The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Finally, there was Goethe’s understanding of the scientific method, the experimental approach. He accepted the fundamental point that “nature has no system,” that she “emerges from an unknown centre” and evolves “to an unrecognisable border.” Abstractions conceived by the mind can therefore be misleading: “We can’t force nature in this way; all we can do is try to ‘overhear’ her secrets.”40

  Goethe recognized that language may not—ever—exactly match nature and so, in the process, may “freeze” understanding in unnatural ways. “Through words we neither express completely the objects nor ourselves.” Poetic language was for him the deepest link between language and nature, whereas the experiment was a demonstration of nature, “both more and less vivid than language.”41 “The mark of the modern scientist,” he added, “is possession of sufficient reflective skills to distinguish between himself, his language and the object of his investigation…He must avoid turning perceptions into concepts and concepts into words and then operating with these words as if they were objects.”42 The debt to Kant is clear and very modern.

  In some ways this was Goethe’s greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where “the real joints of nature” are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine “imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.”

  9.

  The Brandenburg Gate, the Iron Cross, and the German Raphaels

  We shall be describing a curious phenomenon in this chapter, a whole raft of artists who have fallen very much out of favor in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but who were, in their own time, very fashionable indeed. In fact, they were the most famous painters, sculptors, and architects of their day. This change of fortune is nowhere more apparent than with Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79).1

  In the first published biography of him, Giovanni Lodovico Bianconi’s Elogio storico del Cavaliere Antonio Raffaelle Mengs (Milan, 1780), Mengs was held to be “the most notable painter of his century and of comparable stature and importance to Raphael and Apelles in the total history of art.”2 The greatest praise was that bestowed on Mengs by Winckelmann himself, who dedicated his History of Antiquity to the painter, and said in the text that he was “the single modern painter who had most closely approached the taste and perfection of the ancients in his art.” Mengs’s studio in Rome was a meeting place and sanctuary “to which all connoisseurs and aspiring young artists of classicising taste and bent” would naturally gravitate.

  Mengs’s father, Ismael, was court painter in Dresden and named his son after Correggio (Anton) and Raphael. The boy was raised with a strict formal training in art, beginning at age six when his father put him to drawing simple straight lines, and from there allowed him to progress to circles “and other pure geometric forms.”3 In 1741, at the age of thirteen, Mengs was taken to Rome, where he was forced to concentrate on Raphael, but only after he had “mastered” Michelangelo’s sculptures. (He had to tell his father at the end of every day what he thought he had learned.) After three years in Rome, the Mengs family returned to Dresden where, famously, Anton Raphael was “discovered” as a child prodigy (he was fifteen), and made court painter in 1745, aged barely sixteen. He proved popular with Friedrich August II, who acquired seventeen of his works. Dresden is the only place in Germany where Mengs’s work can be seen.

  Despite these early successes, Ismael decided that a second tour in Italy was desirable for his prodigious son, mere portraits being less worthy than history painting. This time the family—granted leave by the Dresden court—traveled via Venice, where they studied the Titians, Bologna, for the Carracci, and Parma, for the Correggios. After his second spell in Rome, Mengs returned again to Dresden and was promoted from court painter to first painter to Friedrich August II. Rather than satisfy Mengs, this rapid promotion seems only to have stimulated his ambition, and in 1752 he left for Rome a third time. He stayed nine years and never saw Dresden or his royal patron again.

  The pre-eminence of Rome was partly due to Winckelmann, but not entirely. The French Academy in Rome had been established as long ago as 1666 for the reception and further training of the best young painters, sculptors, and architects, who usually spent a few years along the Tiber before returning to France (the usual term was six years, but one painter spent nearly two decades there).

