The God behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State

By Alice Goff

 A history of Germans’ attempts to transform society through art in an age of revolution.
 
For German philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century, beautiful works of art acted as beacons of freedom, instruments of progress that could model and stimulate the moral autonomy of their beholders. Amid the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Germans struggled to uphold these ideals as they contended with the destruction of art collections, looting, and questions about cultural property. As artworks fell prey to the violence they were supposed to transcend, some began to wonder how art could deliver liberation if it could also quickly become a spoil of war. Alice Goff considers a variety of works—including forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne, the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Laocoön group from Rome, a medieval bronze reliquary from Goslar, a Last Judgment from Danzig, and the mummified body of an official from the Rhenish hamlet of Sinzig—following the conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of German collections during the Napoleonic period and its aftermath.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226828718

Book preview

Cover Page for The God behind the Marble

The God behind the Marble

The God behind the Marble

The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State

Alice Goff

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82710-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82871-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226828718.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goff, Alice, author.

Title: The God behind the marble : the fate of art in the German aesthetic state / Alice Goff.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023002889 | ISBN 9780226827100 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226828718 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Art and society—Germany—Prussia—History—18th century. | Art and society—Germany—Prussia—History—19th century. | Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Campaigns—Germany—Prussia—Art and the war. | Lost works of art—Germany—Prussia—History—18th century. | Lost works of art—Germany—Prussia—History—19th century. | Prussia (Germany)—Cultural policy—History—18th century. | Prussia (Germany)—Cultural policy—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC N72.S6 G64 2024 | DDC 701/.03—dc23/eng/20230208

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002889

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1  To the Vandals They Are Stone

2  A Brilliant Place

3  The State of the Supplicant

4  Uncertain Saints

5  Stepping onto the Pedestal

6  Hegel’s Neighbor

Coda

Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1  Laocoön and his sons, early first-century BCE

2  Joseph Charles Marin and Jeán-Jerôme Baugean, Depart de Rome, du troisième convoi de statues et monumens des arts, 1798–99

3  Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, Entrée triomphale des monuments des sciences et des arts en France, 1802

4a, 4b  Details of Antoine Béranger, Arrivée à Paris des œuvres rapportées d’Italie, 1810–13

5  Benjamin Zix, Vivant Denon travaillant dans la Salle de Diane au Louvre, 1811

6  Bronze statue of a young man, c. 300 BCE

7  Benjamin Zix, Monsieur Denon visitant le cabinet des Antiques à Berlin, 1807

8  Peter Paul Rubens, L’adoration des bergers, c. 1615

9  Ferdinand Jansen, Flüchtiger Entwurf des . . . Hoch Altar Gemähldes, 1807

10  Krodo Altar, c. 1100

11  Daniel Berger, Uebermuth nahm sie—Tapferkeit bringt sie zurück, 1814

12a, 12b  Schinkel to Friedrich Wilhelm III, February 4, 1829

13  Johann Erdmann Hummel, Die Umlegung der Granitschale, 1831

14  Wilhelm Scholz, Die Spiegelung, 1846

15  Gläserner Mensch, 1935

Plates

1  Hubert Robert, La Salle de l’Apollon du Belvédère, 1803–4

2a, 2b  Arrivée à Paris des œuvres rapportées d’Italie, 1810–13

3  Johann Wilhelm Heinrich Tischbein, Hektor wirft Paris seine Weichlichkeit vor, 1786

4  Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Das Opferfest des Krodo auf der Harzburg, 1798

5  Hans Memling, The Last Judgment, 1466–73

6  Johann Erdmann Hummel, Das Schleifen der Granitschale, 1831

7  Johann Erdmann Hummel, Die Granitschale im Berliner Lustgarten, 1831

8  Carl Emanuel Conrad, Rotunde des Museums am Lustgarten, c. 1830

Introduction

Ich lege den Begriff, welchen ich von diesem Bilde gegeben habe, zu dessen Füßen, wie die Kränze derjenigen, die das Haupt der Gottheiten, welche sie krönen wollten, nicht erreichen konnten.

I place the concept of this figure that I have conveyed at its feet, like the wreaths offered by those who could not reach the head of the deities whom they wished to crown.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of the Art of Antiquity), 1764

Can You Only See the Marble in the God?

