silhouette

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Rococo silhouette chair

Silhouette or outline are terms from the painting , optics , photography . It is used to describe the outline or the contour of an area or the area enclosed by this contour, which contrasts darkly with a light background (or vice versa). The can (for example, the shadow of a body or the contour generated by the development of a site (also a natural contour Skyline )), or artificial (for example, a shadow drawing or shear cut to be).

Origin of the term

Silhouette by Johann Caspar Lavater made as a silhouette

The name silhouette goes back to the former French finance minister Étienne de Silhouette († 1767), who was said to be so greedy that he would decorate his house with black paper cutouts instead of oil paintings. The term initially had a negative connotation in the sense of 'cheap art', poorly made portrait '. Over time, however, the term was also transferred to value-neutral issues such as 'natural contours' and 'light-dark contours' as an artistic medium.

History of the silhouette in the 18th century

In the second half of the 18th century, Germany too was gripped by a wave of enthusiasm for silhouettes, which were rarely made as paper cuttings, but were mostly carefully inked. Especially intellectual circles were caught up in this enthusiasm. The Giessen lawyer and later judge at the Darmstadt Higher Appeal Court, Ludwig Julius Friedrich Hoepfner, designed and built a special silhouette chair on which the upper body and head of the person to be portrayed could be fixed. In 1772, the Swiss philosopher Johann Caspar Lavater provided with his work Von der Physiognomik and subsequently the fundamental work Physiognomic Fragments for the Promotion of Human Knowledge and Philanthropy, the theoretical substructure for the creation of numerous collections of silhouettes of important personalities of his time, which was already ridiculed by contemporaries. His physiognomics as a guide saw itself as the teaching for classifying different human characters on the basis of facial features and body shapes. Lavater used an extensive collection of silhouettes. Lavater was supported by the Swiss physician Johann Georg Zimmermann , who had been "Royal British Councilor and Personal Physician" in Hanover since 1768. While Goethe initially expressed himself in admiration about Lavater and only later moved away from his previously admired friend, the Göttingen physicist and philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg only offered biting ridicule for Lavater. The fact is today that physiognomics and its followers such as Johann Heinrich Merck have contributed to the fact that extensive and important collections of silhouettes from this time have been preserved, because they made important silhouetteurs such as Johann Wilhelm Wendt popular artists of their time. The silhouette and the silhouette collections have thus become permanently associated with the literary circles that are receptive to it, such as the circle of the sensitive around the Great Landgrave or the Göttingen Hainbund and its members. The Goethe collector Anton Kippenberg dedicated a comprehensive article to the silhouette of the 18th century in the yearbook of the Kippenberg collection . Silhouettes were first cut in wood in 1769 by the Jena printer Gottlieb Christian Bernhard Heller.

Nanna Eicke - Holy Family in Marie Feesche : Himmelsglanz, 1931, Hanover, subsequent edition

The publication of these silhouette collections began before the First World War and continued afterwards into the Weimar period. Important collections are the Schubert silhouette collection of stud from Ratzeburg. jur. Carl Schubert, which has been in the collection of the Göttingen State and University Library since 1887 and shows not only the greats of the time in over 200 silhouettes, but also the Göttingen university lecturers , pedels , fencing teachers and students during his studies. Schubert studied in Göttingen from 1778 and his younger brother helped him to find out about the people he had summarized in his memory album until about 1781. Since he noted memorabilia for himself on the back of the silhouettes , the membership of his Hanoverian Landsmannschaft and other Göttingen Landsmannschaft during his student years could be read from this collection .

History of the silhouette in the 19th century

Hermann von Görtz-Wrisberg as a Göttingen student around 1840

While the use of silhouettes in the French period , not least because of competition from heavily became fashionable more romantic pedigree leaves subsided, she experienced after the wars of liberation a true renaissance under frat boys that from 1815 to the late 1850s, despite the supervening as competition, lithography often Have a silhouette depicted. The resulting picture collections were collected as Kneip pictures in student bars . In view of the in the meantime plaitless, less artistic hairstyle now with student hat and color , which were often created in color.

Around 1860 silhouettes and lithographs were simultaneously replaced by the now emerging, cheaper and modern photography. Nevertheless, the topic is still cultivated today in the field of cabaret.

Effect and processing

Photographically, a silhouette can be created on a lighter background with backlight

A match game that uses silhouettes, is originally from China coming Tangram . In silhouette the silhouette of a face or a scene of mostly black construction paper displayed by cutting out the background. In many cases, a similar effect is achieved photographically today.

literature

  • Julia Sedda: Silhouettes: The fashionable paper Portrait Miniature around 1800. Imhof Verlag 2014, ISBN 978-3-86568-969-6 , pp. 179-186.
  • Julia Sedda: The scissor cutter Luise Duttenhofer (1776-1829). Hohenheim Verlag, Stuttgart 2013.
  • Julia Sedda: Reading Circles, Crafts and Flower Arranging. Everyday Items in the Silhouettes of Luise Duttenhofer (1776-1829). In: Maureen Daly Goggin, Beth Fowkes Tobin (Eds.): Women and Things, 1750-1950. Gendered Material Strategies. Ashgate, Farnham 2009, ISBN 978-0-7546-6550-2 , pp. 109-128.
  • Julia Sedda: Ancient knowledge - the rediscovery of the line and the color black using the example of the silhouette by Luise Duttenhofer (1776–1829). In: Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Hrsg.): Cultures of knowledge in the 18th century. deGruyter, Berlin 2008, pp. 479–488.
  • Christa Pieske: silhouettes and silhouetteurs. Schneekluth, Darmstadt 1963.
  • Ernst Biesalski : silhouette and silhouette. Little history of silhouette art. Georg DW Callwey, Munich 1964.
  • The Goethe era in silhouettes. Silhouettes in full figure, primarily from Weimar and the surrounding area. Hain Verlag, Rudolstadt 1996. (Reprint of the 1911 edition) ISBN 3-930215-34-9 .
  • Hermann Bräuning-Oktavio : Silhouettes from the Werther period - From the estate of Johann Heinrich Voss and Carl Schubert's book of silhouettes. Wittich, Darmstadt 1926.
  • Leo Grünstein : Silhouettes from Goethe's time. From the estate of Johann Heinrich Merck, Vienna 1908.
  • E. Kroker: The Ayrerische Silhouettensammlung. Leipzig 1899.
  • Max Morris: The young Goethe , (six volumes) Inselverlag 1909/12.

Web links

Commons : Silhouette  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Silhouette  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bräuning-Oktavio (1926), p. 47.
  2. ↑ 4 vol., 1775–1778.
  3. ^ Bräuning-Oktavio (1926), p. 3.
  4. ↑ Bräuning-Oktavio (1926), p. 4ff.
  5. ↑ Bräuning-Oktavio (1926), p. 5 ff.
  6. ↑ Bräuning-Oktavio (1926), p. 7 ff.
  7. ^ Karl Morneweg: Silhouette book of Count Franz zu Erbach by Johann Wilhelm Wendt. Inselverlag 1924.
  8. ^ Anton Kippenberg: The technique of the silhouette. In: Yearbook of the Kippenberg Collection. 1 (1921), pp. 132–177 ( digitized version )
  9. ^ Gottlieb Christian Bernhard Heller and his sample books in the Jena University Library. Jena 1988. Curriculum vitae p. 10, examples in sample books p. 86 f.
  10. ↑ Otto Deneke: Alte Göttinger Landsmannschaften - documents for their earliest history (1737-1813). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 1937, p. 47 ff.