The Hoflößnitz Museum of Saxon Viticulture sits midway up a hill in Radebeul overlooking the vineyards of Saxony, down on the river Elbe, and beyond to the city of Dresden. Hoflößnitz, Retzsch’s choice abode, is no hermit’s hideaway. Viticulture dates back to 1401 here, where the Electoral House of Wettin would later enjoy a winery and formal rural retreat. In the ballroom of a remarkable 1650 pavilion, over eighty painted Brazilian and African birds vividly parade alongside allegories of good regency. Birds and virtues soared over court festivities celebrating the wine harvest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The pavilion today houses the better part of the Museum collection.
Retzsch’s Parade of the Vinedressers (Winzerzug) opens any tour of its exhibits. A run of eight consecutive coloured lithographs marks the first national festival for Saxon vintners on 25 October 1840. Retzsch, owner of a large vineyard nearby, had been made its honorary member. In his sophisticated pageant, local lore blends with mythological fauns, bacchantes, Silenus, and wine-related biblical figures (Caleb’s grapes from the Holy Land), ending with congregations of citizens.1 The eight lithographs prompt our steps towards a vibrant inscription: “Nothing lives here but pleasure, but freedom, banter and rest | grief be banished, you guests, come to me.” An invitation to “luxury, calm and delight,” it recalls Henri Matisse’s painting Luxe, calme et volupté, while “you guests, come to me” evokes Jesus’s beckoning of children. The vineyards summon their own, just as the eight sheets set the tone for bourgeois wine festivities, local and past traditions, antique and biblical figures. Duly credited as their designer and original conceiver, Retzsch himself leads an artisan parade of three: lithographer E. Otto, printer E. Böhme, and Käthe Bernardt, who had carefully coloured them in 1958. Art-wise, the crafted item ranks as the work of many hands.
Across the way from the pavilion, the main building houses in line with tourists’ expectations a modern information desk, cashier’s till, display stand, and gift stall, all in one. Again Retzsch’s Parade, wood-carved in low relief, but unsigned, adorns its imposing fascia. His authorship is surprisingly unacknowledged. When asked, the young girl at the counter saw no problem in that. Just an imitation, a replication, an apery (Nachahmung), she readily replied. As such it required no signature. Authenticity merits a name, genuineness earns a mark, she seemed to say, counterfeit does not. Yet, the carved parade, neither imitation nor bogus picture, reproduces Retzsch’s lithographs down to their very captions.
Both carved relief and coloured prints testify to a culture of replication, inseparable from Retzsch’s own practice. His technique lent itself uncommonly well to copying by himself and others. Intrinsic to his permeation is the rationale of a remarkable response to reproduction processes and his work’s resilience to imitations. The difference between the anonymously carved Parade and the eight signed lithographs lies not in the imitation process (both copies are accurate) but in the divergent needs of radically different clientele. The counter welcomes the passer-by who would enjoy the view and a glass of wine, and perhaps peruse exhibits before buying a few bottles to carry home. He would not be bothered with signatures, nor does the carved frieze bear one. It is simply part of the décor, an iconic label. The pavilion museum caters for the more inquisitive, who savour historical, cultural and artistic detail. Retzsch’s work answered both requirements. It lives on at the centre of an ample reproduction apparatus that made his icons widely known, just as it lent itself to an equally sizeable imitation craze that led to duplicates, simulations, and even ersatz clones. This chapter considers both processes, while it also shows how genuine interpretations may occur within repetition. It particularly aims at discussing the implications of extensive and intensive iconography.
7.1 Loose Leaves
No mention has been made—notes Atkins—of the countless ways in which Retzsch’s plates were employed singly or in small numbers to illustrate anything connected with the Faust legend. His designs were copied in the numerous almanacs, which circulated widely among the public. They were sold as separate sheets with a quotation from Faust to illustrate the scene. They were lithographed, and reproduced accurately and inaccurately in various countries. The frescoes in Auerbach’s Keller were modelled on Retzsch’s drawings, which have in turn been used for menus and other practical purposes. New editions of the old Faustbuch have been decorated with Retzsch’s work.2
She attempted no excursus into such diffuse material, whose every issue I do not undertake either, but rather indicate dominant tendencies in cultural terms.
Reprocessing Retzsch images may be broadly addressed through the productive metaphor of fliegende Blätter (loose or scattered leaves), a significant yet undervalued extension of a well-known trend, the interpretation of key literary texts in outline. I do not refer here to the popular humoristic magazine published 1845–1944 in Munich, but to the meaningful expansion and agency of Retzsch’s twenty-six prints. These harnessed both prototype and duplicate, original and reproduction, genuine article and ersatz print. They launched the 1808 Faust and instituted it as a major work by introducing it in the honoured pantheon instituted by Flaxman’s outlines after Homer, Aeschylus, Hesiod, and Dante.
Replication and circulation marked them genuinely. As an engraved series, the set thrived on multiplication, spread swiftly, and was much in demand. Novel processes prevalent in the nineteenth century (lithography, wood and steel engraving, later photomechanical reproduction) made of it insert or interleaved plates, in-text images, standalone prints or colour replicas. By not even signing them, the artist himself hardly opposed their multifarious fortunes. Their modest price and availability made them ready cut-and-paste material, as Dibdin early shows. They were no longer outlines according to August Wilhelm Schlegel’s aesthetic and poetic definition, inciting the reader’s imagination to complete the picture. In their many metamorphoses, they became unpretentious contours: they sketched for an untried eye, pictured, and summed up Faust, offering a synoptic digest variously reinterpreted.
Retzsch’s loose leaves are twofold: free-standing prints based on previous templates; and prints copied, remediated, yet productively imitated as well.
A good example of their free-standing mobile agency is Retzsch’s own involvement in Goethe’s Ausgabe letzter Hand (AlH), published 1827–30 by Cotta without illustrations. Meant as Goethe’s legacy to the nation, hallowing him as a classic author, the edition exercised the power of words only, a founding textual monument as Andrew Piper has shown.3 Yet, Friedrich Fleischer visually trailed Cotta’s undertaking 1828–34, offering a total of fifty-six prints for extra-illustration of the memorable edition in two formats and two successive issues under the title Kupfersammlung zu Goethes sämmtlichen Werken (Collection of Copper Prints for Goethe’s Collected Works). As emblematic interpretations per title, these were frontispieces by a variety of artists. A showcase of the period’s visual culture, they exemplify popular styles in literary illustration around 1830.4 Within the same print artefact, opposite aims met: the extra-illustrated tomes established text yet grangerized it, instituted for all yet personalized it, standardized and singled out, textually coalesced and visually teased, all the while calling on the imagination.
As Fleischer’s pet artist at the time, Retzsch is the second issue’s champion with thirteen plates. Contrary to his artistic principles, but due to workload and his eye complaint in those years, the task of engraving was not done by him, but a third party. His prints are literally fliegende Blätter: unconnected yet assorted sheets cut by another, commercialised in unbound sets, they invited readers to ornate their Cotta exemplars with bespoke visual material.
As if fostering what would be a much-loved scene with the public, Retzsch chose Martha’s garden for the Faust frontispiece. As noted, two of his surviving drawings (one in pencil, the other in ink) also revolve around this episode, again twice rendered in his printed Faust I set: first in 1816, in plate 14 centred on the plucked daisy (cf. Fig. 10.3), then, in plate 19 of the 1834 enlarged edition with Faust handing Gretchen the potion phial (cf. Fig. 7.1). The 1829 AlH frontispiece repeats the phial instant, in historical costume with differences: there is no eavesdropper Mephistopheles, and the plate, stipple-engraved by [Friedrich] Wagner, is a close-up of Faust and Gretchen on the bench (cf. Fig. 7.2). A few border details of lush foliage reveal their blossoming desire and longing for each other, in contrast with imminent tragedy. Faust hands the potion that will lull Gretchen’s mother to sleep, granting them an hour of amorous intercourse, yet the mother’s sleep will be eternal.5 Posture and clothing hint at lovemaking as Waltraud Maierhofer notes of Gretchen: “She holds her other hand parallel to the noticeable fold of her dress that marks her lap. A strand of her hair pinned up Biedermeier-fashion has already come loose and, like the broad neckline, indicates her willingness, in contradiction with her facial expression.” As for Faust, he “looks youthful and confidence-inspiring but in both engravings the tight stockings and the almost bare legs with a distinctive flap emphasize his male sexuality, underlined by the boldly towering hat feather.”6 No longer a middle-class backyard, the lovers’ niche has also been upgraded. The detail better matches the technique: stipple engraving (emulating paintings) was deemed nobler than plain outline. Fleischer’s aesthetic and technical choices were in subtle accord with Cotta establishing a textual Goethe monument.
Moritz Retzsch, Faust and Gretchen on a bench with eavesdropper Mephistopheles, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust, erster Theil. Gezeichnet von Moritz Retzsch. Von dem Verfasser selbst retouchirt und mit einigen neuen Platten vermehrt (Stuttgart & Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1834), insert pl. 19
Courtesy HAAB, F 3478, Weimar
Moritz Retzsch, Faust and Gretchen on a bench, stipple engraved by [Friedrich] Wagner, Kupfersammlung zu Göthe’s sämmtlichen Werken in vierzig Blättern (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1829–34), plate meant for vol. 12 of the Ausgabe letzter Hand
Courtesy HAAB, F 3469, Weimar
This double of Retzsch’s own production suggests replication as integral to his practice. In parallel, it is a typifying device, extracting characteristic traits of the main characters and condensing them. Repetition and epitome prepare Retzsch’s prints for wider circulation. The print flow would again single out the garden scene as a choice moment with template-like value. Proof comes again from Retzsch himself as plate 19 from his engraved set after Schiller’s Song of the Bell in 1833 (cf. Fig. 7.3a). The outline pictures another amorous couple on a bench under a tree, in verdant yet placated nature, lifting their eyes to the sky and a diaphanous crescent moon after Schiller’s lines 74–75: “The eye sees the heavens open | The heart falls silent in bliss” (Das Auge sieht den Himmel offen; | Es schweigt das Herz in Seligkeit). Its exemplary quality is confirmed by The German Lovers, the new title it acquired in a repurposed version, re-engraved by Charles Heath and published in The Keepsake for 1835 with a poem by Lord Pierrepont, Viscount Newark (cf. Fig. 7.3b). By focusing on the lovers, lowering the moon, and turning the light atmosphere into a quiet nocturne, Heath suffused Retzsch’s image with romantic emotion and brought forward typical characters, dialoguing as Bertha and Albert in Newark’s poem. Independently from Schiller’s Bell, poem and print (also extant as standalone) gained emblematic value for British readers. Several pictures by Retzsch held similar archetypal value that would come forward under appropriate treatment.
Moritz Retzsch, Umrisse zu Schiller’s Lied von der Glocke: nebst Andeutungen von Moritz Retzsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1833), pl. 19
Courtesy HAAB, Bh 66, Weimar
Charles Heath, The German Lovers, engraved after Moritz Retzsch, 22 × 15.2 cm, in The Keepsake for 1835, ed. by Frederic Mansel Reynolds (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman; Paris: Rittner and Goupil; Berlin: A. Asher, 1835), insert plate between pp. 168–69
NYPL, New York
We may justly see the above as exceptional, even though based on circulation, and boosting in turn distribution and trade abroad. It is indeed but an instance. Far more frequently, Retzsch’s loose leaves do not originate from himself. They were leaves detached and lifted, sheets reworked, and plates remediated by many another. They may be free-standing or enter editions; gather meaning per user category; subsist as flying separate pages; autograph duplicates; etc. They form a vast catalogue of Retzsch copies testifying to his long-lasting influence not only on imitated scenes and motifs, but also on style, treatment and format in well-known artists’ work.
7.2 Copies, Copies, Copies …
Copies of Retzsch’s outlines cover several categories. First and foremost, they were part and parcel of the European book trade and print selling industry, hitherto investigated in detail through mainly three hubs in print circulation, Britain, France and the German States, themselves spearheading other markets (Belgium, Polish-speaking Lithuania, the Netherlands, etc.). Their agency nurtures variability and embraces a large scale of print genres as they shape and respond to diverse readers’ uses. The core phenomenon is the prints’ flexibility, resilience and adaptability. In this context, Retzsch copies emerge as driven by the wave of European print culture and one of the forces driving it.
Second, they form a vast ensemble of outline copies drawn by various hands in diverse shapes: complete scenes whether standalone or in series; imitations re-worked in other techniques (watercolours, oils); groups detached or details re-ordered; incidents modified in detail or inserted to other scenes. Most are anonymous but not always. Interpretation largely depends on tell-tales of use inferred by material condition, although assumptions are not always guesses. Clusters are loose but intriguingly arresting because of their extensive range and alleged applications.
