View of Greece's bloom
Glance into Greece's prime is the title of a painting by Karl Friedrich Schinkel that he had begun before his trip to Italy in 1824 and which he completed in May 1825. It is his main work and the last picture in the field of panel painting. Since 1945 the work has been lost as a war loss. The picture shown today in the Old National Gallery in Berlin is a copy by August Wilhelm Julius Ahlborn from 1836.
Image content and interpretation
The painting is carried out using the painting technique oil on canvas and has a horizontal format of 94 × 235 cm. In the foreground it shows the panoramic section of an ancient Greek temple construction site. Workers in idealized and heroic nudity from antiquity are in the process of transporting an artistically processed marble block from the sculptor's workshop on the right to the intended location, thus completing the temple frieze reminiscent of the Parthenon . In this picture, it is not, as is usually the case with Schinkel, that the wide view into the distance of the landscape to an imaginary destination is important, but the construction work in the foreground of the picture. In the background you can see a planned ancient city and the sea. A large armed group of soldiers has just arrived on the street on the left in the picture. At the lower left edge of the picture, to the right of the signature Ahlborn after Schinkel. 1836. , there is an inscription carved in the marble of the ante of the temple with a hymn of praise to the goddess of virtue, Arete , attributed to Aristotle , and to the virtues of battle and heroic death. The inscription, which Diogenes Laertios 5.1.7 already passed down as a letter from Aristotle, reads:
ἀρετά, πολύμοχθε γένει βροτείῳ,
θήραμα κάλλιστον βίῳ,
σᾶς πέρι, παρθένε, μορφᾶς
καὶ θανεῖν ζαλωτὸς ἐν Ἑλλάδι πότμος
καὶ πόνους τλῆναι μαλεροὺς ἀκάμαντας:
τοῖον ἐπὶ φρένα βάλλεις
κάρτος ἀθάνατον χρυσοῦ τε κρεῖσσον
καὶ γονέων μαλακαυγήτοιό .theta ὕπνου.
In the poetic translation by Christian zu Stolberg-Stolberg the text reads:
Battle-fought virtue,
The
noblest longing of the human race !
For you, O divine virgin,
Greece's youths died the heroic death,
For you they gladly tolerated
burning wounds, torment and the burden of work.
Immortal fruit seeds, your love
Scatter into the hearts of men!
Fragrant blossoms up, and gives
better joys than gold, and the pride of ancestors,
sweeter than the pilgrim's refreshment, the cool slumber.
Through this inscription, the building can be understood as a temple of virtue (Arete) . Schinkel thus awakens in contemporary viewers of that romantic epoch of the 19th century, on the one hand, associations with the Greek Revolution (1821–1829) against the rule of the Turks, but above all with Prussia's past wars of liberation against Napoleon. In this work, the painter uses the metaphor of building and finishing as a basis and thus achieves a programmatic character that makes the work a so-called educational image. In this way, the picture is intended to explain the structure of Berlin as a metropolis based on ancient values. In contrast to painting that was customary up until then, which predominantly shows ancient ruins and decay, and thus evokes melancholy feelings in the viewer, Schinkel presents a cheerful impression and freshness in his work.
Right in the center of the picture is a step pyramid, which is a memory of Schinkel's teacher Friedrich Gilly . Gilly was a representative of the so-called French revolutionary architecture, which rubbed off on Schinkel in its geometric shapes. Another pyramid can be seen on the left in the city. In addition, there is a reference to his 1815 stage design for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte (premiered on January 16, 1816 in the royal opera house), which required an Egyptian-style decoration due to its Masonic libretto . Masonic allusions and symbols can be found in Schinkel's picture in the foreground at the temple construction site, which is a symbol for the construction of the temple. It is not the finished temple that is treated in the Masonic ritual, but its process-based construction.
In the middle distance of the work, in the left third, in front of a mighty tree backdrop and already in the shadow of the sinking sun, there is a monument-like rotunda, a small temple with a seat and in the center a round bench with a fountain, which is based on the engravings by the English archaeologist James Stuart and Nicholas Revett in their work Antiquities of Athens , London 1762–1794, and depict buildings on the Athens Acropolis . The art historian and director of the National Gallery Paul Ortwin Rave suspects a merging of the Korenhalle from the Erechtheion with the Athens Odeion . He identifies the small temple to the right with the seated figure at the top of the roof as the monument of Thrasyllos , which was destroyed during the fighting of the Greek rebellion against the Turks in 1826, but was still depicted by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett and inspired Schinkel. The round bench in between is modeled on the exedra on the tomb of the priestess Mammmia in Pompeii and provided with a fountain.
