Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction III

V Companionship of the Afterlife. Departure to the Past

Exhibit Gallery

The mesmerist influence on the Romantic generation was highlighted ideal-typically by several heads of a book of portraits that Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a main proponent of the Brotherhood of St Luke, created between 1816 and 1824 in Rome. Their gazes to the afterlife correspond with the magnetised states that his brother Ludwig Ferdinand captured in the portraits of several of his female patients. Ludwig Ferdinand was also a painter and in 1820 had gained access via his acquaintance Friedrich Schlegel to the Viennese circle of mesmerists, where he soon became successful as a talented mesmerist. Alongside the portrait drawings, he also created a painting in 1821 following the instructions of a sleeping woman, which identified her as an effigy of St Cecilia, the patroness of immersive music. The fact that the passed away saint was simultaneously the motif of the last work by the terminally ill St Luke brother Johann Scheffer von Leonhardshoff could indicate a veneration in the circle of the Nazarenes in connection with magnetic practices. Spherical sounds played a key role in Mesmer’s trance induction. He created them himself on a glass harmonica, while Schnorr invited his friend Franz Schubert to accompany him on the piano for a therapy session.

The painting was created after a vision that Countess Lesniowska had while in a trance.

The ideal-typical image of Christ that the Nazarenes put forward against the heroic-antique views of Heinrich Füger was inspired by a supposedly contemporary description of the Messiah in the Letter of Lentulus, a pseudo-epigraphy from the late Middle Ages that had already influenced the depictions of Christ during the Renaissance. Overbeck was familiar with this „Wahre Abbildung unsers Herrn“ (True depiction of our Lord) in the form of a pamphlet that the bookseller and writer Jakob Kaiserer circulated in Vienna in 1806 with a copperplate engraving by Academy student Sebastian Langer.

In 1813, the leading Nazarene Johann Friedrich Overbeck had followed the example of the Klopstockian and former Hainbündler Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg who with his conversion to Catholicism in 1800 had triggered a veritable wave of conversions in Protestant artistic and literary circles, in which Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld also participated.

For Bonaventura Genelli, who had come under the influence of Joseph Anton Koch (centre) in Rome, in his autobiographical retrospective it was not the opposing Nazarenes, but the classicists in the succession of Asmus Jakob Carstens (left) who represented the true art-religious alliance, as they were joined in the afterlife by Saint Luke (left in the background).

The glorified Middle Ages that the artists of the Brotherhood of St Luke imagined at the beginning of the 19th century had a remarkable precursor: almost a half century earlier, 12-year-old Thomas Chatterton had beguiled the English public with his Gothic hallucinations. At the end of the 1760s, the son of a sexton, who was fascinated by Ossian, circulated an extensive set of late medieval writings that he had allegedly found in the chests of a remote room of St Mary Redcliff church in Bristol. After his suicide in 1770, the find was to go down in the history of the Romantic period and the Gothic Revival as a brilliant historical forgery. The shock over his suicide grew into an unprecedented idolisation of a youthful genius through the conjunction with the international Werther mania. In Blake’s early Sturm und Drang comedy An Island in the Moon (1784), he appears as a childlike Phoebus-Apollo, whose rising sun of imagination sends not arrows but spurts of urine, causing utter confusion among the somnambulistic moon inhabitants. However, the Middle Ages that Chatterton resurrected through intensive research and the use of opiates as a complex texture of overlapping voices sought to emancipate itself from the ideological narrowness of a feudal society and thus diametrically opposed the regressive vision of the Nazarenes.

Chatterton’s vision of an early enlightened Bristol Gothic can also be understood as England’s antiquarian response to the national-mythical challenge posed by Ossian’s songs, which reclaim both Scotland and Ireland for themselves. But Wales was also represented in the identity competition of Great Britain—by an antiquarian illusionist who even surpassed Macpherson and Chatterton with his multifacetedness and performative consistency. The poet, stonemason, linguist and folklorist Edward Williams from Glamorgan, who was also known under his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, mastered—supported by the effect of the opiate laudanum—all variants of speculative antiquarianism, from meticulous research, to artful forgery, all the way to free mythopoetics. In 1792 he initiated the neo-druidic movement by organising the first modern bard convention. His bardic system of imaginary rites and largely fabricated graphic characters and insignia can be regarded as a precursor of modern roleplay and cosplay.[1] Hence, Williams was active in a similar area of archaic re-enactment as Klopstock with his Bardiets, which, according to the author’s concept, were to be ideally performed outdoors. As a poet and reciter of his own poems, Williams stylised himself as a ‘bard of liberty’ and thus joined the ranks of an international guild of bards that in the context of the French Revolution and with reference to pre-feudal, liberal conditions announced a universal republican dawn—members of the guild included, alongside Klopstock, the Scottish folklorist and ‘Ploughman poet’ Robert Burns and the English songwriter and singer William Blake.