A young woman from Provence died after visiting the Apollo Belvedere in the Louvre (plate 1). Or so goes the story, which circulated across Europe after the statue arrived in Paris from Rome in 1798, one of the most illustrious spoils from Napoleon’s Italian campaigns. For some, the incident was an alluring parable of the transporting effects of a work of classical beauty on the human spirit; for others, a cautionary tale of the pitiful vulnerability of the mental and physical constitution of women to such aesthetic power. But for the Prussian writer Helmina von Chézy, who captured the scene through an anonymous narrator as a Sentimental Fantasy for her 1807 book, Life and Art in Paris since Napoleon I, the encounter involved both rapture and woe.¹ The young woman had entered the antiquities galleries of the Louvre with her family. The Apollo, enshrined on a platform flanked by columns in a gallery that bore its name, had an immediate and erotic effect. The young woman’s gaze froze; her eyes flared; her whole being was electrified as she succumbed to the first surge of love.² Unable to contain the emotions churning inside, she began to utter sweet confusions, which Chézy delivered to her readers in verse:

Dies, sagt ihr, sey Apoll von Belvedere,

Das höchste Werk, das Bildner je erzeugten?

Das würd’ es seyn, wenn es von Marmor wäre.

Doch Menschen nie an solche Hoheit reichten,

Denn wo ihr Stein, da sieht in goldner Sphäre

Mein trunkner Blick der Gottheit Strahlen leuchten.

Wie könnt ihr, um mich zu entfernen, winken?

So kalt euch weg zu jenen Säulen drehen?

Will denn kein Funken in die Seel’ euch sinken?

Könnt ihr im Gott denn nur den Marmor sehen?

O! laßt mich seinen Abglanz in mich trinken,

Im Anschaun sterbend, will ich hier vergehen.³

This, you say, is Apollo of Belvedere,

The greatest work that sculptors ere produced?

It would be so, if it were made of marble.

But humans have not yet reached such epic heights,

For where you see stone, there in the golden sphere

My drunken gaze sees the rays of the divinity radiating.

How can you beckon me away from here?

So coldly turn away to other statues?

Does no twinkle of the soul seek to pull you under?

Can you only see the marble in the god?

O! Let me drink his reflection into me,

Dying through beholding, I want to perish here.

Dying through beholding is, more or less, what eventually occurred. An older sister succeeded in escorting the young woman out of the gallery after this first outburst, but she could not be kept away. According to the testimony of a museum guard, she came sometimes to contemplate the statue in stillness, at other times to minister to it like a priestess. When the young woman’s devotions finally became too much for the conventions of museum etiquette, her family forcibly removed her, and news soon arrived that she had died in delirium. It was a tragic end but an inspiring scene, Chézy mused, which showed the liberating power of Greek beauty to free its beholder from the stilted conventions of modern life and guide them to a state of natural and self-possessed humanity. We will never forget her, the museum guard sighed. How beautiful she is! How moving were her entreaties! Her precious form and tender inner being made her delirium so interesting, that we truly wished her relatives would have some forbearance with her.⁴

Many of Chézy’s contemporaries would have shared the guard’s sentiment.⁵ Sixty years before the young woman from Provence, a cobbler’s son from Stendal, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, had encountered the work at its previous home in the Vatican collections, and his celebrated account of the experience likely rung in the ears of the readers of Chézy’s Sentimental Fantasy. Winckelmann had also professed being overcome by the Apollo’s sublime gaze and heavenly spirit, his chest famously swelling and heaving as he demonstrated that, in Whitney Davis’s terms, eros is the ladder of the ideal.⁶ Winckelmann had also lamented the inadequacy of his description in the face of the work’s aesthetic prowess, offering his words like a wreath at the statue-god’s feet in the passage quoted in the epigraph that opens this introduction. He had also found in the work a portal into a freer world, where the stultifying divisions between art, nature, and society so symptomatic of modernity dissolved into a harmonious whole.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the long-standing acclaim for the Apollo was eroding under the influence of new archaeological finds and corresponding shifts in taste. Particularly in the romantic circles to which Chézy belonged, a new interest in medieval art was beginning to edge out the prestige of the classical sculptural tradition. However, the connection between the veneration of art and the achievement of individual and collective freedom remained a powerful legacy of Winckelmann’s embodied criticism. The work of art stands before the world as an ideal reality, producing a lasting, indeed, the ultimate effect, Goethe wrote in an essay published the year before Chézy’s, which took Winckelmann’s legacy as both topic and muse. For by developing from a totality of strengths, it absorbs everything magnificent, admirable and agreeable, and, by giving life to the human figure, it elevates man above himself, rounds out the circle of life and deeds, deifies him for a present which comprises past and future.⁷ Even as Chézy’s contemporaries disagreed on what tradition most powerfully enabled his deification, they shared a broad faith in the divinity of a work of art as a model of harmonious unity for a fallen modern world, and as an inspiration for the kind of cultivation necessary for the achievement of a moral and enlightened society. This is one way in which the young woman’s delirium would have been interesting in the eyes of Chézy’s readers: it spoke to contemporary debates in German aesthetics concerned with art’s transformative powers. If views differed on the terms of this power, readers could likely agree that there was much more than marble to the god.

