufig unsichtbarer) “Nüanzen der Arbeit”—und damit deren möglichst objective ‘Anschauung’.” Norbert Christian Wolf, “‘Fruchtbarer Augenblick’—‘prägnanter Moment’: Zur medienspezifischen Funktion einer ästhetischen Kategorie in Aufklärung und Klassik (Lessing, Goethe)” in Prägnanter Moment: Studien zur deutschen Literatur der Aufklärung und Klassik: Festschrift für Hans-Jürgen Schings, ed. Peter- André Alt et al (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 373-404, here 393. 172 This connection between torchlight and the appearing of beauty is further underscored in Meyer’s beliefs concerning the “misuse” [Mißbrauch] of this cultural practice.258 Subscribing to Winckelmann’s Stillehre—whereby ancient statuary can be classified historically and formally in terms of a shift from an älterer Stil to der hohe Stil, reaching its apex in der schöne Stil and falling again with der Stil der Nachahmer—

Meyer states that only those statues from the “very best period” (implied is der schöne

Stil) are aided by torchlight: “Vornehmlich aber wird sie [die Fackelbeleuchtung] Werken aus der allerbesten Zeit der Kunst günstig sein […]. Werke des alten Kunststils hingegen, die vom mächtigen, und selbst die vom hohen, haben nicht viel zu gewinnen, wenn sie anders sonst in hellem Lichte stehen.”259 Torchlight creates optimal conditions for visualizing and enhancing beauty inherent in an object; but for those presumed to lack it, it holds little utility. Torchlight viewing becomes so intertwined with the perception of beauty in sculpture that it takes on sanctifying function. It reaffirms the beauty of the statues in the Winckelmannian canon as well as the supremacy of beauty as an aesthetic value.

One year later in 1788, in a section of his Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien:

Dritter Teil, titled “Apollo in Belvedere,” Karl Philipp Moritz will also describe the effect of torchlight upon viewing the aforementioned statue, famous for its beauty.260 Of

258 “Wie übrigens so vieles, was geschieht, um die Mode mitzumachen, zum Mißbrauch wird, so ist es auch mit der Fackelbeleuchtung. Sie kann nur in dem Falle Gewinn bringen, wenn verstanden wird, wozu sie nütze ist. Monumente zu sehen, die, wie vorhin von einigen berichtet worden, bloß verkümmertes Tageslicht erhalten, ist sie notwendig, indem alsdann Höhen und Tiefen und Übergang der Teile ineinander richtiger erkannt werden.” Meyer, 472.

259 Ibid., 472.

173 evening torchlight tours, Moritz writes, “Man versäumt diese Gelegenheit nie, weil einem jede dieser Betrachtungen ein sichrer Gewinn und Erwerb für den Geist ist […]”.261 What we see in Karl Philipp Mortiz’s description of this cultural practice is its absolute coherence with and necessity for actualization of the ideal experience of beautiful sculpture. Viewing the statues of the Belvedere in this manner, according to Moritz, renders other forms of observation all but incomparable:

Und der Unterschied ist so auffallend, daß man fast nicht sagen kann, man habe diese höchsten Werke der Kunst gesehen, wenn man sie nicht auch zum öftern in dieser Art von Beleuchtung sähe.—Die allerfeinsten Erhöhungen werden dem Auge sichtbar, und in dem, was sonst noch einförmig schien, zeigt sich wiederum eine unendliche Mannigfaltigkeit.

Weil nun alle dies Mannigfaltige doch nur ein einziges vollkommenes Ganze ausmacht, so sieht man hier alles Schöne, was man sehen kann, auf einmal, der Begriff von Zeit verschwindet, und alles drängt sich in einen Moment zusammen, der immer dauern könnte, wenn wir bloß betrachtende Wesen wären.262

Here, Moritz makes a case for the superiority of torchlight illumination from an even more subjective standpoint than Meyer. This reliance upon personal experience is one of the hallmarks of the genre of the travelogue. Subscribing to the definition of beauty as perfection, as unity in variety, Moritz claims that because this type of illumination reveals

“infinite variety” (unendliche Mannigfaltigkeit)—variety that essentially comprises “a single perfect whole” (ein einziges vollkommenes Ganze)—torchlight thus also enhances the viewer’s access to “alles Schöne.” Enhanced perception of variety leads to

260 While I’ve cited this passage in my first chapter to highlight (via contrast) the uniqueness of Winckelmann’s practices of description, here I’d like to demonstrate to what extent Moritz’s expectations conform to an aesthetic norm.

261 Moritz, 414.

262 Ibid., 414. 174 maximization of beauty. What would otherwise have been perceived as “monotonous”

(einförmig), torchlight makes exceptional.

More interesting than Moritz’s argument, however, is his description of how this takes place. Here, once again, we observe how torchlight fulfills Lessing’s demand that the beautiful whole be perceived “auf einmal”—a point that Moritz himself emphasizes.

But Moritz also expands upon the phenomenon of decontexualization that we previously observed in Meyer. For what makes this transformative moment possible—in which the beautiful whole can be perceived instantaneously and “everything converges”—is not only torchlight’s ability to enhance visibility, but also its ability to erase, and to create an illusory suspension of time. In his account, Moritz does not describe the particularities of the Belvedere museum, where he actually encountered the statue, but instead a transcendental space opened up by the torchlight, where temporality—the interrupter of beauty—is overridden. In this moment, “der immer dauern könnte,” not only the museum itself disappears, but the viewer contemplates the possibility of existing as a disembodied entity, of being merely a “betrachtend[es] Wesen.” The fantasy evoked by this image is of an observer who can view eternally, that is, without the limits of time, or of a physical body. It is a fantasy of an aesthetic experience that would be perpetually fulfilled, yet never oversaturated. Contemplating the viewer’s displacement from the museum to a non-space, the viewer’s release from the strictures of his own body, the text gestures toward the relief of the viewer and of sculpture from the burdens of temporality and historicity. In this text beauty aspires towards its ultimate validity, as perfection in a realm of timelessness.

175 Strategies of Compensation: From Hermeneutics to Medial Technology

In tracing the discussion of torchlight illumination in the genre of the travelogue, I have sought to demonstrate how this media-technological practice intersects with fundamental assumptions in aesthetic discourse about how beauty should be experienced—and with potential problems raised by a new understanding of sculpture’s three-dimensionality. My contention is that a set of expectations about beauty—that it constitutes a totality, and that said totality is perceived instantaneously—are fundamentally misaligned with the three-dimensionality of sculpture. This disjuncture between expectations and material constraints, which might have led to a debate in aesthetic discourse about the suitability of sculpture as the ideal instantiation of beauty in art (or to a revision of assumptions about how beauty is experienced), instead remained unexamined. The media-technological practice of viewing sculpture by torchlight, in so far as it simulates an experience of enhanced beauty and of perception of a whole, both veils and compensates this for this potential problem. The scene of transformation, where the sculpture is illuminated and beauty generated, is a scene of illusion.

In addition to addressing this medial-specific problem, the practice of torchlight viewing can also be seen as relevant to another broader issue: the conflict between ancient statue’s status as an aesthetic ideal and its historicity. We observed this conflict between normativity and historicity exemplified in Herder’s assertion of ancient statuary’s exemplarity—particularly with regard to beauty—and, on the other hand, his vivid illustrations of its untimeliness in eighteenth-century German culture. While ancient statuary’s exemplary status was legitimized in aesthetic discourse, its historical distance nevertheless remained an irritant, an issue that had either to be addressed or overcome. 176 As long as the ideal of beauty was bound to statuary, let alone ancient statuary—and not re-assigned to a different object or art form—an inherently irresolvable tension persisted, if not overtly, then subcutaneously. Given this broader problem of historical incongruence, we can identify two different modes of compensation. Both will attempt to bring together the ancient aesthetic ideal and the modern beholder by providing different means of imagining the encounter with ancient sculpture.

One means of bridging the gap between the two is through hermeneutics. In the face of historical distance, hermeneutics offers nearness: through attempting to recall the ideal image of the sculpture prior to its creation, practices of observational intimacy

(approaching the statue as an intimate friend), or reconstructing the culture out of which the statue arose. Its most fantastical instantiation, however, takes the form of intellectual time travel, whereby the modern viewer, during aesthetic experience, imagines himself transported back to ancient Greece, where the statue is presumed to have originated, or to the mythical or literary context of the depicted figure. The goal is to unite the viewer and sculpture in the same context—if only via imagination. The examples for this are numerous. Winckelmann, in gazing at the Belvedere Torso writes, “In diesem

Augenblicke durchfährt mein Geist die entlegensten Gegenden der Welt, durch welche

Herkules gezogen ist […]”263; and of the Apollo Belvedere he pens the following: “ich fühle mich weggerückt nach Delos und in die Lycischen Hayne, Orte, welche Apollo mit seiner Gegenwart beehrete […]”.264 Likewise, in Herder’s Plastik, after the beholder

263 Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, second edition, ed. Walther Rehm (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2002), 171.

264 Ibid., 268. 177 imagines the coming-to-life of the statue, “ist [man] auf ihrem Grunde in die Zeiten gerückt, da sie noch lebten und das Alles Wahrheit war, was jetzt als Mythologie und

Statue dastehet.”265 Schiller’s “Brief eines Reisenden Dänen” replicates the same rhetoric and explicitly depicts the dissolution of historical horizons in the museum: “Eine unsichbare Hand scheint die Hülle der Vergangenheit vor deinem Aug wegzustreifen, zwei Jahrtausende versinken vor deinem Fußtritt, du stehst auf einmal mitten im schönen lachenden Griechenland […]”.266 Of the figures in the Laokoon sculpture, the narrator in

Schiller’s text reports “noch immer werden sie Muster der höchsten Wahrheit und

Schönheit sein.”267 The narrator travels during aesthetic experience to ancient Greece in order to declare to the reader that they still remain valid as exemplars of beauty.

Another strategy of compensating for historical distance was through the medial technology of the torchlight. As I have sought to demonstrate in my discussion of Meyer and Moritz’s accounts, in the transformational moment—the moment of perceiving the sculpture in its totality—the modern subject and the sculpture are relocated to a transcendental space. The museum, as a space that both protects and attests to the fragility of ancient statuary in modernity, falls out of focus, disappearing into the dark background. Focused intently on the statue, its beauty and wholeness, the viewer’s own body also falls outside the field of vision. The practice of torchlight viewing compensates

265 Plastik, 313.

266 Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke (Nationalausgabe), vol. XX: Philosophische Schriften: Erster Teil, ed. Benno von Wiese (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna: Schöningh Verlag, 1962), 102.

267 Ibid., 103. 178 for the historical disparity between the beholder and the beheld by generating the illusion of a space outside of temporality and historicity.

Part II. Literature and the Undoing of the Exemplarity of the Ancient Statue

Die Restauration von den ursprünglichen Teilen, die Kopie von dem Original zu unterscheiden, in dem kleinsten Fragmente noch die zerstörte Herrlichkeit des Ganzen zu schauen, wird der Genuß des vollendeten Kenners; und es ist ein großer Unterschied, ein stumpfes Ganze mit dunklem Sinne oder ein vollendetes mit hellem Sinne zu beschauen und zu fassen. —Goethe, “Einleitung in die Propyläen”268

In tracing accounts of torchlight viewing in the genre of the travelogue, we have seen how this practice both intersects with and masks medial and historical problems that beset ancient statuary’s position in aesthetic discourse. The scene of transformation, where a very specific experience of beauty is created, amounts to a scene of compensation. What cannot be realized is fulfilled via illusion. The very extraordinariness of this moment suppresses a question—namely, is ancient statuary an appropriate ideal of beauty for moderns?—and thereby brings potential disjuncture into artificial accord.

The balance of this chapter turns to literary discourse, specifically to narrative fiction. Assembling a corpus of texts by Jean Paul Richter, Ernst August Friedrich

Klingemann and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, it focuses on how literary discourse

268 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Einleitung in die Propyläen,” Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols., I Abteilung: vol. 18, Ästhetische Schriften: 1771-1805, ed. Friedmar Apel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 457-475, here 471. 179 recreates and critically adapts this scene of illumination and transformation. I demonstrate how literary discourse restages scenes of torchlight viewings of statuary in order to critically interrogate this cultural practice, to raise the very questions about statuary that this practice conceals, as well as to intervene in aesthetic discourse and its discussion of beauty. In short, I show how literary discourse transforms this scene of transformation in order to destabilize the status of the ancient statue and to question assumptions about what beauty is, how it can be instantiated and how it is experienced.

There are, of course, examples of literary texts that merely replicate the perspective of torchlight viewing offered in the travelogue. One such case is Madame de

Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie from 1807, translated in the same year into German by

Friedrich Schlegel. In one section, the narrator explains to the function of torchlight illumination:

Zuletzt gingen Corinna und Lord Nelvil zu Canova, dem größten Bildhauer unsrer Zeit; da es schon anfing Abend zu werden, besahen sie die Werkstätte bei Fackelschein; die Statuen gewinnen sehr bei dieser Beleuchtung, auch nach dem Urtheil der Alten, die oft Statuen in ihre Bäder stellten, wo das Tageslicht nicht hindrang. Der verstärkte Schatten bei Fackelschein verschmeltzt den einförmigen Glanz des Marmors, wodurch die Statuen wie blasse Gestalten erscheinen, mit erhötem, rührenderm Ausdruck der Anmuth und des Lebens.269

Referencing torchlight’s ability to “melt” the glare of marble’s uniformity und lend it the

“more moving expression of grace and life,” Madame de Staël’s text recounts the effects of torchlight viewing that we have already observed in the travelogue. Rather than adopting a critical position, and differentiating itself from this genre, it naturalizes this cultural practice, constructing a fictive continuity between the ancient and modern. “In the opinion of the ancients, too,” asserts the narrator, statues profit from this form of

269Madame de Staël, Corinna oder Italien: Aus dem Französischen der Frau von Staël, ed. and trans. Friedrich Schlegel, vol. 2 (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1807), 182-183. 180 illumination; antique precedent is thereby conferred to the practices of the “greatest sculptor of our times,” Antonio Canova.

While de Staël’s literary text hardly conceals its autobiographical origins—the author visited the Canova’s studio during a trip in Rome in 1805—it does point to one of the crucial differences between narrative literary prose and the travelogue. Whereas the latter accounts are written from the first-person perspective and offer an autobiographical account (consider the previously cited examples of Goethe, Meyer and Moritz), narrative fiction—whether it take the form of the novella or the novel—retains the option of the third-person narrator. This option Jean Paul Richter knew to exploit.

Inverted Illuminations: Jean Paul’s Titan and the Poetics of Disillusionment

Already in his novel Siebenkäs from 1796/97, Jean Paul displays familiarity with torchlight viewing and its connection to a rarified experience of beauty. In this text, it is mobilized in order to introduce Nathalie, the love interest of Siebenkäs, the novel’s protagonist. My interest here lies less in Nathalie as a character than in Jean Paul’s narrative strategy and how the scene of torchlight illumination is appropriated. The narrator constructs a metaphor for her appearance that evokes torchlight’s ability to generate beauty—only to disfigure it in the same glance: “Und ein weiblicher Kopf, der vom Halse des vatikanischen Apollo abgesägt und nur mit acht oder zehn weiblichen

Zügen und mit einer schmalern Stirn gemildert war, glänzte vor ihm [Siebenkäs] wie ein

181 Marmorkopf vor der Lohe einer Fackel.” 270 Here, the earnestness associated with beholding plastic perfection is interrupted by humor and irony.271 While we are presented with the much-heralded exemplar of beauty, the Apollo Belvedere, the head is “sawed off,” displaced with comic crudity from its origin. And the narrator’s clumsy imprecision—“nur mit acht oder zehn weblichen Zügen”—performatively undermines the very grace that it had just summoned.