It was William Owen Pughe, the co-editor of Iolo Morganwg’s Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, who had commissioned Blake to paint The Ancient Briton.

Iolo Morganwg’s forgeries also affected Edward Davies’ biblical speculations on Celtic history, which exerted a considerable influence on Blake’s mythopoetics

 

VI Wild Apollo. Ossian und the Songs of Ancient Peoples

Exhibit Gallery

Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, written in rhythmicized prose, became popular in the German-language region only through the metric translation by the Viennese Jesuit priest Michael Denis, which through the use of the hexameter alone revealed the influence of the poet of the Messiah. Denis himself wrote odes under the bardic pseudonym ‘Sined’ (his name read backwards) in the style of his northern German idol and functioned as his most important agent in the Habsburg region. Herder’s Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a Correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples, 1773), a path-breaking digression on folklore in the form of a fabricated dialogue, did not refrain from criticising Denis’ artful translation, while Macpherson’s version was accepted as a prime example of the superior expressivity of the folk song.[2] The wilder, ‘i.e. the more lively, the freer a people’ are, ‘the wilder, […] the more sensual, lyrically acting’ its songs must be. Their furthest distance to an artificial, high-cultural reflectivity is necessary for ‘the entire miraculous power that these songs possess, the rapture, the driving force, the people’s eternal inherited and sensual singing! These are the arrows of Apollo, with which he pierces hearts and to which he attaches souls and minds!’[3]

Who was this wild Apollo, this exuberant vitalistic agent? In Blake’s system, he was included in the figure of Los (Sol / sun read backwards), the embodiment of creativity and the source of revolutionary energy. Herder grasped him as the antithesis of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s interpretation of Apollo of Belvedere as the ideal expression of classical sublimity. [4] In Herder’s opinion, Apollo with his quiver in truth seeks revenge, not transcendence, as described by Homer at the beginning of the Iliad, when his arrows bring an annihilating pest, and therefore, the metaphor of the piercing quality of the ‘Völkische’ as an eternal ‘inherited and sensual singing’ also prophetically resonates with the suggestion of a cyclical devastation.

These folkloristic projectiles were unsurpassed in their sharpness of expression and depth of feeling, but according to Herder, their paths were anything but strictly intentional. With his observation that Ossian and the songs of the peoples were all ‘leaps and bold throws’, he was not only referring to Blackwell’s proposition of the freely improvised, oral background of the Homeric epics, but also to Klopstock’s more recent poems with their ‘harder bardic tone’ of bold leaps and inversions. As an example, he cited Christoph Willibald Gluck’s ode set to music, Wir und sie (We and They, 1766), which was agonistically directed against England and was countered decades later with faecal satire by the British national bard William Blake. [5] The transgressing, experimental approach of Klopstock’s new bard style was expressed programmatically in the so-called skating odes, which after the inner movement of the Messiah addressed an ecstatic body and nature experience of Nordic gods dancing on ice. With the idea that poems could be shaped metrically after the movements on ice, Klopstock placed himself as a poetic lead dancer at the top of a bourgeois-patriotic skater movement. Simple affect transfer turned into an interrelation between body motor skills, word movements and their acoustic resonance in the performance.

What inspired him to this leap from poetics to performance, however, came from the field of graphics, namely, from William Hogarth’s popular aesthetics in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), which along with laying down an ideal beauty curve also contained notions of auto-dynamic lines and the way they appear in space as freely flowing, diagrammatic dance figures. The connection that Klopstock makes in his poem Der Eislauf (Skating, 1764) between his dancing track and the uncontrived lines of an engraver friend already points to his preference for the disguised lineaments of a John Flaxman. The desired illustration of the Messiah by the English graphic artist did not materialise. However, with Joseph Anton Koch there was an excellent artist from the Roman circle associated with the short-lived Classicist Asmus Jakob Carstens, with which Joseph Abel also consorted, who, a few years after the poet’s death, wanted to translate the Messiah ‘in the manner of the Englishman Flaxmann (sic!)’.[6] The project was to commence after the publishing of his Ossian cycle. But the turmoil caused by the Napoleonic Wars thwarted both the printing of his Ossian—only the 37 final drawings in the possession of the Vienna Academy and the 53 preliminary sketches at the Copenhagen Thorvaldsen Museum have survived—and the planned Messiah cycle.

