The family record

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The Goethesche family table in the version by Michael Wachsmuth

The family plate is the printing plate for a copper engraving by Georg Friedrich Schmoll , the Goethean family table , which hasbeen lost in the first version. It was created in 1774 and after the reconstruction of the plate size was 10.9 centimeters high and 25.7 centimeters wide. After the reconstruction, the copper engraving shows the portraits of Catharina Elisabeth Goethe , the councilor Johann Caspar Goethe and their son Johann Wolfgang Goethe from left to right. Only a single complete copy of the 2nd version by Michael Wachsmuth has survived (from the possession of the doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann). The family record was a large-scale, but ultimately unsuccessful publication attempt by Johann Kaspar Lavater as part of the publication of his Physiognomic Fragments , which were published by Steiner in Winterthur and Reich in Leipzig between 1775 and 1778.

prehistory

Johann Wolfgang Goethe's early literary publications caught the eye of the Zurich pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater, who was working on a system of physiognomy in the early 1970s. Lavater initially secretly ordered a profile drawing of Goethe from a Frankfurt painter in 1773, but initially received a drawing by the poet Carl Friedrich Bahrdt at Goethe's instigation , which Lavater recognized as incorrect and rejected ( Poetry and Truth XIV, book). Goethe then sent a small oil portrait, presumably Daniel Bager's oil painting from 1773 in Vienna, to Zurich . Lavater confirmed receipt in the letter of November 6, 1773. Lavater received a silhouette of Goethe from Goethe on February 5, 1774. Lavater's expectations, however, were not met by the portraits. Under the pretext of a cure for his repeatedly flaring up tuberculosis disease in Bad Ems , Lavater decided to collect images himself on site for the intended publication of his physiognomic theory. On the trip to Bad Ems he took the Ludwigsburg draftsman Georg Friedrich Schmoll, whom he had recently taken in at his home in Zurich.

Emergence

According to Lavater's diary, Lavater and Schmoll arrived at the Goethe family in Frankfurt on June 23, 1774 at 1/29 o'clock in the evening . On the same day, the diary notes the creation of a drawing by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (portrait). The portrait in the red house jacket was probably created in this session, in profile to the left with a hairnet . On June 27th followed a portrait of the father Johann Caspar (the Rath Goethe portrait) and finally at the end of July also a portrait of Goethe's mother Catharina Elisabeth . In a letter to Lavater of February 23, 1779, Catharina Elisabeth asks for "some of Mr. Rath's faces that Mr. Schmoll has drawn". It is therefore obvious that Schmoll made at least two drawings by Johann Caspar Goethe. Only two chalk drawings of Schmoll's parents in profile to the left are preserved, which can be related to the information in Lavater's diary. In Vienna Portrait Collection Lavater there is another portrait of Goethe, a chalk drawing in the format of 73:65 received mm. Goethe's hair, who wears the house jacket, is held together by a simple ribbon. The shape, size and coloring match a portrait of Johann Heinrich Merck , painted on June 24th , who came over from Darmstadt immediately. On June 28th, Lavater, Schmoll and Goethe left Frankfurt for Ems. According to Lavater's diary entry of July 20, Goethe wore a gray hat, a brown silk scarf and a gray kaput collar on the trip. According to Lavater's diary, a second portrait session took place in Ems on July 16: Goethe sat sulking. Even if further entries are missing in the diary, it is certain that Schmoll drew Goethe repeatedly. The three portraits of Goethe in the kaput collar preserved from his trip to the Rhine can be distinguished by their clothing and hairstyle. The travelers returned to Frankfurt at the end of July. Lavater and Schmoll left for Zurich from there. The diaries from Lavater's second stay in Frankfurt have not survived.

