Goethe in Ettersberg

Karl Eibl, in his Goethe Handbuch entry on Goethe's poetry in the first Weimar decade, addresses the "ambivalent world feeling" (Weltgefühl) to which Goethe would give expression when mentioning his early years in Weimar and to which most Goethe scholars have assented. Evidence is a letter Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein on July 16, 1777, which expresses what Eibl writes could be regarded as a "deep-seated ambivalence." Goethe was on his way home after a bird shooting with the duke in Apoldo. We must imagine Goethe on horseback (as always cut and paste into Google translate):

Der Etterberg! Die unbedeutenden Hügel! Und mir fuhrs durch die Seele -- Wenn du nun auch das einmal verlassen mußt! das Land wo du so viel gefunden hast, alle Glückseligkeit gefunden hast, die ein Sterblicher träumen darf, wo du zwischen Behagen und Mißbehagen, in ewig klingender Existenz schwebst ...!

Eibl, however, doubts that Goethe really felt existentially ambivalent, instead contending that the mixed feelings (Behagen und Mißbehagen) were primarily an expression of the restrictions on him that gave him little time for poetic production.

The above-mentioned Ettersberg -- called here "unbedeutend" (insignificant) -- is interesting because this range is associated with one of Goethe's best-known poems from the Weimar years, "Wandrers Nachtlied," written "Am Hang des Ettersberg d. 12. Feb. 76."

In my last post I mentioned Wolfgang Vulpius's volume on Goethe in Thuringia, the focus of which is less the poetry and more the natural world that Goethe was introduced to in the duchy of Weimar. The opening sentence of Vulpius's chapter on the Ettersberg mentions the abundant fossils of the shell limestone era in this mountain range. Ultimately Ettersberg was not insignificant at all. The entire area, including the Harz, was important for his mineralogical forays. Vulpius quotes from notes of Goethe, made in 1780 for J.C. Voigt in the context of the geological survey of the duchy:

Auf einer mineralogischen Reise durch das Herzogtum Weimar wäre der Ettersberg zuerst zu besteigen und alsdenn herunterwärts nach Zimmern und Hopfgarten zu, als auch herüber bis an die Ilm, was von Lage zu entdecken sein möchte, zu untersuchen, in was für Ordnung sie aufeinander folgen und in welcher Höhe gewisse Arten von Versteinerungen besonders der Bufonites stehen. Die Erfurter Bemühungen nach Steinkohen bei Hopfgarten sind zu untersuchen und nach den ... auf dem Ettersberg geschehenen Bemühungen sich zu erkunden.

It was the Harz journey of 1777 that inaugurated Goethe's enthusiasm for and learning on the subject of mineralogy, which increased with each journey (mostly on horseback) through this region. Vulpius mentions other Ettersberg landmarks associated with Goethe (e.g., the meteorological station established in 1817 in Schöndorf, on the back side of the Ettersberg), and also from Eckermann's report of September 26, 1827, including this well-known appreciation:

Ich war sehr oft an dieser Stelle und dachte in späteren Zeiten sehr oft, es würde das letztemal sein, daß ich von hier aus die Reiche der Welt und ihre Herrlichkeiten überblickte.

Pertinent to the importance of the area for what Goethe learned about the natural world is this passage from the same report :

Immer der alte Meeresboden! Wenn man von dieser Höhe auf Weimar hinabblickt und auf die mancherlei Dörfer umher, so kommt es einem vor wie ein Wunder, wenn man sich sagt, daß es eine Zeit gegeben, wo in dem weiten Tale dort unten die Walfische ihr Spiel getrieben. Und doch ist es so, wenigstens höchst wahrscheinlich.

"The Road to Hell"

I cannot finish up this post on the Ettersberg without mentioning, as does Vulpius, that the Nazis cleared one of the Ettersberg forests and built a concentration camp there. The two maps in this post (click to enlarge) come from the blog of the British historian, Ian Friel. In a blogpost back in 2014, Friel writes of buying in a bookshop in Germany the 1935 publication of Conti-Atlas für Kraftfahrer (‘Conti-Atlas for  the Motorist’). The map directly above shows the renaming of street names in Weimar by that date. After World War II, Adolf Hitler Strasse was renamed by the DDR government  Ernst-Thälmann Strasse. I am a terrible map reader and cannot tell from the book I mentioned in the previous post (Weimars Stadtbild ...) what the street's name was in Goethe's day.

