Thread by @VeraCausa9

A thread on Goethe's "Italian Journey" [1786-88]. His quest & aesthetic musings about Greek & Roman art.

"For if we look upon Antiquity with the firm intention of educating ourselves, we are rewarded by the feeling that this is really the beginning of our true humanity."

This is Heinrich Christoph Kolbe’s 1806 painting of an older Goethe on the Bay of Naples with Vesuvius looming in the background. Twenty yrs earlier, Goethe started his Italian Journey on September 3rd, 1786 at age thirty-seven [1]

"If our teaching in schools always continues to point to Antiquity and promotes the teaching of the Greek and Latin languages, we can congratulate ourselves that these studies, so essential for any higher culture, will never suffer decline."

- J.W. Goethe, Maxims & Reflections

Thomas Cole-The Temple of Segesta, Sicily with the Artist Sketching ca. 1842 [1]

Goethe's visit to Italy [1786-88] was a pilgrimage of re-finding himself as well as an educational journey:

Goethe deemed Rome,"the first city of the world". Even among its grandeur of ruins, the eternal city was still a great school, providing Goethe with an education of the soul,for "I reckon my second life, a very rebirth, from the day when I entered Rome"

10 November, 1786,Goethe:

11 November, 1786, Goethe:

"These people (Romans) built for eternity; they omitted nothing from their calculations except the insane fury of the destroyers to whom nothing was sacred"

Ruins of the Great Aqueduct, Roman Campagna by Thomas Cole, 1843 [1]

This is one of my favorite entries by Goethe in his 'Italian Journey." A meditation on marble vs plaster cast & a comic incident involving the cast of a Jupiter bust Goethe has bought & his landlady's cat.

25 December, 1786:

This is a marvelous description by Goethe, capturing so evocatively in words the dark stone outlines of the Colosseum by moonlight with a painter's revealing eye.

2 February, 1787, Goethe:

Though painted more than half a century later, this 'Coliseum by Moonlight' [1859] by British artist Frederick Lee Bridell, captures some of Goethe's 1787 description of the Colosseum ruins, illuminated by the uncanny brightness of the Roman moon.

April 7, 1787 while strolling the Public Gardens of Palermo,Goethe felt transported back to antiquity:

"the enchanted garden, the inky waves...the peculiar tang of the sea air, all conjured up images of the island of the blessed Phaeacians...I hurried off to buy myself a Homer"

Love the above entry by Goethe writing about Homer, he compares ancient writers vs us moderns: "they depicted the horror, we depict horribly" [1]

The Farnese Hercules' original legs were found & reunited with the rest of the statue in 1787. Same year, Goethe saw the Hercules with his original legs in Rome & wondered how Porta's substitute legs were so admired, "now it is one of the most perfect works from antiquity"

Notice the detail of how in the above Farnese Hercules' 1860 photograph, the hero's manhood was covered with a marble leaf. The leaf was later removed & Hercules' manhood is now restored as seen in this current photograph @MANNapoli

The original bronze "Farnese Hercules" was created by the Greek sculptor Lysippos in the 4th c. BC, now regrettably lost. Later a Roman era marble copy signed by "Glykon of Athens" was created ca. 216 AD. [1]

On April, 1788 Goethe bid farewell to Rome. His 'Italian Journey' ends as he wandered Rome's moonlit streets like a ghostly Ovidian figure, now expelled from paradise. Then he quotes from Ovid's Tristia 1.3, as the exiled Roman poet sadly recalls his last moonlit night in Rome.

P.S. Highly recommend you to read this wonderful translation of Goethe's "Italian Journey" [1786-88] by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, Penguin Classics edition.

"The ultimate effect of this tour was to strengthen my sense of really standing on classic soil and convince my senses and my spirit that here greatness was, is and ever will be"

-Goethe, Italian Journey

Goethe contemplates the grand Colosseum in Rome, ca.1787 with his friend & painter Jacob Philipp Hackert, who painted this view [1]

Just finished reading Goethe's delightful "Italian Journey". Throughout I listened to Italian Baroque composer Giuseppe Tartini.

This adagio from his Concerto for Violin A major D.96 is sublime, played by Giuliano Carmignola, Enjoy!