Demand for copies may stem from any of the following: safeguarding and conservancy, as when Retzsch traces in pencil his three extra plates from the 1834 enlarged Faust; intense interest in the outline technique and probing Faust stock, as in Delacroix’s freehand replicas (cf. Fig. 6.1a–b to 6.3); as drill doubles for draughtsmen to train their hand in contour (the English and French press encouraged artists to do so); enthusiasts’ hunt for Retzsch figures for personal adornment of walls or portfolios; collectors’ harvest of original piecemeal material bound together; industrial applications responding to the demand for transfer figures onto other surfaces and materials; ultimately the phenomenon known as remediation of an artwork, that is, transformed and reinterpreted through a different medium. Creative sketching may be coupled with copying and trigger re-appropriation, as in the case of Ronald Ross. Copying then turns approval, responding to aesthetic and emotional undercurrents of desire. When springing from individual incentive, it discloses inclination, preference, even predilection. More than a wish to retrace the play’s touching heroine, to possess her by one’s own hand, or catch the villain’s wily expressions and tortuous silhouette, it signals a personal ritual of intimate adoption—perhaps indeed, a Faust staging in the inner playhouse of one’s own heart.
The Knittlingen Faust-Archiv has a copy of plate 13 (Mephistopheles at Martha’s with Margaret present) completed in great detail after the original and dated 1948. On the back, another (undated) copy of Gretchen pondering in her bedroom has been haphazardly added. Frankfurt’s Goethe-Museum collection is even richer. Four sheets disclose replicas of a diverse kind, allowing for speculation on a range of practices. One of them is a highly finished ink drawing of Faust and Gretchen kissing, lifted from Retzsch’s plate 15, with a wealth of staged details (cf. Fig. 7.4). The artist has reworked all timber specifics (wall panelling, soffit, door planks), deepened the vista into the garden through the window, and added a small flowerpot on the windowsill. He has constrained the observer’s view between side-wings of decaying walls, highlighting the intensity of the kiss, and altered Mephistopheles’s and Martha’s prying expressions. Dimensions (13.8 × 16.9 cm) show that he respected height to one millimetre’s difference but enlarged width by ten to accommodate his extra effect. Albeit concealing the name, the signature “G. R. 1822” inscribed on a little shield at lower left begs authorship and authenticity. Further, at the FDH, a pencilled sheet of tracing paper groups several instances from four arresting scenes of Gretchen: a) thoughtful in her chamber (traced almost complete); b) bejewelled by Martha; c) admiring the necklace; and d) conspicuously absent (with sundry figures copied from the cathedral print) (Fig. 7.5). The duplicate is from the original etchings. The sheet has been turned in all directions to lift as many figures as possible. Now creased and crumpled with numerous little dots and holes, it has probably been pinned, re-applied repeatedly, and used on both sides to borrow or transfer several figures, not just from Faust. Three details on the recto are further picked from Retzsch’s 1833 compositions after Schiller’s Song of the Bell (arm and hand details from the Hours’ dance in pl. 1, and the central male figure from pl. 2). Like other replicas after or by Retzsch, it has been pasted down. Any revealing particulars on the verso are for the moment beyond reach.
Faust and Gretchen kissing, signed and dated “G. R. 1822,” ink drawing lifted from Moritz Retzsch’s pl. 15, 38 × 16.9 cm
FDH, Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, III-10749, Frankfurt
Sheet of tracing paper with pencil copies of four Gretchen scenes and other outlines after Moritz Retzsch, n.d., 30 × 21.2 cm
FDH, Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, VIIId-kI, no. 14847, Frankfurt
Lastly, two sheets of thicker paper, signed “ar 1830,” carry smaller grouped pen-and-ink figures, pinched from Retzsch, distinctly isolated, clearly altered, and marshalled like templates for toy theatre figures. Due to their diminutive size and changes, they are believed to be “traced designs from the French 1829 edition or another,” i.e., the prints re-engraved by Trueb and Branche for Audot. Kennerley (published by Bulcock) could also be a candidate. Emulating Retzsch was clearly not limited to the German States or the original prints, but pursued with zest abroad or after copies once or twice removed. Both sheets were previously mounted, possibly for interior decoration—another form of cherishing with a distinctly social dimension. In both, the layout roughly follows the Faust intrigue, and the somewhat wooden style aims at a growing intensity: standalone figures (mostly on one sheet) recede to an array of dramatized group events (on the other). Two exciting items from the Kippenberg Collection, a finished replica and its draft, also point at templates for the stage. The finalized pen drawing, distinctly after Retzsch, bears a long caption in French, close to the stage directions in “The Witch’s Kitchen,” allegedly for a theatre performance.
The gem of such loot is a half-cloth landscape volume of sundry autograph material now in Weimar. Besides Retzsch’s very letters testifying to his regular deliveries to Kummer from 21 January 1811 and completion of the task on 8 April 1812, its miscellaneous contents include a cloned set of all 26 outlines on tracing paper. They strictly abide by the dimensions of the original but for a millimetre’s difference in very limited cases and respect original order (the cathedral scene is pl. 18). Occasionally they slightly modify characters’ expressions. A hand-drawn title-page in overformal black and red Gothic script, signed “R. Jäger 1928,” is a later addition, possibly added on binding. This has obfuscated the primary date, place and signature, which feature however at the end of the introduction to the cloned plates, which fully reproduces by hand the original Cotta letterpress brochure (Huber’s preface and Faust excerpts) in regular Gothic script. Obviously, no pains were spared to replicate as accurately as possible the printed Cotta prototype, yet hand-written (text) and retraced (images). Dated “Muskau 3rd February 1836,” the textual parts were noticeably completed after the plates, giving them pride of place. These are also dated lower centre of the first, “Muskau 21 January 36,” and lettered “Retsch” on the left and “John” on the right. The same holograph “John” appears on yet another plate (Mephistopheles at Martha’s, pl. 13), the last in fact completed. Collation of dates substantiates that they were copied in piecemeal order from 21 January to 3 February [18]36 with brief breaks. A carefully posited “J” also marks plate 2 to ascertain authorship, a single incidence that validates the unknown copyist’s confirmed production and extreme discretion, given that the entire set is but a duplicate.
Gerhard Stumme, who acquired this in 1936, oddly overlooks such tell-tale detail and notes that the copy’s author is unidentified.7 A potential accreditation might be the Polish-Austrian printmaker and etcher Friedrich John (1769–1843). Active over borders in diverse places and contexts, John distinguished himself by his many engravings after well-known master painters, conspicuous personalities’ portraits, or other artists’ drawings for various illustrated editions.8 Inter alia, he cut Johann Heinrich Ramberg’s drawings and Veit Hans Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s designs for Wieland’s and Klopstock’s deluxe Works (Leipzig, Göschen), and also worked for Cotta.9 John is of course mainly recognized for stipple engraving and portraiture, and it may seem odd to attribute outline technique to him. He had retired from his artistic occupations in 1832 to today’s Slovenia. His autograph signature at the end of a 22 December 1824 letter from Vienna does not match the carefully stylized moniker in the re-traced Muskau prints, although an artist’s signature in correspondence may differ from his authenticating sign on a drawing or painting. Yet the “John” signature, the Muskau provenance, today Bad Muskau, on the border of Germany and Poland, as well as his many relations within aristocratic circles, for whom he diligently copied, still plead for a possible ascription.10 Last, but not least, he seems to have engraved Retzsch’s portrait.11
Whatever the case, more significantly than any precise attribution to a documented artistic hand, the cloned object speaks of cultural trajectory. It originates from an artistically important borderland, typically known for its park, today a Unesco-classified World Heritage Site, created to the design of renowned landscape gardener, traveller and writer Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871) and centred on his princely residence. Pückler-Muskau had seen one of Radziwill’s Faust performances in Berlin, and also enjoyed the Porte-Saint-Martin Faust in Paris, as record his profuse memoirs. In an unpublished 17 April 1817 letter to an unidentified correspondent, who is clearly J. F. Cotta, he inquires about purchasing original Faust drawings from Retzsch.12 The carefully made replica could be related either to him, his family, or his wider circle. Reproducing by hand the initial Cotta folder (down to the faulty spelling of the artist’s name—“Retsch” after the original, rather than “Retzsch”) at a time (1836) when the market was flooded by Georg von Cotta’s industrialized albums (whose 1834 Faust I set had been extended from 26 to 29 plates) signals the wish to revert to an archetype, a unique hand-made item after an original source, since superseded by machine-produced contraptions. It points to the nostalgia of an art enthusiast or refined upper-crust circles with the means to commission both manuscript introduction and outline replicas against remuneration. At an unknown date, autograph letters by Retzsch (the latest is dated 4 October 1846) joined the replica drawings-cum-manuscript-introduction, and an unfathomable “R. Jäger” (given the name’s frequency in German) contrived the 1928 title-page. This individual may have been a collector or a scribe working to order. It is likely the tome was bound at this date, given the binding’s average quality. Had they ever wished to have them bound, the original patrons would have gone for top-notch garbing of the hand-copied contents. By 1928 indeed, the precious tome had entered collectors’ orbit: it belonged to Hans Kasten’s Bremen collection in 192913 before entering Gerhard Stumme’s vast assortment in 1936, whence it reached Weimar’s HAAB.
Replica making would take us even further. “The copies of the set are innumerable inland and abroad,” states Wolfgang Wegner, who groups several indiscriminately: lampooning or not, standalone or in sequence, including second-hand bibliographical references.14 Retzsch copies in various techniques still crop up in contemporary auctions.15
Let us however turn to the noteworthy re-appropriation of two Retzsch prints by Ronald Ross (1857–1932), a tropical medicine specialist and 1902 Nobel-prize winner for discovering the role of the Anopheles mosquito in malaria transmission. Anopheles in ancient Greek first means unprofitable, useless, and second hurtful, prejudicial. The first designation ironically fits like a glove Ross’s own fate, whose ambition to become an artist had been thwarted by his father, but whose Nachlaß archive and Memoirs testify to his vital interest in Byronic and Faustian literature. Byron’s Manfred, frequently compared in scholarship to Goethe’s Faust, had been his unyielding father’s favourite text before becoming his own. Taken with blowpipe chemistry in his youth, and dissecting mosquito after mosquito in India, himself contracting malaria in 1897, it is no coincidence that scientist Ross had turned to Goethe’s alchemic and ultimately God-driven scientist and researcher Faust. As a teenager he had also avidly read Elizabethan tragedies (including Marlowe’s hell-condemned hero in Faustus).16 His interest in Goethe’s Faust dates well earlier than his seminal malaria discovery, as revealed by a sketchbook inscribed on the endpaper “R. Ross | September 10th. | 1872,” and entitled “Sketches in Isle of Wight etc.” It had already been variously used from 1870, to judge by the inscription “Walking tour through Isle of Wight with Gerald Lowder? in 1870,” a couple of 1881 entries, and neat additional 1920 ink tags.17
Ink lettering (later added to the endpaper) runs “Figures copied from Retsch’s Outlines of Faust,” a title defying identification. It figures once on a Murton binding, but the wording may have been lifted from “Retsch’s Series of Twenty-Six Outlines” (Boosey, 1820).18 It is certainly based on Moses’s copies, as show attenuations and corrections, yet combined with an original, since one drawing features codpieces. Three (pencilled or more finished) Faust compositions seem to result from the friendly Isle of Wight hike according to a brief description ending “We have had plenty of time for sketching.” These are however difficult to date. A pencilled 1870 would correspond to Ross’s puberty, while on the same page the inked 1920, a full half-century later, records his mature 63 years. All three compositions show male figures, in obvious self-identification and vibrant or spirited interactions with the models.
In copying Faust rebelling against Mephistopheles from plate 23 (“A Gloomy Day. Open Field”), Ross has reinforced the outline’s profile, stripping Faust of his floating short cloak, and prolonged his outstretched arm by a sword, as if the blade now carried his vocal passion. The other two are jubilant, even jokey, doubtless reflecting the tour’s jovial atmosphere. Faust and Mephistopheles, lifted from the draught-drinking scene in the witch’s kitchen (pl. 7), smoke pipes (cf. Fig. 7.6). It is unclear what Faust holds in his raised hand (the witch has evaporated). The last, and most interesting, oddly identified by Oxford art historian Martin Kemp as “Faust sits brooding in a landscape, while an owl, a symbol of night, hovers nearby,”19 pictures rather Mephistopheles (cf. Fig. 7.7), seated comfortably before the witch’s blazing hearth, fire fan in hand from Retzsch’s plate 6. Ross has banished the trappings of witchery and set him in a shorescape, perhaps after nature. The owl, winging towards him in determination, replaces the avian that originally marched facetiously along the beldam’s mantelpiece or peered from it to ogle events in dismay. Kemp, nebulously influenced by Faust-lore, claims dark overtones that Ross’s ambiguity hardly supports. His ironic Mephistopheles’s smile, taking in the landscape, is hard to interpret with certainty and his witty transformation of the stunned night bird into live airborne fowl may simply remodel sombre deathly details according to ancient iconic symbols of virility. Copying Retzsch rarely was a servile task, and toadying to the model included a fair part of (occasionally tongue-in-cheek) bemusement.
