Juno temple in Agrigento (painting)
|
| Juno temple in Agrigento |
|---|
| Caspar David Friedrich , around 1828–30 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 54 × 72 cm |
| Museum for Art and Cultural History Dortmund |
Juno Temple in Agrigento is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, dated from 1828 to 1830 . The picture in oil on canvas in the format 54 cm x 72 cm is in the Museum for Art and Cultural History Dortmund .
Image description
The painting shows an ancient temple ruin on a rock in a mountainous terrain with sparse vegetation in a central perspective representation. The sea can be seen in the background. On the horizon, the setting sun stands over a hazy gray bank of clouds, the sunlight is reflected on the surface of the water. Most of the columns of the building have been preserved, some as truncated columns. On the north long side and on the south-east corner, the columns carry their capitals and an architrave . The interior is full of rubble, some preserved wall remains can be seen. The temple is backlit in a bright southern landscape, but shows every surface detail in an olive-brown tint. To the left of the pillars is the preliminary drawing of a tree that has not been executed.
Building
The ancient building of Greek origin shown in the picture is the Temple of Hera , also the Temple of Hera Lakinia (or Iuno Lacinia), in the archaeological sites south of today's city center of Agrigento in Sicily . The Temple of Hera, located on the southeast corner of a high plateau, stands in a row of several temple complexes. The construction was about 460 to 450 BC. Erected as a Doric peripteros with 6 × 13 columns and rises on a four-tiered substructure. The Carthaginians burned the Temple of Hera around 406 BC. The Romans settled it in the first century BC. Chr. Repaired. The columns of the temple, which was later destroyed, were erected again in the 18th century. The current condition corresponds roughly to that shown in the painting. From the middle of the 18th century, the temple complexes of Agrigento were an integral part of the Grand Tour in southern Italy for many interested in ancient culture . Even Jacob Philipp Hackert and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited on their trips to Italy the temple of Hera in Agrigento.
"The current view of the Temple of Juno is as painful as one could wish."
Image interpretation
The Juno temple in Agrigento receives comparatively little attention in the Friedrich reception. Since the painter never traveled to Italy and also polemicized against the Italian euphoria of his artist colleagues, it is difficult to assign this picture to the common interpretations of his work. Frederick's preference for Gothic was accompanied by a rejection of the architecture of antiquity, idealized in classicism . This is where Helmut Börsch-Supan starts with his interpretation. Accordingly, the temple in the bare environment symbolizes the symbol of the dead of ancient pagan religion. A similar exploration of pagan religions is assumed for the painter with the megalithic grave motifs. Jens Christian Jensen suspects that Friedrich wanted to prove that a painter can create a profound Italian motif without ever having been to Italy. Detlef Stapf sees a construction image in the painting, in which well-calculated mood values of sadness and melancholy are produced based on an idea from Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld's theory of garden art , perhaps linked to the painter's hope for better sales of his pictures.
Image and text templates
According to Paul Ortwin Rave, there is a template for the painting. This was an aquatint etching by Franz Hegi , made after a watercolor by Carl Ludwig Frommel . From 1822 to 1826, Hegi realized the Voyage pittoresque en Sicile for the Parisian publisher Jean Frédérik Ostervald in Aquatins. The watercolored illustrations were made before 1780. Friedrich changed the details of the picture compared to the original. Staffage , aloe shrubs in the foreground and olive trees in the right middle distance have been omitted. On the left, ancient rubble has been reinterpreted as rocks of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. The mountain ranges follow a different shape. Instead of a frontal daylight illumination of the temple ruins, it is backlit by the setting sun. Inserted trees and bushes resemble the Central European flora of other Friedrich paintings. The painter was evidently not interested in the southern character of the natural surroundings of the ruin.
With these changes made, one can assume that Friedrich worked a picture based on Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld's aesthetic effect. A reference text can be found in the chapter On Temples, Grottoes, Einsiedeleyen, Capellen and Ruins of The Theory of Garden Art .