Reconstruction of the arrangement

The first news of the completion of the family record can be found a year later in Goethe's letter to Lavater of July 24th, 1775: "Cassir, yes, I ask you the family board from us, it is horrible. You are prostituting yourself and us. My father have it cut out and use it as a vignette , that's good. I beg you to do it. Do whatever you want with my head, only my mother shouldn't look like that. " Goethe's vehement rejection is astonishing at first sight, as the Goethe family had enthusiastically received Schmoll's drawings. A deep friendship had developed between Schmoll and the somewhat younger Goethe in the course of the Rhine trip in July of the previous year, the lasting break of which coincided with the completion of the family record. Goethe no longer mentioned Schmoll by name after July 1775. In "Poetry and Truth" Goethe substituted the draftsman and engraver Johann Heinrich Lips in place of Schmoll. Goethe's mother, Catharina Elisabeth, on the other hand, seems to have liked Schmoll's drawings. On March 20, 1778, in a letter to Lavater NS, she asked "When would you be able to send us a few more prints of the doctor's face engraved in copper?" On February 23, she asked "thirdly, for some of Mr. Rath's faces that Mr. Schmoll has drawn." On August 20, 1781 she complained to Lavater: "whether you didn't appreciate my face right away to say something about it in your 4 large books:".

Already Ernst Schulte-Strathaus , who in 1913 first identified the Wachsmuth'schen vignettes of the Goethe family as part of the family dinner, Goethe's aversion could understand ... probably deserves the blame. Schulte-Strathaus got no further at this point, since in 1913 Goethe's vignette with the hairnet and the first version of the 3/4 portrait were not known. August Ohage also certifies that the vignettes are of "inferior quality".

He therefore missed the fact that when Lavater was putting together the family record, he had exchanged the Frankfurt profile with a hairnet for the 3/4 portrait made on the trip to the Rhine. Lavater believed to find all of Goethe's physiognomically representable characteristics represented in the 3/4 portrait. Despite the obvious artistic flaws, he saw in this 3/4 portrait the "great, hard-to-reach archetype" of Goethe. In a comparison of the two versions of the 3/4 portrait, deliberate changes to individual parts of the face become apparent. Since these are all character traits that are unfavorable from a physiognomic point of view, there is another motive in terms of content that prompted Goethe to demand the destruction of the family record and its prints. The significantly larger radius of the corner rounding on the mount can be explained by the fact that the portrait of Goethe formed the end of the three juxtaposed medallions on the approximately 3 × larger family plate . The instruction in the letter of July 24, 1774 to cut out the father's portrait and use it as a vignette suggests the position of the father's portrait in the center of the printing plate . Because of the close arrangement, if a usable vignette had been cut out, the pictures of the mother and son would have become unusable. Goethe had also explicitly asked for the existing prints of the family record: "If you still have some prints, send them to me with the ones I ask for on the enclosed slip of paper, it is to cut out the father." A report on the reception of the requested No imprint has been preserved.

The division of the plate after Goethe's rejection

The printing plate was still divided in 1775 before the publication of the third volume of the Physiognomic Fragments. The only surviving plate segment with Goethe's medallion shows that Lavater did not follow Goethe's request to cut out his father. No other impressions of the segments are known, although after the reconstruction a vignette with the image of the mother would have been possible. The background of the 1st version obtained shows a subsequent brocade-like decoration. An identical treatment of the background shows a vignette of Newton published in the Physiognomische Fragmenten . A circumstance that suggests that Lavater continued to consider publishing the 3/4 portrait as a single vignette in the Physiognomic Fragments even after the division.

The publication of the separate portraits of the second version

In the surviving letters from Goethe to Lavater there is no further reference to the whereabouts of the family record after July 24th. Lavater commissioned the copper engraver Michael Wachsmuth, whom he valued, to engrave a second version of the family plate, on which facial features that could be interpreted negatively were corrected. The choice of Wachsmuth was also obvious because Goethe had enthusiastically praised the Newton portrait, which was also made by Wachsmuth. The plate size of 26 × 21 cm corresponds to the standard size for full-page images in the Physiognomic Fragments. The staggered arrangement of the three medallions and the order of father, mother and son and the simple background made the picture more pleasing. Nevertheless, Lavater also decided to split the second version of the family record, which resulted in three vignettes of the same size with the individual medallions. The medallions Johann Kaspar Goethes and Johann Wolfgang Goethes were published separately in Volume 3 of the Physiognomic Fragments on page 221 and page 224. There was no authorization from Goethe. Lavater had sent the section with 5 different portraits of Goethe first to Goethe and shortly afterwards on March 26th directly to the Leipzig publisher Philipp Erasmus Reich : "You will have received Section IX (to Volume III). Because Goethe is inside, I am sending not through Goethe. So you put him in between. Goethe has now everything. I wrote him urgently not to stop you. " Goethe's answer is dated March 10th, 1777: “I was hoping you would let me out, since I had asked you so politely, and you did not have a tolerable streak from me, but since it is a judgment that comes out on some honest fellows May it be. ”The portrait of his mother was last published in 1787 in the Octav edition as plate CXLVII.

