Poetry, Painting, Park: Goethe and Claude Lorrain

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Imbued with a pulsating energy that emanates from the sun, Claude Lorrain’s landscape draws on the interplay of light and darkness to effect a ‘living whole’ and evoke the symbolic. In a life-long conversation with Lorrain - recorded in texts as diverse as ‘Amor as Landscape Painter’, Faust, and the Doctrine of Colours - Goethe conducts an inquiry into the dialectics of nature and art, imitation and invention, subject and object. Goethe seeks to comprehend Lorrain by reenacting him in words, in ekphrastic mode, as an experience and an idea. The inquiry remains open-ended for landscape is a paradox: the real, the spiritual, and the affective meet without merging. This aesthetic discovery and visualization of nature as landscape is consonant with the attempt to grasp the world and our place in it. The three sister arts of poetry, painting, and horticulture serve as mirrors for Goethe’s self-understanding as an artist, including his ambivalence vis-a-vis the English Garden as articulated, for instance, in the novel Elective Affinities.

Franz R. Kempf is Professor of German Studies at Bard College.