Italian Journey Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"We are all pilgrims who seek Italy," Goethe wrote in a poem two years after his return to Germany from his almost two-year spell in the land he had long dreamed of. For Goethe, Italy was the warm passionate south as opposed to the dank cautious north; the place where the classical past was still alive, although in ruins; a sequence of landscapes, colours, trees, manners, cities, monuments he had so far seen only in his writing. He described himself as "the mortal enemy of mere words" or what he also called "empty names." He needed to fill the names with meaning and, as he rather strangely put it, "to discover myself in the objects I see," literally "to learn to know myself by or through the objects." He also writes of his old habit of "clinging to the objects," which pays off in the new location. He wanted to know that what he thought might be paradise actually existed, even if it wasn't entirely paradise, and even if he didn't in the end want to stay there.[7]

While in Italy, Goethe aspired to witness and to breathe the conditions and milieu of a once highly – and in certain respects still – cultured area endowed with many significant works of art. Apart from the impetus to study the Mediterranean's natural qualities, he was first and foremost interested in the remains of classical antiquity, furthermore in Renaissance, but much less in the then predominant Baroque art. Medieval art he treated with complete contempt. During his stay in Assisi, he did not visit the famous Giotto frescoes in the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. Many critics have questioned this strange choice. In Verona, where he enthusiastically commends the harmony and fine proportions of the city amphitheater, he asserts this is the first true piece of Classical art he has witnessed. Venice, too, holds treasures for his artistic education, and he soon becomes fascinated by the Italian style of living. He acquires Andrea Palladio's printed works and studies them intensively.

After a longer stop in Venice and a very short stop in Florence, he arrives in Rome. It was here that he met several respected German artists, and made friends with Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein and notable Neoclassical painter, Angelica Kauffman. He visited the famous art collections of Rome with her and her husband Antonio Zucchi. Other artists he frequently met were the painter Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein and the writer Karl Philipp Moritz.

Goethe lived with Tischbein in his flat in Via del Corso 18, Rome, today Casa di Goethe, a museum on the Italian Journey. He stayed there from October 1786 until February 1787 when they travelled together to Naples and Goethe went on to Sicily, and again from June 1787 until April 1788.[8] Tischbein shared the house with a number of other German and Swiss painters. He painted one of the most famous portraits of Goethe, Goethe in the Roman Campagna. Goethe looked everywhere for ancient works of art, in museums and private collections, travelled twice to the Royal Palace of Portici where the excavations from Pompeii and Herculaneum were exhibited, he visited the Greek temples in Paestum several times. While Tischbein stayed in Naples looking for commissions, Goethe went on to Sicily with the German painter Christoph Heinrich Kniep. There he devoted himself intensively to the then largely unknown Greek ruins in Agrigento. In Palermo, Goethe searched for what he called "Urpflanze," a plant that would be the archetype of all plants.

In his journal, Goethe shows a marked interest in the geology of Europe's southern regions. He demonstrates a depth and breadth of knowledge in each subject. Most frequently, he pens descriptions of mineral and rock samples that he retrieves from the mountains, crags, and riverbeds of Italy. He also undertakes several dangerous hikes to the summit of Mount Vesuvius, where he catalogues the nature and qualities of various lava flows and tephra. He is similarly adept at recognizing species of plant and flora, which stimulate thought and research into his botanical theories.[9]

While more credibility can be attributed to his scientific investigations, Goethe maintains a thoughtful and admiring interest in art. Using Palladio and Johann Joachim Winkelmann as touchstones for his artistic growth, Goethe expands his scope of thought in regards to Classical concepts of beauty and the characteristics of good architecture. Indeed, in his letters he periodically comments on the growth and good that Rome has caused in him. The profusion of high-quality objects of art proves critical in his transformation during these two years away from his hometown in Germany.

Rome and Naples

Goethe stayed almost three months in Rome, which he described as "the First City of the World."[11] His company was a group of young German and Swiss painters lodging with Tischbein, Friedrich Bury, Johann Heinrich Meyer, Johann Heinrich Lips and Johann Georg Schütz. He sketched and did watercolours, experimented with modeling a head of Hercules and even shortly toyed with the idea of turning from a writer into a painter when he took painting lessons from Jakob Philipp Hackert in Naples. But he soon realized his limitations in this field. He visited famous sites, rewrote his play Iphigenia, and thought about his Collected Works, already in progress back home.[12] He could look back now on what he called his "salto mortale" (somersault), his bid for freedom, and he had explained himself in letters to his mistress and friends. But he couldn't settle. Rome was full of remains, but too much was gone. "Architecture rises out of its grave like a ghost." All he could do was "revere in silence the noble existence of past epochs which have perished for ever."[13] It is at this point, as Nicholas Boyle puts it clearly in the first volume of his biography,[14] Goethe began to think of turning his "flight to Rome... into an Italian journey."

From February to May 1787 he was in Naples and Sicily. He climbed Vesuvius, visited Pompeii, found himself contrasting Neapolitan gaiety with Roman solemnity. He was amazed that people could actually live in the way he had only imagined living and in an emotional passage he wrote:

Naples is a paradise; everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included. I seem to be a completely different person whom I hardly recognise. Yesterday I thought to myself: Either you were mad before, or you are mad now.[15]

and about the sights:

One may write or paint as much as one likes, but this place, the shore, the gulf, Vesuvius, the citadels, the villas, everything, defies description.[16]

I can't begin to tell you of the glory of a night by full moon when we strolled through the streets and squares to the endless promenade of the Chiaia, and then walked up and down the seashore. I was quite overwhelmed by the feeling of infinite space. To be able to dream like this is certainly worth the trouble it took to get here.[17]

However, he does not indulge himself predominantly in literary reflections or thoughts on the classics of art. Instead, he observes his new surroundings closely. For example, he contradicts the German travel author Johann Jacob Volkmann who speaks of "thirty to forty thousand idlers" in Naples, by observing in detail what members of the lower classes deal with on a daily basis. He describes their diverse activities, including child labor, and sums up that he had noticed "a lot of ill-dressed people," but no unemployed ones. He expands observations of a year-round abundance of fruit, vegetables and fish into a historical comparison of the southern and northern peoples. The latter, due to climatic and agricultural conditions, were forced by nature in a completely different way to prepare for hard winters, which results in the “Nordic industry” being much more efficient. On the other hand, the Neapolitan poor understand at the same time “to enjoy the world at its best” – like all classes there “do not work in their own way just to live, but to enjoy, and that they even want to find happiness in their work." Basically, Goethe has a positive attitude towards the Italian mentality and art of living and hopes to be able to adopt some of them for himself and his future life in Weimar.

Unlike in Rome, Goethe, the ennobled ducal minister, tried not to withdraw from socializing in Naples. Rather, passed around by the philosopher Prince Gaetano Filangieri, he allowed himself to be invited to aristocratic palaces and socialized with the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton and his wife Lady Emma. In some places Goethe also inserts anecdotes, for example about Filangieri's unconventional sister who was married to the old prince Filippo Fieschi Ravaschieri and enjoyed offending his clerical guests, as Goethe describes with delight. Or about the tyrannical governor of Messina, whose lunch table, filled with dozens of guests, is not allowed to start until soldiers have searched the whole city for Goethe, who had innocently skipped the meal for sightseeing not aware he had the place of honor next to the governor.

After returning to Rome from Sicily via Naples in June 1787, Goethe decided, instead of returning home to Weimar as planned, to stay in Rome for another winter, which turned out to be almost a whole year. He delayed his departure until after Easter the following year and did not leave until April 1788. Besides Iphigenia, he also finished his play Egmont in September 1787.