The instability of this metaphor is suggestive of a question: whether ancient statuary can still maintain its exemplary status. It has become a bodiless head, roughly severed from its context and glorified in torchlight. Even in the scene of compensation— where it had hitherto been exalted, illuminated and stabilized—statuary, and its ability to present beauty, no longer appear intact. If Jean Paul’s metaphoric appropriation and reworking of this scene of illumination evidences its prominence in aesthetic discourse at this time, it also points to the fragility of sculpture’s privileged position. Just as important, however, we also observe how literary discourse can use third-person narration to embed criticality and distance into its portrayal of a moment that the travelogue had rendered from an intimate, non-critical perspective. While this amounts to a minor detail within the larger framework of Siebenkäs, it anticipates the systematic destabilization undertaken in

Jean Paul’s Titan.

270 Jean Paul, Siebenkäs, Sämtliche Werke, Abteilung I, vol. 2, Siebenkäs, Flegeljahre, ed. Norbert Miller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), 7 – 566, here 365.

271 For more on Jean Paul’s deployment of humor as a literary and theoretical tool, see: Paul Fleming, The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006) and Max Kommerell, Jean Paul (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957). 182 Published in four volumes between 1800 and 1803, in addition to a two-volume appendix, Jean Paul’s sprawling Titan embraces all the tendencies of its age. Adopting and adapting the genre conventions of the Bildungsroman, Titan charts the development of Albano de Cesara, from his youth to maturity as the ruler of Hohenfließ. Of importance for my inquiry is Albano’s journey to Rome, which echoes the Grand Tour undertaken by the elites of Britain and Northern Europe, as well as the pilgrimage of

German artists to Rome during the late eighteenth century (including Goethe).

Foreshadowing Albano’s journey is a passage where the narrator describes the character’s capacity for intoxicating fantasy. Relating how Albano would ascend a church’s belfry on Sundays and survey the surrounding landscape, the narrator uses the transformational moment of torchlight viewing as a metaphor:

Gibt es etwas Trunkneres, als wenn er damals an schönen Sonntagen […] zum Glockenstuhle des Turms aufstieg und, überdeckt von den brausenden Wellen des Geläutes, einsam über die tiefe Erde blickte und an die westlichen Grenzhügel der geliebten Stadt? [….] Wenn […] diese rauchenden Altäre der Morgenopfer, und der ganze ausgedehnte Glanz der Sichtbarkeit ihn dämmernd überfüllte und ihm alles wie eine dunkle Traum-Landschaft erschein: o dann ging sein inneres Kolosseum voll stiller Götterformen der geistigen Antike auf, und der Fackelschein der Phantasie glitt auf ihnen als ein spielendes wandelndes magisches Leben umher— —und da sah’ er unter den Göttern einen Freund und eine Geliebte ruhen, und er glüte und zitterte… ”272

Jean Paul’s fundamental insight into torchlight viewing lies in his recognition that it does not enhance visibility of the antique object as is; rather, it facilitates the realization of fantasy—it is, to be more precise, fantasy’s agent. Torchlight glides across the object and

272 Jean Paul, Titan (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1983), 125.

183 performs the work of magic, transforming it into what the viewer desires to create.273 In a footnote to the term “Fackelschein der Phantasie” on the same page, Jean Paul reinforces this very point: “Anspielung auf die Fackeln, vor denen man das Kolosseum und die

Antiken—und die Gletscher, die beides sind—magischer glänzen sieht.”274 In torchlight, the Coliseum and antiquities are seen not as they are, but gain a magical, vivifying luster.

His own literary text thus transforms “torchlight” (Fackelschein) into a metaphor for fantasy’s creative capabilities. When Albano climbs to the top of the church spire and looks out into the distance, it is not—or not only—the surrounding nature that he sees, but one magically illuminated by an ideal landscape within Albano himself. In contrast to the genre of the travelogue, which emphasizes the emission of light in Fackelschein, Jean

Paul’s literary text focuses on the production of Schein—in all its semantic valences, and functions as a critical observer of aesthetic discourse.

I have focused on Jean Paul’s theory of torchlight illumination insofar as it informs his critique of this cultural practice—and the aesthetics it underwrites—in the novel Titan. As I will show, the target herein is less fantasy itself than the specific objects to which it is directed during torchlight viewing: antiquities, art of another age. Titan illustrates that the glorification of ancient statuary—in particular, its identification with beauty—comes at a cost: neglect of the evanescent emergence of beauty in life and in nature, that is, within the temporal realm of the present. In response to this, the text

273 While Jean Paul never ventured to Rome, like his contemporaries, or experienced torchlight viewing first-hand, he was a keen observer of aesthetic discourse. What we see here is an aknowledgment of the magical, or wish-fulfilling potential torchlight had taken on in aesthetic discourse. And much like it is too simplistic to say that Albano observes the countryside before him, Jean Paul implicitly questions whether, or to what extent his contemporaries—Moritz and Goethe, for example—actually saw the antiquities that they write about.

274 Ibid., 125. 184 executes a critical operation. Its vehicle: an inverted mimesis of the paradigmatic scene of torchlight viewing. To expose the artificiality of torchlight and the Schein it produces, the text reconfigures this scene, instead using moonlight—natural light. Whereas torchlight viewing makes possible the illusion of the beautiful whole, of nearness, immediacy, vivification, timelessness, immortality and a-historicity, lunar illumination of the ancient artifacts will systematically undermine and invert each of these values. Nature thus becomes the chief antagonist through which Jean Paul articulates his critique; fantastical realism becomes the counterpoint to idealization.

Arriving in Rome at night, Albano is finally able to break away from company and visit the Roman forum, only to find a barren landscape, bestrewn with the detritus of ancient history:

Endlich stand er zürnend und schmachtend auf und schlich hinunter in die dämmernde Herrlichkeit und trat vor das Forum; aber die Mondnacht, die Dekorationsmalerin, die mit unförmlichen Strichen arbeitet, macht’ ihm fast die Bühne unkenntlich. Welch’ eine öde, weite Ebene, hoch von Ruinen, Gärten, Tempeln umgeben, mit gestürtzten Säulen-Häuptern und mit aufrechten einsamen Säulen und mit Bäumen und einer stummen Wüste bedeckt. Der aufgewühlte Schutt aus dem ausgegossenen Aschenkrug der Zeit—und die Scherben einer großen Welt umhergeworfen!275

Here Jean Paul’s text displays an intimate familiarity with the scene of torchlight illumination in aesthetic discourse. It recognizes the scene’s central function in supporting sculpture’s exemplarity—as well as its weakness: it has a specific choreography; it is contrived. Calling attention to this very point and thereby exposing the unstable foundations supporting statuary’s position, the text recreates the scene of illumination, but inverts each element, thereby emphasizing contingency over necessity.

Instead of torchlight and its idealizing alteration of the object, Albano encounters

275 Ibid., 608. 185 moonlight, “die Dekorationsmalerin, die mit unförmlichen Strichen arbeitet.” Whereas torchlight blends out the surrounding context, allowing for the imagination of a non- space outside of time, Jean Paul’s text cannily refers to its setting as a “stage” (Bühne), one that emphasizes context over an individual work. Instead of constituting the illusion of a whole, it presents a landscape littered with rubble, a plethora of torsos, leftovers of what was ravaged and dispensed with, the “Aschenkrug der Zeit.” This emphasis on temporality’s destructive potential—and its foreclosure upon ancient art’s claim to exemplarity in the present—becomes a leitmotiv in the text, recurring in different variations. Scenes with ancient artifacts are subject to the “Winter der Zeit,”

“Schlachtfeld der Zeit,” or “Herbstwind der Vergangenheit.”276

Jean Paul’s text also emphasizes the formulaic quality of the torchlight scene—its iterability and artificiality—via repetition and intensification. Whereas the prior example demonstrates how moonlight illumination undermines torchlight’s constitution of the whole by replacing it with fragments, the redeployment of this moonlight parody offers an even more radical inversion. Instead of undermining torchlight’s ability to constitute a whole, the text subverts torchlight’s claims to visualization and presence. Moonlight in this scene creates the illusion of total absence, by “dissolving” a host of ancient artifacts—columns, the Coliseum and temples—in shadows created by its own brilliance.

Nature outshines these objects and wrests the rhetoric of permanence so often attributed to ancient statues and their beauty—“ewig,” “unvergänglich,” etc.—for itself.

Die Quelle murmelte geschwätzig und ewig, und die Sterne schaueten fest herunter mit unvergänglichen Strahlen auf die stille Walstatt, worüber der Winter

276 Ibid., 609, 611, 617.

186 der Zeit gegangen, ohne eine Frühling nachzuführen […]. Und noch dazu goß der Mond sein Licht wie ätzendes Silberwasser auf die nackten Säulen und wollte das Coliseo und die Tempel und alles auflösen in ihre eignen Schatten!—277

Jean Paul’s subversive adaptations of the scene of torchlight illumination ultimately serve the purpose of disillusionment. They lay bare this scene’s origins in fantasy as well as the mechanics upon which it relies. If Titan uses fantasy as a tool, it is thus in service of a program of de-idealization. The staging of disillusionment is also heightened through the use of foils: the protagonist Albano, as well as his teacher, the Greek artist and architect

Dian. Schooled by Dian, Albano arrives in Rome already shaped by aesthetic discourse’s exaltation of classical art. But when he enters Jean Paul’s moonlit Rome, Albano is befuddled: “Ich erkenne hier gar nichts wieder.”278 Albano’s experience of disorientation illustrates the gap between aesthetic discourse’s idealizing rendering of antiquity and the text’s own re-imagination of its remnants in the present. While Albano acknowledges this divergence, his teacher Dian denies it. In so doing, Dian exemplifies aesthetic discourse’s propensity to modify ancient artifacts so that they cohere with its own theoretical presuppositions. This form of rationalization—and its connection to beauty—is dramatized in another conversation at the Roman Forum. In free indirect discourse, the narrator relates how Albano at first found the moon “ordentlich unpassend für die

Riesenstadt,”; “eine Sonne,” he presumed, would have fit better.279 But now that he has surveyed a landscape of ruins, “sei der Mond die rechte Leichenfackel neben dem

277 Ibid., 609.

278 Ibid., 610.

279 Ibid., 610-611.

187 Alexander, der zusammenfällt, nur angerührt.”280 Dian’s direct response to Albano’s commentary is striking: “‘Mit dergleichen Gefühlen kommt der Kunstler nicht weit,’

(sagte Dian) ‘auf ewige Schönheiten schau’ er, rechts und links.’”281

Jean Paul’s critique also extends to the ethics of idealization. As we have seen, in order to remain an exemplar of beauty, ancient sculpture requires the support of idealization. But idealization also results in a series of categorical errors. Dian, for example, finds the “everlasting” (ewig) in objects that are damaged by time: the signature of otherworldly eternity is found in precisely those objects that are characterized as moribund. This confusion is not without broader consequences. It leads to a positive valuation of the past at the expense of the present. The present is transformed into a site that gathers the past, reveres it; it is transformed into a cemetery, a space dominated by relics.

The way in which the idealization of the past denigrates the present is systematically linked to a thematics of morbidity in the text. Shortly before Albano sets foot in Rome—the setting par excellence for the past’s ordering of the present—the narrator presents an analogy describing how attachment to a deceased person can imperil the beloved’s survivor: “So ist der Mensch und sein Schmerz; zum Widerspiele des

Schiffziehens, wo die Lebendigen den Toten mitschleppen, nimmt der Tote die

Lebendigen mit und zieht sie weit nach in sein kaltes Reich.”282 The “kaltes Reich” here, of course, refers not only to the underworld, but the way in which the deceased person

280 Ibid., 611.

281 Ibid., 611.

282 Ibid., 595.

188 can assume preeminence in the life of the survivor, reordering and subordinating the surrounding world. Rome in Titan also serves as a metaphor for a set of attitudes and practices that enshrine the ancient past’s domination over the present. As Albano crosses the Tiber, the narrator remarks how he feels as if the era dead had been resurrected, as if time reversed its course: “so war ihm, als sei die Vergangenheit von den Toten auferstanden und der schiffe im zurücklaufenden Strome der Zeit […]”.283 Similarly, while at the Roman Forum, in an apostrophe to dead Romans, Albano fantasizes about dying in a moment of glory and leaving the realm of the present, the “world of graves,” uniting himself with the “eternal” and “immortal” ones: “Dann wär es mir süß und erlaubt, mein Herz zu öffnen durch eine Wunde und zu vermischen das irdische Blut mit dem geheiligten Boden und aus der Gräber-Welt wegzueilen zu euch Ewigen und

Unvergänglichen! Aber ich bin es nicht wert!”284

Pulling the living into the kingdom of death, living amongst the resurrected dead, residing in a world of graves—to this list we can add vivifying ancient statues. Jean

Paul’s response to the morbidity inseparable from idealization of the past and the identification of ancient sculpture with beauty is to expose it to “the prose of time” in the novel. Describing how Rome conquered and afflicted Albano’s spirit, the narrator references the poetics of Jean Paul’s prose:

Albano wurde wie eine Welt von Rom wunderbar verändert. Nachdem er so mehrere Wochen zwischen Romas Ruinen und Schöpfungen gelagert war— nachdem er aus Raffaels kristallenem Zauberbecher getrunken, dessen erste Züge nur kühlen, wenn die letzten ein welsches Feuer durch alle Adern führen— nachdem er den Bergstrom Michel Angelos bald als Katarakte, bald als

283 Ibid., 606.

284 Ibid., 609.

189 Ätherspiegel gesehen—nachdem er sich vor den letzten größten Nachkommen Griechenlands gebeugt und geheiligt hatte, vor dessen Göttern, die mit ruhigem heitern Antlitz in die unharmonische Welt hereinblicken, und vor dem vatikanischen Sonnengott, welcher zürnt über die Prosa der Zeit, über diese niedrige Pythonische Schlange, die sich immer wieder verjüngt—nachdem er lange so vor dem Vollmond der Vergangenheit im Glanze gestanden: so überzog sich auf einmal seine ganze innere Welt und wurde ein einziges Gewölk. Er suchte Einsamkeit—er hörte auf zu zeichnen und Musik zu treiben—er sprach wenig mehr von Roms Herrlichkeit—nachts, wo der tägliche Regen aufhörte, besucht’ er allein die großen Trümmer der Erde, das Forum, das Coliseo, das Kapitolium—er wurde heftiger, ungeselliger, schärfter—ein tiefeingesenkter Ernst waltete auf der hohen Stirn, und durch das Auge brannte ein düsterer Geist.285

In the passage above, the narrator alludes to the myth of Apollo and Python. By killing

Python, the daughter of Gaia, Apollo replaces a prior ruling order, seizing control of

Delphi. In Jean Paul’s appropriation, however, this myth becomes an allegory for the antipathy between beauty, as personified by Apollo, “[der] vatikanisch[e] Sonnengott,” and the “prose of time,” “diese Pythonische Schlange.” As I will show, the reference to the Python as the “prose of time,” a meta-textual reference, also allows the text to distinguish itself from other modes of responding to the conflict between time and beauty.