The rediscovery and retrieval of the individual fragments

Interest in Lavater's physiognomy was already waning in the first third of the 19th century. As early as 1808 Karl Heinrich Jördens stated in his lexicon of German poets and prose writers : "Lavater's physiognomy is now forgotten." The first joint publication of the three vignettes took place in 1901 by Heinrich Funk in the appendix to the volume "Goethe and Lavater" in the publishing house of the Goethe Society . In 1913, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus was the first to name the Wachsmuth vignettes in the supplement to Goethe's works due to the hatching and size of the medallion as belonging together parts of the "family table" criticized by Goethe. At the end of the 1990s, the only previously known undivided 2nd version of the family table was found in Zimmermann's estate in the Hanover State Library . Around the same time, the first version of the 3/4 portrait of Goethe by Schmoll appeared in the Swiss antiquarian trade , in 2001 the profile to the left with a hairnet by Johann Nussbiegel after Schmoll.

Just like the first version of the family record, the vignettes with the medallions of Goethe's parents are still missing in the first version.

literature

  • Heinrich Funk: Goethe and Lavater ., Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, Weimar 1901.
  • Ernst Schulte-Strathaus: The portraits of Goethe . Georg Müller, Munich 1913.
  • Adolf Bach: Goethe's journey on the Rhine with Lavater and Basedow in the summer of 1774 . Seldwyla Verlag, Zurich 1923.
  • August Ohage: The Goethean “Family Table” rediscovered . In: Yearbook of the Free German Hochstift, 1996, p. 130-145.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ August Ohage: The Goethesche “Familien Tafel” rediscovered . In: Yearbook of the Free German Hochstift, 1996, p. 140
  2. ↑ Complete print in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, p. 5
  3. ↑ Complete publication in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, p. 19
  4. ^ Adolf Bach: Goethe's journey on the Rhine with Lavater and Basedow in the summer of 1774, Seldwyla Verlag, Zurich 1923, p. 28
  5. ^ Adolf Bach: Goethe's journey on the Rhine with Lavater and Basedow in the summer of 1774, Seldwyla Verlag, Zurich 1923, p. 28.
  6. ↑ Adolf Bach: Goethe's trip to the Rhine with Lavater and Basedow in the summer of 1774, Seldwyla Verlag, Zurich 1923, p. 35
  7. ↑ Complete print in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, p. 267 ff.
  8. ↑ Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Poetry and Truth III.14
  9. ^ Adolf Bach: Goethe's journey on the Rhine with Lavater and Basedow in the summer of 1774, Seldwyla Verlag, Zurich 1923, p. 122.
  10. ^ Adolf Bach: Goethe's journey on the Rhine with Lavater and Basedow in the summer of 1774. Seldwyla Verlag, Zurich 1923, p. 97.
  11. ↑ Complete print in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, p. 46 ff
  12. ↑ Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Poetry and Truth III.14
  13. ↑ Complete print in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, p. 264 ff
  14. ↑ Complete print in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, p. 269 ff
  15. ↑ Ernst Schulte-Strathaus: The portraits of Goethe, Munich, Georg Müller, 1913, p. 10
  16. ↑ August Ohage: The Goethesche "Familien Tafel" re-discovered ", yearbook of the Free German Hochstift, 1996, p. 143
  17. ↑ Complete print in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, pp. 75 ff
  18. ↑ Complete print in: Goethe and Lavater, Letters and Diaries: In Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Ed. Heinrich Funk, Weimar, Verlag der Goethe Gesellschaft, 1901, panels II and III
  19. ↑ August Ohage: The Goethesche “Familien Tafel” rediscovered . In: Yearbook of the Free German Hochstift, 1996, pp. 140 ff