Emil Möller and Paul Müller-Walde

Microstory of Art IV –
Emil Möller and Paul Müller-Walde


(Picture: artres.com)

»Once Müller-Walde said to me: ›This actually cannot be Lionardo at all; him looking like a German Professor!‹«.
The one who recalled this statement, referring to the picture shown to the left, that by modern Leonardo scholarship is considered as the one picture probably showing Leonardo as he really looked like, was Emil Möller, who published the statement (and also the picture, attributed then to Ambrogio de Predis) within his 1952 monograph on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (statement: p. 181, note 23; picture: frontispiece to the actual main text of the book). Where Möller also went on to recall his own reply: »Wasn’t actually Lionardo then [at the time when he worked at the Last Supper] more of an erudite scientist and technician than of an artist, and had’t he also German blood in him?«

We recall this passage here for a number of reasons. Firstly: The history of art history has only acknowledged the work of these two Leonardo scholars mentioned, but shown little interest as to the biographies of these two men. Paul Müller-Walde (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Müller-Walde), born 1858 and probably 11 years older than Möller (who was born in 1869), is mentioned in a letter that Giovanni Morelli wrote in 1890, a few months before he, Morelli, died, when Müller-Walde, then a man in his thirties, was apparently working his way through Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus. Morelli, for whatever reasons, referred to Müller-Walde as a »kleiner Knirps«.
The second reason, however, that we recall this statement lies in the very fact that it displays how two scholars, when looking at a picture probably showing Leonardo da Vinci as he really did look like, both felt a gap between the impression they got from looking at the picture and their view of Leonardo, meaning here: their intellectual knowing of Leonardo as a historical person, or: their believing to know.
Because the passage shows also how very unstable such knowing or believing to know is, one scholar dismissing the view that the picture was or is showing Leonardo, and the other, in rhetorical question form, bringing forward possible (?) reasons that the picture might still show Leonardo (and at the same time probably already having discovered the possibility that the picture actually might provide arguments for a stabilizing of his knowing or believing to know).
The two reasons that we have named as far as now, we feel, melt into one, or into a third reason. Because we have reasons to assume that Emil Möller felt loyal, be it only for some short period of his life or not, to the Führer and the Duce (see the Leonardo biography by Charles Nicholl, p. 21 of the English paperback edition). But it is still known as little of the history of art history during that period, that we also have very little information on Möller and his biography (except of his being a cleric and also of mentoring, in his very late years, which also means: after the war, Carlo Pedretti). And it seems all the more desirable to know more about these two German scholars – that also, as a matter of fact, contributed a great deal to Leonardo scholarship –, as they brought in their world views, possibly racist, as far Möller is concerned, into this field of scholarship.
Thus: when looking at how various people did look at art during this period, the history of National Socialism, if we like it or not, comes in as well, because, as the passage being quoted makes clear, world views come in.
Still, as far as we can see, up to the present date little has been done, to analyse the effect that racist or National Socialist views, or only the atmosphere of racist and National Socialist thinking, had upon the field of Leonardo studies, where all possible views, and also those, that we consider as the most sinister and disastrous of human mankind’s history, come in.
Which is why, sticking to our microhistorical principle, we give here the full passage of Möller’s book of 1952, in which the author actually refers to the picture shown above, and that, if taken for itself, might not reveal much of this author’s world views at all; and still it reads like a projecting of something into this picture that, as we have mentioned above, Paul Müller-Walde was not willing to project into that picture (of the careers of these two man, to say this again, we know little, but it seems a fact that neither Paul Müller-Walde nor Emil Möller, despite the fact that both achieved a doctoral degree, are to be associated institutionally with the German academia of their times):

»One does get the impression of a personality of mighty intellectual power (»einer geistesgewaltigen Persönlichkeit«), of a clear thinker and a benevolent human being. The forehead is high and mighty, the nose long and even, the lips are thin and closed. The beard is cut to the upper lip; being curled at the corners of the mouth, it melts with the long, soft waves, beginning yet on the cheek bones and blends into the rich main hair, being curled at its ends, and pulling back already from the high forehead. The wise (»klug«), benevolent eye is opened only a little – like it is with scientists that have to strain it much, and drawn actually somewhat too small.« (p. 12)

Postscript: Some informations on Emil Möller (and also a bibliography) can be found in the 1960 Raccolta Vinciana issue (this is edition No. XVIII of that journal), p. 349f.

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