The German Genius

the Altes Museum—“the finest that neoclassicism has to show anywhere, and far superior to the British Museum or to Chalgrin’s Bourse in Paris”—the lines are simple but rational, and the façade and the main building perfectly complement one another. In his later development, which took him away from the Greek and toward the Italian Renaissance and British industrial buildings, he showed himself as too good to be confined to any one inherited idea.
    In 1824 Schinkel made another visit to Italy, this time accompanied by the art historian Gustav Waagen. His aim was to inspect the display of art collections there; two years later he went to England to inspect the new British Museum. In London Schinkel was more impressed by the works of art themselves than by the buildings which housed them, and he was less impressed by English architecture pure and simple than he was by the engineering structures—the tunnels and bridges (iron once more)—erected by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. This was a time when churches were giving way to museums, theaters, and even factories as the focus of architecture. 28 On his return, Schinkel introduced iron staircases into many of his new buildings. 29
    Late in life, Schinkel envisaged a “Higher Architecture,” a less utilitarian form of building, though this was never realized. One might call it an ideal, almost Kantian, form of architecture. After his death in 1841, he fell from favor but was rediscovered by the generation of Loos, Peter Behrens, and the young Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, after about a century. 30
    The passion for Greek architecture in Berlin and the other cities of Germany (for example, Munich) achieved remarkable proportions, so much so that in 1835 Leo von Klenze journeyed to Greece, where he succeeded not only in having a law passed to protect the Acropolis and other Classical sites, but he also designed an entire district of Athens and a palace for Otto I, son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, who became king of Greece in 1832. The neoclassicists had finally returned whence they came. 31
    T HE F IRST A RTISTIC S ECESSION
     
    The world of the Romantics was a small world, and the same point may be made about the neoclassical world, even about Prussia/Germany herself, so far as the arts were concerned. For the most part, the luminaries all knew each other, and painted or sculpted or translated each other. Georg Friedrich Kersting, Mengs, and Tischbein painted Goethe; Heinrich Keller, Martin Klauer, and Traugott Major sculpted him. Joseph Anton Koch and Gottlieb Schick painted Humboldt, and Klauer, Christian Rauch, and Christian Friedrich Tieck sculpted him. Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) translated Winckelmann and painted Bodmer, Joseph Koch painted August Wilhelm Schlegel, Mengs painted Winckelmann. Schadow sculpted Klopstock and Gilly; Tieck sculpted Lessing, Karl Wickmann sculpted Hegel, and Albert Wolff sculpted Friedrich Schadow. It was a world that was conscious of itself as a talented age, much as the Italian Renaissance had been. 32
    After Mengs and Winckelmann, the most notable German presence in Rome was a group of painters variously known as the Brotherhood of St. Luke, the Düreristen, and the Nazarenes. They began as a small knot of like-minded souls at the Academy in Vienna, where Mengs’s pupil, Friedrich Heinrich Füger, was director. Füger was a good director—David himself was an admirer—but Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, and Johann David Passavant grew irritated with the routine of the Vienna Academy. What they had in common, over and above a dislike of routine and Vienna itself, which wasn’t religious enough for them, was a preference for earlier Italian old masters—Perugino, Raphael, and Michelangelo—rather than later painters such as Correggio, Titian, and the Bolognese school then so much in vogue, and especially for the so-called Italian primitives of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. This, the Gothic Revival, ran parallel with Romanticism. 33
    Their views were reinforced by the publication in 1797 of an anonymous short booklet, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders ( Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk ), which, in Keith Andrews’s words, “made an impact in inverse proportion to its modest size.” 34 Written by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, appearing on the eve of his death at the age of twenty-five and put together by his friend, the poet Ludwig Tieck, it was not really art