If we step back from the text for a moment, we might consider two different forms of time that have an antagonistic relationship to beauty. Time as chronology correlates with the physical deterioration of material objects that instantiate beauty; time corrodes it. Time as history affects beauty in a different way: as new historical eras emerge, art forms and aesthetic practices hitherto associated with beauty are supplanted by others. In both of these cases, time acts as a limiting factor for the beauty of objects, and the forms that it can embody. Chapters I and II of this dissertation have presented two different literary modes of responding to the problematics of history and beauty. We

285 Ibid., 617-618. 190 can briefly summarize these literary strategies in terms of Apollo-Python framework used by Jean Paul. Winckelmann’s description of the Torso can be said to reaffirm the myth of

Apollo’s victory over Python: it imaginatively describes an idealized version of the statue, allowing beauty to (momentarily) escape the destruction of history. Schiller’s elegies are a more complex matter: in creating a new ideal of beauty that is then lost and mourned within the course of the poem, elegy acknowledges history’s undermining of beauty, but endeavors to preserve its traces. Both description and elegy are similar in so far as they adopt the side of beauty, of Apollo, and struggle against historical time.

Jean Paul’s text adopts a fundamentally different position on this issue, siding with the Python, time, rather than with beauty—or, to be precise, the specific form of beauty that Apollo has come to represent. For in Jean Paul’s telling, Apollo does not slay

Python, or evidence any activity at all: the “Vatican Sun God” refers to the Belvedere

Apollo statue, and by extension, the ossification of beauty in a relic of the past. Aging and immobile, it can only direct its anger at Python, time, which remains what beauty cannot: forever young, always renewing itself as the present. Jean Paul’s specific phrase

“Prose der Zeit” also constructs a double relationship between time and prose. In one sense, time has its own prose: it erodes markers of beauty linked to form. But it also refers to a type of prose that enacts time: and this is the poetic project realized in Titan.

Divided into the smaller units of the “cycle” (Zykel) and the lengthier “Jubilee”

(Jobelperiode), the novel references cyclical and periodic notions of time. More importantly, as I have sought to show through the scenes of moonlight illumination, its narratives subject those objects to temporality, which have been exempted from it by aesthetic discourse. 191

Resurrecting “unsterbliche Tote”: Raising the Grotesque from the Beautiful in Klingemann’s Nachtwachen

The similarities between Jean Paul’s writing and that of the anonymously published Nachtwachen von Bonaventura were obvious even to contemporary readers, including Jean Paul himself. In turning to Nachtwachen—now agreed to have been authored by Ernst August Klingemann286—I will focus on the ways in which this text continues an agenda pursued in Jean Paul’s Titan, namely, the destabilization of the ancient statue’s position as an exemplar of beauty through narrative fiction.

Klingemann’s Nachtwachen evidences multiple similarities with Titan, also enacting its critique through a literary restaging of the scene of torchlight illumination. Published in

1804/05, one year after the final volume of Jean Paul’s Titan (1803), it presumes and builds upon this novel’s insight into the morbidity of idealizing ancient statuary. It, too, self-referentially links its own literary prose to temporality—opposing it to the claims of eternality associated with ancient statuary and its beauty. However, as I wish to demonstrate in the following section, the Nachtwachen makes substantial contributions to the critical enterprise undertaken by Jean Paul’s Titan. Isolating at the heart of torchlight viewing a principle of intensification, the Nachtwachen applies this very principle in its literary representation of the practice itself. The literary text literalizes the metaphors that govern torchlight viewing—for example, bringing statues to life—and illustrates that the

286 See Jost Schillemeit, Bonaventura, der Verfasser der Nachtwachen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1973). Schillemeit’s thesis that Ernst August Klingemann was the author of the Nachtwachen was confirmed by Ruth Haag, who discovered a handwritten document, in Klingemann’s own handwriting, listing the Nachwachen among his publications. Ruth Haag, “Noch einmal: Der Verfasser der Nachtwachen von Bonaventura,” in: Euphorion 81 (1987), 286-297. 192 very practices intended to enhance and bring forth beauty in fact produce its other, the gruesome and grotesque. This is accomplished through the use of a first-person narrator, who both presents the exaggerated rendering of torchlight viewing and interrupts it, functioning as a medium of critical commentary.

“Keineswegs ganz ohne Poesie”: The Prose of the Night Watchman

In the first Night Watches the first-person narrator, Kreuzgang, situates his narrative viewpoint. A failed poet who took up his current occupation in order to secure a meager existence, Kreuzgang sees a fundamental similarity between the poet and the night watchman: “Wir Nachtwächter und Poeten kümmern uns um das Treiben der

Menschen am Tage in der Tat wenig; […] Die Menschen sind wenn sie handeln höchst alltäglich und man mag ihnen höchstens wenn sie träumen einiges Interesse abgewinnen.”287 Both the poet and the night watchman are positioned on the margins of society, which allows them an alternative vantage point. Both are outsiders, observers of humanity, whose insights derive from their focus not on people’s public activities, but on their private dreams and desires, which night enshrouds. Nocturnal activity and observation allows both to operate outside of social and economic norms—the poet,

Kreuzgang says, works at night because that’s when his creditors sleep and the muses wake288—as well as to espy events that complicate strict categorical boundaries presumed to undergird reality.

287 August Klingemann, Nachtwchen von Bonaventura, Freimüthigkeiten, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), 19.

193 One example of Kreuzgang’s exceptional and disturbing view into private life occurs during the very first Night Watch, where he guides the reader to the window of a house. Peering inside, he shows how a priest, in his unsuccessful efforts to convert a freethinker on his deathbed, assumes the role of the devil—playing the part all too convincingly. Speaking “in der Person des Teufels selbst,” 289 rather than merely describing it, the priest betrays his faith’s dependence upon its own adversary, the devil.

Attempting to convince the dying man of the existence of a “Jenseits,”290 a life beyond the earthly realm, the priest resorts to instilling fear, to becoming a devil himself. Rather than offer the comforts of divine salvation, the priest issues a diatribe testifying to the verity of eternal damnation. Hell thus becomes a means of supporting heaven, eternal suffering an instrument of coercing faith, and the priest, absent any compassion for the dying man, contaminates his final earthly moments with visions of hell. In a perverse transposition, he “conjures” (heraufbannen) “den ganzen Tartarus herauf in die letzte

Stunde des Sterbenden.”291 Assuming that the dying can still hear even in their last moments of life, he becomes a messenger for and witness to the devil, promising the dying man “in seinem eigenen Namen fest und bündig, daß der Teufel nicht nur seine

Seele, sondern auch seinen Leib abfodern würde.”292 At the window and in a muted voice,

288 “Ich wußte wohl, wer da so hoch in den Lüften regierte; es war ein verunglückter Poet, der nur in der nacht wachte, weil dann seine Gläubiger schliefen, und die Musen allein nicht zu den letzten gehörten.” Ibid., 9.

289 Ibid., 12.

290 Ibid., 11.

291 Ibid., 11.

292 Ibid., 12. 194 Kreuzgang sings a requiem, “um in dem noch hörenden Ohre den Feuerruf des Mönchs durch leise Töne zu verdrängen” and challenges the priest as he leaves.293

In the example above, we see how Kreuzgang’s observations challenge the stability of binary structures: the divine and the demonic are brought into unholy union, blurring what should be an absolute theological boundary between the two. However, in addition to introducing Kreuzgang’s dialectical approach—his ability to highlight the dissolution of binaries in the night—the first “Night Watch” also underscores a particular subject matter that comes under scrutiny throughout the novel. Claims to timelessness, or a-temporal validity—whether they take the form of the endless, everlasting, eternal, or universal—and especially the mechanisms by which such claims are sustained, are subjected to systematic interrogation. Disrupting these assertions is not only coincidental to, but a fundamental aspect of Kreuzgang’s narrative agenda, marking an important poetological distinction between the work of the poet and that of the night watchman.

Whereas the former aspires to immortality, the prose of the night watchman interrupts it.

In an apostrophe to a poet working late at night, Kreuzgang explains the difference:

Ich bin dir [the poet] gleichsam wie ein satirischer Stentor in den Weg gestellt, und unterbreche deine Träume von Unsterblichkeit, die du da oben in der Luft träumst, hier unten auf der Erde regelmäßig durch die Erinnerung an die Zeit und Vergänglichkeit. Nachtwächter sind wir zwar beide; schade nur daß dir deine Nachtwachen in dieser kalt-prosaischen Zeit nichts einbringen, indes die meinigen doch immer ein Übriges abwerfen.294

293 Ibid., 13.

294 Ibid., 10.

195 In the second Night Watch, Kreuzgang attests to his sympathy with the poet: originating in the “Narrenhaus,”295 poetry has now been overtaken by an “Überfluß an Vernünftigen,” displacing the true outsiders, noting: “so bleibt es doch heutzutage mit der Dichterei

überall bedenklich.”296 This is one reason he claims to have given up the profession himself: “Ein reiner Toller, wie ich, findet unter solchen Umständen kein

Unterkommen.” 297 All the same, beyond offering circumstantial and economic explanations for his decision to become a night watchman, Kreuzgang provides a more fundamental one. While poetry offers an alternative to the conventional ordering of the world—the poet, too, is a sort of “night watchman,” according to Kreuzgang—it also partakes in idealization, rendering the poet himself prone to delusion. The poet, especially the dilettante poet, confuses aesthetic experience with aesthetic production,298 and “wenn er zuletzt zur Sprache kommt—so ist es kindisch Wort, und die Hand zerreißt rasch das Papier.”299 If the “cold-prosaic age” of the contemporaneous present is to be interrogated via literature, if the absurdity of the real is to be exposed, a literary mode other than poetry is required. To be a night watchman is a metaphor for writing prose, which, in his words, is “keineswegs ganz ohne Poesie.” It issues from the ground level and interrupts claims to a-temporal validity—whether they come from the poet or the

295 Ibid., 14.

296 Ibid., 15.

297 Ibid., 15.

298 On the conflation of aesthetic production and aesthetic experience in dilletantism, see: Paul Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 77.

299 Nachtwachen, 14. 196 priest—enacting the disruptive intrusion of temporality. In the regular blowing of the horn on the hour, Kreuzgang sees a poetics of temporality and transience that makes itself heard in the night, and that also provides him with a livelihood.

From the aforementioned examples there are two different aspects of Kreuzgang’s poetics that I would like to isolate. The first is presentational: the narrator offers a privileged view into the complicated, even grotesque practices that structure his world, focusing in particular on the mechanisms that underwrite claims to a-temporal validity.

Second, the narrator critically inserts himself in the scene he narrates, staging an intervention through speech, one that is explicitly characterized in terms of the intrusion of temporality. Now turning to the thirteenth “Night Watch,” I will examine how this dual function of the first-person narration is applied to the scene of torchlight viewing of statuary. Kreuzgang’s poetics, in other words, becomes a vehicle for the text’s own critique of this practice as well as the ancient statue’s ability to serve as an ideal object of beauty. Kreuzgang presents an exaggerated scene of torchlight viewing, one in which its guiding metaphor of vivifying the statue is literalized: the practice of torchlight viewing is analogized with resurrection of the dead. In addition to this, the narrator also delivers a speech, interrupting this very practice and performing the very “Erinnerung an Zeit und

Vergänglichkeit” mentioned above. The result is two-fold. The ancient statues, heretofore upheld in aesthetic discourse as vessels of ideal beauty, undergo a process of temporalization within the narrative, their vulnerability to time is exposed. This negates their claim to a-historical validity, rendering them as “unsterblich[e] Tote,” 300 a

300 Ibid., 104.

197 paradoxical concept that relieves ancient statuary of its a-historical exemplarity, yet affirms its historical significance. Second, the practice of torchlight viewing, instead of generating the beautiful, is shown to produce an aesthetics of the grotesque and gruesome.

Vivification as Resurrection: The Literalization of Belebung and the Statue as Corpse

Shortly after midnight, Kreuzgang arrives at the top of a mountain, where an art museum is erected, “wohinein jetzt mehrere Kenner und Dilettanten mit brennenden

Fackeln zogen, um bei dem sich bewegenden Lichtscheine die Toten drinnen möglichst lebendig sich einzubilden.”301 From the very start, the text constructs an analogy between torchlight’s ability to lend a life-like quality to statues and resurrection of the dead. It is worth pausing here to consider how aesthetic discourse uses the notion of “life” to characterize the aesthetic experience of statuary. As we recall from Herder’s Plastik, neither an actual “Belebung” of, nor physical contact with the statues takes place—the status of the terms “tasten” and “Belebung” remains on a purely metaphorical level, referring to an enhanced, intimate mode of experiencing an ideal version of statuary and its beauty.302 By analogizing the practice of torchlight viewing with resurrection of the dead, the Nachtwachen, satirically reapplies torchlight’s ability to enhance objects to the practice itself, literalizing what had originally been a metaphorical vivification of the

301 Ibid., 103.

302 See, for example, Dorothea von Mücke’s discussion of the status of the term “life” in The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale. “Sculpture, above all other art forms, endows the beholder with an ideal body that he or she internally recreates through an imagined sense of touch and feeling; the beholder/creator endows the sculpture with life through an erotic, sensual, warm response to that ideal body. The term life does not denote any possible confusion with an external reality.” Dorothea von Mücke, The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 131. 198 statue. Literalization, I will show in the course this section, becomes a literary technique for uncovering a host of problematic assumptions imbedded in aesthetic practices that had heretofore been obscured by metaphor.

Also transformed in the process of literalization, however, is the statue’s ontological status: from that of a merely inanimate object, to one that is dead. In referring to the statues as “the dead” (die Toten), the literary text reframes what it means to encounter an ancient statue in the contemporaneous present, mortalizing and mortifying objects that had been discursively accorded the designation of immortality. Ancient statues, the text thus points out, aren’t simply inanimate objects outside of time and history; they possessed a prior material form; they have a past. By extension, to vivify an ancient statue does not mean to lend animation to an object created in the present age, but to enliven an artifact that carries with it marks of its passage in time. Literal vivification, that is, the attribution of a corpse to the statue, clarifies its pastness, resulting in aesthetic relativity instead of transhistorical exemplarity. To experience these statues in their current state in the contemporaneous present is thus to encounter corpses onto which temporality has both inscribed itself and erased certain features, exposing the statues’ fragility and negating their claims to beauty.

Time’s disfigurement of their mortalized bodies is underscored as Kreuzgang enters the museum:

Und vor mir standen die steinernen Götter als Krüppel ohne Arme und Beine, ja einige gar mit fehlenden Häuptern; das Schönst und Herrlichste, wozu die Menschenmaske sich je ausgebildet hatt, der ganze Himmel eines großen gesunkenen Geschlechts, als Leichnam und Torso wieder ausgegraben aus Herkulanum und dem Bette der Tiber. Ein Invalidenhaus unsterblicher Götter und Helden, hineingebaut zwischen eine erbärmliche Menschheit.303

303 Nachtwachen, 103-104. 199

Here, Kreuzgang highlights the discrepancy between the idealized images of statuary in aesthetic discourse—that is, as “Götter,” as “das Schönst und Herrlichste, wozu die

Menschenmaske sich je ausgebildet hatte”—and their current state, as cripples without arms and legs, some even missing heads, comprising an “Invalidenhaus unsterblicher

Götter.”304 As Kreuzgang describes it, lacking the reverence of the cemetery, the museum functions as a repository for corpses that have been removed from their graves, presenting the disfigured bodies for a “wretched,” modern audience to gawk at. However, the decisive event occasioning the narrator’s critical intrusion is a dilettante’s attempt to kiss a statue’s buttocks, a satirical rendering of the hermeneutics of intimacy advocated by Winckelmann and Herder: “Jetzt kletterte ein Dilettant von den Anwesenden an einer medicäischen Venus ohne Arme, mühsam hinauf, mit gespitztem Munde und fast tränend, um, wie es schien, ihr den Hintern, als den bekanntlich gelungensten Kunstteil dieser

Göttin, zu küssen.”305

In what follows, the narrator moves from a presentational to a critical mode of speech. Standing upon a pedestal, Kreuzgang delivers an oration, admonishing the dilettantes and experts before him to abandon their practices of veneration and observation. Kreuzgang’s speech articulates a coherent critique of the very practices in aesthetic discourse that seek to bridge the historical gap between the viewing subject and object and to overcome the medial problem of experiencing the statue’s beauty—i.e. the very strategies of compensation that I have discussed earlier in this chapter, and in

304 Ibid., 104.

305 Ibid., 104. 200 Chapter I. Interrupting the techniques of observation practiced by the beholders,

Kreuzgang’s speech can thus be seen as a realization of the “Erinnerung an die Zeit und

Vergänglichkeit,” as well as a staging of the text’s own intervention in aesthetic discourse.

