A Book of Living Paintings: Tableaux Vivants in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809)

During his 1787 visit to Caserta, a town near Naples, Goethe recounts a private performance of a new art form by the lively young Lady Emma Hamilton. He describes how with the help of just a few scarves and with her hair undone, she manages to transition swiftly between innumerable postures, gestures, and expressions, offering up a surprising spectacle, while the wealthy British ambassador and connoisseur Lord Hamilton holds out a light to illuminate her actions.¹ Here Goethe describes his first (albeit fictional²) encounter with Attitüden, a mimetic-plastic art in which a solo performer—usually a woman—imitates antique statues or general human affectations in rapid alternation.³ Goethe’s introduction to these Attitüden, precursors to the more elaborate form of tableaux vivants, or live reenactments of paintings, incited him to direct numerous living image performances in Weimar in the 1810s with painter and art connoisseur Heinrich Meyer and his literary assistant Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer. Around 1809, he included a performance of a series of three tableaux vivants and a nativity scene in one of his most ambitious novelistic projects, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). These art forms, variously described as trivial and belonging to low culture,⁴ are means by which to reflect on the mediated and composite nature of representation—and its inability to be pinned down by recourse to a single artistic or narrative mode.⁵

In order to do this, Goethe has two women, Ottilie and Luciane, enact or perform the scenes—either while physically present or allegorically, as physically absent but metaphorically present. In both cases these women enact the oppositions inherent in this hybrid art form described by the narrator as a new form of representation (“eine neue Art von Darstellung,”427). In a letter from 1813 to Meyer, Goethe described these live reenactments of paintings performed privately for entertainment in aristocratic circles as “Zwitterwesen zwischen der Mahlerey und dem Theater” (McIsaac 156; hybrid beings between painting and theater). They belied categorization according to Lessing’s division between the semiotics of the visual and the verbal arts in his 1766 Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoon and the Limits of Painting and Poetry), foundational for Enlightenment aesthetics. In their rapid, sequential alteration of the imitation of paintings, they did not remain within the bounds of the visual arts according to Lessing’s system. Lessing assumed that paintings were spatial and in remaining static were indefinitely present for the beholder’s gaze, whereas poetry, in being temporal, worked only in sequence, unable to represent its content at once. Furthermore, living enactments are not only sequential, but the function of representation is further complicated by their ekphrastic description from the point of view of an unknown, distant narrator. A further distancing from any kind of an iconic representation is presented in that two of the three tableaux performed are based not on original paintings viewed by either Goethe or any of the performers but on their printed copies, themselves interpretative. The fourth is a derivative from a biblical narrative. The sequence of performed paintings and the final staged biblical scene brings out tensions and parallels in several apparently oppositional modes of representation, which I will work out through an analysis of each performed tableau vivant: theatricality and antitheatricality, myth and image making, and the possibility of a performance or representation of unselfconsciousness.

The show begins when the newly engaged Luciane, the daughter of the baroness Charlotte, is introduced to the “elements” of the Wahlverwandtschaften: Eduard, a melancholic baron and the owner of the estate that is the setting of the novel; Charlotte, his wife; an ex-military captain; and the orphan Ottilie, whom Charlotte takes in as an act of charity, having been a close friend of her mother. The extroverted and blithe Luciane is incessantly looking to entertain the guests on Charlotte and Eduard’s estate in order to garner admiration. After her failed attempt at a recitative, the count, another peripheral character, decides that a “picture exhibition,” where she could model tableaux vivants, would be a venue...