“What feelings of melancholy, of melancholy and sadness did not sometimes seize the traveling admirers of antiquity when they found sleeping places for shepherds and caves for wild animals among the remains of temples in the formerly splendidly built-up areas of Greece! Chandler describes such a solemn appearance when he saw the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Ura, not far from Miletus. The columns were still so extraordinarily beautiful, the marble mass so large and noble that it is perhaps impossible to imagine more beauty and majesty in ruins [...] The whole mass was illuminated with a variety of rich inks from the setting sun, and cast a very strong shadow. The sea in the distance was flat and shining, and bordered by a rocky coastline with rocky islands. - But we mustn't look for coincidences with the ruins so far [...] overgrowth in grass, moss, ivy and other climbing plants, an interruption with thick bushes, a closure with undesigned trees that can increase the natural nature of the ruins. "
The "Temple of Apollo at Ura " in the book Reisen in Asia Minor by the English archaeologist Richard Chandler refers to the Hellenistic Temple of Apollo in Didyma (today Didim in Turkey), an ancient sanctuary in western Asia Minor with an important oracle site of the god Apollo.
Classicism and Romanticism
The transformation of the Frommel picture by Friedrich also tells something about the contrast between classical and romantic , of the classical and Christian-romantic conception. When the watercolor was created in the 1770s, the ruins in Agrigento were discovered as objects of an ongoing archaeological research. The painters were partners of local science and endeavored to convey as much knowledge as possible to the public in Germany about buildings, landscape, vegetation, livestock and the inhabitants of the area. For the Christian audience it was also important to give testimony to the structural traces of ancient religions and ancient myths. In Romanticism, temples and landscapes are supposed to have an effect on the soul of the beholder in addition to the historical information that takes a back seat here. The silhouette of the temple in the sunset became more important than the temple itself. Friedrich's hermeneutical image does not seek the accuracy of the historical and topographical details, it invites interpretation.
Painting technique
Although the temple structure is contrasted darkly in the backlight of the sunset, the painting details have a graphic character when viewed from close up. Every blade of grass gets its calculated place. Friedrich developed a process from the sepia technique that enables dark glazes to show through to the background of the picture. The details are first sketched out with a pencil on a light primer and then reinforced with a tube pen. The painting is then carried out with several thin layers of glaze in different shades. This creates a different visual experience from a distance and at a short distance.
Friedrich and Italy
When the Juno Temple was built in Agrigento around 1830, Friedrich polemicized against the Italian euphoria of his painter colleagues and said that staying in the south would not do their art any good. In doing so, he indirectly defended his work on a Sicily motif from a distance.
“The creator of these three pictures must have seen through colored glass […] Perhaps he could have the dangerous idea of painting without glasses, where the objects would appear to him like other honest people, not having been in Rome and have healthy eyes [...] "
“If X [Ernst Ferdinand Oehme] had n't traveled to Rome, he might be further in art. He has improved a lot since he came back from there. He also paid homage to fashion in Rome and was a follower of [Joseph Anton] Koch , no longer a student of nature. "
“Our German sun, moon and stars, our rocks, trees and herbs, our plains, lakes and rivers are no longer enough for these gentlemen. Italian has to be everything to be able to claim greatness and beauty. "
There is only speculation about Friedrich's rejection of the artistic trip to Italy, including the ambiguous accusation of being too German . Economic reasons cannot have been decisive for the decision not to travel, because he received invitations, around 1816 from his painter friend Frederik Christian Lund , which he did not accept.
“Thank you for the kind invitation to come to Rome, but I freely admit that my mind never went there. But now that I've leafed through some of Mr. Farber's drawing books, I've almost changed my mind. I can now imagine traveling to Rome and living there. But the thought of going back north again I could not think without a shudder; In my mind that would mean as much as burying oneself alive. I allow myself to stand still, without grumbling, if fate wills it so; but going backwards is contrary to my nature, but my whole being is indignant. "
In Jens Christian Jensen's judgment, the painter deliberately kept his circle of life narrow, just as he rigorously limited the objects in his pictures.
Johan Christian Clausen Dahl takes his painter friend Friedrich to Naples in a picture. In the painting Erbruch des Vesuvs from 1824, a figure on the back on the edge of the volcano can be identified as Caspar David Friedrich with the help of the drawing of Prof. Friedrich's figure .
German artists in Italy
The enthusiasm for Italy, which has persisted since the middle of the 18th century, had reached a climax at the time the Temple of June was built in Agrigento . Friedrich Wilhelm IV traveled to Italy in the autumn of 1828. In honor of the Prussian Crown Prince, an exhibition was opened in the Roman Palazzo Caffarelli by the Nazarenes ' group of artists , whom Friedrich sharply rejected. For the first time Friedrich Overbeck showed his allegorical painting Italia and Germania there . Friedrich was not alone in his skeptical attitude towards the art production of German artists in the south. The newly emerging public art criticism in Germany discovered great potential for debate in the less innovative painting of the Nazarenes. The German-born artists of Rome, however, were of the opinion that only the artist himself could judge art. In the pamphlet Three Letters from Rome against Art Writing in Germany , Johann Christian Reinhart , Bertel Thorvaldsen , Philipp Veit and Joseph Anton Koch , among others, defended themselves against art criticism from their homeland. Indeed, many artists traveling to Italy showed a disastrous trend. The more clearly they tried to capture the Italy experience in pictures, the more empty their message became. The artistic development of Ludwig Richter can be considered a prominent example.