Explicating each of the topics addressed—the hermeneutics of intimacy, aesthetic discourse as idealizing agent, the ethics and aesthetics of resuscitation, and the contrast between beauty in art and nature—I will demonstrate how they work toward a new understanding of the ancient statues as “unsterbliche Tote.”

The initial focus of Kreuzgang’s critique is directed at the practice of approaching a statue with the assumption of familiarity. As a heuristic device, Kreuzgang imagines what would occur, should the statue literally come to life, thereby problematizing the presumption of intimacy:

“Junger Kunstbruder!” redete ich ihn an. “Der göttliche Hintere liegt Ihnen zu hoch, und Sie kommen bei Ihrer kurzen Gestalt nicht hinauf, ohne sich den hals zu brechen! Ich rede aus Menschenliebe, denn es tut mir leid, daß Sie sich unter Lebensgefahr versteigen wollen. Wir sind seit dem Sündenfalle, vor dem Adam bekanntlich, nach der Versicherung der Rabbinen, seine hundert Ellen maß, merklich kleiner geworden […]. Was wollen Sie überhaupt bei der steinernen Jungfrau, die in diesem Augenblicke zu einer einer eisernen für Sie weren würde, wenn ihr nicht die echten Arme zum Umschlingen fehlten […]”. 306

The problem with a hermeneutics of intimacy is that it presumes an equal status and familiar relationship between the god, goddess, or hero embodied in statue, and the modern viewer. As long as vivification is understood metaphorically, this set of issues can remain obscured. Kreuzgang’s consideration of a literal vivification of the mythological divinity or personage embodied in statue illuminates two sets of problems.

The presumption of intimacy fails to both recognize and respect the ontological abyss lying between the divine, presented in the statue, and the human viewer, here, between

306 Ibid., 104. 201 the goddess Venus and the dilettante. Nor does it fully consider that in the moment of actual vivification, the beholder would also become an object of the statue, as well. In the passage cited above, Kreuzgang argues that if the Venus de’ Medici were to actually come to life at this moment of gross impropriety, and were she in possession of her missing arms, the dilettante would most certainly meet his end—an action that would assert immortal’s power over mortals. Rather than bridging a historical gap, the intimate approach to sculpture is shown to be a gesture testifying to the hubris307 of the modern viewing subject.

Kreuzgang’s second line of critique addresses contemporaneous aesthetic discourse and its idealization of the ancient statue—notwithstanding its present state.

O Freund, was die Kunstärzte der neuern Periode auch immer heilen und flicken mögen, sie bringen doch die von der tückischen Zeit verstümmelten Götter, wie z.B. diesen daliegenden Torso, nicht wieder auf die Beine, und sie werden immer nur als Invaliden und emeriti hier in Ruhe gesetzt verbleiben müssen. Einst, als sie noch aufrecht standen, und Arme und Schenkel und Häupter hatten, lag ein ganzes großes Heldengeschlecht vor ihnen im Staube; jetzt ist das umgekehrt, und sie liegen im Boden, während unser aufgeklärtes Jahrhundert aufrecht steht, und wir selbst uns bemühen leidliche Götter abzugeben.308

307 Moreover, insinuating the possibility of the beholder initiating coital embrace of the statue— “Was wollen Sie überhaupt bei der steinernen Jungfrau […]”; “Küssen Sie den Hintern, junger Mann, küssen Sie, und damit gut!”—Kreuzgang points to the potential links between this practice, intended to facilitate a more immediate apprehension of beauty, and cultural barbarity. Ibid., 104, 105. Countering this narrative of modern dominance, Kreuzgang references the Fall—a line of attack that Heinrich von Kleist reactivates nearly six years later in essay “Über das Marionettentheater”—arguing that man, in his post-lapidarian state, has become increasingly diminutive, thereby reasserting the dissimilarity between the beholder and beheld, the divine or apotheosized and the mortal human.

308 Ibid., 104-105.

202 If Jean Paul, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik, remarks that “von nichts wimmelt unsere Zeit so sehr als von Ästhetikern,”309 Kreuzgang develops a metaphor for these participants in aesthetic discourse: “Kunstärzte der neuern Periode.” What Kreuzgang describes is the predicament befalling the modern viewer, who is confronted with a deformed object, yet can intuit that it must have inhabited a prior form. The “Kunstärzte,” offer resolution to this issue, operating at a host of intersections, mediating between past and present, real and ideal, beholder and beheld. In their efforts to develop an optimal means of experiencing an aesthetic ideal, they artificially restore and resuscitate the maimed bodies of the statues in aesthetic discourse, creating ideal simulacra in discourse itself.

Winckelmann’s restorative description of the Torso, as we observed in the first chapter, serves as a prime example. Furthermore, the “Kunstärtze,” prescribe a set of practices that allow that the modern viewers, the “experts” and “dilettantes” well versed in aesthetic discourse, when they enter a museum, to behold this ideal—and not the deformed body before them. The discursively created ideal is written atop the statue itself, obscuring it.

While Kreuzgang cannot entirely remove the discursive veil separating the modern viewer from the ancient object, he can seek to innovate the terms of this discourse, integrating and emphasizing issues such as transience and temporality. This, in essence, is what his speech—and, by extension, the literary text—enact. Kreuzgang’s intervention thus pursues a multifaceted agenda: in describing the statues’ decrepitude, he critiques an agenda of idealization pursued in contemporaneous aesthetic discourse.

309 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Sämtliche Werke, Abteilung I, vol. 5, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Levana oder Erziehlehre, Politische Schriften, ed. Norbert Miller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), 7-456, here 22. 203 Kreuzgang’s speech asserts the finality and irreversibility of the wounds inflicted by the

“tückisch[e] Zeit”: they can neither be healed nor patched together to restore a whole.

Rather than being compensated for, the statues’ mutilated condition must instead be integrated into the practice of viewing. These statues’ relationship to the present also needs to be reconsidered: rather than paragons of beauty that are still valid in the present, these statues belong irreversibly to the past as “emeriti,” injured veterans.

The most important issue addressed in the speech, however, concerns the ethical and aesthetic implications of the following question: Given the statues’ damaged state, what does it mean to artificially vivify these objects and hold them up as models for the present? Kreuzgang suggests that it is indicative of the moderns’ desire to try their hand at playing “leidliche Götter,” to be gods in age that has anointed itself as “enlightened.”

What initially appears as a gesture of reverence, by according immortality to the ancient statues, can also be understood as an action rooted in self-regard and condescension. For in order for this act to transpire, it requires to the moderns to play the role of the new gods, deigning to reanimate the old ones embodied in stone for their own entertainment and pleasure. It also provides an opportunity for the moderns, if only for a moment, to imagine that they might be exempt from the “tückische Zeit,” which has left its marks on the statues—and which they now imagine themselves able to temporarily reverse.

In a key section of his speech, Kreuzgang further examines the ethics of this practice, using hyperbole as a device to explore the values inscribed therein:

Kunstfreund, wohin sind wir gekommen, daß wir es wagen, diese großen Göttergräber aufzuwühlen, und die unsterblichen Tote ans Licht zu ziehen, da wir doch wissen, wie hart bei den Römern die bloße Verletzung der Menschengrüfte verpönt war. Freilich achten Aufgeklärte diese Verstorbenen jetzt gerdezu für Götzen, und die Kunst ist nur noch eine Heimlich

204 eingeschlichene heidnische Sekte, die an ihnen vergöttert und anbetet—aber was ist es auch mit ihr, Kunstfreund?310

Anticipating the fetischization of beauty in aestheticism and art’s modern elevation to a form of religion, Kreuzgang questions at what cost the absolutist quest for aesthetic experience is purchased. Comparing it to body snatching and grave robbing, Kreuzgang connects this form of aesthetic experience to the actions that made it possible, the excavation of the statues from the earth, thereby reframing the modern aesthetic worship of statues as a historically insensitive—if not illiterate—practice, the very image of desecration.

If Kreuzgang’s ethical analysis raises a set of disturbing problems by embedding this cultural practice within a larger context, his aesthetic inquiry is all but devastating, in so far as it challenges the very premises of the practice itself by utilizing its own evaluative criterion: beauty. Using the technique of literalization once again, Kreuzgang raises the question whether these statues—upheld in aesthetic discourse as examples of ideal beauty—can indeed be considered beautiful in all circumstances, especially the ones that torchlight simulates. Kreuzgang’s thought experiment considers what these statues truly would look like if they really were to be corporealized in human flesh, if the

“Menschwerdung dieser Götter”311 were to take place:

Dieser Apoll wäre vielleicht ein Krüppel, hätte sie [die Natur] ihn von der kleinen Zehe fortgesetzt, dieser Antinous ein Thersites und jener tragische gewaltige Laokoon gar eine Art von Caliban, wenn nach Naturgesetzten alles reformiert werden sollte.312

310 Ibid., 105.

311 Ibid., 105.

312 Ibid., 106.

205

During the course of Kreuzgang’s speech, Apollo becomes a cripple, Antinous transforms into Thersites—in the Iliad, “the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion”313— and the famous Laocoön mutates into Caliban, the monstrous son of Sycorax from

Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In its temporal unfolding, the speech reproduces torchlight’s transformation of the once beautiful into the monstrous and grotesque. The fact that

Kreuzgang combs through literature both ancient and modern for examples that do justice to the hideousness that will be illuminated, underscores how this practice produces forms foreign to sculpture itself. More than an exercise in parody, however, Kreuzgang literalizes a theory that Winckelmann subscribed to about how ideal beauty is achieved in art: it is the product of individual beauties observed in nature, each brought together to form a composite. As Kreuzgang demonstrates, the procedures that might function in art would, if transposed into nature, result in ghastly, incapacitated bodies. In its attempts to bring about a more enhanced and immediate access to beauty, the practice of viewing statuary by torchlight and, more importantly, its imagination of vivification, comes perilously close to conflating art with nature.

From the Grotesque to the Terrifying: Shock Aesthetics and the Destruction of the Beauty of Ancient Statuary

In many ways the greatest shock at the end of the thirteenth “Night Watch” owes to the fact that the narrator himself is shocked. Kreuzgang’s speech, after all, anticipates what will appear in the moment of torchlight illumination and subjects it to rigorous critique, relieving it of its sensory forcefulness via argument. Emphasizing time’s

313 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 2.216. 206 ravaging of the sculptures, their defects and erasures, Kreuzgang describes how torchlight will instead illuminate the grotesque—in the form of incongruously constructed bodies, corpses missing limbs. Kreuzgang’s anticipatory account magnifies what aesthetic discourse represses: temporality and impermanence, the fact that time has had its way with sculpture’s claims to beauty. But expecting the grotesque, Kreuzgang is instead confronted with the terrifying. The resurrection of the gods and heroes in mutilated human form via torchlight elicits terror in the narrator, silencing his own speech:

Ich endete erschrocken, denn bei dem täuschenden Fackelglanze schien sich der ganze verstümmelte Olymp umher plötzlich zu beleben; der zürnende Jupiter wollte sich aufrichten von seinem Sitze, der ernste Apoll griff nach dem Bogen und der klingenden Leier, mächtig bäumten sich die Drachen um den kämpfenden Laokoon und die sinkenden Söhne, Prometheus formte mit den Stümpfen seiner Arme Menschen, die stumme Niobe schützte das jüngste ihrer Kleinen vor den herabstrahlenden Sonnenpfeilen, die Musen ohne Hände, Arme und Lippen regten sich durcheinander, wie wenn sie sich bemüheten die alten verklungenen Lieder zu singen und zu spiegeln—aber es blieb alles still ringsum, und schien nur noch heftige zuckende Bewegung auf einem Schlachtfelde;—nur tief im Hintergrunde stand, ohne Beleuchtung, starr und versteinert ein Furienchor, und schaute finster und schrecklich dem Gewühle zu.314

Literal aninimation of the temporalized, mortalized, and mortified statues does not result in enhanced imperfection or ugliness. Instead, described as the “nur noch heftige zuckende Bewegung auf einem Schlachtfelde,” the statues are dramatically visualized as convulsing bodies lying in a battlefield, where history is made, viscerally evoking images of pain, struggle and suffering. Overseeing this melee of animated, mutilated bodies are the Furies themselves, notably unmoved. Taking the narrator’s description at face value—at least at first—we are confronted with a gap between the aesthetics of beauty that were to be generated (i.e. what the dilettantes and experts expect), and the narrator’s

314 Nachtwachen, 106-107.

207 experience of horror. This discrepancy is suggestive of a human capacity to see as beautiful what is in fact terrifying, repressing the latter entirely. In Die Geburt der

Tragödie, for instance, Nietzsche theorizes that an “apollinische[r] Schönheitstrieb” led the ancient Greeks to create the Olympian gods, repressing and replacing the titanic

“Götterordnung des Schreckens.” 315 Beauty becomes a veiling of the terrifying.

Nietzsche does not restrict his anthropological theory of a beauty drive to the ancient

Greeks, but instead applies to all of humanity generally: it is a necessity that allows humanity to throw a “Schönheitsschleier” upon itself and create a world of illusion, beautiful appearance, which it can then inhabit.316 In this scene of the Nachtwachen, however, it is not the forces of nature that pose an existential threat to man which are transfigured, but illusion itself. What one sees—in this case, media spectacle—is conditioned by one’s own discursive disciplining.

The conceit underlying the thirteenth “Night Watch” is that this, too—the terrifying as illusion—can be instrumentalized by literature to induce pleasure for the reader. After having functioned as a channel for critical discourse, Kreuzgang ultimately serves a theatrical purpose. The staging of the narrator’s own terror is a device deployed

315 “Um leben zu können, mussten die Griechen diese Götter, aus tiefster Nöthigung, schaffen: welchen Hergang wir uns wohl so vorzustellen haben, dass aus der ursprünglichen titanischen Götterordnung des Schreckens durch jenen apollinischen Schönheitstrieb in langsamen Uebergängen die olympische Götterordnung der Freude entwickelt wurde: wie Rosen aus dornigem Gebüsch hervorbrechen.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie in Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I-V, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (München: de Gruyter, 1988), 9-156, here 36.

