Vienna (part 1)
“Whoever can be bored in the rooms of such a man is beyond help.”
“Whoever can be bored in the rooms of such a man is beyond help.”
We arrived here in Vienna on the second day of Christmas(1), having eaten and slept in true Viennese fashion the night before in Stockerau. At the city barrier one official stopped us and sent us to another for inspection. I, poor devil, was duly taken for a Jew who might be smuggling jewels or Brabant lace.(2) So much for the readers of faces! But they must, after all, have had a textbook case before them.
My entire knapsack was unpacked; my clean and dirty linen rummaged through; my Homer examined, my Theocritus tossed about and my Virgil scrutinised, in case some French contraband might be hidden inside. They felt my pockets and even searched my trousers almost down to my sacred legs: all very politely, insofar as politeness is possible in such a procedure. I must needs have the face of a smuggler.(3)
They took the letters from my pocketbook, and I had to deposit a gold ducat against a possible fine for breaking a law whose existence I did not know and had no reason to know: “Thou shalt carry no sealed letter in thy pocketbook.” The devil may look for such a commandment in the Decalogue or the Pandects.(4)
As a special favour, and since they apparently realised in the end that I was neither trading in Brussels lace nor defrauding the post, I got my letters back after three days. My only penalty was to receive, in exchange for my fine, full-weight ducat, new, tinny twelve-kreuzer pieces at the official imperial rate—a rate no merchant in the capital seems to know anything about any more. Apart from that, everything at the barrier, the post office and the police was conducted in a friendly and polite manner.
Contrary to all expectation, they troubled us no further. They merely kept our passports and told us to collect them when we left. As soon as the post returned my letters of introduction, I went round delivering them and presenting myself. All the gentlemen were most friendly and received the little notes with genuine interest. I could name several worthy men of our nation whom I met here for the first time and who welcomed me; but you already know their worth and humanity better than I do.
Yesterday I visited Füger and spent a delightful hour there. His views and his way of doing things interested me greatly. He had business to attend to, which gave me an even better chance to observe his easy openness: he dealt with it as effortlessly as if he were alone, without neglecting us. Whoever can be bored in the rooms of such a man is beyond help.
He had just finished his Achilles by the Body of Patroclus, which is now to be copied in a drawing and engraved. Only a few days earlier I had read the scene in my Homer, so you can imagine how eagerly I studied the painting. It is an enchanting picture. The young hero, life-size beside the dead man, whose upper body is visible, seems just to be emerging from his deepest grief and resolving on revenge.
The figure is entirely naked and seems to me a masterpiece of draughtsmanship and colour; but the head is divine. You know I am no enthusiast, yet I could scarcely look my fill. If my opinion counted for anything, I would have one reservation about the heavenly, youthful beauty of the face. The hero depicted here is no longer the boy whom Ulysses found among the daughters of Lycomedes.(5) He is the son of Peleus, who has already fought and raged, and already become the terror of the Trojans. To represent him at this point, his face seems to me still to retain too much of the women’s quarters. I think he should look rather more mature: this moment comes only a short time before his own death. I readily defer, however, to those initiated into the arts. A slave stands behind him, his face showing astonishment and fear.
Most important to me was his room devoted to Klopstock’s Messiah.(6) Here, for almost every canto, hangs a masterly drawing on which he has worked with love and zeal. He told me that for several weeks he had been unable to decide what to do with the poem, until the entire sequence of scenes suddenly appeared to him. There are twenty; Göschen has obtained engravings of only four for his fine edition.
It would be worthwhile if Göschen, with his usual enthusiasm for truth and beauty in art, would arrange with capable artists to make all of them available to the public. But the undertaking would cost no small amount if Füger were not to suffer a loss. The figures and groups are excellent, the apostles’ faces enchanting, and Judas with Satan terrifyingly distinctive without becoming caricatures.
I was especially moved by the sheet in which an apostle brings the crown of thorns to the women after the death of their beloved teacher. The passage is a masterpiece of pathos in the poem; the artist felt it and breathed that feeling into the group with his whole soul. Caiaphas’s zeal is a stream of fire, and the Roman centurion, even in his terror, shows that he belongs to the old Capitol. Porcia is a divine woman.
