The Building in Bildung: Goethe, Palladio, and the Architectural Media

Well before photography and electronic networks encircled the planet, there existed a European migratory channel within which architectural images were carried across the Alps by tourists and pilgrims.¹ Moving along well-established pathways, architectural drawings, treatises, and personal recollections operated as a self-replicating network that allowed travelers, once home, to recreate the buildings they so admired abroad. The northern European reception of Andrea Palladio (1508–80), facilitated by the elegant woodcuts and explanations of his Quattro Libri dell'architettura (1570) [Four Books on Architecture] and by the prominence of his buildings in cities and estates between Vicenza and Venice, demonstrates the effectiveness of this pre-modern media circuit. The efforts, first British, then German, to emulate Palladio's villas, palaces and churches constitute one of the most successful examples of pre-modern stylistic proliferation.²

Not only did Palladian architecture reproduce itself throughout Europe and North America, it integrated comfortably with other media. For many in the late eighteenth century, Palladian architecture seemed to enhance the production of literary texts, the recollection of foreign adventures and the self-understanding of the modern subject. More than just a backdrop for the idyllic production and reception of literature, Northern European Palladianism was deployed as a technology capable of assisting in the conscious reproduction of experience. Through architectural and imagistic simulation, Palladianism sought both to inspire reminiscences of earlier travels and to encourage their repetition. Stressing the importance of architectural journals, Beatriz Colomina has argued that twentieth-century architecture was constituted within its own photographic representation.³ Renaissance buildings, while moving through much slower networks, were also understood through their media representation, rather than through the existential perception of their space. For a great portion of Europe, Palladio's own buildings existed first and foremost as drawings which allowed, indeed encouraged, the construction of similar buildings far removed from the original site. Once the first Palladian imitations rose in northern Europe, they encouraged a new audience to travel back to the original model for further inspiration and emulation. This loop has run for so long that it is impossible today to understand Palladio except through Palladianism.⁴

Goethe's Italienische Reise was a critical component of this network, reinforcing its operation even as the text sought to escape its terms. Despite his disdain for travel literature, Goethe's memoir became the most well known German representation of Italy in general and Palladio in particular.⁵ His letters and memoirs, furthermore, document how the imagistic recollection of buildings moved back and forth across the Alps. His writing about Italy makes clear not only that he had read treatises about the sites he planned to visit beforehand, but also that he had grown up amidst engravings his father had brought back from his own Italian travels.⁶ Thus, despite the literary historical rupture ascribed to Goethe's sojourn in Rome, the trip south was motivated in large part by desires generated through this already well-established circuit of Italian images. His travelogue makes clear that Goethe was eager to compare his memories of the pictures he knew as a boy with the actual places. In this sense Goethe can be said to have "inserted" the human subject into the migratory movement of classical images. German scholars in earlier generations had formulated long theories about the greater world based solely on their own readings. Kant felt empowered to present authoritive theories about global cultural geography in his popular anthropology lectures even though he had never left Königsberg.

The late eighteenth century brought with it the new northern European demand that one not judge a work of art unless one had done more than see its image, or even just look at it briefly as aristocrats on the Grand Tour might have done, instead one had to engage it with all one's being.⁷ The site had to be questioned, the critical commentaries challenged, every old tale one had ever heard about the place had to be compared with what one saw directly. This kind of personal investigation had not only the potential to alter the judgment...