And yet, if Chézy’s story affirmed this transformative faith, it also presented an awkward challenge. The young woman’s wreath to adorn the Apollo was not figurative but literal, as the guard related: One early morning, in which she had crept in, I have no idea how, we found her inside the gate on the steps, exhausted from crying, half unconscious. The entire gallery smelled of tuberoses, carnations, and mignonettes, a large white veil of Indian muslin with gold tendrils was tenderly wound around the statue.⁸ They called her family to remove her one final time. If we were initially carried away by the young woman’s sublime ecstasy, so stirringly rendered by Chézy’s poetic hand, the report of the guard brings the scene down to earth: he admits with dutiful concern for the safety of the museum’s visitors and collections, that, as moving as her entreaties were, perhaps it would have been better if she had never come.⁹ Not only was Chézy’s wreath a literal thing, the head of the deity that it sought to crown was a literal thing too. We are not in a temple of gods, but in a gallery of art objects, and looted ones at that. If Winckelmann had praised the statue as the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity that have escaped its destruction, its widely heralded immortality had been put dramatically to the test as it made its precarious way over the Alps from Rome to Paris, an illustrious but nevertheless fallible spoil of war.¹⁰ For anyone laying prostrate at the Apollo’s feet, the fact would have been hard to ignore: its pedestal sported a plaque reminding its viewers of its history of excavation and ownership, and commemorating its latest displacement:

THE STATUE OF APOLLO WHICH RISES ON THIS PEDESTAL,

DISCOVERED AT ANTIUM AT THE END OF THE XVTH CENTURY,

PLACED IN THE VATICAN BY JULES II AT THE BEGINNING OF THE XVITH,

CONQUERED IN THE YEAR V OF THE REPUBLIC BY THE ARMY OF ITALY UNDER THE ORDERS OF GENERAL BONAPARTE,

HAS BEEN INSTALLED HERE ON THE 21 GERMINAL YEAR VIII

FIRST YEAR OF HIS CONSULATE.¹¹

For the guard in particular, who was professionally obligated to the museum as a space of people and things, there is a different and more pressing way in which the young woman’s delirium is interesting. In Chézy’s A Sentimental Fantasy, a realm of spiritualized aesthetic experience collides with a realm of mundane material concerns with real human costs. Eros is not so much the ladder to the ideal as the banana peel.

Can you only see the marble in the god? The young woman’s demand—an open question, rather than a statement of belief—is at the center of Chézy’s inquiry into the tangled boundaries between aesthetic reverie and mundane waking life. This book argues that this question was also at the center of German cultural politics in an age of revolution and warfare, in which the relationship between the transcendent and profane worlds of art was troublingly unclear. On one hand, this period produced a set of intellectual movements with a shared conviction that the arts had a vital role to play in reforming the social order while avoiding the violence of the political revolution underway in France. Visions of an aesthetic state, in the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller’s programmatic formulation, saw in art an indispensable catalyst for the bloodless liberation of humanity, and in the work of art itself, this liberation’s end goal.¹² However, the same political turmoil that compelled such visions, and made them compelling in turn, also introduced a set of material challenges to their realization in practice. Among these challenges was the displacement of many of the artworks at the center of Germans’ cultural-political aspirations during and after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The looting campaigns of the French army, the secularization of church property during the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the repatriation efforts after the defeat of the Napoleonic regime, and, throughout the period, the transfer of previously private and often princely collections into public museums meant that theories of the visual arts as a source of political stability and salvation would have to contend with the profane instability of the very works on which such visions depended. These developments created conflicts over ownership, identity, access, and meaning that made the answer to the young woman’s question a matter of both difficulty and urgency. Could a work of art inspire freedom if it had also been made a spoil of war? Did its divinity transcend the local circumstances under which it was viewed? Did it mean the same thing in public as in private hands? "Can you only see the marble in the god?" was more than an expression of faith in a particular aesthetic philosophy: it was a timely and pervasive question about the capacity of art to address the crises of modern life at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

By pursuing the young woman’s question, the following book builds on scholarship in the history of art, philosophy, and literature concerned with the materiality of art in the intellectual life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹³ This scholarship focuses broadly on objects in the solidity with which language invests them, as Jonah Siegel quotes Walter Pater, where the binary between matter and ideas is never absolutely oppositional, and is in any case notional where it appears to be so.¹⁴ Words come with us even when we raise our eyes, as from a book, to gaze out the window, say, at the solid world we believe to be outside of us, Siegel adds.¹⁵ This book has an allied but distinctive disciplinary orientation. The struggle to secure art’s redemptive promise for contemporary society played out in the domain of art history, criticism, and aesthetics, but also in the domain of arts administration, that is, both on and off the page. In Prussia, the focal point of this study, many of the operative figures had feet in both pursuits. Statesmen like Wilhelm von Humboldt, architects like Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and academicians like Aloys Hirt were immersed in contemporary aesthetic discourse, and also concerned with translating its principles into a set of administrative practices and infrastructures that governed which works of art were to be collected, where they were to be kept, and how they were to be used and displayed. These were questions that ideas could address, but that, in an era of chaos and upheaval, they could not fully control. This book finds both the drama and the comedy of German cultural politics in the revolutionary period not so much in the pervasiveness of language’s investment in the solidity of art objects, but rather in the limitations and compromises involved in this investment.