(top) Ronald Ross, Faust and Mephistopheles smoking pipes, drawing lifted from Moritz Retzsch’s pl. 7. From Ross landscape sketchbook in half leather, post 1872, 13.2 × 25.8 cm; (bottom) Moritz Retzsch, In the witch’s kitchen, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust gezeichnet von Retsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1816), pl. 7
Courtesy LSHTM, GB 0809/Ross/158, © Ross Family / LSHTM, and: Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
(top) Ronald Ross, Mephistopheles sitting in a landscape, figure lifted from Moritz Retzsch’s pl. 6. From Ross landscape sketchbook in half leather, post 1872, 13.2 × 25.8 cm; (bottom) Moritz Retzsch, The witch’s kitchen, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust gezeichnet von Retsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1816), pl. 6
Courtesy LSHTM, GB 0809/Ross/158, © Ross Family / LSHTM, and: Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
7.3 Bowdlerizing
A third category includes a wide range of Retzsch copies of special scenes, re-purposed, and further spawned through media culture or home decorations. Amending Retzsch by abridging, correcting, editing and extra-embellishing his compositions to please bourgeois taste inevitably spurred his European fame. For their emotional charge, two choice scenes fell victim to such undertakings: the garden with Gretchen plucking the daisy, and the lovers kissing. As 1841 lithographs by F. A. and F. Zimmermann (presumably the same artist), they were printed and published by Dresden’s Eduard Pietzsch and Company in imperial folio and similar dimensions.20 In both, Gretchen echoes fervent lines from Faust. First of amorous qualm in “He loves me—he loves me not” (Er liebt mich—liebt mich nicht, F 3181), then yielding to passion in “Dearest of men, I love thee from my heart!” (Bester Mann! Von Herzen lieb’ich Dich!, F 3206), as she readily returns his kiss. The capital D in Dich reflects social disparity, equally stressed by Gretchen’s blonde and white-gowned innocent beauty. In both, priority of feeling works to the expense of the play’s metaphysics. Concurrently, Gretchen’s second statement is piquant, even bold, for a young girl expected to conform to more rigid behaviour. It moves the viewer, excites her or his expectations, and corrects the first line’s latent mawkishness with zest. The same print pars desire with prowling danger, embodied by a lurking Mephistopheles. Printsellers’ and publishers’ acute market intelligence mutually promoted both, in an array of techniques and media inland and abroad.
Their expansive use had premièred foremost in Britain with the two 1820 batches of Moses’s copies after Retzsch, each of 13 plates, published by Boosey and Sons and printsellers Rodwell and Martin. Instead of releasing plates 1 to 13 on 1 June 1820, concluding the sequence with “Mephistopheles informs Martha of her husband’s death,” Boosey and Co shrewdly distinguished “The Kiss” (pl. 15). Extricated and specially offered as an enticing prompt, it came out to sensational effect with plates 1–12, just after “Margaret shews her treasures to Martha.” For readers unfamiliar with Faust, it looked as if barging into the maiden’s room, contemplating her bed with raised drapes (pl. 10), and the devil’s jewels (pl. 11 & 12), had all pushed chaste Margaret into Faust’s arms. More would come, but smitten customers need purchase the second batch a month yon. The set appointment on 1 July disclosed an ominous pander’s scene, Mephistopheles stooping to Martha’s ear (suggesting a second troth) afore bejewelled Margaret (pl. 13, cf. Fig. 2.25), directly followed by the daisy-plucking garden episode. Both already enjoyed an English title. Plate 15 had been cautiously named “Margaret meets Faust in the Summer House,” at times simply “Embrace,” but rapidly renamed “The Kiss,” and plate 14 “The Decision of the Flower,” a title that would stick. Even today, as web-surfer’s keyword, it corresponds to girls holding an oversize yellow daisy and suggestively soft-eyeing the viewer. In the interleaved version of Boosey’s 1821 edition, “The Kiss” was further enhanced museum fashion by blank sheets on either side.
Painter and book illustrator John Masey Wright (1777–1866) reworked both plates “after the original by Retzsch” according to the imprint, more credibly after Moses’s copies. In the summerhouse, Moses had cautiously tempered the bulging “unmentionables” flaunting Faust’s desire bang in the middle of the page. Wright followed on, additionally giving Margaret a fair, purer, yet unrestricted surrender of self to her lover (Fig. 7.8). Similarly, in the garden, Wright’s blond Gretchen rapt in the flower took on a more suave and gentle look, again in white gown, confidently leaning against Faust, as if nothing else mattered in the world (Fig. 7.9). Respectively engraved by W. Humphreys (or Humphrys) and Charles Heath for the flourishing keepsake market, both also featured as standalone prints copyrighted by Hurst, Robinson and Co. in London. Indeed, in 1825 and 1826, these publishers’ Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, edited by Alaric A. Watts, a master of the genre, offered both prints facing apposite verse. The garden instant inaugurated the new publication as frontispiece with a delicate poem by L. E. L. after the etching’s title.21 This was a publisher’s choice, not Watts’s.22 A year later, the summerhouse scene with “The First Kiss: A Poetical Sketch,” Watts’s own lengthy composition with Mephistopheles encroaching as any man’s foe, became the keepsake’s allegorical and moralizing finale.23 Hurst, Robinson and Co. exulted: both volumes sold like hot cakes. The first (6,000 copies) was extolled in fourteen press reviews, whose superlative excerpts were reprinted at the end of the second volume. Watts described in a “Postscript” following its success how he had been showered with submissions, and announced two of his own forthcoming collections, sustained by yet another assortment of gushing praise to his talents. Hidden under bashful initials, L. E. L., was Letitia Elizabeth Landon, whose poetry collections, The Troubadour and The Improvisatrice, had respectively been through three and six editions by 1826. The Literary Gazette, cheering The Troubadour, thought her “the greatest name in the annals of elegant and imaginative female literature, whether of modern or ancient times,” and added that The Improvisatrice marked “an era in our country’s bright style of female literary fame.”24 Detached, transformed, and versified into poignant scenes for (mainly female) sensibilities, Retzsch’s plates, numerously replicated, had integrated gift-book culture. Goethe had penetrated the foreign market for keepsake literature, a thriving industry of the time.
John Massey Wright after Moritz Retzsch, The Kiss, engraved by W. Humphreys, in The Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, ed. Alaric A. Watts (London: Hurst, Robinson Co., 1826), insert plate between pp. 280–81
BnF, Z-33733, Paris
John Massey Wright after Moritz Retzsch, The Decision of the Flower, engraved by Charles Heath, used as frontispiece in The Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, ed. Alaric A. Watts (London: Hurst, Robinson Co., 1825)
BnF, Z-33732, Paris
Britain was not unique in such undertakings. Further variation ensued. In France, Édouard Robert, a deaf and mute lithographer, also reworked both scenes with French titles echoing the English ones (La Décision de la fleur, Le Baiser) for lithographer and printseller E. Ardit, who commercialized them as twinned prints. He specified “d’après Restech,” yet another bizarre francization of Retzsch’s Magyar name, attributable to Robert’s handicap.25 Robert had produced for Charles Motte a collection of colourful Turkish army costumes in 1828, and Achille Devéria was one of his friends. Precisely, in the “Goethe” volume from Devéria’s eclectic visual encyclopaedia, a precious period iconographic repertoire, several prints attest Retzsch’s impact, including Robert’s copies. The lithograph of a contrapuntal garden composition by Alexandre Colin (1798–1875) sports Faust and Margaret in medievalist attire, loyal to “troubadour style” and an already antiquated romantic agenda (cf. Fig. 7.10), but also with facetious details (Faust’s long blade amusingly and unnaturally dangles between his legs, a hook-nosed horned creature leers from a corner urn). It can be identified as plate 6 from Album composé et dessiné sur pierre by Colin issued in 1829, in full Parisian Faust craze, with the inevitable text quote serving as caption. A further print pictured Valentine dying. Colin, a close friend of Delacroix and Bonington, was well known to the Devéria brothers from their student years. He had spent several months of 1825 in London (according to other sources, accompanying Delacroix during his trip) and was certainly acquainted with the local craze for Retzsch prints. Less convincingly, painter-lithographer Nicolas Maurin (1799–1850), in an opulent flowery frame intertwined with snakes, snubs any salutary irony with an over-decorous Margaret idiotically eyeing Faust to whom she offers the devastated flower but for one petal—his love pledge (cf. Fig. 7.11). One of twelve, dated 1830 by the BnF, it heralds typical lower middle-class over-romanticizing, as if to correct the spicy croquis de mœurs, for which Maurin is cited by Baudelaire among the painters of modern life under the Bourbon Restoration.
Alexandre Colin, Faust and Margaret in the garden in troubadour style, lithographic print cut out and mounted by Achille Devéria in his Faust compendium
BnF Est., Tb-55 (C)-Pet. fol., Paris
Nicolas Maurin, Marguerite consulte une fleur pour savoir si elle est aimée de Faust, lithographic print cut out and mounted by Achille Devéria in his Faust compendium
BnF Est., Tb-55 (C)-Pet. fol., Paris
In the second part of Devéria’s compilation, which extra-illustrates the Motte-Sautelet dismantled folio of 1828, Édouard Robert’s reverse lithographic version, with tenderer protagonists and a spooky antithetic couple in the gathering evening darkness, has been mounted opposite the garden passage (cf. Fig. 7.12). Comparison between these versions powerfully proves how French romantic artists’ keen understanding of Faust’s complex messages gradually gives way to empty medievalism and galloping soppiness. Such European expansion heralds the spread of Retzsch’s twinned scenes in the German lands in the late 1830s and early 1840s, this time developing rather patriotic overtones.
Édouard Robert, La Décision de la fleur, reverse lithographic print after Moritz Retzsch, cut out and mounted by Achille Devéria in his Faust compendium
BnF Est., Tb-55 (C)-Pet.fol., Paris
Nagler lists “Faust und Gretchen” as “two lithographs by H. F. Grünewald and C. Müller” in large oblong folio format, then, “the same, lith. by F. Zimmermann” in oblong folio.26 In reality, their formats and framing make for several versions, while Nagler’s single, impenetrably loose title doubtless camouflages two different scenes. In his 1899 exhibition catalogue, Tille imparts their titles as “after Retzsch.”27
Of those inspected, “He loves me—loves me not” corresponds to three distinct, reframed and repurposed lithographed versions. Two of them are by F[riedrich] A[ugust] Zimmermann (1805–76) and Karl Müller (1807–79). Based respectively in Dresden and nearby Meissen, the artists prepared these prints for the Dresden firm of Eduard Pietzsch and Co. Interestingly, at the Dresden Academy, Zimmermann had “pushed himself” into Ferdinand Hartmann’s class, Retzsch’s friend and protector, before turning to porcelain painting as a potboiler and assiduously producing lithographs, mainly portraits, for the Dresden periodical Saxonia from 1834 to 1841.28 Karl Müller is not to be confused with Carl Müller (1818–93), later close to the Nazarenes and the Düsseldorf Association for the diffusion of religious images (Verein zur Verbreitung religiöser Bilder).29 Also a former student of the Dresden Academy, he tirelessly worked for the Meissen porcelain factory where he was promoted chief painter from 1860. The third lithograph with the imprint “executed and lithographed by H[einrich] Ferd[inand] Grünewald,” was made in Grünewald’s own Dresden lithography studio according to the imprint, either in competition or in association with Müller. Even more interestingly, Grünewald, painter and lithographer (1802–49), studied from 1822 at the Dresden Academy under Retzsch himself, executed large oil versions of Retzsch’s compositions after Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare, brought out lithographs after Horace Vernet and Jean-Antoine Gros with the printer Ludwig Theodor Zöllner (see below), and is reported to have made “with Karl Müller two images after Retzsch (Faust and Gretchen).”30 All three versions date from the early 1840s (as mentioned, Hirschberg dates both “Faust and Gretchen” scenes 1841).