  Mengs formed important friendships with Monsignor (and after 1756, Cardinal) Albericho Archinto, who had persuaded Winckelmann to convert to Catholicism, and Cardinal Alessandro Albani, a nephew of Pope Clement XI. These contacts led to Mengs’s first really important commission in Rome, for the ceiling of S. Eusebio in 1757.4 This was one of the most ancient churches there, dating from the fifth century, and when his picture was unveiled it was universally welcomed as “eine Schöpfung der Zauberkunst,” a magical creation.5

  Mengs and Winckelmann were natural companions in Rome and sought each other out, even planning a joint treatise on the taste of the Greeks. In fact, Mengs was as important for his taste as for his painting and he became more and more interested in the art of antiquity. On a visit to Naples in 1758–59 he had begun a collection of “Etruscan” vases, which would eventually comprise 300 pieces when he donated it to the Vatican Library. He also had another collection of plaster casts, modeled after famous antique statues. This he gave to the king of Spain in the hope that they would help improve what he regarded as “the lamentable state of public taste in Spain.” A second collection was acquired, after his death, by the court in Dresden “where it influenced the Dresden and Meissen porcelain produced in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.”6

  Mengs’s first painting to treat an ancient historical subject has disappeared (a lot of his work has been lost) and the earliest classical history painting of his that does survive is The Judgment of Paris. Paris, seated, looks out on the three nude goddesses, as described in Ovid and as shown in an existing painting by Raphael. Mengs’s evolution toward neoclassicism is shown still more clearly in a small tondo painting, Joseph in Prison, now in Madrid, where the flat stones and smooth ashlar masonry look forward to Jacques-Louis David.7 Mengs had by now discovered in Rome the paintings of Nicolas Poussin.

  Such compositions made Mengs the obvious artist for patrons making the grand tour, but to establish himself as a serious exponent of classicism he needed a project on a grander scale. This arrived when he was given the commission to decorate the Villa Albani, which Thomas Pelzel describes as the most significant commission of Mengs’s career. The contents of the cardinal’s magnificent new villa, near the Porta Salaria, were so important that it was an obligatory stop for any informed visitor to Rome.8 The ceiling took Mengs about nine months. In the center of the composition is Parnassus, with the laurel-crowned Apollo holding a laurel branch and a lyre. They are surrounded by the nine muses and their mother, Mnemosyne, a reference to Cardinal Albani as patron and protector of the arts. The muses are known to be likenesses of Albani’s favorites among the more ravishing women of Rome. In this flattering view, Villa Albani is established as the center of the neoclassical world.9

  In this composition, Pelzel says, Mengs was convinced he was going further than Raphael. Mengs believed that Raphael did not have “that knowledge of true beauty which the Greeks possessed.”10 Mengs, on the other hand, in his own mind, had the advantage of the new discoveries at Herculaneum. In the Albani ceiling it was therefore Mengs’s aim to improve upon the style of Raphael “in the light of his own superior knowledge of Greek art.” When the ceiling was unveiled in 1761, Winckelmann said he could “recall nothing in the works of Raphael to place beside it.” It was in connection with this ceiling that Winckelmann called Mengs “the German Raphael.”11

  Mengs’s fame was now spreading, and in 1772 he was elected president of the Accademia di S. Luca, soon after receiving a major commis
sion from Pope Clement XIV.12 Mengs selected an Allegory of History. He remained interested in antiquity to the end of his life, even when he was so ill that he was forced to paint from bed. It was then that he was awarded the biggest honor of his career, the commission for a large altarpiece for St. Peter’s. This, the Giving of the Keys, was never carried further than the initial cartoon, for Mengs died in June 1779.

  Winckelmann thought Mengs was the one modern painter who had “most clearly approached the taste of the ancients” and this too was the verdict of later authorities who studied the neoclassical movement. In Winckelmann’s letters there are copious references to life in Mengs’s convivial house in Rome, and several of Mengs’s pupils served in academic posts all over Germany, including Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, who described him as “the most accomplished German painter since Dürer.”13 According to one account, as many as 500 German artists passed through Rome at this time.