The perspective construction aims at a vanishing point exactly between the first and second left fifth of the painting just above the bull, whose model is considered the landmark of the Kerameikos burial ground in Athens. All the extensions of the shortened perspectives aim at this point and show that Schinkel also used the panorama-like proportions in the ratio 2: 5 to compose his picture and therefore allows an exact reconstruction of the temple floor plan. It is therefore a so-called double ring hall temple , an idealized two-story dipteros , which, however, never existed in practice and which, according to the Roman architect Vitruvius , would belong to the Hypäthral temples , since Schinkel's picture shows a roofless architecture in the upper part represents right entablature.
The assumption that the composition in the foreground of the picture, i.e. the temple under construction, points to Schinkel's museum building at the Lustgarten , which was started in 1825 , becomes clear from the specific pillar optics and the perspective. In his design drawings, the gaze falls down from above, just like in the painting, which was created at the same time and does not show the base of the pillars and thus causes a kind of dizziness (vertigo) in the viewer. This inner perspective is not new; Caspar David Friedrich's picture of the chalk cliffs on Rügen had a similar effect as early as 1818. Schinkel's elongated image format becomes an all-round view, a closed panorama, which is reflected in the rotunda of his Berlin museum.
History and provenance
Schinkel's painting commissioned the city of Berlin and gave it to Princess Luise of Prussia in 1825 on the occasion of her wedding to Prince Friedrich of the Netherlands . In 1931 the National Gallery acquired the picture from the Netherlands and added it to the holdings of the old Schinkel Museum. Carl Beckmann and Wilhelm Ahlborn made the first copies as early as 1826. These two copies, as well as the original, were destroyed in 1945. The second copy of Ahlborn was made in 1836 on behalf of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm IV. For Charlottenhof Palace and was acquired from private ownership by the National Gallery in 1954 and bears the inventory number NG 2/54 . This picture is not an exact copy of Schinkel's original. For example, she omits one of the two workers who are directly above the Greek inscription. Helmut Börsch-Supan lists further copies of the flower :
- 1826 AWJ Ahlborn, for a Major Paalzow (temporary husband of Henriette Paalzow )
- 1826 Carl Beckmann, for the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
- In 1836, Ahlborn made another copy for an unknown client (on the other hand, it is described on the Schinkelzeit website that this copy was commissioned by the Crown Prince for Charlottenhof Palace)
- An undated partial copy is in private ownership in Berlin
- In 1846 a steel engraving by Wilhelm Witthöft in the format 31.7 × 77.5 cm was published for the Society of Art Friends in the Prussian State
A direct comparison between the original and the copies is no longer possible, only that between Witthöft's steel engraving, which made the picture known to a larger public as an edition, and the copy by Ahlborn from 1836.
review
Schinkel's contemporaries were full of enthusiasm for the picture; as Helmut Börsch-Supan writes, they recognized the status of this work of art . Bettina von Arnim wrote to her husband on May 24, 1825: Schinkel's landscape […] could be seen for a few days; it has aroused general delight, the invention is new and entirely appropriate to the builder. [...] magically and lovingly composed. [...]. Those who saw this landscape were amazed, and I almost want to say that it will bring them more fame than its buildings. Schinkel himself writes about his picture: Landscape views grant a special interest if one perceives traces of human existence in them. [...] because people would like to experience how their own kind took control of nature, lived in it and enjoyed its beauty [...].
literature
- Paul Ortwin Rave : Karl Friedrich Schinkel's View of Greece's Bloom , Verlag Gebrüder Mann, Berlin 1946.
- Peter Krieger (Red.): Paintings of German Romanticism in the National Gallery Berlin , Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-88725-202-0 .
- Adolf Max Vogt : Karl Friedrich Schinkel. View of Greece's bloom. A picture of hope for the Spree-Athens , Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-596-23924-9 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan in: Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Architecture - painting - applied arts , catalog for the exhibition in the orangery of the Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin 1981, p. 262
- ^ Adolf Max Vogt: Karl Friedrich Schinkel. View of Greece's bloom. A picture of hope for the Spree-Athens , Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 11 f.
- ↑ Lucius Grisebach : Schinkel as a painter in: Painting of German Romanticism in the National Gallery Berlin , Berlin 1985, p. 98 f.
- ↑ Gustav Friedrich Waagen : Karl Friedrich Schinkel as a person and as an artist , Reprint Düsseldorf 1980, p. 378
- ↑ Adolf Max Vogt, p. 30 ff.
- ^ Adolf Max Vogt, p. 46 ff.
- ^ Paul Ortwin Rave : Karl Friedrich Schinkel's View in Greece's Bloom , Verlag Gebrüder Mann, Berlin 1946, p. 18.
- ↑ The Kerameikos on the website of the German Archaeological Institute
- ^ Adolf Max Vogt, p. 42
- ^ Adolf Max Vogt, p. 58 ff.
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan in: Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Architecture - painting - applied arts , catalog for the exhibition in the orangery of the Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin 1981, p. 261 f.
- ^ Website of the National Museums in Berlin
- ↑ Adolf Max Vogt: p. 16 f.
- ↑ Helmut Börsch-Supan, p. 262