Thwarted plans, lost works, damage, misunderstandings, and sabotage litter the following pages, and these are episodes of central rather than peripheral concern. In the introduction to her study of the institutionalization of German philhellenism across the modern period, Suzanne Marchand writes that establishing the process by which ideas become active forces, and conversely, events or structural factors effect changes in thought, has ever been the intellectual historian’s nightmare.¹⁶ This study is more cultural than intellectual history. In the balance sheet of ideas and context, its allegiance is to the contextual circumstances that produce ideas and are informed by them, and above all to the particular contextual circumstances that threaten to overtake the very ideas they produce. As such, however, this book is consumed fully by the nightmare Marchand and others have described, a nightmare that doesn’t tend to visit the cultural historian as frequently, given her typical confidence in the capacity of language to generate meaning and to go to work in the world. However, the tenuous correspondence between intellectual and material life is here not (only) the torment of the historian, but more centrally that of the historical actors whose story the historian strives to tell: scholars and poets, philosophers and functionaries, who, if they were confident in the capacity of art to govern society, lived in a world of open questions about society’s capacity to govern art.

In order to tell the story of these questions, it is necessary to tell of intellectuals engaged in a delicate dance between their scholarly ambitions and their administrative duties. It is also, however, important to tell of those whose principal obligation was to art’s profane material life: the castellans, conservators, guards, and custodians of the artworks themselves. People in these roles were on the front lines of the logistical drama of putting art objects to work for society, whether in negotiating with looters or saving collections from destruction, providing access to objects or preventing it, accommodating the requirements of visitors or standing in their way. Torn between the demands of administrators, viewers, and objects, these caretakers were often maligned as small-minded pedants or functionaries, incapable of true insight into the lofty concerns of the aesthetic state. Their perspectives are, in any case, difficult to discern from their ubiquitous but elusive presence in the archive as compilers of inventories, recipients of directives, and reporters on the everyday life of the museum institution. And yet, their necessarily literalist approach to the place of art in contemporary society constituted a sometimes outright, sometimes implied, and invariably incisive form of critique. They reveal a story about the inconvenient fact of a work of art’s obdurate materiality; of its capacity to resist the theoretical claims made on its behalf; and, above all, of its quotidian mortality alongside its divine powers. Meaningful contributions to how and whether the experience of a work of art can provoke social change came not only from the Schillers and the Schinkels, but also from historical actors like Chézy’s museum guard, who acquaint us with the limitations of cultural politics and the human and material costs in ignoring these limitations—of seeing, as did the young woman from Provence, the marble too completely as a god.

The God in the Marble

In order to appreciate the resonance of the young woman’s question with which this book begins, the following pages will trace briefly the faith she casts in doubt. Chézy herself was part of a field of romantic criticism that posited the beautiful work of art as an expression of the absolute totality of creation, and an encounter with this work of art a point of communion with this absolute. In the words of the writers Wilhelm Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, whose 1797 Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar offered the revelatory quality of artistic creation in explicitly Christian terms, Art . . . which by the meaningful combination of colored earth and a little moisture recreates the human shape in ideal form within a narrow, limited sphere . . . reveals to us the treasures of the human breast, turns our gaze inward, and shows us the Invisible, I mean all that is noble, sublime, and divine in human form.¹⁷ The divinity of a work of art depended on more than its transcendence of the constraints of the mortal world through its invocation of the divine; it depended on its capacity to integrate mud with spirit in such a way that reflected the creation of the universe as a harmonious whole. For this reason, art was not simply exceptional in romantic thought, taking priority over other domains such as reason, or science, or religion. The romantic faith in art went further, as Frederick Beiser argues: The activity of the artist is a revelation and manifestation of the absolute because it is nothing less than the highest expression and embodiment of all the powers of nature.¹⁸ The artist is a medium of the creative force that produces the universe itself as a work of art. And if the universe is a work of art, then philosophy, science, religion, politics, and history transform from competing fields of human understanding to become themselves fundamentally aesthetic ones.