Twenty-five years after the Cotta original, remediated lithographic reproduction had then originated, from Retzsch’s very hometown, in a technology catering for long print runs. Zimmermann’s print subsists in at least four variants, given inking, size, printing, framing, conditioning, and other technical details, while Müller’s is in at least two formats. All three are close-ups, centred foreground hip-high on Margaret and Faust, with Martha and Mephistopheles passing background left (cf. Fig. 7.13 to 7.15). Frames are elaborate, double or treble, highlighting the scene, and marshalled by prompts within the image. Margaret is always given an elaborate white dress with either embroidered cuffs or gigot sleeves and mid-arm puffs, and an amply pleated full skirt, which converts her youthful slender figure into that of a latent matron. In both Pietzsch versions, a decorative sash or girdle enhances her ample lap, promising that her capable flanks will bear the nation-to-be a brood. Her face is fuller and rounder, her intricate hairstyle loosens blond curls over the shoulders. Her expression, mild and serene (Zimmermann), earns large Madonna-like features and a vague smile (Müller), or a remote angelical aspect (Grünewald). Contrasting and complementing her mellow beauty, Faust in terrific dark attire at her side sports a cavalier’s sober but costly costume with a short mantle under a spectacular plumed hat. Of his daunting blade, concealed by reframing, only an elaborate hilt remains, an opulent jewel rather than a weapon, matching his cape’s chain. His ample locks, sideburns and stylish moustache mirror any handsome young man’s return from the wars to happily live with his beloved in an Eden-like garden. A paradise with parasites however, since the devil’s eye flashes and burns in the background, unrelentingly ogling the lovers. Whatever the treatment of the garden (realistically urban in Grünewald, lusher in Müller, blurred and hazy in Zimmermann, as if from a faraway legendary past), the devil’s pupil lights up, and his sword’s hilt portentously matches Faust’s in anticipation of Valentine’s doom.
Friedrich August Zimmermann after Moritz Retzsch, Scene from Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen: “He loves me, he loves me not,” lithograph, n.d., 35.5 × 49 cm, printed by G. Braunsdorf, published by Eduard Pietzsch and Co., Dresden
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5822 (1), Weimar
Karl Müller after Moritz Retzsch, Scene from Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen: “He loves me, he loves me not,” lithograph, n.d., 37.5 × 43.5 cm, printed by Carl Pohl and published by Eduard Pietsch [sic] and Co., Dresden
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5822 (4), Weimar
Heinrich Ferdinand Grünewald after Moritz Retzsch, Scene from Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen: “He loves me, he loves me not,” lithograph, n.d., 43 × 50 cm, printed in Grünewald’s establishment
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 8052 [a] (39), Weimar
By the 1830s and 1840s, when standalone prints swarmed the market, Goethe’s Faust had become a commonly shared story of pathos with German readers sorrowing for pure and comely Margaret. Identification processes strongly worked on public sensitivity and these images were for everyone as Christa Pieske has amply shown in Bilder für Jedermann (1988). Households “lived with images,” walls were covered in them, illustrated magazines distributed them as premium samples, art societies gave their members costly first-class prints as annual gifts, and travelling sellers varied routes to spread, circulate and deliver prints to secluded spots. The three garden scene lithographs belong to the lower-grade wares of such implementation. Pieske’s valuable roll of art publishers lists neither Pietzsch’s Dresden firm nor the lithographers or printers concerned, since it mostly covers the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The phenomenon, object of her seminal study, can be antedated by ten years thanks to these prints that document an extensive use of Goethe’s Faust as widespread reference. The garden scene quickly typified consumer goods: it decorated for instance porcelain pipe bowls (see Chapter 12) or became a picture postcard in the 1870s, when the ever-expanding German card industry adopted illustrated versions.
Such is an embossed specimen with gilt impression (Goldtiefdruck) recapping the garden scene, now in Knittlingen (Fig. 7.16). Faust in a cavalier’s brown doublet with slashed and puffed sleeves, breeches to match, and knee-high white stockings, hat in hand, stands as if proposing to an azure-gowned Gretchen leisurely seated on a bench. Not by chance, instead of Martha’s, we now see the devil’s back (his fiery look has disappeared). Her aged profile, as worried matchmaker, casts a spying glance over the youthful couple and the outcome. The front caption in German unmistakably identifies the very Faust episode, yet the commercials on the back are in fourteen European languages.31 That of the Universal Post Union, established 1874 by the Bern Treaty, testifies on the reverse in three languages to a worldwide postal system, analogous to the potential commercialization of such a card. By 1874 then, the garden episode was common currency across Europe, if not the world. A staple of Retzsch copies had fed its spreading. The postcard’s message, from her Dorfen mother (50 km to the east) to Theres Moshofer, cook to Baroness von Schacky in Munich’s central Türkenstraße 31, is revelatory. Sublimating the scene’s potency, the mother had chosen the image to write “One hears that the Lenz girl is getting married do not know more [to] write to you” (Man hört daß die Lenz-dirn heiratet wißen nicht mehr schreiben dir), no doubt wishing her daughter the same. The card may be dated [19]07 from the incomplete postmark. Far removed from Retzsch’s original, the postcard, typical of nineteenth-century remodelling, had been sent to the address of a noble household that had given Bavaria several public servants. It made ends of the social ladder meet at an address close to royal palaces, embassies and the Gallery of Old Masters (Alte Pinacothek), yet also the 1903-inaugurated Simplicissimus cabaret at Türkenstraße 57.
Unknown artist, embossed colour postcard after Goethe’s garden scene, posted [19]07, 14 × 9 cm
Courtesy Faust-Museum, Moosmann collection, Ill. 568, Knittlingen
7.4 A Kiss’s Exceptional Fortune
“The Kiss” met with an even wider fortune as it titillated viewers’ imagination in a still more intricate way. In order to fully capture its enticing pull, we need to view it with period sensibility, long before Hollywood kisses and deep embraces anesthetized our inner eye. To judge by his numerous preliminary drafts (see Chapter 2), Retzsch had spared no effort to capture the right atmosphere for one of the shortest and most tumultuous passages in Faust—eleven lines of curt responses, interjections, cries, yells, and outbursts, enlacing four characters (F 3205–16). The artist finally left aside playfulness, friskiness, yearning, fervour, annoyance, disgust, meddling, fear, apprehension, and prohibition, which end with Margaret at a loss, asking herself what Faust might find in her. Retzsch’s image retained fervour instead of commotion and confusion. Even when isolated, framed, revised, and mounted, it still works powerfully.
In the prototype, enraptured Margaret and passionate Faust ardently kiss in full embrace. Bareheaded Margaret features in neat attire, while Faust in short cape, plumed hat, and protuberant sword cuts a lordly, domineering figure drawing close his paramour (Fig. 7.17). Bosoms cling but limbs keep cautiously apart from the waist down, to stay decorum, a clever detail that fully displays Faust’s strong legs and robust thighs in a tight-fitting hose, his secret parts swelling with desire. The couple’s self-surrender to love speaks unambiguously of sex shortly to be consummated. Slightly off centre, they stand in a wood-panelled space overlooking a fully-grown garden (a transparent symbol of lush fertility), while the door, violently pushed inwards, yields to Mephistopheles and Martha. Love is spied and intruded upon with glee and guile as show Martha’s sly grin and Mephistopheles’s sharp look and raised brow. No end kissing meets with curt interruption. The display indiscernibly turns us, whether readers or spectators, into nosy trespassers. Our full viewing is indeed no different from the devil’s wild eyeing and the procuress’s door ramming. In British consciousness, De Quincey’s “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (London Magazine, October 1823) hovers inescapably over the scene. Even without that souvenir, our glare, riveted on the lovers—Retzsch tells us—might be different in intention, if not in deed, from the devil’s. Yet is it? We infringe privacy, and like it or not, become peeping Toms. If we ourselves violate the exclusiveness of a closeted affair, plate 15 throws it open to public view.
Moritz Retzsch, Faust and Gretchen kissing, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust gezeichnet von Retsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1816), pl. 15
Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
It is this plate that made Shelley almost swoon. His reaction reflects the exhilaration and tension that Retzsch’s vista could trigger at the time. What Shelley saw of course was Moses’s smoothed-out 1820 copy, republished in the 1821 Faustus, similar to most engraved and lithographed English, French, and American editions (but for the 1830 Giard one). Nevertheless remain the intimate setting, the passion, the unwelcome invasion, the prying, the prurience. In Shelley’s case, the print’s impact engaged his souvenir of reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and meshed with personal qualms for forsaking wife Harriet, as Timothy Webb has subtly suggested.32 One exemplar of Lumley’s 1832 edition (the first to include Shelley’s translations next to Boosey’s Faust) strangely mirrors his troubled feelings: the kiss plate is elected frontispiece (cf. Fig. 5.13), as if the poet’s vivid sensibility had dictated the volume’s structure at the binder’s. It is unfortunately impossible to attribute.33 More widely than this unique case, publishing evidence shows that men of the trade and readers alike felt the kiss’s pull on all accounts, and rightly so.
Achille Devéria’s self-devised “Goethe” compendium stands as best proof of romantic artists’ tributes to the scene (cf. Fig. 7.18). The collector-cum-compiler has carefully cut, framed and mounted four reproductions in comparison, of which three are identifiable Retzsch copies: top left, Wright’s English version engraved by Humphreys, either taken from the Literary Souvenir or a detached print of the same; next to it, Édouard Robert’s reverse lithograph “Le Baiser,” in which Faust has removed his sword, while an evil-looking Mephistopheles knocks the door inwards; bottom left, Tony Johannot’s title vignette to Blaze de Bury’s Faust translation into French (1847) with a gloomy, desperate Faust pulling to him a white, distant Margaret; and Muret’s 1824 lithographic version. Devéria’s assemblage shows no trace whatsoever of Retzsch originals. Perhaps by the time he put together this particular sheet (1847 at the earliest), the original set was hard to come by. The compendium’s first part, mostly of full-page prints, also shows Nicolas Maurin’s version. Over-sentimentalizing Maurin had sacrificed the kiss to a startled Margaret clinging at Faust’s neck for protection, as the door, more agape than ajar, discloses at low angle a cock-eyed Mephisto, ready to leap at the reader (cf. Fig. 7.19). Martha follows innocuously on, an explicit caption running: “United in a summer house, Faust receives from Margaret the avowal of the purest love.” Male prominence and sensationalist mawkishness were fast gaining ground.
Four prints on Faust and Margaret (three of their embrace) cut out and mounted post 1847 by Achille Devéria in his Faust compendium opposite the corresponding passage
BnF Est., Tb-55 (C)-Pet. fol., Paris
Nicolas Maurin, Réunis dans un pavillon du jardin, Faust reçoit de Marguerite l’aveu du plus sincère amour, lithographic print, n.d., cut out and mounted by Achille Devéria in his Faust compendium
BnF Est., Tb-55 (C)-Pet. fol., Paris
German lithographs of the 1840s grant characters, theme and mood further such development, although a c.1850 steel engraving by August Hoffmann after Wilhelm von Kaulbach clearly exemplifies the impact of Retzsch’s scene on the nineteenth-century German master.34 Karl Müller’s is missing from the four versions inspected, but must be extant, as his and Zimmermann’s will have formed a twin set with the garden scene, commercialized by Dresden’s Pietzsch. Besides, Müller is supposed to have produced two “Faust and Gretchen” scenes with Grünewald. In Zimmermann’s version, the framing, again hip-high, bears the same imprints and type, Margaret and Faust sport the same historical attire (cf. Fig. 7.20). Now in profile, they offer a pleasant match-cum-variation of the frontal garden view. Passion is toned down, composed bodies keep apart, lips hardly touch (Gretchen targets Faust’s nose, he tentatively kisses her lower lip). Margaret wears a pear-shaped earring closely resembling the one she displays on one of Retzsch’s own fine drawings (cf. Fig. 3.4).
Friedrich Zimmermann after Retzsch, Scene from Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen: “Dearest of men, I love thee from my heart!” lithograph, n.d., 35 × 50 cm, published by Eduard Pietzsch and Co., Dresden
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5822 (7), Weimar
Had Zimmermann tiptoed into Retzsch’s Academy courses, diligently followed by Grünewald? Had he bartered with the master, laboured in oils for him or after him? The question is all the more important as, from the very beginning of the Faust adventure, Retzsch himself seems to have been aware of the value of reproduction techniques. As shown, he used his own original etchings as reproduction tools. If the moderated Zimmermann lithograph, repurposed in Dresden, perhaps with the master’s consent, takes on features of other Retzsch compositions, it may be considered not plagiarized but simply derivative. In Peter-Christian Wegner’s knowledgeable book on lithophanes—a fascinating industry of the time I turn to in the last chapter—two of these prints are considered as plagiaries (Plagiate).35 Grünewald’s lithograph was however exhibited in the 1932 Dresden Goethe centenary exhibition as a collector’s piece.36 Categories and hierarchies therefore shift with the times, and we ourselves, under copyright law, have become hypersensitive to surrogate prints, previously considered part of an artist’s legacy—surrogate, yet still a part.