  But Mengs’s most enduring influence was outside his own country, in the genesis of French neoclassicism. According to the French historian Jean Locquin, any Frenchman of classical or archaeological inclination who found himself in Rome in the late eighteenth century would have sought inspiration “de la bouche du Maître [Mengs], qui répond si parfaitement aux aspirations de l’époque.”14 Joseph-Marie Vien, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and, above all, David were influenced by the general milieu radiating from Mengs and Winckelmann. Mengs was by no means the only influence on David, of course—there was a general return to Poussin in the middle of the eighteenth century, but “Mengs was at the height of his reputation when David was in Rome, where he is said to have attended drawing classes ‘nel museo del cavaliere Mengs.’”15

  The term “neoclassical” did not come into use until the 1880s, by which time this form of art was already well out of favor.16 But in the late eighteenth century it was regarded as the “true” or “correct” form of painting and looked upon as a Risorgimento. The aim was a return to first principles—to antiquity. This was to be achieved by visits to Rome, by the study of Raphael and Poussin, by reading Winckelmann and the Greek and Roman classics themselves. There was an idea that there is a classicism common to all the arts, but there was no precise program and for that reason artists as varied as Jean-Antoine Houdon, Hubert Robert, Greuze, George Stubbs, Joshua Reynolds, and Francisco Goya derived inspiration from the same sources, all engaged in an exercise to see how nature could be “purified and ennobled.”17 As Winckelmann had said, line took precedence over color, and restraint was valued over passion. Between 1780 and 1795 the greatest masterpieces of neoclassicism were produced, culminating in that “icy star,” David.

  Neoclassicism is, therefore, particularly interesting for this brief moment of stylistic unity, as true of architecture as of painting. As Wend von Kalnein has put it, “For the best part of a century architecture spoke the same language from Rome to Copenhagen, from Paris to St Petersburg.”18 Columns and porticos became the main features of public buildings everywhere, from banks to theaters and churches to town halls.

  CREATING THE BERLIN SKYLINE

  German neoclassicism arrived late, despite the roles played by Mengs and Winckelmann in its genesis. It began about a generation after France and Britain and was at its height from 1800 on.19 Though Berlin and Munich led the way, Karlsruhe, Hanover, Brunswick, and Weimar all boasted neoclassical buildings. Friedrich Wilhelm II, who succeeded Friedrich the Great in 1786, brought to Berlin the architects Friedrich Erdmannsdorff (1736–1800), Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732–1808), David Gilly (1748–1808), and Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850), and from then on neoclassical buildings began to dominate the Prussian capital.

  Gotthard Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate (1789–93) paved the way. Langhans was the chief court architect though his knowledge of Greek architecture was derived not from experience, but rather from book learning. This shows, for the Brandenburg Gate has many features that are not Greek. Even so, it was widely understood as an expression of the new style and modeled on the Propylaeum on the Acropolis in Athens. It would be much mutilated down the years, notably by Napoleon who took Schadow’s bronze statue of Eirene to Paris in 1806 (it was later returned).

  Langhans was followed by the Gillys, father and son. David Gilly, from Pomerania, assumed the directorship of public buildings in Berlin and in 1793 founded a school of architecture there, later turned into an academy. It was this academy that trained the younger generation of architects—Heinrich Gentz, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Leo von Klenze.20

  The principal genius of early German neoclassicism was David Gilly’s son, Friedrich (1772–1800). He died tragically young in 1800 at the age of twenty-eight, but in 1796 he came closer to the Greek ideal than anyone else had done with his design in a public competition for a monument to Friedrich the Great, to be erected in the Leipziger Platz in Berlin.21 Friedrich’s drawings show a solitary Doric temple on a raised platform, approached by means of a triumphal arch with a Doric colonnade. This design contrasts with the Brandenburg Gate, but nonetheless “set the standard” for German neoclassicism.

  Gilly’s influence was strongest on Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “thanks to whom Prussian Classicism became of European importance.”22 Schinkel, “the last great architect,” as Adolf Loos described him, was honored almost everywhere architects received honors and knew personally many of the great luminaries of his time: Clemens Brentano, Fichte, the Humboldt brothers, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the art historian. He is much admired by modern architects such as Philip Johnson, James Stirling, and I. M. Pei.