The romantic conviction in art’s divinity drew on the idea of aesthetic autonomy, a concept that developed at the end of the eighteenth century through the work of Karl Philipp Moritz and Immanuel Kant. For Moritz, a beautiful object is opposed to a useful one, its beauty attendant on being regarded as "something that is . . . complete in itself, that thereby constitutes a totality in itself and affords me pleasure for its own sake."¹⁹ Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment modified this idea, placing it on more firmly subjective ground. For Kant, the pleasure one experiences in response to a beautiful object must be independent of any interest in or concept of the object at hand: it is won instead through the free play of the imagination and understanding that the exercise of judging something to be beautiful provokes.²⁰ We find pleasure in the beauty of the representation of the Apollo Belvedere because we are able to assess it independently from any desire for the body of the god itself, for example (providing we are not the young woman from Provence). This pleasure is universally valid, Kant argues, but unlike Moritz, he maintains that it cannot derive from any quality of the object itself. Instead, such determinations must be made through individual contemplation based in subjective experience alone.

This emphasis on the autonomy of art and its experience represented a departure from the conventions of aesthetic philosophy as it had developed since the mid-eighteenth century. Art had been understood in this tradition broadly as a heteronomous object of study, whose production, reception, and beauty were determined by rational logics, which it was the task of aesthetics to uncover. By investigating what made an object beautiful and why, aesthetics could inquire into what made an individual, or a society, beautiful as well. Winckelmann is the paradigmatic example of this engagement: by charting the history and forms of ancient beauty, he held up the ideal of the Greek polis against the stultifying conventions of aristocratic society and the repressive institutions of absolutist governance.²¹ As Marchand writes, Winckelmann’s Greeks looked not unlike this generation’s image of themselves; youthful, creative, self-sufficient, yearning for self-fulfillment, passionate, uninterested in short-term success or eventual salvation.²² In relating the body and character of the ancients to the body and character of their modern beholders, he inspired the conviction of many of his successors that questions of ideal beauty were also questions of the conditions of contemporary political freedom.

Arguments for the autonomy of the aesthetic domain from morality and politics that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century were also deeply invested in the moral and political world.²³ However, as the apparent paradox in this statement suggests, this investment proceeded according to new terms. Art’s moral relevance for Kant functioned independently of an object’s adherence to a set of laws or qualities; it relied instead on its freedom from adherence—its purposiveness without purpose, in Kant’s inimitable construction—and on the correlate freedom of aesthetic judgment itself. Paul Guyer explains: At the most immediate level of response, aesthetic judgment must be free of external constraints, including the constraints of morality, but in virtue of this freedom the experience of aesthetic judgment can represent and in some degree prepare us for the exercise of freedom in morality itself.²⁴ When we determine an object to be beautiful, without motive or bias and on the basis of our own individual experience alone, we are rewarded with a freely won harmony of imagination and understanding that renders morality sensible, and aligns us with humanity at large. According to Kant’s famous dictum, the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.²⁵

For some of Kant’s readers, a symbolic conjunction between aesthetic and practical judgment did not go far enough. Friedrich Schiller, looking with trepidation at the Terror unfolding in France, learned from and expanded the position, persuading a broad intellectual circle, including his romantic contemporaries, that avoiding the political violence of revolution required restoring some of the blood to aesthetics that Kant had drained from its cheeks. The symbolic relation of beauty to morality, and thus to politics, must be elaborated, Schiller maintained in his 1795 work, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, One must take the aesthetic path, for it is by way of beauty that one walks toward freedom.²⁶ For Schiller, drawing from Kant, the freedom beauty enabled was indeterminate: it compelled in humanity an awareness of each individual’s capacity to choose to make of themself what they will.²⁷ This high level of equanimity and freedom of the mind, linked to power and vigour, is the mood in which a genuine work of art should leave us, Schiller wrote.²⁸ This theory of aesthetic judgment offered more than a symbol of moral reason. It offered an account of political transformation through it—an education—premised on the anthropological constitution of man as a whole. Where both religion and reason had failed to liberate society, as events in France amply showed, art held extraordinary promise as an instrument of Bildung, a practice of indeterminate yet holistic self-formation understood at the end of the eighteenth century to be indispensable for the concrete achievement of a moral and rational political order in sensible terms. In the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian aristocrat who was formative for Schiller’s views on Bildung, and who, as the future first head of the Section for Culture and Public Education, would do much to bring them into institutional form: "Mere sensuous feelings must receive education and refinement through the aesthetic. Here the realm of art and its influence on Bildung and morality begins. Nothing has such a widespread effect on the entire character as the expression of the non-sensuous in the sensuous, the sublime, the simple, the beautiful in all the products of art that surround us."²⁹