Whatever the case, in these reworkings, one important lithographic revision is the background: the initial opening onto the fully-grown garden (cf. Fig. 7.17), offering the lovers air, light and the protection of verdant nature, akin to their passion, has given way to oppressive stonework with the only opening blocked. Zimmermann’s lithograph walls them in, and the only casement opening towards them discloses Mephistopheles prying (Martha has vanished), a rather ghostly figure emerging from a hazy past.
These changes are not however Zimmermann’s own. They originate from an image dated 1837 and attributed to E. Schuler, that is, Édouard Schuler (1805/06–82). An Alsatian steel and copper engraver, also a lithographer active in Strasburg and Karlsruhe, he also authored prints after Flaxman’s Iliad and Odyssey. The image, definitely smaller (12.5 × 19.5 cm) and in sharp lines (cf. Fig. 7.21a), was cut out by Alexander Tille perhaps from a gift-book or periodical, without any leads to its potential provenance, for use in his exhibition.37 As a steel engraving from the Album aus der Damenzeitung Iris, commercialized by E. Ludwig in Graz, it further circulated in France and Austria after 1849 (cf. Fig. 7.21b). Unless further evidence emerges, Schuler seems to be the inventor of the dungeon-like walls encircling Faust and Margaret, while a demonic gaoler pushes the casement. Zimmermann and Grünewald followed suit, both watering down details for a broader public.
Édouard Schuler after Moritz Retzsch, Faust and Gretchen, engraving, 1837, 12.5 × 19.5 cm, cut out by Alexander Tille, provenance unknown
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 8052 [b] (8), Weimar
After Moritz Retzsch and following Édouard Schuler, Faust and Gretchen, steel engraving, post 1849, Album aus der Damenzeitung Iris, engraved and printed by the Art Institute of the Austrian Lloyd, published by E. Ludwig in Graz. Available in Paris and Vienna
Courtesy Peter-Christian Wegner
A further lithographed version by self-taught reproduction lithographer Carl Friedrich Patzschke (1813–71), printed in Berlin by Ludwig Zöllner (active c.1840), and commercialized by C. G. Ende, coloured the scene, a final touch to attract further clients (Fig. 7.22). With the canonical quote “Bester Mann, von Herzen lieb’ ich dich!” in ornate lettering, prints survive in several formats, and—more importantly—various stencil-applied colour schemes, as shows variance in tints. These are not always successful (in one, Gretchen’s rosy complexion has turned apoplectic mauve) but chromolithography using several stones was still costly and chancy. All four testify to Retzsch’s appeal and many metamorphoses. Additionally, it has proven rather complicated to find precise information on the artists who followed Retzsch and produced proxy work.38 But at the same time, such an excursus into the sparsely and unequally mapped area of reproduction shows how much remains to be done in an area indispensable for understanding how prints circulated in the nineteenth century.
Carl Friedrich Patzschke after Moritz Retzsch, “Dearest of men, I love thee from my heart!” coloured lithographic copy, c.1880, 27 × 29 cm, printed in Berlin by L. Zöllner and commercialized by C. G. Ende
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5822 (8), Weimar
7.5 Spread and Sway on Style, Form and Set
Retzsch’s influence on other artists would fill volumes. In the German context, Peter-Christian Wegner’s expressive metaphor is that of an admiralty flagship, all sails set, cruising on the iconographic Faust ocean and steering other artists’ creations: “Retzsch stands for a milestone (Markstein) in Faust iconography, and Faust illustrators, from Nisle to Stassen, follow time and again in the wake (in den Sog) of his pictorial creations.”39 From Julius Nisle’s Göthe-Gallerie in steel-engraved outlines, and his third 1840 issue entirely on Faust I, to the 163 Faust pen drawings by Franz Stassen (1919) republished in 1980, the (non-exhaustive) list would include the Brandenburg draughtsman, painter and lithographer Theodor Hosemann (1807–75) and Meyerheim,40 active in Scenen aus Goethe’s Faust in acht lithographirten Bildern, an 1835 homage to Prince Radziwill’s Faust performances; Gustav Nehrlich; Retzsch’s friend Carl Vogel von Vogelstein; Ferdinand Rothbart who worked as lithographer, engraver, and illustrator; and historicist painters such as Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Engelbert Seibertz or August von Kreling. Taking stock of Busch, Giesen and Wegner, Viola Hildebrand-Schat mentions in her own right Eugène Delacroix, Moritz von Schwind, Gustav Heinrich Naeke, as well as Gustav Nehrlich, A. Riedel, August Ferdinand Hofgarten, Louis Freiherr von Pereira-Arnstein, and Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld.41
Even in the 1920s, after the Great War, when Faust iconography underwent major changes, Retzsch’s influence may still be seen among expressionist artists. Such is prominent set designer Ernst Stern’s elongated Mephistopheles in a Faust edition for the “Booklets of German Theatre” series.42 All the more so, Willi Jaeckel’s 1925 masterly engraving of a naked Gretchen, prostrate on her cell’s straw bedding, stems from Retzsch’s penultimate plate.43
We may be tempted to see Retzsch’s Faustian sway limited only to black and white iconography. Faust graphics, repetitive and dull for certain scholars,44 already form a sub-category in graphic arts. Invested with scant esteem, the latter themselves were underrated in traditional art hierarchies, before a comprehensive media stance repetitively stressed their weight. Yet, Retzsch’s stimulus is also traceable in renowned contemporaries’ paintings. Art historian Werner Busch, for instance, lengthily discusses the meaning of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea, 1808–10) in the light of Retzsch’s plate 2, i.e., Faust’s walk and discussion with Wagner (cf. Fig. 2.21). His reading opens up a newly interpretative perspective touching on methodology in art history, and enriching our understanding of Friedrich’s pursuits. Friedrich commented on Retzsch’s work, developed interest in the Faust legend, and himself nourished Faustian preoccupations. Busch refers to a first version of Friedrich’s painting, examined with imaging techniques and X-rays, revealing two figures in old-style German clothing, closely resembling Faust and Wagner’s promenade, as in Retzsch’s plate.45 One of the figures was finally erased, leaving in a vast and unruly landscape the solitary form, back turned to the viewer, as if he, Faust-like, faced the world’s sea of tumult and unrest. Busch reads the early version of this painting as a palimpsest in “direct response to the Faust illustrations”46—despite illustrations being inappropriate to define Retzsch’s artefacts.
However concealed in Germany, Retzsch’s repute and influence was standard proof abroad. When Rümann, a knowledgeable scholar, asserted in 1932 “Stylistically however Retzsch had not won any kind of influence on English artists,”47 his assertion can only be explained by period views and his own diffident stance. Vaughan’s ample chapter on Retzsch in English art has proven the contrary,48 and his proficient example may be extended to numerous other cases. In the last twenty years of his life, for instance, Thomas Stothard (1755–1834) adopted in his outlines intricate detailing, minutiae, and a staccato rhythm, the outcome of Retzsch’s popularity in England. His parsimonious patron George Thomson of Edinburgh asked him to imitate Retzsch’s style when he altered in 1821 Scottish artist David Allan’s designs to suit his sponsor’s whim.49 Imitative style was one of the ways Retzsch’s influence spread, and in Stothard’s case, the exceptional aesthetic appeal of his designs proved certainly a plus.
More often, however, than desirable, British artists domesticated Retzsch’s inventions. Two occurrences from the nineteenth-century press mirror how wide and recognisable was this impregnation. It did not escape the critics’ eye, trained in the German artist’s widespread œuvre thanks to reproduction. In 1879, the Saturday Review commented on Charles Bell Birch’s outlines thus: “M. Birch has made what are called illustrations of [Byron’s] Lara, more obviously than commendably imitated from Retzsch.”50 The innuendo veils frank criticism, yet the plates, published by the Art Union of London, were a premium product of the time. The 1902 Athenaeum followed on in the obituary of eminent painter Sir Joseph Noël Paton: his 1863 outlines for Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a set of 20 lithographs again for the Art Union of London, were “in the manner of Retzsch, but conventionalized and tamed.”51
“By precisely following the Faust scenes,” the “modest” Retzsch52 had not then only found for many of them “the first typified conceptual representation” [den ersten Typus der Verbildlichung], as Richard Benz had early noted53 and Wolfgang Wegner corroborated;54 nor just invented “deeply abstract types” for the characters by opposition to the “pretentious Cornelius”;55 he had importantly spread a style, borrowed from Flaxman, further developed, and expanded in countries in which printing industries thrived—delays, deferrals, and seasonal discrepancies being explicable by circumstances pertaining to their national histories.
On returning to London after their German tour, the Halls themselves were utterly convinced. As the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition was attracting multitudes to London, Samuel Carter Hall stated in an Art Journal review of a recently published pictorial life of Martin Luther: “The Faust of our friend Moritz Retzsch has given an ever sensible impulse, especially to the small plate and vignette works of Germany. After the Faust plates nothing, without impressive character, perfect drawing, and full and appropriate composition, would be at all successful.”56
Retzsch’s legacy then had not only affected image construction, but inadvertently determined book ornaments, even portfolio or album shape. From a wealth of examples, I will develop here only one case, which takes us over the ocean to the United States. There, lithographer Henry Stone had turned to engraving and re-cut Retzsch’s twenty-six plates as early as 1824 in Washington. His work was apparently not reissued but it is possible that English or European surrogates were early imported as well. Aesthetic infiltration was such that Ralph Waldo Emerson, deeply interested in Goethe, noted in his diary between 16 and 20 April 1837: “Retzch [sic] is a Gothic genius [—] not the Greek simplicity but the Gothic redundancy of meaning & elaboration of details. His pictures are like Herbert’s poems hard to read[,] for every word is to be emphasized.”57 Such detailed ability proved rewarding for several North American artists.
Illustrator Felix O. C. Darley (1822–88), Emerson’s contemporary, would devote several full-page large-format outlines to Sylvester Judd’s Margaret, a novel of transcendentalist breed. Ultimately embracing wide-reaching fame, his case typically combines initial obscurity, when working for Philadelphia periodicals, then quick recognition, characteristic outline aesthetic choices, and on moving to New York, celebrity with commissions from an art society. Flaxman’s feted style and Retzsch’s notoriety “clearly inspired” Darley to illustrate in outline,58 although several of his plates also recall Nehrlich’s or Nisle’s more detailed designs, both already strongly influenced by Retzsch. Being born into a theatrical family may also account for his attraction to Retzsch’s silent stage-like views. A self-taught draughtsman, he began working for illustrated magazines in the early 1840s, yet first attracted attention thanks to fifteen full-page outlines of a fictional Sioux chief for Scenes in Indian Life (1843). His career was verily launched in 1848–49 thanks to two outline sets after Washington Irving commissioned by the American Art-Union (1838–52). The latter represented a remarkably ambitious attempt to furnish many of the elements of a nascent art world: large-scale patronage, an exhibiting venue, criticism, and even rudimentary education for artists and the public in order to encourage US art and artists.59 At its height in 1849, the society boasted “nearly 19,000 members from almost every state in the country.” Period descriptions show consorting of social classes to the venues. The Darley years also tally with the Union’s decision to combine premium prints for members, coupling historic with popular themes.
Distinctly on the popular side, Darley was entrusted with Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and its companion tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The second’s German gothic atmosphere and Headless Horseman (supposedly a Hessian trooper, beheaded by a cannon ball during the American War of Independence and pursuing lanky schoolmaster Ichabod Crane) may have settled his choice on Retzsch. Similarly, Rip Van Winkle was a legend “transplanted from Germany to the banks of the Hudson.”60 Both light-hearted and cherished, they were a resourceful attempt to spread contour graphics in the US. Once outlined, they addressed a large audience of mixed social origin, appreciative of fine quality printing as an upgrading social plus.
Both in landscape format (c.32 × 39 cm) and tan paper wrappers, they sport refined title-pages in black and red, and frame Irving’s abridged texts, finely printed in double column and followed by Darley’s prints with large margins on thicker creamy white paper. Layout and content sequence mirror the Retzsch albums issued by Georg von Cotta and Ernst Fleischer in the 1830s. Title-pages publicize the plates (engraved on stone) as “Designed and etched by Felix O. C. Darley,” the American turning both into designer and printmaker, contrary to national tradition.61 Both were printed in New York by Sarony & Major, one of many lithographic partnerships involving Napoleon Sarony (1821–96), lithographer and would-be popular photo-portraitist. Coupled with a fine landscape engraving, they were reserved for American Art-Union’s members under the annual five-dollar subscription. Press announcements harped on the pains taken in sixfold printing to achieve a fine result, while insisting on the Art-Union “putting to press in all an edition of some twenty thousand.”62 The Bulletin of the American Art-Union concluded its praise of Darley’s Rip Van Winkle on “scatter[ing] these leaves, in tens of thousands, from the St. John to the Rio Grande.”63 Fliegende Blätter meant not just words. The metaphor materialized in circulation and imitations in the late 1840s even beyond the European publishing market. New modes of consuming books and prints had been established.