Forget the Age of Aquarius

Markgrafenstein in den Rauener Begen (2012) by Lars Gabyrssch

Just let me get something off of my chest before I start talking about Jason Groves’ article “Goethe’s Petrofiction: Reading the Wanderjahre in the Anthropocene” in the special section on Goethe and environmentalism in volume 22 of Goethe Yearbook. The word “anthropocene” (interestingly, my spell check does not recognize the term) makes me gnash my teeth. We already have a good geological term for when humans first appear in the geological record: Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979, Man in the Holocene), as in Max Frisch’s wonderful novel. “Anthropocene” carries connotations of human damage to the environment, as in “ecological serial killers.” Clearly the term is meant to “formalize” human-induced environmental change.

Okay, that is off my chest. Let me turn to Jason Groves’ article, which is the first I read in this section because it is on Goethe and geology, which was also a subject of an article of mine that appeared in the GYb in 2008.  Goethe’s earliest scientific writings, from 1784–85, were on granite, and I analyzed the essays in connection with the aesthetic category of the sublime. And though I did gnash my teeth over the word “anthropocene,” Jason’s essay is really first rate and only minimally disfigured with un-ecological writing.  Jason (whom I have not met, but since I am sure we will meet in the future I take the liberty of referring to him by his first name) takes Goethe’s explorations in geology into the 19th century and links the Wanderjahre with so-called erratic blocks with which Goethe was familiar, “large, ostensibly displaced boulders that were known to litter parts of Thuringia, Prussia, and Mecklenburg.”

Markgrafenstein mid-19th centry

From the 1820s Goethe received samples of these boulders from one of his many correspondents. The Markgrafenstein, near Brandenburg, particularly interested him. This was a 700-ton granite boulder that he discussed in his 1828 essay “Granitarbeiten in Berlin.” It turns out to be a “1.2 billion-year-old boulder from a Scandinavian outcroppping.” Clearly no one, especially not Goethe, knew of its age, but as Jason writes “it was widely surmised to be an important piece of evidence in the history of the earth.” Goethe’s own geological adviser J.C.W. Voigt had already ventured to suggest that such displaced blocks gave evidence of an early Ice Age.

"Spaltung"

(Click on all pictures to see them enlarged. The following pictures here show, as described in the essay, the the labors of master builder Christian Gottlob Cantian, stone masons, and others to to shave off a 75-ton fragment that was carted to the Altes Museum in Berlin and polished into a "Granitschale." It still stands there today. The black-and-white images are from Dieter Kloessing.)

"Verladung"

 This very suggestive piece of scholarship proceeds not from the premise that the earth is powerless against the depredations of humans. Nigel Clark (and other “critical voices”) is quoted to the effect that that “whatever ‘we’ do, … the planet is capable of taking us by surprise.” Thus, ”the various environmental disasters associated with the Anthropocene [are also] evidence of ‘our susceptibility to the earth’s eventfulness’ rather than just the earth’s susceptibility to human eventfulness.” In turn, Goethe’s interest in erratic granite blocks “evinces an openness to the planet’s inherent instability and thus to human vulnerability.” I immediately wrote in the margin that Goethe did not like instability, and it struck me that Jason did not deal with this issue sufficiently. Was it a case of Goethe being drawn to something that frightened him?

"Aufstellung"

 I won’t harp on this, however, because the essay is a wonderfully rich reading of the geological formations that appear in the Wanderjahre. Not only is the novel about itinerant humans, but it is also full of wandering “erratics” of a non-human type, especially in the 1829 version. The novel is set in a “neue, bewegliche Welt,” full of “interpolated tales of foolish pilgrims, displaced laborers, and emigrants to America.” But, as Jason writes, “Inhuman things also wander.” Throughout the novel, the earth does not appear simply as a monolith, but instead in the form of animated, active, transitory fragments. As he notes, drawing on Wolf von Engelhardt, stones and rock formations, when appearing as predicates, are never static or passive. Instead the verbs  are always active and reflexive: zeigen sich, verwandeln sich, erzeugen sich, and so on. “In this drama of things, mineral agents take humans as accusative objects: they address us, they come together to make formations.”