Having rooted Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment more firmly in the moral and political world, Schiller turned to the task of rooting this world more firmly in aesthetics, transforming the idea of art’s autonomy into a call for art’s sovereignty over all dimensions of modern life.³⁰ Art enables man to appreciate the possibility of his own self-determination, but just in this way something infinite is achieved, Schiller wrote. This space of open-ended possibility and the freedom to pursue it is, after all, the originary state of humanity itself. It is not then merely poetically permissible, but also philosophically proper, to call beauty our second creator, he continued. For whether beauty simply makes humanity a possibility for us, leaving to our own free will any decision about how far we wish to actualize this, it shares in common with our original creator, nature, which likewise did no more than offer the capacity for humanity, the fact that any of this potentiality is left to a decision made by our own free will.³¹ With art thus established not only as the tool of humanity’s cultivation, but the author of humanity itself, the stage is set for the god within the marble toward which the young woman from Provence hopelessly gestures. At stake in this faith is more than the divinity of an ancient statue, or the supremacy of its beauty. It is its power to contribute to the transformation of human society, and to serve as the model for the perfection of human life.

The plastic arts were certainly not the only genre on which aesthetics pinned its transformative aspirations. While Winckelmann had secured the importance of ancient sculpture in the German aesthetic imagination by unsettling the distinction between marble and human form, at the end of the eighteenth century, pride of place often went instead to painting, and even more so to forms beyond the visual arts, in particular music and poetry. Kant shared this priority, citing poetry’s unequaled capacity to free the imagination and its proximity to the level of ideas.³² Schiller himself argued that the most beautiful work of art was one that erases material with form, a quality attributable to no one genre but to each in their capacity to transcend their specific medial constraints and achieve a general character.³³

Nevertheless, if, as M. H. Abrams writes, aesthetic autonomy was an institutional fact as well as a conceptual innovation, perhaps nowhere were the moral and political aspirations being pinned to aesthetic experience more paradigmatically institutionalized than in the public museum of art.³⁴ Across Europe during the eighteenth century, rulers had begun to make previously private collections accessible to broader audiences as sources of public edification, political stability, and royal prestige.³⁵ These developments had their origin in Italy, where the Capitoline Museum, opened in 1734 on the Campidoglio, offered travelers on the Grand Tour a landmark civic cultural achievement, as Carole Paul writes, represent[ing] Rome to itself and the world.³⁶ Founded by Clement XII through the purchase of the sculpture collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, and enriched over the decades with celebrated acquisitions from excavations and private collections, the museum reflected the period’s broad faith in the uplifting possibilities of aesthetic imagination and scholarship. Karl Philipp Moritz, who visited the collection repeatedly on a trip to Italy between 1786 and 1788, wrote of the sense of affirmation he felt in the museum’s Gallery of Philosophers, where, if one were to enter with a copy of Plutarch’s Lives, he marveled, the letters on the page might well come alive. "One is even more convinced that the highest pinnacle of human cultivation [Bildung] is the visual arts themselves, which re-orient a person’s gaze through the surface of his being to his inner self, and which . . . preserve those vanishing traces that otherwise leave no mark on the surviving and constantly regenerating world, having been washed away by the current of time."³⁷

While these new public museums of art that emerged across Europe in the eighteenth century were often considered to be places of escape from the profane vagaries of everyday modern life, they were, of course, inextricably bound up with its dynamics, and in particular with the art market. In Italy, for example, public museums responded to the vigorous appetite for antiquities, driven by an expanding circle of elite European collectors taken with the promise of enlightened cultivation afforded by knowing, and better yet owning, ancient art. With the establishment of the Capitoline Museum, and, several decades later the Museo Pio-Clementino, the papacy hoped to curb the export of ancient art out of Italy and into the palaces of the aristocracy and monarchies across Europe, and to consolidate the Vatican’s status as rightful inheritor of the legacy of Rome.³⁸ The market was also a factor in the development of public museum projects north of the Alps, as princely collections from Vienna to Dresden to Stockholm filled with new acquisitions and outgrew the constraints of existing princely cabinets, prompting the construction of new gallery spaces where the wealth, power, and connections necessary to compete for celebrated masterpieces could be made visible as a public utility. This was not always done persuasively, as an anonymous visitor complained of his experience in the Painting Gallery of Kassel, which opened in a new wing of the city palace in 1753: I have often marveled when in some collections they show me the pieces that have been purchased at great cost, and in which I do not find the degree of perfection that I expect from a beautiful painting.³⁹