Carstens’ most famous drawing, The Night with her Children (1795), served as the title vignette of an influential scientific treatise on magnetism in 1811. The Night is accompanied by Apollo’s son Asclepius, the god of healing incubation. A few years later, Berthel Thorvaldsen took up Carstens’ motif again in a scuptural tondo.

The Ossianic longing for death found an ideal interpreter in the Mannheim painter and lithographer Simon Petrus Klotz. This artist, oscillating between Classicism and early Romanticism, is also regarded as a pioneer of practice-orientated academic art history, but was restricted in his teaching activities by his unstable mental constitution. He maintained contacts with Carstens’ successors in Rome and created an abysmal version of The Night with its children Sleep and Death in 1811.

Klopstock’s Nordic Apollos were named Tialf or Braga and they did not dance regimented beauty lines but hurricanes in the sky. And their bards, as chthonic descendants of the primal singer Orpheus, did not sing on a clear Mount Parnassus, but—like in Klopstock’s most famous bardic ode Der Hügel, und der Hain (The Hill and the Grove, 1771)—alighted under shady oaks from a forgotten national underworld. The Germanic past remained dark and inaccessible, the bardic collection of Charlemagne untraceable—in marked contrast to the Celtic culture of the Scottish Highlands. Macpherson and his contemporary interpreters were fascinated by the idea that, with the indigenous people of North America, a culture quite comparable with, if not related to, the Celtic tribes of the Highlands could be studied live. ‘The bards of Ossian and the savages in North America have everything in common’, according to Herder.[7]

In his agonistic ode “Wir und sie” (We and they), Klopstock challenged the bards of England by suggesting the superiority of Teutonic poetry and music. Gluck’s unadorned expressivity shows him to be a congenial composer of such works.

Angelika Kauffmann’s famous allegorical motif of the mourning friendship, represented here in a drawing of a Habsburg noblewoman, was based on a portrait of Anne Hunter, with whom the painter was close friends during her time in London. Klopstock hoped that this Scottish connection of Kauffmann’s would help to shed light on the source material of Macpherson’s Ossian poems.

It is documented that Blake also performed his songs himself, and so successfully that the melodies were noted down by music connoisseurs during spontaneous performances in the salon of his patron Harriet Mathew. As there were close connections to Anne Hunter’s Music Salon, it cannot be ruled out that Haydn also heard examples of the Songs of Innocence with the lost melodies there during his London years.

The Scottish poetess Anne Hunter (n.e Home), who in London at the beginning of the 1790s worked with Joseph Haydn on an English- language cycle of songs and through this aroused his passion for the Scottish folk song, had borne witness to this Ossianic identification with the heroism of the North American indigenous peoples with her poem Death Song of the Cherokee Indians published as a one-sheet print in 1785. Blake, who during this time participated in the folk movement of ‘Wild Apollo’ with spontaneous performances as a singer-songwriter, felt attached to their spirituality. As with Zinzendorf, who regarded the North American ethnicities as descendants of the tribes of Israel, his identification also took place via the bible. In his manifesto-like picture poem, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790–1793), he had the prophet Ezekiel proclaim that in the unfolding of his genius he saw himself entirely on a par with the visionary practices of the peoples of North America. This identification was made possible not only through wild speculations of esoteric ancient research.[8] As early as 1753, the English bishop Robert Lowth, with his seminal treatise De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews), had already provided surprising, literary-historical access to the prophesies and psalmic songs of the Tanakh, through which Hebrew, Celtic-Germanic and indigenous American bardism, druidism, prophetism and shamanism could be merged to a single, primeval topos.

 

[1] It was the co-editor of Edward Williamsʼ Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, the Welsh language scholar and antiquary William Owen Pughe, who commissioned Blake to paint The Ancient Britons.

[2] Herder coined the term Volkslied, folk song, in this essay.

[3] Johann Gottfried Herder: Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (1773). In: Herder, Goethe, Frisi, Möser: Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. Einige fliegende Blätter (1773). Ed. by Hermann Korte. Stuttgart, 2014, p. 16f.

[4] Cf. Johann Gottfried Herder: Eine ungekrönte Preisschrift Johann Gottfried Herder’s aus dem Jahre 1778. In: id.: Die Kasseler Lobschriften auf Winckelmann. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1963, p. 42.

[5] With the poem When Klopstock England defied existing in two different drafts.

[6] Joseph Anton Koch: Letter to Georg Friedrich Fischer, Rome, on 3 May 1805.

[7] Herder, Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, p. 19.

[8] Towards the end of the 19th century, a wide variety of speculations about an Israeli descent were to become part of the broad nationalist-identitarian current of Anglo- Israelism in Great Britain and the United States.