"The Biedermeierweltwunder" by Johann Erdmann Hummel

I recommend the essay for its detail and for its excellent use of a variety of sources. It demonstrates the insight into Goethe’s poetic work that can be had when considering it in connection with his scientific explorations. In this connection, this volume of the GYb also offers a review by Astrida Orle Tantillo of the Goethe Handbuch supplement Naturwissenschaften.

Aside from the lack of resolution concerning Goethe’s fascination with erratics vis à vis the volatility of the earth, there was another issue that might be further explored. I interpret somewhat differently a passage Jason quotes from the final section of the novel, part of the discussion of  contemporary theories of the earth’s formation. “A few quiet guests,” as Goethe calls them, seem to ruminate about a time of immense glaciers, when masses of primeval rock slid down from on high and huge blocks of rock were transported by means of floating ice. This passage appears as the epigraph of Jean de Charpentier’s Essai sur les glaciers of 1841; for Charpentier, student of Swiss glaciers, they were “milestones in the discovery of former ice ages.” But might it not be the case that the passage is exactly about what Nigel Clark suggested, and that the guests were drawing on a deep human memory of the "earth's eventfulness," a period of volatile instability, in the face of which "human eventfulness" counted as nothing?

Image credits: Lars Gabrysch;  The Economist; Dieter Kloessing

Goethe and the mines

Clausthal (click to enlarge)

 Goethe's "first" Harz journey began at the end of November 1777, the culmination of which was his ascent of the Brocken on December 10. While on this trip, undertaken on horseback, Goethe also visited several working mines in the region, perhaps as part of informing himself about mining matters in connection with the Ilmenau project. The Rammelsberg mine, south of Goslar, was open to visitors, and he wrote in the visitors' book on December 5: "Den ganzen Berg bis ins Tiefste befahren."

He was also writing letters to Charlotte von Stein during this journey; unfortunately he provides no details in these letters, nor mentions anything of his observations or of conversations with mining officials.

Model of a 16C mine, from G. E. von Löhneyss' Bericht vom Bergwerck, 1690

The next day he rode to Clausthal, pictured at the top of this post, site of the most productive mine in the entire Harz, producing silver, copper, tin, and "Zinkblende." He spent the night in Clausthal, and on the morning of December 8, he traveled to the nearby Dorothea, Caroline, and Benedict mines (the mines were first worked by Benedictine monks) and inscribed his name in the guest book as “Johann Wilhelm Weber aus Darmstadt.” Again he descended into the mines, apparently without any fear of the depths or the poor illumination. It was not an entirely danger-free thing, as the miner who accompanied him, walking in front of him, was injured by a large block of falling debris. According to Wolf von Engelhardt, the Clausthal mines extended to a depth of 520 meters (1,700 feet), but we don't know far into the depths Goethe descended. We know, however, that he went down by ladders, as are pictured in the above illustration from a 16th-century mine.

Picture sources: GeoMuseum Clausthal; Robert M. Vogel

Goethe and geology

From The New Yorker (click to enlarge)

A friend reminds me that I have not posted much lately. True: most of my time is devoted to the book I am trying to finish, which is not directly about Goethe, but I came across something yesterday that gave me an opportunity to think about him.

I was at the M.D., one who has copies of The New Yorker, and an issue from earlier this year had a rather thrilling piece by Hector Tobar on the Chilean miners who were trapped 69 days at 2,3000 feet below the earth — and survived. The piece contains some factoids about the geology of the mining environment, which reminded me that I have been asked to prepare 100 words on “Goethe and Geology” in connection with a book exhibit for the forthcoming conference of the Goethe Society of North America.

For those unfamiliar with the subject, Goethe was a member of a commission in the duchy of Weimar that investigated the possibility of re-opening the mine at Ilmenau as a way of producing revenue for the duchy. The venture eventually came to nought, but Goethe struggled with it for a decade. He also familiarized himself with the mineralogy of the region and with "geology," a subject that was not yet known as such, as it was then a field only coming into being. The first scientific writing he produced was on granite, which was believed at the time to constitute the earliest building block of the earth. (See my essay in the Goethe Yearbook.)