The disappointment betrays new expectations for display and viewership that accompanied the emergence of public museums. The capacity of a museum to reflect the prestige of a court was tied increasingly to its ability to educate its visitors, and to derive its standards of organization and display from the concerns of art history and aesthetics alone. One would misunderstand the true advantages of a famous painting collection . . . if one were to regard it as disposable interior decoration and an object of empty bewonderment, wrote Simon Causid in the introduction to the first published catalog of the Kassel gallery in 1783. One only proves an appreciation of its true value . . . if one promotes and administers it as a teacher, which provides wide-ranging and collectively useful instruction to friends of the arts who study it according to sound rules.⁴⁰ This emphasis on educational utility meant that collections that had previously contained a range of naturalia and artificialia were disaggregated into specialized institutions devoted to works of art alone, separated by material and school according to aesthetic and art-historical understandings in order to provide visitors with a sense of the normative standards of beauty in the classical tradition, as well as their stylistic evolution over time. Galleries were no longer primarily supervised by artists in the employ of the court, but by scholars and curators with topical expertise about the works at hand.⁴¹ The space of the museum gallery itself was designed to accommodate studied consideration of individual works through innovations in lighting, framing, labeling, and hang.⁴² This didactic regime too had its corresponding market: in the catalogs, engravings, plaster casts, and published commentary available for purchase by those wishing to take some of their experience of a collection home, or by those unable to experience it in person at all.⁴³

However, at the same time that early public museums of art were entwined with the commercial, political, and intellectual dynamics of contemporary Europe, they also increasingly became subjects of a fiction that they stood apart from the temporal vicissitudes of the constantly regenerating world, in Moritz’s terms. In this fiction, the museum’s institutionalization of the imperatives of aesthetic autonomy are most clear. The gallery may belong to a prince, James Sheehan writes, citing Goethe’s description of his visit to the picture gallery of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden in 1768, but it is now a sanctuary set aside from ordinary life, a public temple dedicated to art; across its polished floors move those who have come to see, to worship with their eyes.⁴⁴ The museums of Dresden, the Vatican collections in Rome, the Painting Gallery in Düsseldorf, and the Antiquities Gallery in Mannheim, for example, all inspired the prominent aesthetic thinkers of the day in their articulation of a view of art whose connection to the world resided in its remove from it. By the lights of the new generation of romantic writers, this autonomy would be figured as a form of divinity as a new century began. Picture galleries are viewed as trade shows, where you summarily judge new products, Wackenroder and Tieck admonished, and [they] should be temples where you wonder in still and silent humility and with heart-lifting solitude at the great artists, as the highest among the mortals, and where with long intent gazing at their works you might warm yourself in the sunbeams of the most enchanting thoughts and sensations.⁴⁵ Notably, however, worship in these temples proceeded without benefit of priests, or priestesses, unfortunately for the young woman from Provence. As Anke te Heesen observes, just as museums opened their doors to broader publics, their collections also become depersonalized in an important regard. With visitors now entitled to move around the space at their leisure, armed with their own views and with a gallery catalog to inform them, the custodian, who had long been charged with guiding people through private collections stored in cabinets and under lock and key, was no longer necessary nor desired. The close interdependence between the infrastructure of the museum and the resonance of its collections, apparently at least, had dissolved.⁴⁶

Goethe’s description of his Dresden visit, written decades after the fact, betrays a more balanced view of the relationship between the mundane conditions of viewing and the possibility of its transporting effect. As he entered the holiness of the gallery, he could not help but express his delight out loud, and his exclamations attracted the attention of the gallery inspector, the engraver Johann Anton Riedel, who obligingly provided the rapturous Goethe with some valuable references.⁴⁷ Riedel had a reputation for being exceptionally invested in the material life of his collection: according to the collector Joseph Friedrich Racknitz, Riedel had intervened to save Correggio’s Madonna with St. George from the inroads of a beetle, reportedly tipped off by the sound of its munching.⁴⁸ Perhaps he was too invested, as in the view of the theologian Johann Daniel Falk, who complained that Riedel’s loyalty was above all to his entomological visitors, denying admission to connoisseurs and scholars so that they could feed without disturbance.⁴⁹ In any case, Goethe continued to be moved by Riedel’s magnanimous guidance through the gallery years later. His image is so woven together with those works of art for me, that I never see either without the other, and even his memory accompanied me to Italy, where I would have much wished for his presence in some of those grand and rich collections.⁵⁰ This is perhaps the ultimate feat of aesthetic education, in which the experience of the gallery is so ennobling that even its custodians can themselves become works of art.

