BEYOND HEGEL'S END OF ART: SCHADOW'S MIGNON AND THE RELIGIOUS PROJECT OF LATE ROMANTICISM

Abstract

This article explores the cultural controversy about the relationship between painting and poetry sparked by Wilhelm von Schadow's 1828 rendering of Mignon, a famous literary heroine in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Following closely a position introduced by Lessing and endorsed by Goethe, and using it to advance his general thesis about the end of art, Hegel argued that Schadow's image transgressed the proper borders of its medium by attempting to translate the poetic into the visual. Schadow, by contrast, insisted on the crucial regenerative role of art in society and art's religious mission, thereby giving an emphatically Christian tenor to the Romantic injunction to strive after the infinite. Animated by these convictions, Schadow turned Goethe's heroine into an allegory of Romantic art, thus “Christianizing” Goethe's neoclassical sensibility. The controversy provoked by Schadow's Mignon provides an opportunity to explore late Romantic aesthetics and the cultural and political meaning of art within the context of the Prussian Restoration, as well as to reconsider the relationship between this putatively conservative sensibility and “modernism.”