The German Genius

radiating from Mengs and Winckelmann. Mengs was by no means the only influence on David, of course—there was a general return to Poussin in the middle of the eighteenth century, but “Mengs was at the height of his reputation when David was in Rome, where he is said to have attended drawing classes ‘nel museo del cavaliere Mengs.’” 15
    The term “neoclassical” did not come into use until the 1880s, by which time this form of art was already well out of favor. 16 But in the late eighteenth century it was regarded as the “true” or “correct” form of painting and looked upon as a Risorgimento . The aim was a return to first principles—to antiquity. This was to be achieved by visits to Rome, by the study of Raphael and Poussin, by reading Winckelmann and the Greek and Roman classics themselves. There was an idea that there is a classicism common to all the arts, but there was no precise program and for that reason artists as varied as Jean-Antoine Houdon, Hubert Robert, Greuze, George Stubbs, Joshua Reynolds, and Francisco Goya derived inspiration from the same sources, all engaged in an exercise to see how nature could be “purified and ennobled.” 17 As Winckelmann had said, line took precedence over color, and restraint was valued over passion. Between 1780 and 1795 the greatest masterpieces of neoclassicism were produced, culminating in that “icy star,” David.
    Neoclassicism is, therefore, particularly interesting for this brief moment of stylistic unity, as true of architecture as of painting. As Wend von Kalnein has put it, “For the best part of a century architecture spoke the same language from Rome to Copenhagen, from Paris to St Petersburg.” 18 Columns and porticos became the main features of public buildings everywhere, from banks to theaters and churches to town halls.
    C REATING THE B ERLIN S KYLINE
     
    German neoclassicism arrived late, despite the roles played by Mengs and Winckelmann in its genesis. It began about a generation after France and Britain and was at its height from 1800 on. 19 Though Berlin and Munich led the way, Karlsruhe, Hanover, Brunswick, and Weimar all boasted neoclassical buildings. Friedrich Wilhelm II, who succeeded Friedrich the Great in 1786, brought to Berlin the architects Friedrich Erdmannsdorff (1736–1800), Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732–1808), David Gilly (1748–1808), and Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850), and from then on neoclassical buildings began to dominate the Prussian capital.
    Gotthard Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate (1789–93) paved the way. Langhans was the chief court architect though his knowledge of Greek architecture was derived not from experience, but rather from book learning. This shows, for the Brandenburg Gate has many features that are not Greek. Even so, it was widely understood as an expression of the new style and modeled on the Propylaeum on the Acropolis in Athens. It would be much mutilated down the years, notably by Napoleon who took Schadow’s bronze statue of Eirene to Paris in 1806 (it was later returned).
    Langhans was followed by the Gillys, father and son. David Gilly, from Pomerania, assumed the directorship of public buildings in Berlin and in 1793 founded a school of architecture there, later turned into an academy. It was this academy that trained the younger generation of architects—Heinrich Gentz, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Leo von Klenze. 20
    The principal genius of early German neoclassicism was David Gilly’s son, Friedrich (1772–1800). He died tragically young in 1800 at the age of twenty-eight, but in 1796 he came closer to the Greek ideal than anyone else had done with his design in a public competition for a monument to Friedrich the Great, to be erected in the Leipziger Platz in Berlin. 21 Friedrich’s drawings show a solitary Doric temple on a raised platform, approached by means of a triumphal arch with a Doric colonnade. This design contrasts with the Brandenburg Gate, but nonetheless “set the standard” for German neoclassicism.
    Gilly’s influence was strongest on Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “thanks to whom Prussian Classicism became of European importance.” 22 Schinkel, “the last great architect,” as Adolf Loos described him, was honored almost everywhere architects received honors and knew personally many of the great luminaries of his time: Clemens Brentano, Fichte, the Humboldt brothers, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the art historian.