The God behind the Marble

As this brief sketch suggests, to claim the primacy of a work of art at the end of the eighteenth century was to assert its relevance to the concerns of the mortal world. If art was a god, it was an immanent rather than a distant one. In the field of intellectual history, this argument has countered the long-standing view that the distinctive modernity of eighteenth-century aesthetics lay in its self-conscious intellectual consolidation as such: a newly unified and system-oriented field concerned with a new conceptual and systematic unity, Art. According to this separability principle, in Lydia Goehr’s terms, the fine arts of painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, and music were cordoned off from the mechanical arts, and the philosophy of this new domain was in turn cordoned off from other philosophical fields in a sweeping theoretical emancipation of art from subservience to political, religious, and economic ends.⁵¹ M. H. Abrams’s version of this position makes clear its troubling implications of utopianism, elitism, and naivete: The essential feature predicated for the fine arts, setting them off from all cognitive, practical, and moral pursuits, was that each work is to be experienced disinterestedly, for its own sake, unalloyed by reference to the world, or to human life or concerns, or to any relations, ends, or values outside its all-sufficing self.⁵² As many scholars have more recently pointed out, this position imposes an excessively teleological narrative on eighteenth-century aesthetics, a heterogeneous field that did not culminate necessarily in Moritz and Kant, and, as much of the literature cited here maintains, oversimplifies even the strongest claims for aesthetic autonomy itself.⁵³

However, while these revisionist arguments do much to expand our understanding of the scope and complexity of aesthetic thought at the turn of the nineteenth century, they do not address an important dimension of the separability principle, which this book takes as a point of departure. Narratives about the indifference of art and aesthetics to the pressing concerns of contemporary life in the period typically also make claims for the sovereignty of its theorization. In his classic article on the formation of a modern system of the arts, Paul Oskar Kristeller speculates that the growing consensus about a new category of art in the eighteenth century reflects the waxing influence of amateur criticism: while to the professional artist a work is inseparable from the technical conditions of its production, to the unskilled (but well-read) viewer, these conditions are necessarily filtered through the experience of spectatorship.⁵⁴ Buoyed by an emergent public sphere of cultural consumers, modern aestheticians used the position of perception to arrive at a generalizable and transcendent concept of art-as-such according to which individual art forms could be measured and compared.⁵⁵ Ultimately, the interpretive shift in emphasis from the site of making to the site of perception constituted a bid for the creative authority of criticism itself. Immersed in the textures of sensory life, Ernst Cassirer writes,

The philosopher is and remains akin to the artist in a fundamental feature of his thinking, in his striving for totality; and if he cannot compete with the artist in the creation of the beautiful, yet he can seek a knowledge of the beautiful and by this knowledge, by means of systematic aesthetics, he can bring to completion his own world picture. . . . The beautiful sciences now form no longer simply a relatively independent province of knowledge, they activate the whole man and are indispensable to man’s realization of his true destiny.⁵⁶

Against the troubling passivity of spectatorship compared to the activity of the working artist, aesthetics made itself into a productive force with its own aesthetic power. We might take Goethe’s 1827 comment on Winckelmann as a measure of the success of aesthetics’ artistic project: "When you read him you do not learn anything, but you become something."⁵⁷ If Winckelmann had once found in the works of Greek antiquity a provocation to his own self-realization, manifest in the gesture of laying his text at the statue’s feet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such texts stood beside the works they celebrated, exerting their own kind of transformative power.⁵⁸

Clarifications of the moral engagement of Kant’s aesthetics or the political investments of romanticism expand the jurisdiction of the philosophical domain, integrating aesthetics more completely into the cultural and political world in order to disprove its alienation. This opens up a new kind of risk, however, in which the cultural and political world itself becomes a party to the lofty estrangement of aesthetics. Despite all its integrationist potential, art’s sovereignty remains an achievement of the mind, rather than of the brow. This is certainly understandable: the primary formulators of the position were philosophers, poets, and scholars, and it has thus been addressed as a topic of intellectual history. Not only that, but for German theorists of beauty in a revolutionary age, interacting with a work of art either in person or in the abstract—sensing its form, contemplating its beauty, appreciating its history—was valuable precisely for its intellectual yield. We may acknowledge that aesthetic experience was understood to be a harmonizing affair, which mediated between the sensuous register of limited yet necessary material life and the spiritual register of free yet abstract moral laws. But ultimately, its value lay in its capacity to cultivate thought, and only through thought, life. One can be spiritually brilliant in nothing, one cannot even think about history—without an aesthetic sense, the poet philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin wrote in the fragment, Oldest Program for a System of German Idealism, of 1796. "Those people without an aesthetic sense are our Buchstabenphilosophen."⁵⁹ That mouthful of a word is typically translated in English as philosophers of literalness, but alphabet philosophers or philosophers of the letter—a more precisely literal rendering—better captures the gist of the idealist critique.⁶⁰ Aesthetics must light the way beyond the rule-bound pedants of eighteenth-century rationalism who had mistaken the edifice of the letter for the spirit of the word. The epithet intimates that the détente between god and marble that the new aesthetic philosophy pursued would in the end be settled firmly in the favor of the divine. And if art