Goethe went on to pursue other scientific areas, perhaps because they were more easily accessible: for instance, botany, anatomy, and colors. In retrospect, it might seem that to theorize about geology took a leap of the imagination that was nigh impossible for people, even for Goethe. James Hutton’s revolutionary insight into the age of the earth was something hard to wrap your mind around. Here is Hutton, a Scottish farmer who is known as "the father" of modern geology (emphasis added):

James Hutton, by Sir Henry Raeburn (1775)

"As there is not in human observation proper means for measuring the waste of land upon the globe, it is hence inferred, that we cannot estimate the duration of what we see at present, nor calculate the period at which it had begun; so that, with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end."

The above is from 1785, from a "dissertation" Concerning the System of the Earth, its Duration, and Stability. Hutton's point was that the earth was continually being formed, a process that we could not observe because it took place over such a vast extent of time.

In the early years in Weimar, when Goethe was studying mineralogy, there were certainly writers who already estimated that the earth was much older than the Biblical account would suggest. I believe Buffon thought in terms of 75,000 years. If Goethe been able to visualize millions of years, he might have come to accept the concept of a dynamic planet, especially the massive forces of volcanoes and hot springs in the formation of the earth.

So, what about the Chilean miners? As for the age of the stone forming the mountains in which they worked, it was “born of the earth’s magma more than 140 million years ago. For aeons, a mineral-rich broth rose up through the fissures of the Atacama Fault System. Eventually, the broth solidified, becoming ore layered with interlocking veins of quartz, chalcopyrite, and other minerals.”

And as for the slab that blocked their escape? “It was later estimated to weigh seven hundred thousand tons, twice the weight of the Empire State Building."

Such figures are something that we moderns have come rationally to assimilate. Ah, yes: twice the weight of the ESB. Of course! Yet, confined as we are to our tiny place on the earth and in the universe, do we really understand the infinity of time or the enormous weight of the earth? As the author of The New Yorker piece writes: "The men couldn’t see the extent of the slab, but one could sense the enormity of the disaster.”

Life before Goethe

Clearly no one is born to be a Goethe scholar, and there was little in my background to suggest that would be the case with me. My path toward studying German was the most accidental in the world, though I would also say serendipitous. In my final year of high school I was fortunate to have one of those teachers who are celebrated in fiction, Ruth Braeutigam. Much later, after I had become a teacher myself, what constantly struck me was the effect of small, seemingly inconsequential things on a student's intellectual growth, for it was not the subject of U.S. history for which she was my teacher that Ruth Braeutigam had an effect on me. From the start, what intrigued me about her class was the arrangement of the room, one that was already more adult than any I had encountered in school. Miss Braeutigam sat on a stool before a podium on which her notes were spread and to which she would occasionally refer, while the students' desk were set out in rows of half-circles around her. Obviously, unlike in other high school classes, the slow students could not hide in the back of the room.

Miss Braeutigam herself was the first spinster, aside from my maiden aunts, I knew close up. The Catholic sisters, strictly speaking, could not be counted among the spinsters: they, like the married, had a special calling. Though I had loved the sisters who had taught me as a child, I had not been attracted to joining a religious order.

Miss B. must have already been in her fifties when I was her student, and in terms of outward appearance she had probably never been the attractive feminine type of teacher who turns adolescent schoolgirls into acolytes. There was indeed something masculine about her, though, again, after I had become a teacher myself, I better understood her manner: one that gave a student room, that did not seek to ingratiate, that revealed enough of an individual personality -- what a booming laugh she had! -- without false or inappropriate confidences. After three years of being sunk in adolescent narcissism, I seemed to be jolted awake by her clear-eyed way of relating to the world and to the unencumbered life that she radiated.

One day I asked her about her name and learned of her German ancestry. "Braeutigam," as she informed me, meant "bridegroom." Not long afterward she gave me a copy of my first German grammar, a thin book in which all the German words appeared in the funny script known as "Fraktur." As a sign of my own eccentricity, I desired to known things that no one else in my milieu knew or even cared about. So it was that I spent more time deciphering those strange German letters and memorizing German words than on anything I had done in the previous three years of high school.

Such small influences, principally the use of my brain on something besides boys, prompted me to think about my future. My female role models (this was the early 1960s), mostly products of Hollywood, had "careers": Doris Day or Edith Head, dresser to the stars. With no one in my milieu offering guidance, I would have needed a lot more self-direction to chart such a remarkable course, and it was absolutely for lack of any alternative that I began to consider college, where, after all, I could study German. As I said, could there have been anything more accidental and more exotic -- considering my white bread background -- in my becoming a German scholar?