Choosing Retzsch and outline marked a brilliant beginning to Darley’s career before he turned to wood, steel engraving, and three-dimensional style. Best-known illustrator of his time, even outside the United States (in 1853 Goupil and Co published large tinted lithographs by him in Paris, and Prince Napoleon commissioned watercolours), the fluid, expressive line for which he has been much praised draws on Flaxman and Retzsch.64 A variety of techniques would allow him to illustrate over a hundred texts, several in deluxe editions. Among them, let me single out Compositions in Outline from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, with a full-page dedication to “Henry W. Longfellow | in memory of | a friendship of many years” in 1879. Under a front cover in fancy lettering, the album reiterated the formula of the set with large margins, offering twelve of Darley’s fifteen outline compositions after Hawthorne with corresponding excerpts facing the plates. By then, heliotype printing had taken over and albums were widespread commodities issued by Houghton, Osgood and Co. in Boston, in association with the Riverside Press in Cambridge. Finely engraved sets belonged to the past. The Hawthorne album would be re-issued the following year in a smaller format, and under the heading of Houghton, Mifflin and Company in an elegant Japanese stab binding (Boston and New York, 1884), before becoming a large paper octavo with sideways-inserted photogravure plates (The Riverside Press, 1892). All three sets are stock illustration for Irving’s tales and Hawthorne’s novel even today.
We might be tempted to think that Darley’s Retzsch inspiration appealed most to an East coast WASP audience retaining strong ties with Europe, but the Art-Union’s vast membership roll and recent mapping per state65 contradicts such a narrow view. As Retzsch and others had done for Faust, Darley was granting American literary texts pride of place nationwide, building the US canon.
7.6 Extensive vs. Intensive Iconography
The main question is then: how to evaluate these fliegende Blätter, what tools to use to assess their importance and malleability?66
I suggest using extensive vs. intensive iconography. I coined the terminology in 2005 by reference to Ségolène Le Men’s article on “extensive” and “intensive culture of the image” in Jean-François Millet’s work.67 Le Men expertly studies, against the backdrop of an internationalized art market and competition between nations (his painting L’Angélus was acquired by the United States outbidding France), how Millet is extensively diffused thanks to reproduction from the 1850s, through popular objects of everyday life. She also shows how the artist expertly condensed and reduced an overabundance of images and materials into iconic compositions, his work preserving a tension between extensive and intensive culture. The incentive derives in turn from Roger Chartier’s notion of “intensive” and “extensive reading,” borrowed from German and American reading theories.68 Intensive reading, following Chartier and his peers, corresponds to periods in which books are sparse, valuable, and infused with (often religious) aura within family or church circles. Reading communities might gather around a key mentor, who would read aloud for a group. Conversely, extensive reading matches the age of multiple printed books, negligible by-products of the industrial era, easily discarded, often destroyed.69 Le Men proposed to import “intensive” and “extensive” from history of reading to other cultural areas, particularly image production and art reception. The pattern is readily applicable from books to images, especially in the nineteenth century, rich in novel techniques of multiplication and reproduction.
I follow suit, specifically transferring the concept from a text to its iconographic interpretations; from author (Goethe) to artist-cum-engraver (Retzsch); from one such key figure to several others, either named or anonymous; from Retzsch’s originals to their multiple re-workings, reception, and aftermath. Application of the concept is obviously not confined to Retzsch and may span Goethe’s several visual interpretations through their gradual establishment as iconographic canon, Retzsch serving as showcase model.
In this sense, extensive iconography applies to the “veritable flood of images” (eine wahre Bilderflut)70 across the German lands, then Europe, with which artists hailed Goethe’s 1808 Faust, and strove to interpret, transpose or illustrate it. It underlines the role of images, active in the migration of motifs from artist to artist, while showing how they gradually constitute a collective orientation of imagination. To take but an example, images and motifs pass from one edition to another, as when Édouard Frère (1850) or Gaston Jourdain (1904) copy, highlight, and rework key scenes by Retzsch. An intensive iconography however persists within the extensive trend, allowing for genuine reinterpretation within characteristic books. Such is the case of Delacroix’s brilliant development of Faust’s meeting with Gretchen, on the basis of a Retzsch plate, in his celebrated Faust issued by Auguste Sautelet and Charles Motte in 1828. An equally arresting example is Italian master Francesco Hayez’s painting Il Bacio, a powerful picture construed, I argue, from Retzsch’s “The Kiss.” Gradually endowed with national overtones and grown duly iconic, Il Bacio extensively nurtured items, even banal, for everyday life. A closer look will elucidate what I mean.
7.7 Extensive Rations
Édouard Frère’s copied, focussed and enhanced images for Joseph Bry’s “Les Veillées littéraires illustrées” (“Literary Illustrated Evenings,” 1849–56) are a meaningful example of extensive iconography based on Nerval’s last Faust translation. Frère’s ten in-text illustrations adopt astute gradual shadowing. Black and white contrasts dramatically offset effect by preceding, paralleling or finishing the most touching or gripping parts of Faust with engraver [François] Rouget’s help. Amongst the four revamped Retzsch copies in pp. 12–13, well before the text, one focusses on Retzsch’s plate 6 of Faust contemplating the reclining young woman, chastely dressed, in the witch’s magic mirror. As in Moses’s English and Muret’s French renderings, the comely figure has become a feverish sheet-clad female with bared breasts, passionately gesturing in a fantastic amorous embrace (Fig. 7.23, cf. Fig. 6.18 for the page layout). Two further wood engravings, set in matching passages (pp. 24–25), oppose a malignant Mephistopheles, muttering to Martha, to a tender Faust, leaning over a petal-plucking Margaret, his arm over her shoulders (cf. Fig. 7.24a). Nearly ninety years later, Gründ would copy this for the cover of their Faust edition (cf. Fig. 6.22). A fourfold climax, ending with the text (pp. 34–35), hammers home Margaret’s suffering (at the spinning wheel, then at the cathedral), and Faust’s torments (killing Valentine, aghast at Margaret’s spectre) (Fig. 7.24b). Front page, full centre, Faust pledges to a white, phantom-like Mephistopheles, also reproduced on the cover. Above it, the “Veillées littéraires illustrées” header, with two suave ladies nonchalantly reading, promises a brighter future to the consumer for the modicum of 50 centimes (Fig. 7.25).71
Édouard Frère after Moritz Retzsch, Quelle céleste image se montre dans ce miroir magique!, woodcut by François Rouget, (enlarged) detail vignette of Faust contemplating the magic-mirror woman, in Faust par Wolfgang Goethe: Traduit de l’allemand par Gérard de Nerval (Paris: J. Bry aîné, 1850), 12b
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5293, Weimar
Édouard Frère after Moritz Retzsch, two woodcuts by François Rouget, in Faust par Wolfgang Goethe: Traduit de l’allemand par Gérard de Nerval (Paris: J. Bry aîné, 1850), 24–25
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5293, Weimar
Édouard Frère after Moritz Retzsch, four woodcuts by François Rouget, in Faust par Wolfgang Goethe: Traduit de l’allemand par Gérard de Nerval (Paris: J. Bry aîné, 1850), 34–35
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5293, Weimar
Édouard Frère, front-page scene after Retzsch and series header, in Faust par Wolfgang Goethe: Traduit de l’allemand par Gérard de Nerval (Paris: J. Bry aîné, 1850), 1
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5293, Weimar
Conversely, the book illustrated by Gaston Jourdain, issued after his premature death, pertains to fin-de-siècle book collecting. Jourdain’s compositions in photogravures (héliogravures) by J. Chauvet are insert plates in a deluxe private publication, again based on Nerval’s translation and prefaced by Frantz Jourdain, his architect brother, Art Nouveau theoretician, and author. A four-page list of noble and literati subscribers underpins its prestige. The dramatized introduction implicitly parallels Gaston’s toils and early demise with Nerval’s own tragic fate. According to the preface, both artists are bonded through a common creative idealism and passionate vision. The iconography opens with a quasi-erotic scene—a shapely female nude in a meditative Faust’s dark study—an intensified idea borrowed from the opening plate of Gabriel Max’s 1880 portfolio. In the latter, a body lies foreground concealed beneath a veil.72 Frantz Jourdain’s preface stresses how Gaston toiled ten years for these compositions, commissioned by Paul Gallimard, although he knew Faust by heart: “Each drawing summarizes a mound of documents, research, sketches, studies, attempts, trials and errors that exhausted him.”73 Indeed, the plates read as a compendium of Faustian iconography where Retzsch, hailed, is subject to fantastic or burlesque treatment and gender reversal. When the poodle mutates in Jourdain’s plate 4, Gaston’s ferocious monster has swollen to extraordinary proportions, his muzzle revealing terrifying fangs, but both the creature and the room’s layout are based on Retzsch’s plate 3. A male sorcerer is swapped for the witch in her kitchen, but strung frogs hang from the ceiling (cf. Fig. 7.26), clearly a graphic citation of Retzsch (cf. Fig. 2.18 & 2.19). A true compilation, this book shows to what extent nineteenth-century iconography rests on pliable amalgams, at the heart of which Retzsch occupies pride of place.
Gaston Jourdain, photogravure by J. Chauvet, in Le Faust de Goethe, traduction de Gérard de Nerval, préface de M. Frantz-Jourdain, illustrations inédites de Gaston Jourdain (Paris: Imprimé pour la Société de Propagation des Livres d’Art, 1904), insert plate 8, between pp. 60–61. Telling detail of frogs after Moritz Retzsch (cf. Fig. 2.18–19)
BnF, Rés. M-Yh-4, Paris
7.8 Intensive Inspiration
An impressive 1828 Faust folio was imposed on Delacroix (who himself drew his creations on stone and would have preferred a portfolio of lithographs74) by lithographer and printseller Charles Motte. It is now hailed as an important romantic book responding to Goethe’s opus, yet period realities differed.
Delacroix knew Retzsch well since 1821, both directly and indirectly, mentioning him in his diary and cor- respondence.75 His freehand sketched copies show he had studied his work (cf. Fig. 6.1 to 6.3), lifting at least fifteen figures from some ten Retzsch plates, including the witches’ Sabbath and the Prologue in Heaven, not all of which have been identified. Moreover, in The Devil and Doctor Faustus, the Drury Lane play that triggered Delacroix into action, Daniel Terry had performed Mephistophiles (sic in the play) in a costume after Retzsch (cf. Fig. 9.13).76
Retzsch’s set is therefore an important iconographic matrix for Delacroix. It inspires numerous scene compositions and details: the poodle’s twisting tail in his lithograph 4, as it alights at Faust and Wagner’s feet in open country, harks back to the trailing strokes of Retzsch’s plate 2. The upper diagonal of the Brocken scene, as Mephistopheles and Faust ascend the mountain in Delacroix’s lithograph 14, is similarly based on Retzsch’s plate 21.77 The Dresden artist was first to compose the layout, to order the characters and their ascent, even though there are substantial differences in atmosphere and feeling between Delacroix’s superb dark lithographs and Retzsch’s fanciful, energetic, yet clear outlines. In several other plates, similarities and distinctive traits would infringe on the scope of the point discussed.
Here, I neither seek an artist’s source of inspiration nor discuss creations in terms of originality. Conception of creation—whether in literature or other arts— as pure originality or the elaboration of talented genius-cum-unique spirit is largely the outcome of a romantic myth, farfetched from artistic or literary realities.78 Artists and writers create their work not only through talent, but also grasping knowledge. Delacroix grasped what he knew. What is remarkable in his case is his capacity to extract the dramatic potential from a scene by Retzsch. Intensive iconography builds on this. Let me briefly revert to a telling Faust scene, the protagonist’s first meeting with Margaret.
Exceedingly short in the play, yet momentous in Faustian iconography, it brings together the two main characters of Gretchen’s story, setting the tone for what will subsequently be developed. Retzsch’s plate 8 could itself be based on extensive iconography, or indeed set the rules for such future development. As shown in Chapter 1, comparison with Cornelius and Naeke suggests that the original for such parallel treatment can hardly be pinned down (cf. Fig. 1.8 to 1.10). Ostensibly, all three artists were stimulated by Goethe, whose several details can easily be conveyed into a picture. Each of their renderings however creates a special atmosphere and builds on variant symbolism. Delacroix’s conception however poses the question differently since he creatively transforms Retzsch’s plate.
