The Question of the Autonomy of Art: The Origins of Goethe's Classicism and French Eighteenth-Century Neoclassical Architectural Theory

WILLIAM J. LILLYMAN The Question of the Autonomy of Art: The Origins of Goethe's Classicism and French Eighteenth-Century Neoclassical Architectural Theory Denn die Zeit des Schönen ist vorüber, nur die Noth und das strenge Bedürfniß erfordern unsre Tage. (Goethe, Venice, 5 October 17861) There is General agreement that Goethe's residence in Italy from September 1786 to May 1788 was a crucial stage in his development both as an artist and as a human being. It gave part of the impetus for those works usually categorized in German literary history as the products of his Classical period. Among the arts, it was the architecture which Goethe encountered in Italy that elicited from him the most extensive and detailed comments in the diary he kept during his travels. This is despite the fact that Goethe was testing his own talent for painting during his stay and claimed that Raphael was as significant for him as the architect Andrea Palladio.2 Indeed, it was particularly the villas and public structures of Palladio as well as the ancient Roman amphitheater in Verona which had a decisive impact upon Goethe. It was thus not literature and not painting, but Goethe's encounter with the most functional of the arts, with architecture, which led him to record in his diary observations not merely on the principles of Classical architecture but on the nature of Classical art in general . This choice of architecture reflected not merely a personal predilection but was also an acknowledgment that architecture was 98 William J. Lillyman one of the two principal fine arts of ancient Greece and Rome, the other being sculpture.3 The most influential analysis of Goethe's reaction to the works of Andrea Palladio has been that of Herman Meyer. Meyer saw the encounter of writer and architect as constitutive for Goethe's Classicism and maintained: "Im Grunde handelt es sich hier um nichts weniger als den Kardinalpunkt von Goethes und Schillers klassischer Schönheitslehre , nämlich um die Autonomie des ästhetischen Scheins und um den hierauf fußenden fundamentalen Unterschied zwischen Natur und Kunst. In Italien war diese Autonomie Goethe zum großen Erlebnis geworden. . . . Wir halten fest: die Autonomie des ästhetischen Scheins war Goethe in Italien zuerst an Palladio aufgegangen."4 Goethe 's Classicism has been praised, as here by Meyer, or berated, as by many other critics and writers from at least Heinrich Heine on, for propagating a notion of art as an independent, self-enclosed aesthetic realm totally divorced from social and political considerations or needs, a concept which has been seen by Goethe's detractors as peculiarly inappropriate in a historical period that produced the French Revolution. The nature and significance of the "Autonomieästhetik" of German Classicism has, indeed, remained a central concern in studies of Goethe and his age to the present day as witnessed by a recent and significant symposium devoted to this very topic: Revolution und Autonomie: Deutsche Autonomieästhetik im Zeitalter der Franz ösischen Revolution!" During this symposium doubts were revealed as to whether the traditional understanding of the concept of the work of art during the Classical period was adequate. Wolfgang Wittkowski commented on Goethe's skepticism about notions of the "absolute" autonomy of art (5ff.), for example, and summarized the view of several participants in the symposium: "Alles andere als selbstgenügsam, wie etwa das spätere l'art pour l'art, ist autonome Dichtung vielmehr angelegt einerseits auf optimale Nachahmung und 'Nachahnung' der Schöpfung, wie sie sein sollte und wie sie ist, andererseits auf optimale Wirkung in den Zusammenhang des Ganzen hinein" (23). In the present paper I wish to contribute further to such doubts about the origins, nature, and intent of Goethe's Classicism by an analysis of one of its formative moments. I According to Herman Meyer the work by Andrea Palladio which had the most impact on Goethe at the time of his Italian journey was the Villa Almerico Capra or Villa Rotonda near Vicenza: "Am meisten aber beschäftigt ihn 'die famose Rotonda' " (285). Meyer, moreover, Goethe Yearbook 99 followed the architectural historian Fritz Burger in seeing this villa as "die Wiedergeburt klassischer Schönheit...