Wild Apollo’s Arrows: The Book

Decades before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment witnessed an outbreak of national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm whose force, as cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder observed, resembled the epidemic arrows that open Homer’s Iliad. Alexander Roob’s image-text essay traces this attraction to a newly discovered “primitivist” Homer – from the cult surrounding his Nordic counterpart Ossian to the titanic attempt to surpass Homeric classicism in The Messiah, the epic work of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the first literary superstar of the German language.

This volume offers the first in-depth examination of Klopstock’s considerable influence on the visual arts of his time, while also broadening the view to the international context of early Romanticism – particularly Klopstock’s reception among the circle of Fuseli, Flaxman, Blake, and Hayley. The lack of such a study can also be explained by the consequences of the Austro-Prussian dualism, since Klopstock’s cultural orientation toward Vienna meant that an informal Klopstock gallery – developed there in the spirit of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery – remained largely ignored in Austrian archives. 

Alexander Roob: Die Pfeile des wilden Apollo. Klopstockkult & Ossianfieber,                                                                 Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with a prologue by Sabine Folie

Textem Verlag, Hamburg 2025
248 pages, €32.00