German Artists Association (Rome)

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The German Association of Artists was the successor to the 1813/1814 resulting Ponte Molle Society an artists association for German-speaking artists in Rome that existed from 1845 to 1915.

history

After the Wars of Liberation , the number of German Romans , the German visual artists and writers in Rome, increased noticeably and reached their highest level shortly before the revolutions of 1848/1849 . It was primarily painters , sculptors and architects of classicism and romanticism who Back then, from many countries - including the states of the German Confederation - moved to the "Eternal City" to study ancient models. The so-called Nazarenes , predominantly Catholic painters, who came to Rome from Vienna in 1810 to experience the Christian heritage and the creations of the Renaissance through their own intuition , were among the pioneers of the German-speaking artistic community in Rome . In the following years they attracted a growing crowd of like-minded people from German-speaking countries and formed an artists' colony .

Cervarafest in the Campagna , study by Carl Steffeck , around 1841, Alte Nationalgalerie , Berlin
Friedrich Nerly , disguised as “General u. Field Marshal Der Tiber u. their bridge ” , drawing by Leopold Pollak , 1832

Among the artists, the custom arose to receive newcomers at the Milvian Bridge , the Ponte Molle , where the newcomer gave his friends a barrel of wine at the start . In the course of the institutionalization of a spring festival for German-speaking artists, the Ponte Molle Society was established in 1813/1814 , whose members adopted the manners of an order of knights for fun . This society soon became known in Rome by organizing a carnival pageant in the Campagna Romana to the ancient travertine quarries on the banks of the Aniene near Tor Cervara (Torre Cervaro) every year around May 1st , where the "Cervarafest" or "Cervarofest" or - according to the Roman vernacular - as "carnevale dei Tedeschi" a bivouac with "Olympic Games" was held. An "aid fund" was also organized by members of the society to save impoverished German artists from starvation.

In order, following the example of the French artists in Rome, who were able to hold regular exhibitions in the Villa Medici , also to enable the German artists to have a permanent exhibition space in Rome, a circle of was formed within the Ponte Molle Society six shop stewards who met in the summer of 1845 to discuss a reorganization of the company necessary to finance the matter in the Villa Malta . These were Johann Martin Wagner , Johannes Riepenhausen , Franz Nadorp , Anton Hallmann , Heinrich Kümmel and Julius Moser . On November 6, 1845, the Ponte Molle Society adopted the statutes developed by this circle, according to which it was henceforth known as the German Art Association . The founding party in Palazzo Fiano followed two days later. On April 8, 1846, the new association held its first major exhibition in the Palazzo Simonetti on Via del Corso . The association, which in 1846/1847 had 260 members, including 163 ordinary ones, was established there on the basis of a permanent lease. It offered members and their guests daily opportunities to read the newspaper and evening parties and invited not only to art exhibitions, but also to festivals, dance events, concerts and recitals. From the estates of the painter Johann Christian Reinhart and the Prussian Prince Heinrich , he built a considerable library that is still preserved today and can be used in the Casa di Goethe .

In the course of time, the association had to change addresses several times as a result of falling membership numbers and fees. Because of the German War , the number of members fell to half a hundred when many Austrians and South Germans left in 1866, so that he could only afford more modest rooms in the Palazzo Poli and - to the chagrin of the Romans and their international artists - around 1870 the organization of the "Cervaro Festival" gave up. In 1884 the association moved to Palazzo Pacca and then to inadequate premises in Palazzo Torlonia . From 1889 to 1915 he was housed in the Palazzo Serlupi near the Pantheon . At times he received financial support from the private boxes of Wilhelm I and Friedrich III.

In the 1870s, the German Artists 'Association, with the involvement of the German Ambassador Robert von Keudell , tried to persuade the German Empire to establish a "German Artists' House" and a "Roman Academy" of the German Empire in Rome. For this purpose, it was proposed to acquire the Palazzo Zuccari . The plan failed in 1879 due to the resistance of the Reichstag , which, at the instigation of the center member Peter Reichensperger, refused to approve the necessary funds.

In 1896, the magazine Die Kunst für Alle reported that the German Artists' Association had "become a kind of dignitaries' room or regulars' table for non-artistic elements that were sometimes alien or incomprehensible to art interests". The Rome-based novelist Konrad Telmann , husband of the artist Hermione von Preuschen , who exhibited in the artists' association, made this observation public through his novel Under Roman Heaven, published in 1896 , by describing "certain types" of the association in his work. Ostentativ, he was then refused admission to the association. As a result of the dispute, about which the press reported in detail, all correspondents of German newspapers resigned from the association. Furthermore, the German artists residing in Rome stayed away from the association for months, and so the non-artists among themselves.

In 1915 - with the termination of the Triple Alliance by Italy and its entry into the First World War - the association, like other institutions of the German-Roman cultural industry, such as the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo , which only opened in 1913 , had to close. In 1926 the "German Association" took over the holdings of the dissolved association that had been confiscated in 1915.

The library and estate of the German Artists' Association have been in the collection of the Casa di Goethe since 2012 . They are currently being developed for an online catalog that will be made available to the public in 2019.

literature

  • Ernst Willkomm : Italian nights . Leipzig 1847, pp. 427-436.
  • Gustav Floerke : Il carnevale dei Tedeschi . In: The present. Weekly for literature, art and public life. Issue No. 18 of May 25, 1872, Volume I, pp. 277 f.
  • Otto Harnack : The German Artists' Association in Rome in its fiftieth anniversary . Weimar 1895.
  • Friedrich Noack : The Germanness in Rome since the end of the Middle Ages . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1927, Volume 1, pp. 525-534.
  • Julius Hermann von Kirchmann : The German artists in Rome . In: The Gazebo . Issue 39, 1864, pp. 617-619 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ F. Osten: The German Artists' Association in Rome . In: Kunstblatt , No. 25 of May 25, 1847, p. 97
  2. ^ Heinz Spielmann (eds.), Jan Drees, Thomas Gädecke, Christian Rathke: Draftsman of the North in Italy . Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum Kloster Cismar, Grömitz 1998, p. 17
  3. ^ Siegfried Müller : On the cultural history of traveling. German artists in and around Rome in the 18th and 19th centuries . In: Brigitte Flug, Michael Matheus , Andreas Rehberg (Hrsg.): Kurie und Region. Festschrift for Brigide Schwarz on her 65th birthday . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-515-08467-3 , p. 337; regionalgeschichte.net (PDF)
  4. ^ The German artists' association in Rome . In: Art for All . Issue 8 from January 15, 1889, p. 122
  5. ↑ Michael Dorrmann: Eduard Arnhold (1849-1925). A biographical study of entrepreneurship and patronage in the German Empire . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-05-003748-2 , p. 172 f.
  6. ↑ From Roman art . In: Art for All . Issue 14 of April 15, 1896, p. 217
  7. ^ Library and estate of the German Artists' Association. Casa di Goethe, accessed on May 18, 2019 .