316 “Könnten wir uns eine Menschwerdung der Dissonanz denken—und was ist sonst der Mensch?—so würde diese Dissonanz, um leben zu können, eine herrliche Illusion brauchen, die ihr einen Schönheitsschleier über ihr eignes Wesen decke. Dies ist die wahre Kunstabischt des Apollo: in dessen Namen wir alle jene zahllosen Illusionen des schönen Scheins zusammenfassen, die in jedem Augenblick das Dasein überhaupt lebenswerth machen und zum Erleben des nächsten Augenblicks drängen.” Ibid., 155. 208 in order to heighten the shock-aesthetic value of the literary text. This is one of the primary differences between Jean Paul’s Titan, whose prose wields humor and irony both as devices and ends. The Nachtwachen, sharing many of Jean Paul’s insights into the status of statuary, branches off and pursues its own course. At this point it is worth reconsidering what transpires in the course of the Nachtwachen’s and how it transforms the ancient statue. In the unfolding of the narrative, ancient sculpture is divested of exemplary beauty; it succumbs to temporalization and de-idealization. But rather than being disposed of, its corpus is then repurposed within the text as a site for a different aesthetics—of the uncanny, of shock—and for the literary genre of the fantastic tale. The destruction of classicist beauty in narrative fiction thus is not only a topic of inquiry, but becomes an instrument for generic innovation.317

How, then, are moderns to understand their relationship to ancient statuary; how should they respond to both the traces of beauty as well as marks and erasures of historicity? The Nachtwachen’s answer is to regard statues as “unsterbliche Tote,” a metaphor that captures the complicated relationship between the past and the present, in

317 In The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale, Dorothea von Mücke examines the emergence of the genre of the “fantastic tale” in the early nineteenth century. Von Mücke makes two central claims about the genre. First, that its poetic and aesthetic program lies in shock: “One sees this aesthetic program in how these tales frame the encounter with an occult phenomenon: as a shock, a shattering of the protagonists’s—and by extension the external reader’s—certainty; or as a dangerous disorienting escape into a virtual world of sensual delights.” (2). Furthermore, von Mücke argues, the genre innovates literary discourse by reconfiguring the relationship between the text and the reader. “In this framing, the fantastic tale thematizes and stages a new relationship between a text and its reader. […] Hence, the generic innovation of the fantastic tale can be understood in light of how it intervenes in the cultural history of reading, by proposing a new relationship between a tetual representation and the subjectivity of the reader— one that can be captured in terms of shock and excitement, or as the occasion of flight or escape into fantasy.” (2). The Nachtwachen—in so far as it operates via shock aesthetics, and attempts to structure an empathetic relationship between the reader and the narrator, via the latter’s observation of a medially occasioned occult phenomenon—can be situated in proximity to the literary genre of the fantastic tale. 209 which traces of what once was persist in the now. Ancient statues are “dead” in the sense that their claims to validity as aesthetic exemplars have vanished along with the passage of time—a point that this text repeatedly emphasizes. They are, however, “immortal,” not only because they present divinities and apotheosized heroes, but also because they represent a stage of human cultural production that is understood to be remarkable in its artistic achievement. While they do not point the way forward for artistic production, they remain relevant as reference points from the past. In particular, for German philosophical aesthetics as well as literary discourse, ancient statuary will assume the position of “immortal dead” in the sense that it will haunt discussions of beauty, as ghosts that cannot entirely be driven out, or outright dismissed. If ancient statuary can no longer fulfill its former exemplarity, it will instead point to what beauty once was and can no longer mean—harmony, for example—or what it can no longer guarantee.

Excursus: Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik

One place, however, where ancient statuary still predominates as the epitome of beauty at this time is in the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel—where its consequences for art’s post-classical viability are grave. In many ways, Hegel’s philosophy is a repository for a collection of assumptions about the singularity of ancient Greek artistic achievement.

Hegel’s identification of artistic beauty with ancient Greek statuary means that post- classical art’s historical development follows a degenerative trajectory. Its ability to be beautiful declines, ultimately leading to art’s end, i.e. its inability to fulfill its purpose.

We can see this by briefly examining Hegel’s definitions of the beautiful, of art, and the crucial relationship between the two. 210 In his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, given between 1817 and 1829, Hegel conjoins beauty and art such that only beautiful art—as exemplified in ancient Greek classical sculpture—realizes art’s highest purpose. Here, Hegel famously defines the beautiful (das Schöne) in the following terms: “Das Schöne bestimmt sich dadurch als das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee.”318 The beautiful is the sensuous presentation of the

“Idea,” what we might call the nature of the universe, or, the way in which the Absolute manifests itself in different historical stages. It is beauty that brings “die Idee selber zur

Darstellung.”319 Art, according to Hegel—although it can take many forms—only fulfills its purpose when it externalizes truth (Wahrheit). Supplanting prior definitions of the purpose of art, such as the imitation of nature or moral instruction, with one that capture’s its essence, Hegel argues that art is called to sensuously reveal Truth: “Hiergegen steht zu behaupten, daß die Kunst die Wahrheit in Form der sinnlichen Kunstgestaltung zu enthüllen, jenen versöhnten Gegensatz darzustellen berufen sei und somit ihren

Endzweck in sich, in dieser Darstellung und Enthüllung selber habe.”320 The crucial point here turns on Hegel’s definition of truth (Wahrheit) and what is true (wahr)—both of which originate in the Idea: “Wahr nämlich ist die Idee, wie sie als Idee ihrem Ansich und allgemeinen Prinzip nach ist und als solches gedacht wird.”321 Thus, in order for art

318 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. 13, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 151.

319 Ibid., 152.

320 Ibid., 82.

321 Ibid., 151.

211 to fulfill its truth-revelatory purpose, it must be beautiful and thereby represent Truth, which is the Idea.

For Hegel, art’s most complete fulfillment of its purpose occurs in the “ideal of the classical form of art” (Das Ideal der klassischen Kunstform), one of the three forms of art—symbolic, classical and romantic—whose historical development corresponds to different phases of the Idea’s manifestation in consciousness. The ideal of the classical form of art is privileged in Hegel, because at the historical moment of its highest expression—that is, in classical sculpture—art’s form corresponds to the shape

(Gestaltung) in which the Idea has manifested itself in consciousness, thus allowing art to embody (Einbildung) the Idea. The classical form of art, according to Hegel’s lectures, is

“die freie adäquate Einbildung der Idee in die der Idee selber eigentümlich ihrem Begriff nach zugehörige Gestalt, mit welcher sie deshalb in freien, vollendeten Einklang zu kommen vermag.”322 It is only in the Classical art that this convergence—of art’s form and the Idea’s shape—occurs, making it possible that art “wirklich erreicht und herausstellt” “that which comprises its innermost concept,” namely: sensuous revelation of truth in the beautiful.323

The plastic shape of sculpture, the ideal of the classical form of art, renders beauty—and hence Truth, and the Idea itself—sensuously perceivable. The beautiful

322 Ibid., 109.

323 “Hier müssen wir es nun in dem speziellen Sinne des klassischen Ideals nehmen, dessen Begriff sich uns gleichfalls schon mit dem Begriffe der klassischen Kunstform überhaupt ergeben hat. Denn das Ideal, von dem jetzt zu reden ist, besteht nur darin, daß die klassische Kunst das, was ihren innersten Begriff ausmacht, wirklich erreicht und herausstellt.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. 14, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 74.

212 surface of the sculpture is thus not superficial. It is both the form and the content itself and hence the concrete realization of the Idea. The divine, the Greek Gods, are brought to consciousness and embodied in stone. In the romantic form of art, which follows the classical and ends with historical rupture of the Protestant Reformation, the Idea’s form transcends that of sensuous beauty. The romantic form of art thus cannot embody the

Idea but must point beyond itself. As of this point, art’s truth-revealing function is superseded by other epistemologies: religion and philosophy. This leads to two of

Hegel’s most significant and controversial claims about beauty and post-romantic art.

One, the days of the beautiful (art) are over: “Die schönen Tage der griechischen Kunst wie die goldene Zeit des späteren Mittelalters sind vorüber.”324 Two, art, in that it thereby no longer fulfills its “highest determination,”—that is, revealing the Idea—is a thing of the past: “In allen diesen Beziehungen ist und bleibt die Kunst nach der Seite ihrer höchsten Bestimmung für uns ein Vergangenes.”325 As Agnes Heller has written, the end of both beauty and art are inextricably linked to one another: “Ultimately, the end of beauty is the end of art, and the end of art is the end of beauty.”326

324 Hegel, Werke 13, 24.

325 Ibid., 25. This, of course, does not mean that artistic production ceases, but that it no longer fulfills the function—the highest it had historically—of disclosing the Absolute. Hegel aligns art’s decline with the rise of Christianity and its own notion of truth, which has a more complicated relationship to the sensuous than that of the classical world: “Dagegen gibt es eine tiefere Fassung der Wahrheit, in welcher sie nicht mehr dem Sinnnlichen so verwandt und freundlich ist, um von diesem Material in angemessener Weise aufgenommen und ausgedrückt werden zu können. Von solcher Art ist die christliche Auffassung der Wahrheit, und vor allem erscheint der Geist unserer heutigen Welt, oder näher unserer Religion und unserer Vernunftbildung, als über die Stufe hinaus, auf welcher die Kunst die höchste Weise ausmacht, sich des Absoluten bewußt zu sein.” Ibid., 24.

326 Agnes Heller, The Concept of the Beautiful, ed. Marcia Morgan (New York: Lexington Books, 2012), 93-94. 213 Written into art’s ability to fully reveal the Idea in classical sculpture is also its impending inability to do so. Concomitant with art’s fulfillment of its highest purpose,

Hegel also isolates the emergence of what he calls the prosaic [das Prosaische]. Opposed to and historically arising after the poetic, Hegel uses the term “prosaic” in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Metaphorically, it refers to a mode of consciousness that lacks a productive or creative impulse, instead proceeding according to (reductive) protocols such as cause-effect, means-end relations: “Auf der einen Seite nämlich betrachtet dasselbe [das prosaische Bewußtsein] den breiten Stoff der Wirklichkeit nach dem verständigen Zusammenhang von Ursache und Wirkung, Zweck und Mittel und sonsitgen Kategorien des beschränkten Denkens, überhaupt nach den Verhältnissen der

Äußerlichekit und Endlichkeit.”327 In its more literal meaning, however—applicable therefore to works of art—prose signifies a content that is not or does not partake in the disclosure of the Absolute. Tracing its origin to end of the heroic age and to Herodotus328, i.e. to the 5th century BCE, Hegel links prose to the historical and to the writing of history: “Denn nicht nur die Art und Weise, in der die Geschichte geschrieben wird, sondern die Natur ihres Inhaltes ist es, welche sie prosaisch macht.”329 As Paul Fleming

327 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. 15, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 242.

328 “Das eigentlich dem Gegenstand und der Sache nach Historische nimmt erst da seinen Anfang, wo die Zeit des Heroentums, das ursprünglich der Poesie und Kunst zu vindizieren ist, aufhört: da also, wo die Bestimmtheit und Prosa des Lebens sowohl in den wirklichen Zuständen als auch in der Auffassung und Darstellung derselben vorhanden ist. So beschreibt Herodot z.B. nicht den Zug der Griechen gen Troja, sondern die Perserkriege und hat sich vielfach mit mühsamer Forschung und besonnener Beobachtung um die genaue Kenntnis dessen bemüht, was er zu erzählen gedenkt.” Ibid., 258.

329 Ibid., pg. 258. 214 writes, “History, for Hegel, is the epitome and residence of the prosaic […]”.330 After ancient Greek sculpture fulfills its purpose, the viability of artistic beauty and then art itself becomes compromised by history—as prose. Hegel describes, a prosification of the world, whereby “allem und jedem” is assumed into its mode of understanding

[Auffassungsweise], crowding out poetry. 331 With the arrival of the Protestant

Reformation, “the prose of life” not only predominates, but also is elevated to the level of virtue.332 This results in a state of affairs where history, as prose, comprises the world; and art, too, which no longer fulfills its poetic—that is creative, revelatory—function, becomes prose as well. As Fleming, again, writes, “When art no longer idealizes the

330 Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 121.

331 “Hat dagegen die Prosa den gesamten Inhalt des Geistes schon in ihre Auffassungsweisen hineingezogen und allem und jedem den Stempel derselben eingedrückt, so muß die Poesie das Geschäft einer durchgängigen Umschmelzung und Umprägung übernehmen und sieht sich bei der Sprödigkeit des Prosaischen nach allen Seiten hin in vielfachen Schwierigkeiten verwickelt.” Werke 15, 244. Cf. Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 2. The notion of prose crowding out the poetic is not specific to Hegel. Consider the following letter from Friedrich Schiller to Herder on November 4, 1795. It very much announces the same problem as Hegel does, but also proposes a survival strategy: a retreat to a separate aesthetic sphere, of which Greek mythology is constitutive and where the poetic is most concentrated: “Es läßt sich, wie ich denke, beweisen, daß unser Denken und Treiben, unser bürgerliches, politisches, religiöses, wissenschaftliches Leben und Wirken wie die Prosa der Poesie entgegengesetzt ist. Diese Uebermacht der Prosa in dem Ganzen unsres Zustandes ist, meines Bedünkens, so groß und so entschieden, daß der poetische Geist, anstatt darüber Meister zu werden, nothwendig davon angesteckt und also zu Grunde gerichtet werden müßte. Daher weiß ich für den poetischen Genius kein Heil, als daß er sich aus dem Gebiet der wirklichen Welt zurückzieht und anstatt jener Coalition, die ihm gefährlich seyn würde, auf die strengste Separation sein Bestreben richtet. Daher scheint es mir gerade ein Gewinn für ihn zu seyn, daß er seine eigne Welt formiert und durch die Griechischen Mythen der Verwandte eines fernen, fremden und idealischen Zeitalters bleibt, da ihn die Wirklichkeit nur beschmutzen würde.” Letter from Schiller to Herder on 4. November, 1795. NA XXVIII: Schillers Briefe 1.7.1795-31.10.1796, ed. Norbert Oellers (1969), 98.

332 “Ihrer Religion nach waren die Holländer, was eine wichtige Seite ausmacht, Protestanten, und dem Protestantismus allein kommt es zu, sich auch ganz in die Prosa des Lebens einzunisten und sie für sich, unabhängig von religiösen Beziehungen, vollständig gelten und sich in unbeschränkter Freiheit ausbilden zu lassen.” Werke 14, 225-226.

215 world, it has succumbed to the prosaic reality it once opposed. Post-Romantic art, for

Hegel, no longer possesses a poetic (productive, revealing) power but rather has become a mere prosaic (i.e., historical) presence. Art belongs to the everyday; it can be collected and displayed, pondered and reflected upon, but it is no longer significant in and for the present. With its poetic power exhausted, art is relegated to “prosaic reality.”333 Prose, in

Hegel, stands for art’s inability to fulfill its own role, the victory of history and the historical, and (true) beauty’s historical positioning as belonging to the past.

Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik proves to be an indispensible study in contrast insofar as it clarifies how the two literary texts I’ve discussed in this chapter— published a minimum of 12 years before the first year of Hegel’s lectures—also conceived of a relationship between prose, or non-idealizing literary discourse334 and temporality, one that has a radically different outcome for both art and beauty than

Hegel’s. Both Jean Paul’s Titan—with “die Prose der Zeit”—and Klingemann’s

Nachtwachen—with Kreuzgang’s “Erinnerung an die Zeit und Vergänglichkeit”— explicitly link the textual strategies employed in their narrative texts to a poetics of temporality and transience. More importantly, for both, narrative fiction becomes a literary mode in which the ancient Greek statue is de-idealized, and along with it, the specific type of beauty it embodies. Yet, while these literary texts deconstruct sculpture’s normative status as the epitome of artistic beauty, they by no means dispense entirely with beauty as such, let alone with art. The dire fates of beauty and art in Hegel’s

333 Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity,121.

334 In contradistinction to Hegel, in both literary texts, the term “prose” signifies not the absence of poetic power, but a resistance to, or deviation from a regime of idealization that had come to dominate contemporaneous aesthetic discourse. 216 philosophy owe to what Peter Szondi calls the “eigenartigen Widerspruch der Hegelschen

Lehre.”335 Szondi writes, “Es ist der Widerspruch zwischen der radikalen Historisierung der Kunst einerseits und dem historischen Ursprung und der Fixierung von Hegels Kunst-

Begriff anderseits.”336 What Szondi says of Hegel’s concept of art is equally valid for his concept of beauty. It, too, can only be totally fulfilled by the ancient statue—whereas all other forms of beauty are radically historicized. In short: Hegel does not historicize in equal measure; once beautiful art—and its concept—is realized, there are no meaningful replacements for it. What we observe, by contrast, in Titan and the Nachtwachen is the temporal destabilization of the ancient Greek statue—i.e. the negation of its normative validity—such that space is opened up for the possibility of new forms that the beautiful can inhabit, or new ways in which beauty can be understood. In contrast to Winckelmann, therefore, where the beautiful must be rescued from history, in Jean Paul and Klingemann, time and temoprality becomes a tool through which narrative fiction rescues beauty.

