In Dresden

In Dresden (part 3)

Budin.

You know that compulsive writing is hardly my besetting sin, and for your own sake you will readily forgive me if I tell you too little rather than too much. Had I wanted to write at length, I might just as well have remained in my armchair. So make do with fragments—from which, after all, our whole life is composed.

One last thing in Dresden displeased me greatly: for the convenience of newcomers and strangers, the streets and lanes still had no names at their corners. Even small provincial towns in Poland had adopted this civic measure ten years ago, and it makes finding one’s way extraordinarily easier; easier topography, in turn, makes business easier.

On my last afternoon there I went to see the Mengs(1) collection of plaster casts. Schnorr will tell you better than I what it is worth, and Küttner, to my knowledge, has already done so very well. You know that in such matters I am quite an ignoramus and dare not venture into the sanctuary of the goddess, though I have, about certain works of art—for instance, the Medicean Venus(2) — some thoughts of my own which no antiquary, with all his aesthetics, will easily drive out of me. I already look forward to the moment when I shall see the original in Palermo, where I believe it now stands.

A number of heads interested me most; I took the majority to be Roman. Küttner’s(3) wish occurred to me—that the Elector(4) might enlarge the collection still further for the benefit of art. The hours allowed for viewing are also too restricted: in summer it is open to the public only two days a week, and in winter not at all. Some of the regulations concerning art seemed to me quite absurd. No artist, for instance, is permitted to make a completely finished copy in the gallery, so I was told. That betrays a very petty jealousy. It would be no small honour for the Dresden school if copies of great masters were produced there that might be mistaken for the originals. Nor may any painter work in the gallery for longer than the appointed two hours—a span in which almost nothing can be done in oils.

Yet artists may sometimes carry their mischief to the point of insolence; and it is said that not long ago a well-known painter from our German fatherland wiped his brushes on one of the finest originals to test his colours. At that, although I am a layman, my knotted stick would involuntarily have stirred in my fist.

On my last evening I went to an opera, produced with considerable splendour. My memory is like a sieve, but I think it was The Countess of Amalfi(5). The music, if I am not mistaken, was of a rather eclectic sort. There was not a single bad singer or actor in the performance—but, in my view, not a single excellent one either, much as people in Dresden insisted otherwise. The fault was probably mine, since in nearly every part I could not help recalling a better performer elsewhere.

Footnotes

• (1)'Mengs collection': The collection of more than 800 plaster casts assembled in Rome by Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), the painter and art theorist. The Saxon elector bought it from Mengs’s heirs, and it was installed in Dresden in the 1780s. ↩︎
• (2)'Medicean Venus': The celebrated ancient statue of Aphrodite, normally kept in the Uffizi in Florence. Seume was correct: it had been moved to Palermo in 1800 to protect it from French seizure and was still there when he wrote this passage. It was taken by the French in the summer of 1802. ↩︎
• (3)'Küttner': Karl Gottlob Küttner (1755–1805), German travel writer and tutor whose published journeys ranged across much of Europe. ↩︎
• (4)'The Elector': Refers to the Elector of Saxony (Frederick Augustus III, later King Frederick Augustus I). ↩︎
• (5)'The Countess of Amalfi': La contessa d’Amalfi, an opera by the Austrian composer Joseph Weigl (1766–1846). ↩︎