Abstract
This chapter examines how intellectuals and curators understood connections between classical sculpture, history, and sexual desire in the first public art museums of the early nineteenth century. It builds on Frank Ankersmit’s reading of the Romantic novella Das Marmorbild by Joseph von Eichendorff. According to Ankersmit, one of the novella’s central themes is historical experience: an embodied and sensual relationship to the past as opposed to the ‘scientific’, objective mode of historiography associated with the Enlightenment. The chapter argues that this sensual engagement with history finds an echo in the way Eichendorff’s contemporaries experienced sculpture. The masterpieces room, a museographical invention presenting highlights of a collection in an apparently disorganised manner, emerges as the museal equivalent to the Romantic, sexualised engagement with the past.
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Notes
- 1.
Sculpture on Screen: The Very Impress of the Object ran from 14 July to 2 October 2017 and was curated by Penelope Curtis.
- 2.
For a biography of Eichendorff, see Günther Schiwy, Eichendorff: der Dichter in Seiner Zeit: eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2007). For Eichendorff in the context of Romanticism, Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: eine Deutsche Affäre (Munich: Hanser, 2007), especially 210 and further.
- 3.
Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- 4.
For the theme of the living statue and the myth of Pygmalion in the history of art, see, among others, George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Pygmalion (Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2009); Victor I. Stoichita, L’Effet Pygmalion: Pour une Anthropologie Historique des Simulacres (Geneva: Droz, 2008); Andreas Blühm, Pygmalion: die Ikonographie eines Künstlermythos Zwischen 1500 und 1900 (Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1988); and Oskar Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter: Die Rezeption von Plastik und Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, ed. Wolfgang Kemp (Cologne: DuMont, 1985), 183–224.
- 5.
Bénédicte Savoy, Kunstraub: Napoleons Konfiszierungen in Deutschland und die europäischen Folgen (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011). For the Louvre, see also Arthur McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
- 6.
For the relation between artwork and viewer and its changing conceptualisations through the early modern and modern periods, see Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015). For sculpture and its display see Caroline van Eck, ed., Idols and Museum Pieces: The Nature of Sculpture, Its Historiography and Exhibition History 1640–1880 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).
- 7.
Ankersmit himself speaks of a ‘new Romanticism’. See also Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 7. For the relation of his thinking with Hayden White’s work, see below.
- 8.
See also Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For the experience of art in the eighteenth century, see van Eck, Art, Agency, and Living Presence, and Idols and Museum Pieces; also Sigrid de Jong, Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); and Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), addresses the connections between public art galleries and the general category of experience; however, it is not interested in subjective experience.
- 9.
Here I follow David West’s “theoretically innocent” way of understanding the term “sexuality”; that is, not primarily in the Foucauldian sense as the socially constructed expression of subjectivity. See David West, Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005), 5.
- 10.
Unless otherwise indicated, the English language edition quoted is Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning, eds., German Literary Fairy Tales (New York: Continuum, 1983), here 143–4.
- 11.
Translation adapted from Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 151.
- 12.
Ryder and Browning, Fairy Tales, 150.
- 13.
Ibid., 161.
- 14.
Ibid., 163.
- 15.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience. Other interpretations which are particularly relevant to my own reading are: Gretchen Hachmeister, Italyin the German Literary Imagination: Goethe’s “Italian Journey” and Its Reception by Eichendorff, Platen and Heine (Rochester: Camden House, 2002); Volker Klotz, Venus Maria: Auflebende Frauenstatuen in der Novellistik (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000); and Simon Richter, “Under the Sign of Venus: Eichendorff’s “Marmorbild” and the Erotics of Allegory,” South Atlantic Review 56 (1991): 59–71. For critical reactions from Eichendorff’s contemporaries, see Schiwy, Eichendorff, 442–3.
- 16.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 9.
- 17.
Ibid., 13.
- 18.
Ibid., vii and 9.
- 19.
For Ankersmit’s full, intricate reading of Das Marmorbild, see ibid., 146–60.
- 20.
Ryder and Browning, Fairy Tales, 144.
- 21.
Ibid., 163.
- 22.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 160.
- 23.
Richter, “Sign of Venus,” 69.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Schiwy, Eichendorff, 673.
- 26.
See Safranski, Romantik, 162–3; West, Reason and Sexuality, 88–9.
- 27.
Ibid., 110.
- 28.
Ibid., 104–10.
- 29.
Richter, “Sign of Venus.”
- 30.
Ibid., 64, 69.
- 31.
Ibid., especially 69–70.
- 32.
Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (London: Vintage, 2012); Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); William J.T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 167–84; and Klotz, Venus Maria.
- 33.
See Footnote 4.
- 34.
Lebensztejn, Pygmalion, 41. See also Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter.”
- 35.
Lebensztejn, Pygmalion, 64.
- 36.
Adapted from Ryder and Browning, Fairy Tales, 170.
- 37.
Hachmeister, Italy, 86.
- 38.
See, among others, ibid.
- 39.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise, vol. XI of Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 477.
- 40.
Goethe, Italienische Reise, 154.
- 41.
Goethe, Italienische Reise, 551–2.
- 42.
The veiling and unveiling of the statue-woman finds an echo in the metaphor of the veil used in other Romantic literature, in which it can have a similar sexual connotation, next to, for instance, an epistemological one. See Christian Knirsch, “World Metaphor, Metametaphor: Veils in Literature, Literature as Veil,” Comparative Studies of SouthAsia, Africaand the Middle East 32 (2012): 169–82.
- 43.
See also Hachmeister, Italy, 63.
- 44.
Quoted after Safranski, Romantik, 163.
- 45.
Hachmeister, Italy, 89.
- 46.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 150. See also Hachmeister, Italy, 89.
- 47.
For example, Clemens Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Novalis: see ibid., 86.
- 48.
Hachmeister, Italy, 87.
- 49.
This is not unlike the invention of paper money, highly fascinating to Eichendorff’s contemporaries, which offered a substitute for the object of real value, and attracted and repelled at the same time: see Warner, Stranger Magic, 252 and further.
- 50.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 152.
- 51.
Translation from ibid.
- 52.
Ibid., 8–9.
- 53.
Michael Forster, “Johann Gottfried von Herder,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/herder/. See Michael S. Roth, “Foreword,” in Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Fortieth-Anniversary ed. with a foreword by Michael S. Roth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), xv; and Mark Day, The Philosophy of History: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2008), 118.
- 54.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 10.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 7.
- 57.
Savoy, Kunstraub.
- 58.
Schiwy, Eichendorff, 259.
- 59.
Joseph von Eichendorff, Tagebücher, ed. Ursula Regener, vol. XI.1 of Sämtliche Werke (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 5; James Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 32.
- 60.
In Das Marmorbild, the adult Eichendorff made the recovery of long-forgotten memories into a recurring motif.
- 61.
Pascal Griener, La république de l’œuil: L’expérience de l’art au siècle des Lumières (Paris: O. Jacob, 2010), Chapter 3.
- 62.
Ibid., in particular 90.
- 63.
Hooper-Greenhill, Shaping of Knowledge, Chapter 7.
- 64.
Sheehan, German Art World, esp. 80.
- 65.
Hooper-Greenhill, Shaping of Knowledge, 190.
- 66.
For the topos of the early art museum as a mausoleum, see Elsje van Kessel, “The Role of Silence in the Early Art Museum,” in Silence. Schweigen. Über die Stumme Praxis der Kunst, eds. Andreas Beyer and Laurent Le Bon (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015), 169–82.
- 67.
Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations Morales sur la Destination des Ouvrages de l’Art [suivi de] Lettres sur l’Enlèvement des Ouvrages de l’Art Antique à Athènes et à Rome, ed. Jean Louis Déotte (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 48.
- 68.
Quoted after Mark Ledbury, “Art Versus Life: A Dissenting Voice in the Grande Galerie,” Journal18 2 (2016), http://www.journal18.org/866.
- 69.
Van Kessel, “The Role of Silence.” For an alternative, anti-Romantic view see Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London: Verso, 2015), Chapter 5.
- 70.
Cecilia Hurley and François Mairesse, “In the Shadow of the Tribuna,” Studiolo 9 (2012): 128–40.
- 71.
Hurley and Mairesse, “In the Shadow of the Tribuna.” For a contemporary voice, see, for example, Théophile Gautier, “Le Musée Ancien,” La Presse, 10 February 1849.
- 72.
See Stijn Bussels, “Da più Scorretti Abusata: The Venus de’ Medici and Its History of Sexual Responses,” in The Secret Lives of Artworks: Exploring the Boundaries Between Art and Life, eds. Caroline van Eck, Joris van Gastel, and Elsje van Kessel (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2014), 38–55.
- 73.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, trans. by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
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van Kessel, E. (2019). Longing for the Past: Eichendorff’s Marmorbild, Historical Experience, and the Sexuality of the Masterpieces Room. In: Funke, J., Grove, J. (eds) Sculpture, Sexuality and History. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_3
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