These texts, rather than devaluing art or beauty wholesale, pursue a different course: clearing the past in order to focus upon the question of how art and beauty might coincide in the present.

The prose of both texts also seeks to integrate the temporal—that force, in addition to the historical, which undermines the ancient statue—with the beautiful. Rather than being subverted by it, the beautiful emerges in the temporal, in the unfolding of narrative fiction, thus reconciling beauty with the transient. Temporality thus becomes

335 Peter Szondi, “Hegels Lehre von der Dichtung” in Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I, ed. Senta Metz and Hans-Hagen Hildebrandt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 304.

336 Ibid., 305. 217 the very precondition of beauty’s appearing. In Jean Paul’s Titan, glorification of the ancient statue is shown to come at a cost: the neglect of the evanescent emergence of beauty in life and in nature, that is, within the temporal realm of the present. One of the novel’s poetic responses is to offer an alternative, its own moments of beauty in the form of literary landscapes337—the ideal landscapes that the text itself constructs, for example,

Albano’s vision and those fashioned by the narrator. Occurring as interruptions in this colossal novel, these literary landscapes do not aspire to permanent form: their beauty is reminiscent of brief flashes of color in the sky and implicitly challenges the monochrome form of sculptural beauty—and associated claims of permanence.338

In the Nachtwachen, we can observe a similar equation of the beautiful with the transient in Kreuzgang’s narration of the deathbed scene in the first “Night Watch.”

Watching at the window, Kreuzgang observes that man’s wife is “beautifully ignorant” that the father has already died, confusing his death for sleep:

Ach! dort im Zimmer war die Szene lieblicher worden. Das schöne Weib hielt den blassen Geliebten still in ihren Armen, wie einen Schlummernden; in schöner Unwissenheit ahnte sie den Tod noch nicht, und glaubte, daß ihn der Schlaf zum

337 See Eckart Goebel, Am Ufer der zweiten Welt: Jean Pauls “Poetische Landschaftsmalerei” (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1999).

338 Jean Paul’s upending of the hierarchical relationship between the heavenly and timeless, and the earthy and transient, can also be seen in the preface of the novel, titled “Der Traum der Wahrheit.” It is a dedication to Prussian Queen Luise and her sisters, Charlotte, Therese and Friederike—“Den vier schönen und edeln SCHWESTERN auf dem Thron.” This paratext, however, also functions as a metatext for the entire novel, condensing its most essential gesture. Rather than earthly desire to ascend to the heavenly, Jean Paul describes how Aphrodite and the three Graces, Aglaja, Eurphrosyne and Thalia, become envious of earthly existence, descending in order to partake in the pleasures of mortality. “Aphrodite, Aglaja, Euphrosyne und Thalia sahen einst in das irdische Helldunkel hernieder und, müde des ewig heitern, aber kalten Olympos, sehnten sie sich herein unter die Wolken unserer Erde, wo die Seele mehr liebt, weil sie mehr liedet, und wo sie trüber, aber wärmer ist.” Titan, 9. Cf. Helmut Pfotenahuer, Jean Paul: Das Leben als Schreiben (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2013).

218 neuen Leben stärken werde—ein holder Glaubte, der im höhern Sinne sie nicht täuschte. Die Kinder knieten ernst am Bette, und nur der jüngste bemühte sich den Vater zu wecken, während die Mutter, ihm schweigend mit den Augen zuwinkend, die hand auf sein unmlocktes Haupt legte. Die Szene war zu schön; ich wandte mich weg, um den Augenblick nicht zu schauen, in dem die Täuschung schwände.339

What makes this scene “too beautiful,” to borrow the words of the narrator, is the fact that its emergence is inexorably tied to the momentary, to the illusion that the man is sleeping, which will soon vanish. What lends gravity to this private moment of tender care is dramatic irony: the observer’s awareness that the family’s actions proceed from ignorance, and that this quiet moment will soon give way to profound sadness. It is, thus, the merely momentary sustainability of illusion that gives rise to the beautiful; its duration is short, evaporating in an “Augenblick.” Much like Jean Paul’s revaluation of the earthly over the heavenly or immortal, the narrator of the Nachtwachen glimpses the evanescent existence of the beautiful in the un-rarified milieu of the domestic sphere, in bourgeois life.

From Statues to Sirens: Dangerous Beauty in “Das Marmorbild”

Harmony and Danger: or, Apollo and Venus

Let us, for a moment, consider the possibility that the majority of positions concerning what beauty is, and how ancient statuary embodies it, can be abstracted into one guiding image: that of Apollo. That is, that from 1750 up until around 1800, when a viewer encounters a statue, despite its particular features, what is actually viewed is a collection of discursively constructed assumptions, which I would like to condense in the figure of Apollo as a heuristic tool. These positions are: that beauty produces a feeling of

339 Nachtwachen, 12-13. 219 pleasure that confirms the harmonious construction of the human (Kant, Schiller); that the statue itself is harmonious, or an allegory thereof (Winckelmann); that beauty (and the statue) do not awaken desire itself (Kant), but instead encourage the viewer’s desire to emulate its wholeness, perfection, internal peace given form in the beautiful statue

(Winckelmann, Herder). To this we might add a restorative function, namely, that when the internally fragmented modern beholder encounters the beautiful ancient statue, its embodiment of wholeness has the potential to re-harmonize him (Schiller), or reinvigorate the viewer’s life, by lending life to it (Herder). We might reformulate these positions in terms of prohibitions, a list of emotions or states that the beautiful statue should or does not engender: excess, for example (insofar as it should promote harmony); danger or harm (for the same reasons); sexual desire (insofar as the intimate mode of interaction with it is to be limited to admiration); or even death (insofar as it should promote or inspire life). To see Apollo in every ancient statue, for instance, would mean to see beyond the suffering of Laocoön and discover a calm soul, such as Winckelmann does, or the erasure of pain—and hence ugliness—such as Lessing. In other words, by

“seeing Apollo,” I mean to chart out a set of general positions that encompasses, for example, Winckelmann’s, Lessing’s, and Herder’s more subtle points in their essays on the Laocoön.

If the crystallization of the positions that I have set out above in the figure of

“Apollo” is broad, lacking in subtlety, it is because the changes that I want to discuss— enacted in Eichendorff’s novella “Das Marmorbild”—are themselves so fundamental. To close this chapter, I will briefly examine two transformations that take place in this text.

The first is theoretical in nature. Focusing on key passages in the text, I wish to 220 demonstrate how “Das Marmorbild” recasts the scene of torchlight viewing (here as moonlight), in order to formulate a fundamentally different conception of categories that can be aligned with beauty.340 That is, instead of the positions embodied by Apollo above,

“Das Marmorbild” constructs what we might call a Bacchic beauty, visualized in a different statuary deity: Venus. The set of values associated with beauty here represents all that is suppressed in aesthetic discourse prior to 1800, that is, in Apollo—potential for danger, encouragement of (sexual) desire, ecstasy instead of harmony, insanity instead of composure, as well as death. My second claim is that rather than fully embodying these new values that can be identified with beauty, Venus and her statue function as an inversion of Apollo, a point of mediation, ultimately facilitating the transfer of exemplarity away from the statue itself to another art form: music. Music, I would like to claim, becomes an exemplar in the text for beauty—and a new set of values ascribed to it.

Unlike the statue, it easily reconciles beauty with temporality, transcends physical borders, and is a “non-representative” art, corresponding more easily with the generation of more extreme emotional states. As music, beauty is understood less as an instantiation of perfection, as something that can be embodied, than as a force.

Before isolating some key passages, I will offer a brief summary of the plot of

“Das Marmorbild.” Florio, a young nobleman, rides on horseback into the city of Lucca,

340 The formulation of a concept of the beautiful aligned with danger and intoxication—that is, with situations, values, and states of mind diametrically opposed to its classicist conception—is not an invention of Eichendorff’s “Das Marmorbild.” Referencing the “zauberischer Spielmann,” “Das Marmorbild” explicitly marks its affiliation with texts from Tieck’s Phantasus—specifically “Der getreue Eckart und der Tannenhäuser” and “Der Runenberg”—and alternative conceptualizations of the beautiful therein, which are linked to music instead of to the ancient statue. My selection of “Das Marmorbild” for this chapter—beyond its thematic reworking of torchlight illumination—lies in the fact that this text does not simply offer an opposing conception of the beautiful. Rather, the text develops this alternative conception out of the statue itself, explicitly performing a transition from the one to the other. 221 meeting the famous singer Fortunato on the way. That evening, Florio attends a festival, meeting Fortunato again and becoming enamored with a girl (Bianca) who wears a wreath of flowers. A Bacchus-like knight, Donati, whose arrival is described in one of

Fortunato’s songs, interrupts the party. Although he has a conversation with Fortunato, he is unable to assimilate himself in the group. That night, Florio has a dream in which he is sailing on the sea and encounters Sirens resembling the beautiful girl with the flowers.

Waking up, he opens the windows and hears a reverberation of the Siren’s song, grabs

Fortunato’s guitar and rushes down to the river, responding with his own song. On the banks of the pond, he sees a statue of the goddess Venus illuminated by moonlight and senses that he recognizes her. After he stares at the statue, he perceives it coming to life in the moonlight, forcing him to close his eyes, due to the glare and feelings of melancholy and rapture. When he glances at the statue again, as the moonlight changes, it appears white, motionless and he is seized by horror, rushing back to the inn where he is staying. Meanwhile, Florio has repeated encounters with figures who remind him of the statue: in the forest, a “Dame von wundersamer Schönheit,”341 who sings and plays a lute; and at a party, a girl wearing a Greek robe—and her Doppelgänger—tells Florio that she was the lady whom he heard playing the lute. A few days later, Donati brings

Florio to the woman’s castle. While in the there, he hears a voice reminiscent of

Fortunato singing an “altes frommes Lied”342 outside. Gazing at a series of marble statues, upon which the light flickers, he recognizes the lady’s likeness in all of them. As the

341 Joseph von Eichendorff, “Das Marmorbild,” Ahnung und Gegenwart: Erzählungen I, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald and Brigitte Schillbach (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 383-428, here 401.

342 Ibid., 417.

222 volume of the singing increases, a storm approaches, the candles flicker, the statues begin to rise from their pedestals, the woman becomes paler and paler, flowers transform into snakes, and Florio is seized by horror, fleeing the castle. Two days later, Florio decides to leave Lucca, encountering Fortunato, Bianca and her uncle on the road. Passing a

“verfallenes Gemäuer,”343 in the place of the castle, Fortunato sings of the temple of

Venus that once was there. He relates that according to legend, Venus’s spirit returns each spring to seduce youths, who, entirely entranced, devour themselves. They depart together, Florio having fallen in love with the Bianca, the “Engelsbild.”344

One way of re-describing the the plot of “Das Marmorbild” would be in terms of a trajectory that leads from beauty’s endangerment of the protagonist to salvation through

Christian piety. What interests me here is the text’s identification of beauty with danger in the text—as well as the means by which this identity is delivered. This transformation is dramatically enacted through a restaging of the scene of torchlight illumination, one that substitutes the moon for the torch, Venus for Apollo. Much like the scene of torchlight illumination compensates for and fulfills total perception of the beautiful statue, this text uses moonlight illumination as a means of clarifying its alternative concept of beauty associated with the goddess Venus:

Der Mond, der eben über die Wipfel trat, beleuchtete scharf ein marmornes Venusbild, das dort dicht am Ufer einem Steine stand, als wäre die Göttin so eben erst aus den Wellen aufgetaucht und betrachte nun, selber verzaubert, das Bild der eigenen Schönheit, das der trunkene Wasserspiegel zwischen den leise aus dem Grunde aufblühenden Sternen widerstrahlte. […] Florio stand wie eingewurzelt im Schauen, denn ihm kam jenes Bild wie eine lang gesuchte, nun plötzlich erkannte Geliebte vor, wie eine Wunderblume, aus der Frühlingsdämmerung und träumerischen Stille seiner frühesten Jugend

343 Ibid., 423.

344 Ibid., 428. 223 heraufgewachsen. Je länger er hinsah, je mehr schien es ihm, als schlüge es die seelenvollen Augen langsam auf, als wollten sich die Lippen bewegen zum Gruße, als blühe Leben wie ein lieblicher Gesang erwärmend durch die schönen Glieder herauf. Er hielt die Augen lange geschlossen vor Blendung, Wehmut und Entzücken.— Als er wieder auflickte, schien auf einmal alles wie verwandelt. Der Mond sah seltsam zwischen Wolken hervor, ein stärkerer Wind kräuselte den Weiher in trübe Wellen, das Venusbild, so fürchterlich weiß und regungslos, sah ihn fast schreckhaft mit den steinernen Augenhöhlen aus der grenzenlosen Stille an. Ein nie gefühltes Grausen überfiel da den Jüngling.345

Narrated in this scene is the appearing of illusion, the sculpture’s apparent coming-to-life in the moonlight. More important, however, the scene also functions as a presentation of positions that it associates with beauty. What emerges in the process of narration is a systematic performance of all that is repressed in mid to late eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse on the beautiful, that is, in Apollo.

We might begin by considering how this literary representation of Venus differs from claims made in eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse. For one, instead of displaying a lack of awareness about its own beauty, the sculpture exhibits a sentimental, narcissistic preoccupation with its own image. And rather than originating in moral character, in a soul perfected, here, beauty presents itself upon the waves, as mere surface: pure Schein.

These differences in the statue service a larger argument about a naiveté inherent in the modern idealization of ancient beauty. In the image of Venus contemplating herself, beauty is rendered as a force that “entrances” (verzaubert) even the ones who possess it, possessing them in turn. And this—beauty’s ability to disarm people’s rationality, to command their attention and stimulate their sexual drives, to compel them to submit their

345 Ibid., 397. 224 autonomy—is the crux of its danger. It is not a harmless pleasure, but, as evidenced in the case of Florio, a force to which one submits. Furthermore, the beautiful neither originates in ethical exemplarity, nor does its contemplation lead to ethical self-formation—quite to the contrary. Rather than responding with admiration to the Venus sculpture, Florio perceives it as a “Geliebte,” confusing it with an object of erotic desire. And seduced by its beauty, he is brought not to a state of harmonized wholeness, but overpowered by

“Blendung, Wehmut und Entzücken,” overwhelmed both emotionally and sensuously.

The sequence of the narrative—leading from the object to the beholder’s response—raises the question of the ultimate end of beauty: where does it take us? It is an arc that the narrator represents in vivid imagery. Rather than culminating in the exaltation of life—and a call to ennoble one’s living of it—the beholder is presented with an altogether different telos, a ghastly image of death. We might simplify the argument thus far in the following terms: exposure to danger, intoxicating as it is, terminates in death.

With this, the text offers a literary refutation of Kant, positing that the beautiful does not confirm the harmonic constitution of the human; it instead exceeds it, initiating its very downfall. Desire, which Kant in the Kritik der Urteilskraft systematically excludes from his consideration of the beautiful (insofar as its object is “das Angenehme”), is shown to be a category without which beauty cannot be fully understood. “Das Marmorbild,” rather than idealizing beauty or upholding it as the ideal, stages it as harmful and puts forth a case that desire and danger must reenter discussions of beauty.