The first and last sheets pleased me least, because I cannot accept the personification of God. Raise the ideal as high as you will, and all you get is an Olympian Jupiter; I will have none of him—he is not enough for me. Christ is the highest ideal of Christian art. Even according to the most orthodox teaching, he is still our brother. Our senses can rise as far as him, but no further.
Our apostles and saints are the gods and heroes of ancient myth. No Greek artist, either, has ventured to reach Plato’s one truly real being. The Olympian Jupiter is Homer’s Jupiter. I wish Klopstock and Wieland could spend just one hour in this room: they would find reward for their work, and Füger for his.
I must tell you about two more paintings by Füger, which I saw in the rooms of Count Fries and which you may not yet know. The count remembered me kindly from the Academy. His friendliness and courtesy towards strangers, like his enthusiasm for art and learning, in which he takes his greatest pleasure, are well known. The two paintings are quite recent: the first is only two years old, and the second is younger still.
The first shows the elder Brutus condemning his sons. Its moment is the dreadful command Expedi secures!(7) One must take in the whole painting at a glance to feel the full force of the effect the artist has achieved; any description that pulls it apart weakens it. The picture is rich in figures, but none is idle: all belong to the catastrophe or take part in it. Every one is a distinct and convincing character, from consul to lictor.
Everything is authentically Roman, beautiful and grand. I dare not describe it; it must be seen. What moved me particularly was a very successful episode which, so far as I remember, the ancient historian does not include—or, if he does, it has greater power here in the painting than in his narrative. A rather elderly man stands at a distance with his two boys and points, with all the expression of ardent patriotism, to the judge and the judgement, as if to say: “By the gods, this is how I should have to act towards you if you became like those two!” The father and sons are indescribably beautiful to me.
The second painting shows Virginius, who has just sacrificed his daughter, holding up the knife before the people and the decemvir, and standing for a moment like a fearful prophet of what is to come.(8) The artist’s imagination was made for that instant. The two principal figures, Virginius and Appius Claudius, are excellent in their different ways; but indescribably beautiful, moving, and seemingly breathed into life by the Graces themselves is the group of women holding the dying girl.
They pay no attention to the father, the tyrannical judge, the crowd or anything happening around them; they are occupied solely with the beloved girl. Such an affecting interweaving of figures has seldom occurred even to a poet. Add to this the finish and delicacy of the figures and the pathos of the moment. It is one of the loveliest compositions to come from the mind of an artist animated by the spirit of a noble and beautiful humanity.
I would kneel and worship if I did not know the Romans better. You already know my somewhat heretical views on this. Thinking as a friend of humanity, I would rather live in Russia, chained by its servitude, than under the supposed safeguard of Roman liberty. Do not be too quick to call this a paradox. Woe to the new Gauls(9) if they try to impose ancient Roman liberty on their own people, or even, as Klopstock puts it, to yoke their neighbours to it! But where am I wandering?
Füger’s latest work, which, I hear, he is now painting for Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen,(10) shows Jupiter appearing to Phidias to inspire him to make his image of the Olympian god. Since it is to be hung high, the design is rather colossal. It is a bold idea, a very bold one; but Füger may be the man to carry it out.
With charming frankness the great artist admits that he has taken some of his finest compositions from Father Wieland’s Aristippus.(11) Now I wish I could spend a few hours as close to David as I have been to Füger; and I hope I shall succeed.
During the fourteen days I stayed here, we had a few hours of clear, bright weather only occasionally, and never a whole day. The Viennese complain that it is almost always like this. Sometimes, then, I walked alone and gloomily along the ramparts and amused myself with etymologies: Vindobona, quia dat vinum bonum; Danubius, quia dat nubes—and more of the same. Who knows whether the Romans were not thinking along such lines when they chose their names?(12)
Had Harrach, Füger, Retzer, Ratschky, Miller and a few others not given me a quarter of an hour now and then, I would have had to pack my knapsack again on the third day out of sheer anxiety.