Attribution and provenance
Hermann Beenken published the Juno temple in Agrigento in 1943, initially as a work by Friedrich, but then assigned it to Carl Gustav Carus . For Helmut Börsch-Supan, the painting in Carus' late work is unthinkable, but due to its style and conceptual content it can easily be assigned to Friedrich's oeuvre. The picture is said to have been in the possession of the FA Brockhaus Verlag in Leipzig in the meantime. The Museum for Art and Cultural History of the City of Dortmund acquired the painting in 1951 from the Cologne art trade.
Classification in the overall work
The motif of the ancient temple is rare in Friedrich's oeuvre, but not an isolated event. The etching Landscape with Temple Ruins was created around 1803 . With this lead, the explanation of the June temple in Agrigento from the painter's situation around 1830 is not considered mandatory. The etching may already have been created according to Hirschfeld's theory of garden art .
The distant motifs
In addition to the Juno temple in Agrigento , Friedrich created two other paintings, the Watzmann and the Arctic Ocean , whose motifs he did not get to know in nature - the Alps and the North Sea. The three pictures were created with narrow dating in a biographical window between 1824 and 1828, in which a change in motif in the work can be registered. Although the painter was always a master of compilation and construction, in this series he once again achieved an increase in landscape painting beyond the naturalism of mere observation of nature to visionary pictorial inventions. He also breaks completely with the staffage-oriented manner of representation and shows pictorial spaces with intentional emptiness. The message of the impressive pictures is encrypted and can be interpreted accordingly. For the Italian riders among his artist colleagues, Friedrich remained a mystery.
“Caspar David Friedrich ties us to an abstract thought, uses the natural forms only allegorically, as symbols and hieroglyphs, they should mean this and that: in nature, however, every thing speaks for itself, its spirit, its language lies in everyone Shape and color. "
Caspar David Friedrich: The Watzmann , 1824/25
Caspar David Friedrich: The Arctic Ocean , 1823/24
Artist and Agrigento
With his painting, Friedrich places himself, whether intentionally or not, in the classical tradition of Agrigento motifs by German artists. In 1778 Jacob Philipp Hackert painted the Juno temple in the classical style with a lot of staffage. Friedrich's romantic reception of the temple of June did not find any imitators. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the classicist way of representation persisted. This is shown in 1841 The Valley of the Temples of Agrigento by Alexander Herrmann , in 1857 the Concordia Temple in Agrigento by Leo von Klenze or in 1913 a Doric temple in Agrigento by Hans von Bartels.
Jacob Philipp Hackert: Landscape with Temple Ruins in Sicily (Valley of the Temples, Agrigento) , 1778
Leo von Klenze: The Concordia Temple at Agrigento , 1857
Alexander Hermann: The Temple of Agrigento , 1841
Hans von Bartels: Doric Temple in Agrigento , 1913
reception
The Rügen pastor Theodor Schwarz wrote the novel Erwin von Steinbach or the spirit of German architecture under the pseudonym Theodor Melas in 1834 . The author provides the fictional character, the cathedral builder Erwin von Steinbach , with a painter named Kaspar, who is close to Caspar David Friedrich in his character and in his biography. Painter and pastor were good friends. Schwarz developed the protagonists' journey to the far north and beyond the Arctic Circle as a counter-program to the compulsory Grand Tour of the artists in Italy. The temple at Grigenti in Sicily was chosen as a specific reference point . Here the northern and southern topos of art are negotiated in the way that one can easily guess from Friedrich.