I was thinking of these things yesterday. I am spending the holidays with my sister and brother-in-law in Louisville. Until I went to college, my life had moved back and forth across the Ohio River, whether we lived in Louisville or in southern Indiana. The most memorable thing about the river for me was the huge Colgate-Palmolive clock that stood on the Indiana side of the river. Though I had crossed the Ohio back and forth for years, such was the lack of my parents' resources that I had never ridden a boat on the river. My appreciation for natural beauty was still in nuce, and my sense of the history of the region was undeveloped. I knew that Indian tries had once populated these shores -- Algonquian, Shawnee, and Cherokee -- because the Louisville city parks carried their resonant names.

Well, yesterday I learned more about this local history, especially of the Ohio River, than from living here for years. We went on an outing to Falls of the Ohio State Park. The exhibits at the park tell of the important role of the Falls area. For instance, George Rogers Clark established the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the Northwest Territory on Corn Island and then founded the town of Clarksville, a town in which I had once lived (again, without taking note of this illustrious history). John James Audubon was a storekeeper in Louisville and began his career as an artist with his sketch of bird species in the Falls area.

A more interesting discovery, however, because of my later work on Goethe and geology, was that the Falls area had been covered by a shallow tropical sea about 387 million years ago. It turns out that the fossil record goes back to the Devonian (i.e., pre-Cambrian) period. (That's me standing in front of a re-creation of the ancient sea.) The impulse for this work was not purely scientific on my part. It seemed to me that Goethe's writing on scientific subjects sounded a lot like his writing on literary subjects. Thus, my theory was that Goethe's aesthetics influenced his approach to science. My work was enriched by the assistance of by my dear husband, who was a physics teacher for several decades. We used to take long walks along the Hudson River, where I would pick up stones. He would then explain what they were.

Well, that's the long and short of my life pre- and post-Goethe.

The historical postcard of the Falls and the link to Clarksville above are from the wonderful blog of Frances Hunter. Another blog, Louisville Fossils, describes fossil tours of the Falls park. The picture of Edith Head is from Robert J. Avrech's blog.

Goethe and Geology

For a review I will be writing for Goethe Yearbook I am reading a trilogy by Bernd Wolff. The novels have as their central theme Goethe's three "Harz journeys," which took place in the years 1777 to 1784. The most well known product of these years, in terms of Goethe's oeuvre, is the poem "Harz Journey in Winter," which begins with a poetic invocation: may his song rise as effortlessly as a hawk, its pinions resting lightly on morning clouds, on the lookout for prey: "Dem Geier gleich/ Der auf schweren Morgenwolken/ Mit sanftem Fittich ruhend/ Nach Beute schaut,/ Schwebe mein Lied." Wolff's first novel, Winterströme, seeks to re-create the Harz journey of 1777 that gave impetus to this poem.

The major products of the second and third Harz journeys were two writings by Goethe on the subject of granite. Goethe, after becoming a member of Carl August's governing council, was appointed to the Ilmenau mine commission: the duchy of Weimar was short on cash, and it was hoped that the mine there, which had been shut down for several decades, would yield copper. Goethe took his duties seriously and began immersing himself in the study of mineralogy. The oldest university of mining and metallurgy in the world, established only a decade or so before, was located nearby, in Freiberg in Saxony. Among its famous students (at a later date) was Alexander von Humboldt.

Goethe took advantage of the expertise of J.C.W. Voigt (1752-1821), whom Carl August had sent to Freiberg to study, to carry out a mineralogical study of the duchy. This period was really the infancy of the science of geology or, in German, Erdenkunde. Voigt's mineralogical mapping was carried out with real hands-on labor. Today we are the beneficiaries of two centuries of technological development, as can be seen in this digital magnetized map of the so-called Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. We now can instantly see the mineralogical potential of the entire earth, thanks to the Commission for the Geological Map of the World. It is Goethe's enthusiasm for granite that Wolff portrays in the second and third novels: Im Labyrinth der Täler and Die Würde der Steine. It sounds very arcane, but Wolff's intention is to show the development of Goethe's scientific interests as a search for what might be called cosmic certainty. Another view of Goethe's interest in geology can be found here, in an article I wrote a few years back.