As Faust approaches Margaret, Retzsch subtly parallels Faust in the foreground and Mephistopheles in the background through identical costumes and corresponding swords. Delacroix projects this very analogy to the fore, partly masking one of the swords under Faust’s ample cloak while each figure lines up with the other, either side of Gretchen (cf. Fig. 7.27). In his lithograph, the male bodies become a narrow trap, into which an alluring, disdainful, yet frightened Margaret falls. The partners close in on her in a powerful grip, both real and fantastic, in which each is the other’s double as suggest their strongly similar profiles shown in parallel. Here, Faust turns devil, the physical embodiment of Mephistopheles’s spectral form, while the contrapuntal movement of their legs and feet on the ground builds a metaphor of the road to destruction. Delacroix’s intensive scene clearly transcends Retzsch’s inspiring plate, adding a fantastic dimension and dark symbolism to the scene.
(top) Eugène Delacroix, lithograph, in Faust, tragédie de M. de Goethe, traduite en français par M. Albert Stapfer (À Paris: Ch. Motte & Sautelet, 1828), insert plate between pp. 72–73; (bottom) Moritz Retzsch, Faust meeting Gretchen, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust gezeichnet von Retsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1816), pl. 8
BnF, RÉS.-YH-17, Paris, and: Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
A last case shows how intensive iconography, again triggered by Retzsch, gives in turn birth to extensive iconography in its own right.
Il Bacio by Italian painter Francesco Hayez (1791–1882) is probably Italy’s best-known nineteenth-century painting (cf. Fig. 7.28), which I argue takes after Retzsch’s “The Kiss.” Shelley was not alone in being impressed by the latter, a most popular image indeed, due to its numerous copies and repurposed versions as amply shown.
Francesco Hayez, Il Bacio. Episodio della giovinezza. Costumi del secolo XIV, oil on canvas, 1859, 112 × 88 cm, first version
Courtesy Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
To my knowledge, neither Hayez studies on The Kiss (mostly by Fernando Mazzocca) nor general studies on the theme refer to Retzsch’s print. Regular interpretation of Hayez in Italian scholarship is strongly based on his own previous conceptions, mainly the painting L’ultimo bacio dato a Giulieta da Romeo (The Last Kiss Given to Juliet by Romeo, 1823), a sensational romantic work with scandal overtones at the time, differing though from Il Bacio in dimensions, atmosphere and formal treatment. Conversely, Retzsch’s influence on Hayez seems highly plausible for at least three reasons. First, the iconographic kinship between images, both thematic and aesthetic. Thematically, the lovers are isolated between open door and sinking stairwell (the scene intimates leave-taking), while an indefinite third disappears down the steps. In consecutive versions, this figure is occasionally further dimmed. What remains is the passionate riveting of both figures clasping each other, lost in the kiss, as in Retzsch. If Carlo Carrà insists in his 1919 Pittura metafisica on the picture’s “linearities,” its “sensitive, definite lines,” and the “engraved crystallisation” (cristallizzazione incisa) of all Hayez’s compositions,79 Mazzocca stresses the arabesque of the couple as resolving the strong colour contrast. He summons both Venetian colour treatment and the Munich school’s purist abstraction as in the work of Schnorr, Kaulbach and Feuerbach.80 Line accuracy, arabesque and abstraction all recall Schlegel’s comments on the outline and bring forward the painting’s delineated underpinning. Second, Hayez, mostly known as a painter, also was a printmaker for Milanese publishers. He lithographed Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, illustrated Andrea Maffei’s translations of Schiller, and also was briefly a candidate to illustrate Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, first published 1827) with vignettes.81 His printmaking achievements in the late 1820s are deemed a major feat of his romantic period.82 Such contexts would have readily acquainted him with Retzsch’s set. And thirdly, his numerous contacts with German painters and 1830s trip to Munich were further opportunities for familiarity with Retzsch, although cited bibliographies rather stress the influence German historicist artists had on him. This is not however the case of Il Bacio, the lesser dimensions of which (112 × 88 cm) contrast with its wider fame. Precisely, its intimate quality works emotions while subtly donning patriotic and commonly shared symbolism.
Hayez’s painting gave four oil versions, proliferation being also a telling feature. A first from 1859, Il Bacio. Episodio della giovinezza. Costumi del secolo XIV (The Kiss. An Episode of Youth. Costumes of the 14th Century), exhibited the very year of its making at Milan’s Brera Academy annual art exhibition, instantly brewed patriotic significance as Mazzocca has shown.83 Hayez was by then a prophet-painter, whose work signalled turning points in his native land’s history. His Bacio post-dated by only three months Vittorio Emmanuele II’s and Napoleon III’s triumphant entry to Milan, after liberating Lombardy of Austrian rule. Not by chance, already in 1862, reproduction of Bacio prints are referentially embedded in two further Italian paintings. Gerolamo Induno’s Triste presentimento (Sad Premonition) shows a young girl contemplating the portrait of her departed lover to fight for Italy’s liberation at Garibaldi’s side: a small coloured Bacio hangs on the wall close to Garibaldi’s bust. The same year, in Giuseppe Reina’s Triste novella (Sad News), a young lady melancholically considers another larger Bacio print by the window, while the colours of sparse objects on the table recall the Italian flag.84 The two maidens belong to different social backgrounds. By 1862 then, Hayez’s coloured Bacio reproduction had spread among diverse social strata. His painting was fast becoming an Italic icon.
In the meantime, it had itself been through at least one further version in 1861 with the embracing couple’s colour scheme (red and green for the young man, dazzling white for the damsel) manifesting the Italian flag, and sponsoring explicit national fervour (Fig. 7.29). The kiss was of leave-taking. An ominous shadow fell on the steps to the right, and the mysterious figure sliding down the shadowy, stately stairwell, spoke of threat. Hayez sent a last version in oils, entitled simply Il Bacio (The Kiss), to Paris’s 1867 Universal Exhibition, which quickly entered princely collections, and is still today in private hands (Fig. 7.30). In this, even more portentously, the kiss occurs between two open doors with the descending figure dimmer than ever. Disquiet and dread hover over the parting while a white veil or stole, fallen on the stairs, stresses urgency and fervour. The meaning-laden colours (azure blue dress, brilliant green doubling of the man’s mantle, red hose, and white fallen wrap) allude to the flags of two nations, France and Italy, bonding in Italy’s future unification. The painting does not represent just any departing young man’s kiss to his beloved, but precisely the Garibaldi volunteer’s goodbye kiss to a fiancée he may never see again, in a painting celebrating the strong friendship and political alliance between “two friendly nations that embrace each other with a view to a common destiny of intention” (due nazioni amiche che si abbracciano verso un commune destino di intesa).85 Already at the time, the painting was named Il Bacio del volontario (The Volunteer’s Kiss). Its symbolism and public exhibition at the Paris Universal Exhibition, shortly before the Franco-Prussian war, make of it a manifesto, the Italian version of Overbeck’s Italia und Germania.
Francesco Hayez, Il Bacio, oil on canvas, 1861, 127 × 95 cm, second version, private coll.
All rights reserved
Francesco Hayez, Il Bacio, oil on canvas, 1867, 116.8 × 80 cm, third version, private coll.
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Hayez’s successive renderings show how extensive iconography may acquire strong ideological and political importance, all the more paradoxical as it originates from German-speaking territories (Retzsch’s print) at the very moment fledgling Italy was fighting to throw off Austro-Hungarian dominion, and unite. But, as is well known, most travelling images have no indelible ethnic, national or religious identity. Retzsch’s “The Kiss” is one of such. Revamped by Hayez, it entered yet another cycle of transmutations, “from engravings to chromolithographs and the covers of chocolate boxes” (dalle incisioni alle oleografie ai coperchi delle scatole di cioccolatini).86
In present-day Italy’s standard culture, the faraway reminiscence of Hayez’s painting subtly informs a commonly shared industrialized product, known as chocolate kisses or baci. Based on a special recipe invented by Luisa Spagnoli after the Great War, the small, round, somewhat irregular sweets, using hazelnut and chocolate filling, are topped with a bulging hazelnut, all covered in chocolate. They are always accompanied by a text with a twist, proverb or apophthegm on the meaning of life or love. Due to the uneven shape recalling a fist, they were initially named cazzotti (punches), rechristened kisses (baci), or Perugina kisses (Baci Perugina), and astutely advertised as “a kiss on every Italian’s mouth” by La Perugina firm.87 An industrial yet elegant product, an inexpensive yet succulent present, they reply to the immediately recognizable image of a forlorn couple in elegant dress, kissing against the sky. The iconic image is based on a 1923 logo by Federico Seneca (1891–1976), Perugina’s artistic director at the time, who shaped both the image and the marketing campaign with Hayez’s painting in mind (Fig. 7.31a). The reversed contrast of the couple in silhouette is reminiscent of transfer techniques (engraving, lithography, etc.). It suggests a brighter perspective as the couple kisses under a blue sky and the promising Baci inscription. Their clothing is voided of Hayez’s nationalistic symbolism although still vaguely historic and refined. Yet this is a post-World War I image. Based on an iconic template, it subliminally talks of togetherness rather than heroic parting. In any event, wrapped in silver paper decked with stars, both axiom and chocolate kiss are far-flung upshots of Doctor Faust’s wisdom or folly (Fig. 7.31b).
Federico Seneca, Baci: ciocolato Perugina, in Tavole di Federico Seneca con prefazione di Leonardo Borgese (n.p.: Edizioni Vendre, n.d. [c.1950])
Courtesy Paola Pallottino
Present-day display of Baci Perugina in Venice airport
Author’s photograph 10 June 2022
Within extensive and intensive iconography, the interaction and reinterpretation of iconographic motifs and circulation of images re-evaluated from country to country thus involve famous and less conspicuous artists in the comparative process. Illustration studies traditionally privilege exceptional cases but sideline composite cultural objects. By contrast, the extensive/intensive concept allows us to address circulation of images in larger corpora through an interdisciplinary approach.
7.9 Recycling and Authorship in Image Circulation
In an article on the recycling of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa reproductions, Tom Gretton has pointedly opposed the notion of authorship, relating intentional agency (individual or collaborative gestation), to the effect of pictures’ post-partum life and their power over onlookers’ imagination.88 We may be inclined to consider some of these proxies as sub-products lacking “aura,” as in Walter Benjamin’s well-known 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Yet what Benjamin names “aura” is to be viewed in terms of authorship, specifically individual, which serves to grant artworks a precise place in space, time, personal career, and national history. It also later feeds the competition of nations for cultural recognition within an international arena.
However, aura barely resists the mass culture phenomenon and the effectiveness of pictorial motifs in circulation, particularly when subject to combination, modification, or profound alteration. For Ségolène Le Men, Jean-François Millet’s work gained aura in reproduction through Millet’s ability to condense images into icons, emblems or symbols. Yet Retzsch’s case differs entirely.
Customized copies of his twenty-six plates reveal intentional agency. In most cases, this does not reflect on Retzsch himself, but on Goethe’s Faust. The aura pertains to the author of a singular text, gradually canonized and treasured as paragon of heritage. In this sense, Retzsch’s outlines, much abused through copying, are an “outline” bait, that is, a fishing line cast out by publishers to pull in clientele: small fry as well as big fish. In Frère’s case, tailored as mass production publications, the focussed and repurposed Retzsch copies reveal diverse artistic intentions and the combined agency of authorship by publisher Bry, the French artist, and Belgian wood engraver François Rouget. The item thus produced gains further aura, this time for both Goethe and Nerval, his translator, publicizing, with the German author’s approval and endorsement, his own translation.89 In Gaston Jourdain’s recycling of details, we perceive an ironic reference-packed fin-de-siècle compendium of culture, reflecting yet again on the play’s aura, but also his brother Frantz’s clever intention to parallel Gaston’s and Nerval’s common path for a choice audience. Extensive iconography prompts analysis of publishing context, readers’ reactions, public sensitivity to images, and imaginative processes. It reveals that books and prints are largely cultural objects, relegating authorship to a de facto subordinate position. In considering their circulation, we are led to see those dimensions, and can hardly consider copied images in isolation.90
In intensive iconography, intention is still manifest but strongly engages with the re-imaginative process of different communities. Delacroix’s Faust only acquired aura in the second half of the twentieth century, when the artist himself emerged as a major master. In the 1950s, Jacqueline Armingeat would refer to it as “a forgotten book.”91 In its own time, this Faust was a commercial failure, for both publishers and artist, dismissed as “one of the leaders of the school of ugliness” (un des coryphées de l’école du laid).92 Conversely, Hayez’s celebrated image quickly became an early icon, which it still is, having strongly gripped the collective imagination of Italians. It gave in turn birth to products of arguably uneven artistic merit, which nevertheless strongly connect with a nation’s modern history.
