The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture ed. by Evelyn K. Moore, Patricia Anne Simpson (review)

A product of the 2003 German Studies Association Conference, this edited volume contextualizes Goethe’s concerns with vision, language, and identity to produce a prolegomenon to a more comprehensive reexamination of visual aesthetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Given the surge of interest in inter-art relations, a volume placing Goethe in the center of an interdisciplinary and contextual study of visual aesthetics is bound to attract much scholarly attention. To do justice to the rich variety of the contributions, a brief assessment of each chapter is called for.

At the center of her erudite study, Melissa Dabakis places Goethe and the painter Angelika Kauffmann’s common membership in the Arcadian Academy, the eighteenth-century literary, artistic, and cultural society dedicated to the promotion of Enlightenment ideals of natural simplicity against baroque bombast. Her interdisciplinary approach shifts the locus of Goethe’s neoclassical revival in Italy away from Winckelmann’s sculptural aesthetics toward the poetic and pictorial sphere of the Arcadian Academy. Catriona MacLeod’s meticulously researched and composed study of porcelain miniatures in classical Weimar successfully inserts her micro medium into the aesthetic debates of the neoclassical age. Her nuanced interpretive assessment of the half-body busts of aristocrats, artists, intellectuals, and mythological figures, including Laocoön and his sons, that adorned the tables of the upper classes, highlights the ambivalence of a medium that not only reproduced but also challenged the neoclassical principles of emotional restraint and corporeal control.

While the subject matter of Beate Allert’s “Goethe, Runge, Friedrich: On Painting” is better known, her study lends newer insights into Goethe’s relationship to both artists. With references to their mutual correspondence, Allert reexamines key points of conflict and identifies areas of convergence between Goethe’s intensely visual poetry, his color theory, and the Romantic painters’ visualization of temporality. With her discussion of the collaborative Athenaeum essay Die Gemählde: Gespräch, whose likely coauthorship by Caroline and/or Dorothea Schlegel was omitted by the Schlegel brothers, Margaretmary Daley adds new documentation of the philological neglect of women’s texts. Her interpretation calls attention to the fact that the female protagonist successfully argues for the inclusion of a holistic feminine viewpoint to complement male-centered aesthetic theory and reception of artworks. Women’s own creative agency also lies at the heart of Mary Helen Dupree’s compelling case study. She examines Elise Bürger’s theatrical and literary career to illustrate how negative biographical anecdotes and gender stereotypes conspired to provoke her exclusion from the Weimar circle, and to demonstrate which rhetorical strategies Bürger deployed to counteract her marginalization.

Patricia Anne Simpson’s “Visions of the Nation: Goethe, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Ernst Moritz Arndt” is a complex interpretive undertaking combining several layers of analysis (interart, gender, historical aesthetics) against the background of the Prussian Wars of Liberation. The gender-specific focus on the portrayal of women as allegory for the nation brings into relief the central allegorical figure of Goethe’s neoclassical play Des Epimenides Erwachen, Hope, an embodiment of the nation endowed with traditional male attributes of fighting spirit and cognitive power, and demonstrates the complexity of Goethe’s allegory in comparison with contemporary portrayals. In her discussion of Goethe’s changing relationship to Lavater’s physiognomy, “Goethe and Lavater: A Specular Friendship,” Evelyn K. Moore finds a surprising parallel between Lavater’s visual language and the Werther alter ego fictionalized in Goethe’s 1779 trip to Switzerland. For what she diagnoses as a syndrome of specularity, the inability to see beyond the self, she proposes the Lacanian gaze as an objectifying remedy.

In a methodically composed essay, Elliott Schreiber demonstrates the importance of Karl Philipp Moritz’s lifelong engagement with Werther to his theory of artistic autonomy by showing how Moritz’s theory of the self-contained artwork erased Lessing’s Laokoon distinction between the spatiality of painting and the temporality of poetry and spatialized the Augenblick, making...