Wolff's novels suffer from the problem of most historical novels: the impossibility of recapturing the reality of the past. As I read, I constantly find myself objecting to conversations between characters but mostly to the mentality Wolff portrays. Nevertheless, for a Goethe scholar like myself it is fun to encounter all the people who were part of Goethe's milieu. There is hardly anyone Wolff leaves out: Goethe's cook and servants; Charlotte von Stein, but also her son Fritz; the painter Melchior Kraus (who accompanied Goethe on the third Harz journey and supplied the drawings of geological formations, including the one pictured here); Carl August's sad wife, Louisa August; the poet Gleim; Maria Antonia Branconi; Herder. They are all there and many more. So, if I can't take seriously Wolff's reconstruction of these figures, I have at least been led to reading more about them in historical accounts (which also suffer from the difficulty of recapturing past reality).

The painting at the top of today's post, The Weimar Court of the Muses, is by the artist Theobald von Oer. It shows Schiller (who died in 1805) reading his poems in the park of Schloß Tiefurt. (Goethe stands at the right, in a Napoleonic gesture.) It was painted in 1860, 55 years after Schiller's death, and is evidence of the late-19th-century fascination for "great" men. The court of the Muses at Weimar more likely resembled that to be seen in contemporary drawings by Melchior Kraus of "amateur theatricals" at the court in Vienna. Pictured here is a production of Der Postzug by the Austrian "officer and author" Cornelius Hermann von Ayrenhoff (1773-1819). Never heard of him? (And feminists are always decrying all the "disappeared" women writers!) According to his Wikipedia entry, his plays were modeled on the French writers Racine and Corneille; at the Burgtheater in Vienna, he was opposed to all the new-fangled theatrical innovations.

Picture credit: Free Republic

Goethe in Bohemia

The cycle of poems entitled "Marienbader Elegie" (more properly, "Trilogie der Leidenschaft," or trilogy of passion), from 1824, is the most famous product of Goethe's frequent visits to the spas and healing springs of Bohemia. Other spas he favored were Franzensbad, Teplitz, and Karlsbad, of which he wrote, on a visit in 1785: "From granite and through the entire creation, to the women: everything conduced to make this stay pleasant and interesting."

From "granite and through the entire creation" refers to Goethe's lifelong interest in geology and geological formations. The drawing above (click on image to enlarge), made by Goethe in 1808, is of the so-called "Kammerberg" (chamber mountain), not far from Franzensbad, which we now know is an extinct volcano. Goethe visited and climbed it numerous times, and his geological writings contain an essay entitled Der Kammerberg bei Eger.

The 18th century challenged the time frame of the Biblical account of earth's creation, and rival theories arose to explain the formation of mountains. Thus arose the so-called Neptunist-Vulcanist controversy: Vulcanists (or Plutonists) declared that rocks and mountains had been formed by violent means, through volcanic action within the earth; for the Neptunists the process had been more gentle, with geological sedimentation (as in mountains) arising from the precipitation of water. This was an academic controversy, somewhat like that today over global warming. Goethe was a Neptunist. The fourth act of Faust II even has a scene between the two sides, with Mephistopholes taking sides with the Plutonists.

Goethe wrote the following about his observations at Kammerberg: "A long stay in Franzensbrunnen allows me to visit the problematic Kammmerberg at Eger often. I collect samples, observe it closely, describe and draw it. I find myself compelled to diverge from the opinion of Reuss, who declares it to be pseudo-volcanic, and to declare it instead to be volcanic. I will write an essay on it ... but the question will probably not be solved, and a return to Reuss's opinion might be advised" (Tag- und Jahreshefte 1807). Reuss refers to the first Czech balneologist, Frantisek Ambroz Reuss, founder of modern geological research of the Bohemian mineral waters. Goethe had consulted his works on the geology and hydrology of the Bohemian mineral springs.

It was not only at Kammerberg that Goethe collected rocks and minerals. He amassed a considerable collection all over Germany and Bohemia (and people constantly sent him samples from other regions of the world, though I don't know whether he had a sample of jasper, as in this piece in the Metropolitan Museum (2000.504). He frequently said he was not interested in gems. The jasper, with its lovely amethyst inclusions, was mined in mountains northwest of Prague and transformed into this vessel at the court of Charles IV in the late 1300s.