In all cases, historical, artistic, and ideological context is still to be taken into account, if we wish to properly evaluate image circulation.
This book might have ended here, the influence of print culture on other arenas affording no suit. Other matters, such as parody, literature, inspiration for the stage, romantic gifts by poets to exceptional women, or popular three-dimensional objects, may seem secondary to prints, outlines and their circulation. Yet to consider outlines “beyond outlines” is crucial, if we wish to fathom cultural history. The appeal of Retzsch on such contexts poses critical aesthetic questions and flags up nations’ ambitions, time and again. Hence, beyond such a turning point, this book tracks burlesque, stage designs, actors’ bearing and costumes, authors’ scheming and plot, literary barter, even decorative trivia, all after Retzsch. However differently illuminated, are the latter to be dismissed as trivia?
See Vogel, “Moritz August Retzschs Winzerzug,” and visit “Winzerzug,” Wikipedia, last modified 4 June 2022, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winzerzug.
Atkins, “Fragmentary English Translations,” 36–37.
Piper, Dreaming in Books, 58–59.
See Maierhofer, “Die Titelkupfer von Moritz Retzsch,” 219–45.
For this and following copied material, see Appendix 2.
Ibid., 226.
Stumme, Meine Faust-Sammlung, ed. H. Henning (Weimar: Jahresgabe der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar, 1957), 85.
AKL Online, s.v. “John, Friedrich” (by Susanna Partsch), https://www-degruyter-com.proxy.rubens.ens.fr/database/akl/html (accessed 16 September 2021).
Dorothea Kuhn, Anneliese Kunz, and Margot Pehle, eds., Cotta und das 19. Jahrhundert: Aus der literarischen Arbeit eines Verlages (Munich: Kösel, 1980), 14.
Other candidates might be (Carl) Wilhelm John or Johne (1782–1840), architect in Dresden, or (August) Wilhelm John (1813–81), landscape painter in Düsseldorf and Berlin. Prince Pückler-Muskau also knew Eugenie John (1825–87), successful magazine writer under the pen name E. Marlitt. Might the signature refer to one of her family? See Ulf Jacob, Simone Neuhäuser, and Gert Streidt, eds., Fürst Pückler: Ein Leben in Bildern (Berlin: Bebra / SFPM, 2020), 419.
See https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/975898 (last accessed 14 Mar 2023). Regrettably it has not been possible to retrace the original engraving up to now.
Beinecke: YCGL MSS 6, box 14, folder 546. There is no recorded answer in the Cotta archive.
Niessen, no. 3095.
Wegner, 58, n. 226.
Copy of the garden scene in oils, Artnet auction, 2017: http://www.artnet.fr/artistes/friedrich-moritz-august-retzsch/gretchen-and-faust-in-the-garden-Px4JU5a_24Kp0kiAJ41v8A2 (last accessed 14 Mar 2023).
Ross, Memoirs, with a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution (London: John Murray, 1923), 21–22.
LSHTM: Ross/158, file 69. Ross’s question mark makes the date uncertain. References in his Memoirs are also vague (pp. 22–23).
Beinecke: Speck Ck99 R3 +820b. “Retzsch’s Outlines engraved by Henry Moses” also figures in arabesque on a sham file from Tille’s Collection (HAAB: F 8078).
Kemp, “A Feverish Imagination,” Nature 451 (28 Feb 2008): 1056.
Hirschberg, Chronologisches Verzeichniss, nos. 402 & 403.
L. E. L. [Letitia Elizabeth Landon], “The Decision of the Flower,” Literary Souvenir, ed. A. A. Watts (1825), 1–2.
Alaric Alfred Watts, Alaric Watts: A Narrative of his Life by his Son (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1884), 1:173.
Literary Souvenir, ed. A. A. Watts (1826), 280–84. Watts subsequently republished his composition as “A Scene from Faust” with an image of quite a different ilk, Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel by Madame Colin, in harmony with his collection Lyrics of the Heart: And Other Poems (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), 141–45, also issued for the American market (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1852). The adjustment shows how disturbing the kiss scene was.
Publishers’ catalogue at the end of the Literary Souvenir, 1826.
This identifies with Wolfgang Wegner’s curious mention “A. Phil. Ed. Robert lith. d’après Restech” (Wegner, 58, n. 226). Kippenberg, no. 1887, accurately lists it as a lithograph by Ed. Robert, published by E. Ardit.
Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon, 13:52.
Tille, Bilderverzeichnis der Bode-Tilleschen Faust-Galerie (Cologne: J. G. Schmitz, 1899), nos. 112 & 113.
Sigismund, “Zimmermann, Friedrich August,” in Thieme-Becker 36 (1947): 510b.
Pieske, Bilder für Jedermann: Wandbilddrucke 1840–1940 (Berlin: Keyser, 1988), 60.
AKL Online, s.v. “Grünewald, Ferdinand” (by Andreas Quermann), https://www-degruyter-com.proxy.rubens.ens.fr/database/akl/html (accessed 7 Oct 2021).
German, French, English, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Austrian (naming the postcard differently from the German), Czech, Slovenian, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.
Webb, Shelley and Translation, 153–55.
HAAB: F 3495, digitized: https://haab-digital.klassik-stiftung.de/viewer/epnresolver?id=1335575138.
Wegner, Literatur auf Porzellan, 115–16.
Goethe Ausstellung: Sächsischer Kunstverein zu Dresden (Dresden: Wilhelm und Berta von Baensch Stiftung, 1932), 159, no. 839, from Puppel’s Berlin collection.
Tille, Bilderverzeichnis, no. 111. See on this, Stead, “Faust-Bilder,” 163–67.
I have used several art dictionaries to collate information provided without detailing in footnotes. Sigismund’s 1947 article on Zimmermann (in Thieme-Becker, 36:510b) is however particularly arresting, as he knew well both the milieu, the work of Retzsch, and Dresden.
Wegner, Literatur auf Porzellan, 113.
Perhaps Friedrich Eduard Meyerheim (1808–79). Several of the Meyerheim family were however artists.
Hildebrand-Schat, Moritz Retzschs Illustrationen, 38, n. 83.
Goethe, Faust: der Tragödie erster Teil. Mit Federzeichnungen von Ernst Stern, Die Bücher des Deutschen Theaters 3 (Berlin: Verlag der Bücher des Dt. Theaters, 1920).
Faust, eine Tragödie von Goethe (Berlin: Erich Reiss, n.d. [1925]).
Thomas Fusenig and Sebastian Giesen, “Goethes Faust in Bildern,” Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel 166, Aus dem Antiquariat, no. 7 (1999): A378–88.
Werner Busch, Caspar David Friedrich, 46–81, particularly on Retzsch 61–64.
Beate Allert, “Goethe, Runge, Friedrich: On Painting,” in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, ed. E. K. Moore and P. A. Simpson (Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi, 2007), 88, 90.
Rümann, Das illustrierte Buch, 55.
Vaughan, German Romanticism, 123–54.
Shelley M. Bennett, Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 55–57, 98.
“Minor Notices,” Saturday Review 47, no. 1224 (12 Apr 1879): 473.
“Sir Joseph Noël Paton,” Athenaeum, no. 3871 (4 Jan 1902): 24c (obituary).
Günter Busch, Eugène Delacroix, 38.
Benz, Goethe und die romantische Kunst, 176, my emphasis.
Wegner, 58.
Busch, Eugène Delacroix, 38.
“Reviews,” Art Journal, n.s., 4 (1 Jan 1852): 35b.
Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 5. 1835–1838, 298.
Nancy Finlay, Inventing the American Past: The Art of F. O. C. Darley (New York: New York Public Library, 1999), 15a. Cf. Sue W. Reed, “F. O. C. Darley’s Outline Illustrations,” in The American Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century, ed. G. W. R. Ward (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1987), 113–35.
Kimberley Orcutt, “The American Art-Union and the Rise of a National Landscape School: Scholarly Essay,” in Orcutt and Allan McLeod, “Unintended Consequences: The American Art-Union and the Rise of a National Landscape School,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 18, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 3.
“The Fine Arts. Mr. Darley’s Rip Van Winkle,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 1, no. 14 (10 Nov 1848): 29.
Finlay, Inventing the American Past, 20a; Reed, 120–21.
“The Fine Arts,” 28.
Ibid., 30.
AKL Online, s.v. “Darley, Felix Octavius Carr” (by Georgia B. Barnhill), https://www-degruyter-com.proxy.rubens.ens.fr/database/akl/html (accessed 3 Oct 2021).
Orcutt, “The American Art-Union,” 6–7.
A first version of some of the following pages appeared open access in Artl@s Bulletin 10, no. 1 (2021): Article 4, <https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol10/iss1/4/>.
Stead, “Le voyage des images du Faust I de Goethe: Lecture, réception et iconographie extensive et intensive au XIXe siècle,” in L’Image à la lettre, ed. N. Preiss and J. Raigneau (Paris: Paris-Musées / Les Éditions des Cendres, 2005), 137–68; Le Men, “Millet et sa diffusion gravée, dans l’ère de la reproductibilité technique,” in Jean- François Millet (Au-delà de l’Angélus), colloque de Cerisy, ed. G. Lacambre (Paris: Éditions de Monza, 2002), 370–87.
Chartier, “Du livre au lire,” 69–70.
Chartier recalls Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1974), and David D. Hall, “Introduction: The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. W. L. Joyce et al. (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 1–47.
Petra Maisak, “Illustrationen,” in Goethe Handbuch, vol. 4, 1, Personen, Sachen, Begriffe A- K, ed. H.-D. Dahnke and R. Otto (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1998), 518a.
A fully digitized version of Faust illustrated by Frère in a later edition (1860) is of poor quality, as it is based on a previous microfilm, not the printed item: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k692289.
Max, Faust-Illustrationen: Zehn Zeichnungen, in Holz geschnitten (Berlin: G. Grote, 1880), pl. I, https://goethehaus.museum-digital.de/singleimage.php?imagenr=2882.
Jourdain, “Préface,” in Le Faust de Goethe, traduction de Gérard de Nerval, illustrations inédites de Gaston Jourdain (Paris: Imprimé pour la Société de Propagation des Livres d’Art, 1904), III.
Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix, 4:304.
To Burty he writes having seen Retzsch’s outlines c.1821; Delacroix, Journal, 1:120–21 (20 Feb 1824).
Christopher Murray, “Robert William Elliston’s Production of Faust, Drury Lane, 1825,” Theatre Research 11, no. 2–3 (1971): 108, n. 25; Doy, “Delacroix et Faust,” 19.
Doy also makes this comparison, 22.
Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism, 1–2.
Carlo Carrà, Pittura metafisica (Florence: Vallecchi, 1919), 281–82.
Mazzocca, Francesco Hayez: Catalogo ragionato (Milan: Federico Motta, 1994), 334–35.
Mazzocca, “L’illustrazione romantica,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, pt. 3, Situazioni momenti indagini, vol. 2, Grafica e immagine, 2, Illustrazione, fotografia (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 394, 406.
Grove Art Online, s.v. “Hayez-Francesco” (by Mazzocca), https://doi-org.janus.bis-sorbonne.fr/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T037051 (accessed 21 Jan 2021).
Mazzocca, Hayez. Dal mito al Bacio (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 178.
Mazzocca, Francesco Hayez: Il Bacio (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), 13–18; and Susanna Zatti, “Amore e morte, passione e patriottismo nell’iconografia del bacio tra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Il bacio tra Romanticismo e Novecento, ed. S. Zatti and L. Tonani (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), 31.
Mazzocca, Hayez. Dal mito al Bacio, 180c.
Ibid., 178a.
Luca Masia, Buitoni, la famiglia, gli uomini, le imprese (Milan: Silvana Editoriale / Volumnia, 2007), 118–21.
Gretton, “Reincarnation and Reimagination: Some Afterlives of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa from c. 1850 to c. 1905,” in “L’Image recyclée,” ed. L. Cheles and G. Roque, Figures de l’art, no. 23 (2013): 77–94.
Goethe, Faust: Traduit de l’allemand par Gérard de Nerval, 35–36.
Further on this approach, see Stead, ed., Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects, index entries under circulation.
Armingeat, “Un livre oublié,” L’Œil, no. 12 (Noël 1955): 54.
Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix, 4:304.