“So I wandered through this lush land, and remain a stranger in Italy, hating the new, admiring the old, but not taking anyone as an example. The more I saw and heard of its intoxicating glory, the more desolate and lonely it became in my heart, and I longed to go back to the German forests and rivers, and to a never-before-seen sanctuary in nature, which must be found somewhere. "
“Do you want to go to the wonderful country of Sweden?” Exclaimed Kaspar, “so I'll go with you, that's also a new bond among us. My mind has always been there; in the far north, I hope, some secrets in my art will reveal themselves to me and an unknown urge will be satisfied. [...] "
Web links
literature
- Hermann Beenken: A romantic landscape with the Juno temple of Agrigento . In: Die Kunst 59, pp. 1, 2
- Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich. Paintings, prints and pictorial drawings , Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7913-0053-9 (catalog raisonné)
- Sigrid Hinz (Ed.): Caspar David Friedrich in letters and confessions . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1974
- Jens Christian Jensen: Caspar David Friedrich. Life and work . DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1999
- Detlef Stapf: Caspar David Friedrich's hidden landscapes. The Neubrandenburg contexts . Greifswald 2014, network-based P-Book
- Herrmann Zschoche: Caspar David Friedrich. The letters . ConferencePoint Verlag, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-936406-12-X
Individual evidence
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Letters 1829 - 1830 , Works Volume 46 (Weimar Sophienausgabe), p. 186
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich. Paintings, prints and pictorial drawings , Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7913-0053-9 (catalog raisonné), p. 420
- ^ Jens Christian Jensen: Caspar David Friedrich. Life and work . DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1999, p. 141
- ↑ Detlef Stapf: Caspar David Friedrichs hidden landscapes. The Neubrandenburg contexts . Greifswald 2014, p. 267, network-based P-Book
- ^ AE Gigault de Salle: Voyage pittoresque en Sicile . Magnificent volume in a large folio, 2 volumes, Paris 1822 and 1826
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich. Paintings, prints and pictorial drawings , Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7913-0053-9 (catalog raisonné), p. 419
- ^ Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld: Theory of garden art . Five volumes, MG Weidmanns Erben and Reich, Leipzig 1797 to 1785, Volume 3, p. 113
- ^ Richard Chandler: Travel in Asia Minor . Weidmann, Erben and Reich, Leipzig 1776, Chapter 43, p. 213 f.
- ^ Ulrich Johannes Schreiber: About temples and texts. A picture comparison . In: Joseph Vogl (Ed.): Poetologies des Wissens um 1800, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1999, p. 233
- ↑ Sigrid Hinz (Ed.): Caspar David Friedrich in letters and confessions . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1974, p. 85
- ↑ Sigrid Hinz (Ed.): Caspar David Friedrich in letters and confessions . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1974, p. 122
- ↑ Sigrid Hinz (Ed.): Caspar David Friedrich in letters and confessions . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1974, p. 89
- ^ Herrmann Zschoche: Caspar David Friedrich. The letters. ConferencePoint Verlag, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-936406-12-X , p. 34, p. 111
- ^ Jens Christian Jensen: Caspar David Friedrich. Life and work . DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1999, p. 141
- ^ Dieter Richter: From court to Rome. Johann Christian Reinhart, a German painter in Italy. A biography . Transit Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-88747-245-0 , p. 93 ff.
- ^ Three letters from Rome against art writing in Germany , Verlag Fritsche, Dessau 1833
- ^ Jens Christian Jensen: Caspar David Friedrich. Life and work . DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1999, p. 141
- ^ Hermann Beenken: A romantic landscape with the Juno temple of Agrigento . In: Die Kunst 59, pp. 1, 2
- ↑ Helmut Börsch-Supan: Caspar David Friedrich's painting “The Junotempel von Agrigento”. On the importance of the Italian and Nordic landscape in Friedrich . In: Münchner Jahrbuch für bildenden Kunst, Volume II, Volume 22, 1971, pp. 205–216
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich. Paintings, prints and pictorial drawings , Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7913-0053-9 (catalog raisonné), p. 277
- ↑ Birgit Verwiebe: Caspar David Friedrich - The Watzmann . SMB DuMont, Cologne 2004 p. 9
- ↑ Ludwig Richter: Memoirs of a German Painter. Self-biography with diary entries and letters . Ed .: Heinrich Richter, Leipzig 1909, entry in the diary of January 30, 1825
- ^ Theodor Schwarz (under the pseudonym Theodor Melas): Erwin von Steinbach or the spirit of German architecture . Hamburg 1834, volume 3, p. 75
- ^ Theodor Schwarz (under the pseudonym Theodor Melas): Erwin von Steinbach or the spirit of German architecture . Hamburg 1834, volume 1, p. 5 f.
- ^ Theodor Schwarz (under the pseudonym Theodor Melas): Erwin von Steinbach or the spirit of German architecture . Hamburg 1834, volume 1, p. 3