Faust illustrations

Arabesques. What does that word conjure up? For me, it is a ballet pose, as in the figures in the margins of the above watercolor drawing by Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810). (Click on images to enlarge.) But it also refers, according to Wikipedia, to “a form of artistic decoration consisting of surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils or plain lines, often combined with other elements.” In is in that pictorial sense that it is used in an article by distinguished Goethe scholar David Wellbery, which concerns illustrations of Goethe’s Faust drama by the painter Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867). Since I finished rereading the “Urfaust” this past week, it struck me as a good subject for a post. 

One can imagine that a form so playful and frivolous as the arabesque would have appealed to the "young" Goethe, but Professor Wellbery's article reveals the expansion of Goethe’s aesthetic interests in new directions well into the 19th century. His article appeared in a volume that has just appeared: Arabesque without End. Across Music and the Arts, from Faust to Shaharazad (edited by Anne Leonhard and now available from Routledge). So, consider the following a first review, though in Goethe Girl’s own fashion.

Goethe, it turns out, was not unfamiliar with the aesthetic potential of the arabesque. Wellbery writes that the “meandering, nonconceptual character” of the arabesque had even captured the attention of Kant, disclosing, as it did, a “terrain of aesthetic experience where an unfiltered imagination could exercise itself as ‘play.’” Kant was thinking of wallpaper designs, mollusk shells, vegetal motifs, and the like. Goethe wrote a short piece on arabesques during his stay in Italy, in which he discussed wall decorations from Pompeii, vault paintings in the Vatican Palace by Raphael, and Raphael’s wall decoration for a private home in the park of the Villa Borghese. Goethe noted the “gaiety, frivolity, and delight in ornamental forms,” celebrating “joy, living, and love.”

In May 1811, through through the mediation of Sulpiz Boisserée, Goethe was introduced to a series of six pen-and-ink drawings in the arabesque manner by Cornelius, illustrating scenes from Faust. Goethe had of course given thought to the difficulty, “the sheer improbability of justly rendering verbal action [the Faust drama] as artistically convincing pictorial arrangement.” Schiller and Goethe’s classical “Kunstprogramm” was over. Whatever his irritations with the Romantic artists, his interest in the pictorial potential of the arabesque was piqued.

Before getting around to Cornelius’s illustrations, Wellbery discusses the above-mentioned Runge, whose work brings out the pleasing character of the arabesque. To my eyes, the sinuosity of Runge’s depictions of The Times of the Day (go here for images of the series) matches my sense of what an arabesque is: ballet again. The subjects of Runge’s engravings in the Times series are framed, setting them off in a realm of their own, outside the real world, increasing the “art” potential. In fact, Runge seems to have liked the frame, as can be seen in the wonderful watercolor of the hunt.

I was surprised to read that Goethe, before seeing Cornelius’s illustrations, “had not conceived the [Faust] play as rooted in a particular historical locale” But because of Goethe’s suggestion to Cornelius to study “the artistically created world” of such painters as Albrecht Dürer, illustrations of the drama would henceforth be set in the late medieval German world.  (I am omitting here Wellbery’s discussion of Goethe’s notion of artistic imagination and of “transfigured artistic subjectivity.”) Goethe mentioned his admiration to Cornelius of the  marginal decorations by Dürer that accompanied the so-called Prayer Book of Maximilian I of 1513. Cornelius took the hint, and the title page of the resulting Bilder zu Goethe’s Faust “simulates” Dürer’s  blending of script and picture in the prayer book. At bottom left on that page, Cornelius has set Faust in his study, while on the right can be seen Gretchen and her mother examining the contents of the box that Mephisto has secreted in Gretchen’s cupboard.

This is followed by 11 scenes from the play, including the scene of "Faust mit Gretchen, Mephistopholes mit Marthe im Garten." A  preliminary drawing — maybe Goethe saw something like the sketch above left? — shows the lithesome, decorative aspect of the arabesque, to which has been added, in the final production, the “story” elements: the garden scene that animates the alternating dialogue between the two parties.

After receiving a letter from Goethe in support of his project, Cornelius headed for Italy to seek the inspiration necessary for the final installments of the series. Italy? Really? I would like to have known more about the inspiration Cornelius found there for representing the medieval German world.

What can one make of the final image in the series? As Wellbery writes: “In its depiction of an angel descending to answer the anguished Gretchen’s prayer, the last-mentioned illustration diverges more radically from Goethe’s text than any other in the entire suite.” Wellbery doesn’t make too much of Cornelius’s religious attitudes, only mentioning the influence of the “Nazarenes,” who were a group of “religiously motivated artists.” And, yet, what a sense of drama there is in the attitudes of Faust, Mephisto, and the horse, the rendering of urgency in the gesture of Mephisto pulling at Faust’s robe, or of Faust, his body twisted in two directions, his legs ready to run away, while his right arm reaches beseechingly toward Gretchen, whose posture is one of rejection. The angel behind her is a little too much in the way of "story." Sometimes less is more.

When I started writing my dissertation on Goethe, other graduate students (not in German) would ask me whether everything hadn't already been written about Goethe. David Wellbery shows us anew that there is always something to be discovered about Goethe and especially the influence his works have exercised on the imagination of artists.

Image credit (Runge): Meisterdrucke