  The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Lutheran pastors, Schinkel was born in 1781 in Neuruppin, a town famous for its Gymnasium, about twenty miles northwest of Berlin. When he was six, his father was killed in a fire that laid waste most of his hometown, and in 1794 his widowed mother took the rest of the family to Berlin. An exhibition of drawings by the young Friedrich Gilly so fascinated Schinkel that, at the age of sixteen, he decided to be an architect. He began his studies with David Gilly, Friedrich’s father, in March 1798, while the younger Gilly was abroad. When Friedrich returned, they formed a close friendship so that, by 1799, Schinkel was living in the Gilly household. That was the year when a separate Bauakademie was officially opened on the first floor of Henrich Gentz’s new Berlin Mint, Schinkel becoming one of ninety-five students. Carl Gotthard Langhans was on the teaching staff.23

  Berlin in 1794, when Schinkel arrived there, had a population of 156,000, compared with 332,000 at his death in 1841. It was built on marshy ground and crisscrossed with dikes, canals, and ramshackle wooden bridges, hardly a sophisticated capital of a rising state. There were, however, a few monumental buildings: the old Stadtschloss on an island in the river Spree, had been renovated by Berlin’s first great architect, Andreas Schlüter (1659–1714). North of that was the Lustgarten, or pleasure garden, dominated by Johann Boumann’s Lutheran cathedral (1747–50). There was a library and a Palladian opera house but little more because Friedrich the Great had preferred Potsdam. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the two most prominent of the very few modern buildings in Berlin were the Brandenburg Gate and the new Mint.24

  Because of the uncertainties produced by the Napoleonic Wars, Schinkel spent the early years of his career as a stage designer and painter of romantic landscapes. But a panorama Schinkel produced in 1809 caught the attention of someone close to the royal family, and on the strength of that he was commissioned to redecorate the bedroom of Queen Luise at Charlottenburg Palace. When the queen died later that year, he submitted plans for a mausoleum. That commission eventually went to Gentz, but Schinkel had more luck with Berlin’s most important war memorial, a Gothic cross he designed for the Tempelhofer Berg (subsequently known as the Kreuzberg). Cast iron was used for this war memorial, one of the first times the material was employed. Iron was on everyone’s mind just then because, at the beginning of the War of Liberation in 1813, Schinkel had collaborated with Friedrich Wilhelm
III on the design of the Iron Cross, which would become Prussia’s most honorific military medal. In this case iron was used not so much because it reflected developing industry (Berlin had excellent foundries), but as a substitute for precious metals and symbolic of a sacrifice made for the fatherland. The crown had appealed to wealthy families to contribute jewelry to help pay for the wars, and they were given receipts in the form of iron jewelry. This often bore a small cross with the head of the king and inscriptions such as “Gold gab ich für Eisen 1813” (I gave gold for iron). Between 1813 and 1815 it is estimated that over 11,000 pieces of iron jewelry were produced, including 5,000 iron crosses.25

  By the time the Kreuzberg monument was executed (1821), the Napoleonic Wars were long gone, and prosperity was returning to Prussia. Schinkel became fully engaged in a range of improvements in and around Berlin and was given ever greater administrative responsibility for architectural projects.26

  Though he turned into one of the finest neoclassical architects—if not the finest—Schinkel was not interested only in Greek antiquity, and when he first visited Italy, in 1803–05, he paid just as much attention to Italian medieval buildings.27 His genius was deep enough that he could express himself in a number of styles. His commissions included the Neue Wache of the Palace Guard (1816), the Schauspielhaus or Royal Theater (1819–21, the previous one having burned down), and the Altes Museum (1824–28). In each of these masterpieces, Schinkel was so at ease with classicism that he was able to use its principles to lay the foundations of a new style. For example, behind the Ionic colonnade of the Altes Museum—“the finest that neoclassicism has to show anywhere, and far superior to the British Museum or to Chalgrin’s Bourse in Paris”—the lines are simple but rational, and the façade and the main building perfectly complement one another. In his later development, which took him away from the Greek and toward the Italian Renaissance and British industrial buildings, he showed himself as too good to be confined to any one inherited idea.