Whereas I suggested earlier that the psychological effects of beauty, and the valued embodied in ancient statue, could be generalized in terms of the figure of Apollo, we can also observe “Das Marmorbild” utilizing a similar gesture, upholding a single 225 statue. Solidifying the philosophical aspirations of the text, all forms of visual beauty either emerge from, or can be assimilated to fit Venus, the text’s metonym for an alternative concept of the beautiful. For instance, when Florio encounters the lady (the goddess Venus) in her castle, the narrator notes the following: “Mit Verwunderung glaubte Florio, in allen den Damen, die er in diesen letzteren Schildereien erblickte, die schöne Herrin des Hauses deutlich wieder zu erkennen.”346 Her response also serves as confirmation: “jeder glaubt mich schön einmal gesehen zu haben, denn mein Bild dämmert und blüht wohl in allen Jugendträumen mit herauf.”347 Whether Florio views the statue, or any other (imagined) instantiation of Venus—the lady of the castle, the Greek girl and her double, the woman singing playing the lute and singing—all are the same.

There is, however, one notable exception: the angelic Bianca, whose likeness echoes that of the Virgin Mary—“Ein andres Frauenbild.”348

Containment via Content: Christian Piety and the Mastery of Music

While “Das Marmorbild” constructs a relationship between beauty and danger that had hitherto been underexamined in German philosophical aesthetics, and thereby enacts a significant discursive intervention, it ultimately does so in order to advance its own sublimation and suppression of this relationship—via a regime of Christian piety. 349

346 Ibid., 418.

347 Ibid., 419.

348 Ibid., 425.

349 This regime of Christian piety thematized in the text is, however, no end in itself. “Das Marmorbild” opposes pagan sensuality to Christian piety not in order to promote a religious agenda, but to pursue an aesthetic one. In creating scenes that culminate in detailed descriptions 226 This leads to continuities and discontinuities between this text and its discursive predecessors. Both classically oriented eighteenth-century German aesthetic discourse and “Das Marmorbild” are unified in assuming an identity between antiquity and beauty.

But whereas the former seeks to overcome a historical gap between the ancient and modern periods, for “Das Marmorbild,” the problem is reversed: the beautiful is not distant, predominating in the historical past, but still all too immanent in the present. The novella, written in 1817, rather than seeking to erase, re-inscribes the ancient-modern divide, aligning itself with the progenitor of the modern, the first era to understand itself as breaking with classical culture: the modernus of the Middle Ages. Because beauty contains within itself the potential of awakening eros, and thus inherently poses a danger, it must therefore be relieved of its overt connections to sexuality and Christianized— hence, Bianca as imitatio mariae—and other explicit practices of suppression and containment. These are, perhaps, nowhere more evident than in the songs of Fortunato.

At times, like a Greek chorus, his songs comment on events as they unfold, disclosing symbolic content to the reader that the other characters do not register as commentary on the present. But they also intercede at crucial junctures in the narrative—for example, when Florio nearly succumbs to Venus in her castle—and serve to remind Florio of

Christian values, injecting pious sobriety into a maelstrom of intoxicating sensuality. As

Fortunato remarks of the songs he sings, they possesss power the power subdue forces that emerge from the earth, i.e. the Sirens: “Glaubt mir, ein redlicher Dichter kann viel

of the horrific, and the protagonist’s experience thereof, “Das Marmorbild” participates in tradition of literature based in shock aesthetics, aligning itself with the Nachtwachen. 227 wagen, denn die Kunst, die ohne Stolz und Frevel, bespricht und bändigt die wilden

Erdgeister, die aus der Tiefe nach uns langen.”350

Fortunato’s songs—which stretch from the beginning to the end of the novella, breaking up the prose with verse—enact and exemplify the central strategy the text offers for negotiating beauty’s dangers: containment and control through overwriting. The texts of Fortunato’s songs master the beauty of music, forcing it to accommodate a message of

Christian piety. The most explicit formulations of Christian values in the text respond to and are thus indicative of the site that poses the most harm. If the ancient statuary is able to embody the text’s alternative conception of beauty, its true exemplar is music. If we consider the verses of Fortunato’s final song, it testifies to the predominance of music over sculpture in the contemporary present of the narrative: “Zuweilen nur Sirenen /

Noch tauchen aus dem Grund / Und tun in irren Tönen / Die teife Wehmut kund.—”.351

While the sculpture of Venus is damaged, her temple reduced to ruins, the Siren song persists. Thus, in addition to developing a new concept of the beautiful, “Das Marmorbild” ever so subtly shifts the status of exemplarity from sculpture to music. Music signifies the powers of Venus better than she herself.352

350 Ibid., 426.

351 Ibid., 424.

352 Long before the protagonist ever views the statue, the relationship between music and a dangerous beauty are foregrounded in the text. In his initial conversation with Fortunato, as they enter the city, Florio likens spring to a “zauberischer Spielmann” who walks through a garden and sings “von der wunderschönen Ferne” and “großer unermeßlicher Lust.” Fortunato, suspicious of the language of desire, warns him of the dangers posed by the seductive notes of travelling musicians: “Habt Ihr wohl jemals sagte er zerstreut aber sehr ernsthaft, von dem wunderbaren Spielmann gehört, der durch seine Töne die Jugend in einen Zauberberg hinein verlockt, aus dem Keiner wieder zurückgekehrt ist? Hütet Euch!—” The narrative of arc leading from musical enchantment to demise is already prefigured. Ibid., 386. 228

Stimulus, Resonance, Reverberation and the Sequence of Enchantment

I’d like to conclude this chapter by addressing the following question: how is the beauty of music different from what had previously been attributed to sculpture? In other words, in shifting the status of exemplarity from one art form to another, what claims about the experience of beauty does this text make? How does music, as a model, alter how the effects of beauty are understood? One of the ways that music’s effect upon the human psychology was understood—in particular in French and British aesthetic theory, since the eighteenth century—was in terms of the concept of “sympathy.” 353 The plucking of an instrument’s strings, for example, was thought to lead to an internal vibration of man, a mechanical manipulation of his nerves. To describe beauty in terms of music is thus to describe less an embodied quality than a depersonalized force that can inhabit and modify the constitution of other bodies, traveling across both space and in time. In so far as music stimulates a body, it holds the potential to affect that person’s perception of the external world and to elicit an outward response, or echoing of the initial stimulation. In other words, beauty’s ability to enchant—one of the novelties of the conception advanced in “Das Marmorbild”—is aligned with a sequence of external stimulation, resonance and reverberation that the model of music provides.

353 As Maria Semi writes, “In many cases, with no further attempts at definition, sympathy remains a hidden cause that in mysterious ways produces effects that can be experienced in any person. Sympathy, however, can be understood in a mechanical sense, as a phenomenon of resonance that enables the air that is made to vibrate by a sounding body to cause the sympathetic vibration of our ‘internal strings’, the nerves.” Maria Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain, trans. Timothy Keates (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 62. 229 For an illustration of how beauty’s ability to enchant in the text is modeled after this pattern, we might consider Florio’s psychic state after having attended the first festival, where he encounters Bianca (“das schöne Mädchen mit dem Blumenkranze”) and Donati, the Bacchic harbinger of intoxicating beauty. The narrator in the following passage describes the persistence of sensual impulses in the protagonist, their penetration into his interiority, after his return to the inn:

Florio warf sich angekleidet auf das Ruhebett hin, aber er konnte lange nicht schlafen. In seiner von den Bildern des Tages aufgeregten Seele wogte und hallte und sang es noch immer fort. Und wie die Türen im Hause nun immer seltner auf und zugingen, nur manchmal noch eine Stimme erschallte, bis endlich Haus, Stadt und Feld in tiefe Stille versank: da war es ihm, als führe er mit schwanenweißen Segeln einsam auf einem mondbeglänzten Meer. Leise schlugen die Wellen an das Schiff, Sirenen tauchten aus dem Wasser, die alle aussahen wie das schöne Mädchen mit dem Blumenkranze vom vorigen Abend. Sie sang so wunderbar, traurig und ohne Ende, als müsse er vor Wehmut untergraben.354

As we see in the preceding passage, external stimulation does not remain in the past, but takes up residency in the protagonist’s “soul” (Seele)355, where it persists, shaping his dreams. First materializing there in the literalized form of waves, sonic beauty is later personified in the Sirens—arguably, the more crucial figure for understanding how beauty is conceptualized in this text. With this, “Das Marmorbild” mobilizes the idea of resonance—the ability of a vibration to be transferred to another object—as a means of pointing to beauty’s ability to pierce the outer surface of the subject, enacting an internal

354 Eichendorff, 395.

355 In addition to this excerpt, the passage of music from the exterior into the subject’s soul is also thematized elsewhere in the text. The following passage, for example, illustrates how music serves as a precondition for the illusory vivification of the statue: “Morgen, morgen! Schallte es in einem fort durch seine Seele. Ihm war so unbeschreiblich wohl. Das schöne Marmorbild war ja lebend geworden und von seinenm Steine in den Frühling hinunter gestiegen der still Weiher plözlich verwandelt zu unermeßlichen Landschaft, die Sterne darin zu Blumen und der ganze Frühling ein Bild der Schönen.” Ibid., 404.

230 transformation: that is, enchantment. In addition to being referenced on an explicit level

(i.e. the Sirens), music and sound also operates on a more metaphorical one, which ultimately serves to demote the primacy of visuality. For even though visual beauty is referenced in the passage above—“Bilder[n] des Tages,” for example—its mode of transmission relies entirely on a series of sonic metaphors: wogen, forthallen, erschallen.

From this we can draw an important conclusion: music is not only constitutive of how the text conceptualizes beauty; it is also the precondition for the protagonist’s experience of visual beauty in the text. Indeed, “das schöne Mädchen mit der Blumenkranze,” Bianca— who is later aligned with the Virgin Mary—gains her beauty in Florio’s dream precisely because she sings as the Sirens do, ventriloquizing their beautiful song: “so wunderbar, traurig und ohne Ende.”

Beauty’s enchantment of the protagonist, which I’ve discussed in terms of resonance, also has wider implications. It, in turn, transforms his relationship to the external world. On the level of plot, Florio’s enchantment by the Sirens is what renders possible his initial animation of the Venus statue, his imagination of her castle and his ability to perceive one form of beauty instantiated in many things. The result of internal enchantment is thus an enchantment of the exterior world, such that they correspond.

“Das Marmorbild” thus identifies the experience of beauty with a loss of an objective apprehension of the exterior world. This realignment of the subject’s interiority and the external world follows a pattern that can also be understood in terms of reverberation, that is, in echoing. On the level of plot, Florio perceives the internal singing of the Sirens in the external world: it is both a performance and confirmation of what he experiences internally: “Auch da draußen war es überall in den Bäumen und Strömen noch wie im 231 Verhallen und Nachhallen der vergangenen Lust, als sänge die ganze Gegend leise, gleich den Sirenen, die er im Schlummer gehört.”356 Florio himself will then echo the Sirens he hears within himself, and in nature, when he takes Fortunato’s guitar and sings. In singing—“Ist so auch mir ein heimlich Singen / Geblieben in der tiefsten Brust.”357— spectral song is given actual expression, and the ability of beauty to seize physical control of the body is performed. Via reverberation, “Das Marmorbild” stages a scene in which the subject is intoxicated, has lost his autonomy358 and is driven by compulsion—all of which has its genesis in the experience of beauty.

Whereas torchlight viewing aspires toward an immediate encounter with the beautiful, “Das Marmorbild” takes a far more critical view, suggesting that realization of this would entail the total possession of the subject, his loss of autonomy. If we consider the text’s generic designation as a novella, and Goethe’s designation thererof as an “eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit,”359 “Das Marmorbild” fulfills this definition on the level of plot, but also discurisively. It performs a discursive rupture or “unprecedented

356 Ibid., 395.

357 Ibid., 396.

358 This image of the hijacked body is underscored after Florio gives his “serenade,” unaware of to whom it is addressed. The same passage also demonstrates the ability of beauty to transform exterior objects and make them cohere with an inner image, illustrated here through the mapping of Venus onto Bianca via beautiful sound: “Er mußte über sich selber lachen, da er am Ende nicht wußte, wem er das Ständchen brachte. Denn die reizende Kleine mit dem Blumenkranze war es lange nicht mehr, die er eigentlich meinte. Die Musik bei den Zelten, der Traum, auf seinem Zimmer, und sein, die Klänge und den Traum und die zierliche Erscheinung des Mädchens, nachträumendes Herz hatte ihr Bild unmerklich und wundersam verwandelt in ein viel schöneres, größeres und herrliches, wie er es noch nirgend gesehen.” Ibid., 396-397.

359 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Heinz Schlaffer, vol. 19, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ed. Karl Richter (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1986), 203. 232 event” by underscoring a relationship repressed in aesthetic discourse: the reconcilability of beauty with danger. Furthermore, it facilitates the explicit transfer of exemplarity from the statue to music and thereby provides a new logic for understanding the psychological dimensions of experiencing beauty.

Conclusion

During the course of this chapter I have argued that while the ancient statue enjoyed the status of exemplarity in eighteenth-century German aesthetic discourse— embodying assumptions about what beauty is, and how it was to be experienced—it was, nevertheless, fraught by the problem of anachronicity. As the eighteenth century reached its end, the statue’s ability to fulfill this role became less stable. Focusing on the observational technique of torchlight viewing, and tracing its reception in contemporaneous theoretical texts and travelogues, the chapter illustrated how this cultural practice presented a means of compensating for the historical and medial problems adherent to the statue, rendering it possible for the beholder to view the aesthetic ideal in an ideal manner, thereby reinforcing the statue’s exalted position.

The second half of this chapter examined how this cultural technique was transformed into a subversive thematic device in literary discourse around 1800.

Formerly employed to prop up ancient statuary’s status as an exemplar of beauty, the chapter demonstrated how the scene of torchlight viewing becomes the very means by which literary discourse destabilizes the ancient statue’s exemplarity. Focusing, in particular, on Jean Paul’s Titan and Bonventura’s Nachtwachen, I argued that these texts’ literary reworkings of the scene of torchlight viewing enact a form of historicization not 233 undertaken in aesthetic discourse. Both of these texts operate with a poetics in which narrative fiction subjects the ancient statue to temporality, ultimately relieving it of its normative status in the contemporaneous present. This, I furthermore argued, serves a very particular goal. Narrative fiction—unlike the genre of description, or the form of the elegy—does not seek to compensate for beauty’s precarious positioning in modernity by overcoming an ancient-modern divide. Instead, it operates under the assumption that the rescuing of beauty requires two things: the abandonment of sculpture’s claims to exemplarity (a goal it seeks to achieve via temporalization of the statue); and the formulation of new conceptions of the beautiful that could be reconciled with the demands of the contemporaneous present. In narrative fiction, temporality and time thus becomes the salvation of the beautiful as a category, the very condition from which it emerges.

For a counterexample, the chapter then briefly turned to Hegel’s Vorlesungen

über die Ästhetik, illustrating how Hegel’s insistence upon the ancient statue’s status as an exemplar of beauty ultimately precipitates his thesis on the end of art and, by extension, the end of beauty. To close the chapter, I turned to Eichendorff’s

“Marmorbild,” where we observed the articulation of an alternative concept of the beautiful, one that integrates the category of danger, as well as the explicit transitioning from the old exemplar, sculpture, to a new one, music. Like Jean Paul’s Titan and

Klingemann’s Nachtwachen, this text, too, I argued, reworks the scene of torchlight viewing in order to achieve these ends.

