Philipp Otto Runge and the Semiotic Language of Nature and Patriotism

Abstract Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) was a leading German Romantic artist whose iconography represents a transition from the Neoclassical iconography of classical mythology and allegory to an abstract semiotic system of signs based on a mystical interpretation of nature. An admirer of Herder's theory of language, Runge's iconography was representative of a trend among Romantic artists to promote nationalism and cultural values through the implementation of formal epistemological systems in the medium of art. Runge's individual iconography reveals a synthesis of rational and mystical systems of knowledge that emphasizes Herder's concept of the German Volk as a unique cultural identity, and presents an analogy between the creation of the cosmos, the organic origins of language, and the conception of the German Volk. Runge's iconography expresses the nationalist sentiments and linguistic theory of Herder that formed the basis of German propaganda movements during the Wars of Liberation, 1807–1815. Notes NOTES This article was originally presented at the 11th International Conference of ISSEI, "Language and the Scientific Imagination," University of Helsinki, 28 July–2 August 2008. 1. Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800–1815 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 499–505. The drawing was originally commissioned for a patriotic journal, Das vaterländischen Museum, by its editor, Friedrich Perthes, but rejected in favor of another design by the artist. 2. Daniel Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften. von Philipp Otto Runge (Hamburg: F. Perthes, 1840), I.355–61. 3. Marianne Thalman, The Literary Sign Language of German Romanticism, trans. Harold A. Brasilius (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1972); Liselotte Dieckmann, "The Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism," Comparative Literature 7.4 (Autumn, 1955): 306–12; Frances Connelly, "Poetic Monsters and Nature Hieroglyphics," Art Journal 52.2 (Summer, 1993): 31–46. 4. Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. E. Frank Manuel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 5. Robert Feinhold Ergang, Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (New York: Octagon Books, 1966); F. M. Barnard, Herder on Nationalism, Humanity and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), 55–65. 6. Robert Berdahl, The Politics of Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, 1770–1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 61. 7. James Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 235–326. 8. Friedrich Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815, ed. Peter Paret (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977). 9. Walter Consuelo Langsam, The Napoleonic Wars and German Nationalism in Austria (New York: AMS Press, 1970). 10. Kiethelm Klippel, "The True Concept of Liberty: Political Theory in Germany in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (London: Oxford University Press, 1990), 447–68. 11. James Elstone Dow, A Good German Conscience: The Life and Time of Ernst Moritz Arndt (New York: University Press of America, 1995); Ernst Moritz Arndt, Ausgewählte Gedichte und Schriften (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1969); Adam Zamoyski, Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 331, 545. 12. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Geist der Zeit (1806), vol. 1, 282–89, translation quoted in Alfred Pundt, Arndt and the Nationalist Awakening in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 65–66. 13. Hellmuth, Transformation of Political Culture, 74. 14. Ernst Moritz Arndt, "The German's Fatherland?" (1813), quoted in Dow, Ernst Moritz Arndt, 55–56. 15. Arndt, Ausgewählte Gedichte und Schriften, 47. 16. Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation States: The French and German Experience, 1789–1815 (Princeton, CT: D. Van Nostrand), 1967. 17. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Lanugage, Trans and ed. John Moran (Chicago, IL. University of Chicago Press, 1970), 50. 18. Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, trans. and ed. Alexander Gode (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 88; Walter Wiora, "Herder's Ideen zur Geschichte der Musik," Im Geiste Herders, ed. Erich Keyser (Frankfurt am Main: Holzner-Verlag, 1953), 75–128. 19. Runge to Johann Georg Zimer, 24 January 1806. Philipp Otto Runge, Briefe und Schriften, ed. Peter Betthausen (Munich: C.H.Beck, 1982), 177. 20. William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 65, 76, 81. 21. Rudolf Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp Otto Runge (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1970), 16. 22. Letter to Daniel Runge, Dresden, 6 Octtober 1801. Runge: Briefe und Schriften, 61–62. 23. Steffi Roettgen, Mengs: Die Erfindung des Klassizismus (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2001), 31. 24. Steffi Rottgen, "Mengs, Alessandro Albani und Winckelmann – Idee und Gestalt des Parnass in der Villa Albani," Storia dell'arte 30 (1977): 87–156. 25. Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, I.52. 26. Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, I.52, II.210. 27. John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press, 1999), 169–76; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colour, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 161, 212. 28. Alexander Rueger, "The Cultural Use of Natural Knowledge: Goethe's Theory of Color in Weimar Classicism," Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.2 (Winter 1992–93): 211–32. 29. Philipp Otto Runge, Die Farbenkugel und andere Schriften zur Farbenlehre, ed. Julius Hebing (Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben, 1959); Hellmuth Freiherrn von Maltzahn. Philipp Otto Runges Briefwechsel mit Goethe (Weimar: Goethes Gesellschaft, 1940), 39–47. 30. Philipp Otto Runge to Daniel Runge, 6 October 1801. Runge, Briefe und Schriften, 62–63. 31. Anton Raphael Mengs, "Reflections on Beauty and Taste in Art," in The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, Jose, Nicholas Azara (London: R. Faulder, 1796), 1–82. 32. Hanna Hold, "Philipp Otto Runge: Four Times of Day," in Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich: The Passage of Time, ed. Andreas Blühm (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle, 1996). 33. Runge, Briefe und Schriften, 238. 34. Curt Grützmacher, Novalis und Philipp Otto Runge: Drei Zentralmotive und ihre Bedutungsphäre: Die Blume – Das Kind – Das Licht (Munich: Eidos Verlag, 1964). 35. Novalis, "Christianity or Europe," in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. and trans. Frederick C. Beiser (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79. 36. Mrs. Vaughan, Jennings, Rahel: Her Life and Letters (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 126–27. 37. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. George Armstrong Kelly (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 45–91. 38. Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, quoted in Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp Otto Runge, 49–50. 39. G. W. F. Hegel, "Religion Is One of Our Greatest Concerns in Life," in Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 39–57. 40. Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 157, 175; Walter Consuelo, The Napoleonic Wars and German Nationalism in Austria (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 43, 68; Friedrich Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 102–78. 41. Lisolette Dieckmann, "The Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism," Comparative Literature 7.4 (Autumn 1955): 306–12. 42. Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, I.82. 43. Gunnar Berefelt, "On Symbol and Allegory," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (1969): 201–12. 44. Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, I.52. 45. Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 82–113; Madelyn Gutwirth, Twilight of the Goddesses (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 46. Quoted in Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 28–29. 47. Emmett Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 204–5, 343. 48. Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation States: The French and German Experience, 1789–1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 49. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, eds. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 50. Letter from Schiller to Duke Augustenberg, 8 February 1793; and Letter from Schiller to Goethe, 1794, quoted in Wilkinson and Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, n. 3, xvii–xix.

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