There are three broader conclusions that we can draw from this chapter. The first pertains to the theoretical significance of literature. Insofar as the literary texts here— 234 “Das Marmorbild,” chief among them—endeavor to rescue beauty by generating a new concept, and a new exemplar through which to understand it, early nineteenth-century

German literary discourse makes a contribution to philosophical aesthetics. The second point pertains to the history of aesthetics. The literary texts considered here complicate our understanding of the history of aesthetics, insofar as they challenge the narrative that beauty, around the eighteenth century, was replaced or subjugated by the sublime. Such ideas subscribe to a theory of the beautiful as “benign,” i.e. they presuppose a “classicist” definition of the beautiful and are thus unable to account for texts such as “Das

Marmorbild.” Furthermore, Titan and the Nachtwachen provide a powerful counternarrative to Hegel, by developing alternative ways of considering the relationship between prose (as non-idealizing art) and beauty in modernity, ones that do not terminate in the deprivation of art. The final broader conclusion concerns how the texts analyzed in this chapter contribute to the development of literary discourse itself. The problem of ancient statuary’s exemplarity as well as the emergence of a new conceptualization of the beautiful (in relation to music) also results in a generic contribution to the “fantastic tale.”

235 Conclusion

I’d like to begin my conclusion by briefly discussing a text that I do not, but could have examined in the body of the dissertation: Goethe’s unfinished festival play Pandora from 1808. Written after Schiller’s death, the traditional reference point for the end of

Weimar Classicism, this text offers a sustained exploration of beauty and its relationship to the temporal orders of the past, present and future. At the play’s center is Pandora, a character who never takes the stage, whose voice itself is never heard, who exists only in the recollections of the protagonists, yet whose influence irradiates through each word of the Festspiel.

Described as “allschönst” and “allbegabtest,”360 Pandora is perhaps—with the exception of Helena in Faust: Zweiter Teil—the closest Goethe comes to personifying an abstract form of beauty. 361 Ernst Cassirer, for instance, has referred to her as a presentation of “das Reich der Form”362 and David Wellbery has characterized the text in terms of a “Dramatisierung der Schönheit.” Inverting a tradition that originates with

Hesiod’s Works and Days, Goethe’s play positively revalues the figure of Pandora.

360 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pandora in Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, section 1, vol. 6: Dramen: 1791-1832, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer and Peter Huber (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 661-699, here 666.

361Ernst Cassirer introduces his reading of “Pandora” vis-à-vis Plotinus’s concept of intellectual beauty by claiming that the text demands abstract, philosophical examination: “Von allen Werken Goethes scheint die ‘Pandora’ am meisten einer abstrakten ‘philosophischen’ Auslegung fähig zu sein und ihrer, zum vollen Verständnis ihres Gehalts und Aufbaus, zu bedürfnis.” Ernst Cassirer, “Goethes Pandora” Idee und Gestalt: Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 7-32, here 9. Likewise, David Wellbery points to the abstractness of the beauty invoked in the play: “Denn hier erlangt das Abstraktum Schönheit keine Einverleibung, wird nicht zur Person, sondern existiert nur als Bewusstseinskorrelat […]”. David Wellbery, “Goethes Dramatisierung der Schönheit,” Dankesrede, Jacob- und Wilhelm- Grimm-Preis (Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, 2010), 37-45, here 40.

362 Cassirer, 18. 236 Instead of opening a jar and releasing all the evils that plague man’s existence into the world (while trapping Hope inside), in Goethe’s version the beautiful Pandora bestows gifts. Removing the lid to the vessel, Pandora sets free several clusters of stars that burst forth: “Und fröhlich fuhr ein Sternblitz aus dem Dampf heraus / Sogleich ein andrer; andre folgten heftig nach.”363 She also forms a relationship with Prometheus’s brother

Epimetheus and bares two daughters, Elpore and Epimeleia. One of the central problems negotiated in the play, however, is that Pandora eventually ascends to the heavens with

Elpore, leaving behind Epimeleia and a flower wreath that falls apart. The opening scene takes place after her departure, focusing on Epimetheus’s longing for Pandora and the divergences between his and Prometheus’s memories of her.

Originally, Goethe had intended to compose an ending to the drama, “Pandorens

Widerkunft,”364 in which Pandora, and the beauty she signifies, would return, ultimately heralding the emergence of “Wissenschaft” and “Kunst.”365 Goethe’s design of the ending celebrates a return of beauty (“Schönheit”)366, which ultimately brings about the

363 Goethe, Pandora, 667. The descriptions of the stars and the images that they visualize rank among the more cryptic passages in Goethe’s poetic oeuvre (see verses 96-114). The commentary of the Münchner Ausgabe refers to Pandora’s gifts as “Liebesglück, Pracht und Schönheit.” Christoph Siegrist, commentary to Pandora in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens: Münchner Ausgabe, vol. 9: Epoche der Wahlverwandschaften 1807-1814, ed. Christoph Siegrist et al (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1987), 1138- 1157, here 1155. In the Frankfurter Ausgabe, cited here, Dieter Borchmeyer reads the flashes of stars as “verdeckte Anspielungen auf die poetischen Gattungen”: lyric, epic, tragedy, and comedy. Dieter Borchmeyer, commentary to Pandora in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, section 1, vol. 6: Dramen: 1791-1832, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer and Peter Huber (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 1226-1270, here 1255- 1256.

364 Goethe, Pandora, 697.

365 Ibid., 699.

366 Ibid., 698. 237 dawning of a seemingly utopic age where discord is overcome, happiness (“Glück”)367 prevails and both science and art flourish. Beauty (and its return) thus becomes the precondition and guarantor of social harmony and cultural progress. But this ending and its potential staging of absolute beauty’s reemergence in the present—both within the fictive present of the literary text and upon the stage—is nevertheless undermined by the fact that these scenes never were completed, 368 that the ending never advanced beyond a rough sketch of keywords, and that Goethe himself, according to Eckermann, came to regard the previously completed portion as a “whole” in and of itself.369

Rather than an incidental detail, the incompletion of the ending fundamentally alters the trajectory and gravitational center of the text. Instead of dramatically culminating in Pandora’s triumphant return, Pandora remains a literary testament to the foreclosure of this very possibility. The return of Pandora’s emphatic beauty thus exists only as the unwritten, the unrealized—perhaps even the impossible. In Goethe’s Pandora literature strives to imagine a return of metaphysical beauty to the present and, in failing

367 Ibid., 698.

368 Recalling a conversation with Goethe on October 31, 1810, Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer relates Goethe’s difficulty in completing the ending. “Als ich Goethe zur Fortsetzung der Pandora ermunterte, sagte er: Wenn er seine Schätze heben wolle, so versänken sie immer wieder zurück und er sähe die glühenden Kohlen gar nicht mehr, die sich ihm verlöschten.” Pg. 506. Woldemar Freiherr von Biedermann, ed. Goethes Gespräche, vol. 2 (Leipzig: F.W.v. Biedermann, 1889), 506.

369 Conversation with Goethe on October 21, 1823. “Ich war diesen Abend bei Goethe. Wir sprachen über die Pandora. Ich fragte ihn, ob man diese Dichtung wohl als ein Ganzes ansehen könne, oder ob noch etwas Weiteres davon existiere. Er sagte, es sei weiter nichts vorhanden, er habe es nicht weiter gemacht, und zwar deswegen nicht, weil der Zuschnitt des ersten Teiles so groß geworden, daß er später einen zweiten nicht habe durchführen können. Auch wäre das Geschriebene recht gut als ein Ganzes zu bertachten, weshalb er sich auch dabei beruhiget habe.” Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Heinz Schlaffer, vol. 19 in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ed. Karl Richter et al (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1986), 50. 238 to bring this to fruition, confirms beauty’s rootedness in the past and its alliance with the sentimental.370

Instead of ending this dissertation with texts by Jean Paul, Klingemann and

Eichendorff, I could have concluded it with a chapter on Goethe’s text. Positioning

Pandora after Schiller’s poems, for example, would have allowed for the construction of a sequence of literary texts that situate the beautiful in different, increasingly remote pasts: the ancient Greece of Winckelmann’s Torso description, the pastoral pre-classical era imagined in Schiller’s “Spaziergang” and, finally, the pre-historical age of myth in

Goethe’s Pandora. The fundamental problem, however, with selecting Goethe’s Pandora as a bookend to this study is that this would have excluded literary attempts to conceive of the beautiful as emergent in the present. For Pandora—rather than offering an alternative to the positioning of beauty in the past—instead corroborates this very fate. It implicitly affirms an account of beauty that will later become a recurring theme in philosophical aesthetics, at least beginning with Hegel. Ending the dissertation with this text would have thus left open the question: why study literature if it confirms what can be learnt from philosophy?

The texts examined in Transformations of the Beautiful were selected precisely because they, taken together, offer answers to the following question: What can the study of mid-eighteenth to early-nineteenth century literary discourse tell us about the status of the beautiful that philosophical discourse neglects to emphasize? By examining these

370 For more on Schiller’s concept of the sentimental as it relates to Epimetheus and Prometheus’s mode of relating to Pandora, see: David Wellbery, “The Imagination of Freedom: Goethe and Hegel as Contemporaries” in Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature, ed. Simon Richter and Richard Block (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 217-238. 239 specific literary representations of the beautiful—not in isolation, but in dialogue with contemporaneous philosophical texts—my dissertation identifies two broad ways in which literary texts complicate and expand our understanding of how the beautiful was understood. I thereby make a case for the inclusion of imaginative literature in the writing of histories of aesthetics.

First, rather than upholding the beautiful as an aesthetic phenomenon that resists definition, yet is also self-evident, the literary texts assembled here adopt a different position. They undermine the presumption that beauty is immediately self-evident by emphasizing the precise measures that precede its perception. In attending to concrete instantiations of the beautiful that are accorded an exemplary status (that is, the statue, the landscape) instead of beauty as an abstraction, these literary texts alert us to a series of cultural practices necessary for the successful perception of beauty. These practices typically fall outside the purview of philosophical discourse. Through the study of these literary texts we learn, for example, to what extent perception of the beautiful, as it is instantiated in sculpture, required a whole host of observational protocols, media- technological enhancements and alterations, as well as the (re)attunement of the subject’s senses. And in the literary representation of beauty as it pertains to the landscape, we find recognition of the importance of historical situatedness and how it frames our aesthetic perception. That is, that what once was sensuously accessible may no longer be, and what we now perceive as beautiful, may not have been perceived as such in the past. The specific literary texts examined here, by attending to concrete sites where beauty is concentrated, render visible the aids, cultural techniques and historical preconditions that fall outside the framework of understanding the beautiful via first principles. We also 240 learn how literature—as a repository of myth, as a resource and record of cultural memory, as a mode of understanding and generator of aesthetic experience itself—was also viewed as such a precondition as well.

Second, and more importantly, my dissertation demonstrates how these literary texts present counter evidence to narratives of the history of aesthetics that would write an end to beauty and adopt a position of closure or finality. Rather than blindly asserting the value or resilience of the beautiful, the literary texts examined here instead confront an ever-greater sense that the beautiful is more closely aligned with the past, and, via literary techniques, struggle against it. These texts thus constitute discrete instances of resistance, sites of tension, specific attempts to either discover, or to consider the possibility of, alternative destinies and conceptions of the beautiful via literary invention.

In presenting them here, my dissertation thus offers a revision of the way the history of aesthetics is written; by emphasizing the relevance of these texts for a broader discourse on beauty, it injects contingency into what have become ossified, deterministic accounts.

Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, as I argue in my third chapter, offers the most powerful philosophy of art in the form of a narrative of beauty’s decline. It also provides the theoretical basis for Arthur Danto’s claim that beauty is a thing of the past because, with the achievement of conceptual art—that is, art that is sensuously indistinguishable from the everyday—aesthetics itself has become a thing of the past.

Hegel’s premise, however, rests upon his positing of one emphatic type of beauty— beauty that discloses the divine sensuously—and that necessarily renders all subsequent instantiations of beauty as, in some form, deficient. Yet as Adorno perceptively writes in

Ästhetische Theorie, “Hegel stellt die ästhetische Dialektik still durch die statische 241 Definition des Schönen als des sinnlichen Scheinens der Idee.” 371 By pointing to literature’s attempt to transfer exemplarity away from the ancient statue, to conceive of beauty otherwise, to transform it, to develop an alternative to the very fixity that Adorno identifies in Hegel, my dissertation highlights literature’s legitimacy as a participant in aesthetic discourse and its own inventive powers. The moments of transformation examined here thus offer a fundamental counterpoint to the stable fixity of philosophical definition and represent the promise of contingency and transience.

What ultimately emerges from Transformations of the Beautiful is the extent to which beauty is a contested site and object of concern in aesthetic and literary discourses between 1754 and 1817. Instead of presenting redefinitions of what the beautiful is—a property, a quality, an expression of taste, a feeling, the result of a reflective judgment, the sensual shining forth of truth—this dissertation shows how the grounds of this category’s normative status begin to erode, become a question. Moreover, rather than pointing to a contemporaneous embrace of beauty’s decline, the dissertation also evidences a deep ambivalence about its instability, born out in compensatory techniques of observation, programs of sensory reconfiguration, hermeneutic as well as media- technological practices that explicitly seek to restabilize beauty’s status by rendering it perceptible in the present. If the eighteenth century is the era in which the beautiful becomes a prime object of philosophical reflection, and its necessity for artistic production becomes more a question than a certainty, then it is equally unwilling to sever itself entirely from beauty.

371 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 7 in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 82. 242 Furthermore, in its focus on literary discourse, Transformations of the Beautiful underscores one of literature’s chief insights into the beautiful, one that is deemphasized in philosophical aesthetics. That is, the relationship of the beautiful to temporality and transience, which is poetically enacted in the literary texts examined here. This very insight also provides for a poetic procedure—temporalization—through which literary discourse defines itself, deconstructs ossified conceptions of the beautiful and generates new ones, thereby participating in a theoretical enterprise, albeit via different discursive procedures. These literary deconstructions and reconceptualizations are relevant to our own understanding of the history of aesthetics today because they relativize the weight of de-facto reference points: Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft and Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. In many ways, accounts in contemporary scholarship that assign an end to beauty in the eighteenth century, or at the latest, with Hegel’s philosophy, presuppose

‘classicist’ conceptions of the beautiful—that is, ones that conform to notions of harmony, or that tacitly uphold the ancient statue as an exemplar of beauty.372 By focusing on literary discourse’s destabilization of privileged instantiations of the beautiful, and its generation of new ones, I offer an intervention into the history of aesthetics and expand our understanding of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century aesthetic practices.

372 As Joachim Jacob points out, the construction of an opposition between the sublime and the beautiful in Lyotard (and its reception in works such as Carsten Zelle’s Doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne) itself relies upon a ‘classicist’ concept of beauty. This deprives both the beautiful and the sublime of conceptual variance. Of Zelle’s project in Doppelte Ästhetik of an “Aufklärung über Aufklärung als Kritik des Schönen,” Jacob writes the following: “Unter dieser Vorannahme stellt sich das Schöne, wie schon bei Lyotard, als harmonistisches, Rationalität und Sittlichkeit unterworfenes Phänomen dar, das durch den erregenden Affekt und die Undarstellbarkeit des Erhabenen einer fälltigen Korrektur zugeführt wird.” Joachim Jacob, Die Schönheit der Literatur: Zur Geschichte eines Problems von Gorgias bis Max Bense (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2007), 8. The same, however, can also be said of Danto, whose art-theoretical positions are shaped by Hegel and his end-of-art thesis—which also amounts to a declaration of the end of beauty and the necessity of aesthetics for art itself. 243 Bibliography

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