Jean Paul Richter

Christoph Ernst Luthardt (1823-1902)

Tiberias in 1877

The professor knew: his protégé was dilligent and energetic, but also still undecided about what to do in life and with it. Would he be willing and be able to write an art historical supplement to the second edition of the professor’s commentary to the Gospel According to John?
Willing? Yes and no. He probably had agreed to do so when being supported by the professor as to a research trip to the Holy Land, where his professor himself probably had never been. But now the professor had waited long for the first letter of his protégé to come. A letter from Tiberias had now arrived, dated by March 29 of 1876. And the protégé, meant to act as being the eye of his professor, his travelling resesarch assistant, as it were, and meant to look out for Christian monuments, catacombs and manuscripts, he showed to be dilligent and grateful, but the professor did also read that his young protégé would probably only be back at Lipsia by the end of June. And the protégé did even ask if – under the circumstances – it would still be possible for him to write that art historical supplement to the commentary. Thus: The question of being able could be seen as being put on hold. At any rate the preface to the second edition of the commentary to the Gospel of John by Christoph Ernst Luthardt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Ernst_Luthardt) is dated by June 14 of 1876. And the career of the 30-year-old protégé named Jean Paul Richter was definitely at a turning point.

And it was a turning point, this trip of 30-year-old Jean Paul Richter (1847-1937) to Egypt and to Palestine. Only he did not know so at the time. But it retrospect the letter from Tiberias, actually finished at a cloister of the Carmel mountain region and entrusted by Richter to the Austrian postal service, speaks of everything that would gain importance in Jean Paul Richter’s life soon. Only what was gaining importance – Renaissance painting in the first place – was not to be found where he was travelling. Jean Paul Richter, who had been travelling in Italy for years prior to this trip to the Near East in 1876, did not exactly say that he was missing what he had found in Italy. But he did speak of the ways his mind had taken when being confronted with the topography of Palestine. Because he had compared Biblical sites with the images of his own imagination, stemming from his reading the Bible. And now it seemed that his imaginiation had been corrected, and at the same time he had become aware that the creations of Renaissance artists, he had seen in Italy, were renderings of Biblical scenes in their own right. The effect that Renaissance art had had on him showed, as it were, with some delay. When being out of Italy, and when being away from the artistic landscapes of that country.

»In the past I never would have thought it possible that a visit to Palestine be of such an essential facilitation as to the understanding of the Holy Scripture. The Images of sites of Biblical incidents produced by imagination do actually not amount to the reality. You shall find it natural that – as a reaction – the conceptions of a Perugino, Dürer and others manifest themselves within my soul all the more lively.«

Jean Paul Richter had already realized while travelling through Italy that he had no actual sense nor for nature nor for landscape in its quality as nature. Landscape was topographical to him: a site of incidents and not being of interest in itself or in its aesthetical quality. And the letter from Tiberias was frank in that: the sun was burning merciless. The color of the 30year old traveller turned from lobster-red to a bronze brown. And Richter awaited the »beautiful« time when one did travel only at night.

Panoramatic view of the Carmel region (picture: Oriaaaass)

Thus what he did and what he did’t see at night we do not know. But the landscape of the Holy Land did manifest as a site of one particular incident for him. If a shifting one’s attention, away from the interests of a remotely supervising professor, can be regarded as an incident. But it was a bronze-brown shade that Jean Paul Richter brought back to Italy and to Milan, when on his way of actually returning to Lipsia he did encounter for the very first time his second, his actual mentor that now would, for the next fifteen years, be of actual guidance for him: in Milan at Via Pontaccio he did encounter Giovanni Morelli, and although a book on the Ravenna mosaics awaited to be written first, a turn to the connoisseurship of Renaissance painting as a life preoccupation was taking place, that had begun while travelling in Palestine.

(Picture: ou.edu)

Maybe while travelling at night. While thinking about Renaissance art in its rationally-mystically rendering of Biblical scenes. While being away from a mentor’s supervision. It was not a complete shift that prepared in these very days, but a shift of attention for about the next 20 years. And then, but only then, Jean Paul Richter was to shift his attention again. Away from the everlasting questions of attribution, i.e. of determining authorship of Renaissance paintings. And towards a renewed interest in other ways of depicting Biblical scenes, a shift of attention to Early Christian mosaics and especially to those of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. And while both areas of art historical interest have their specialists – it’s this shifting that would deserve some more attention. The coming back to the researching of Early Christian mosaics with the eyes of a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. And vice versa the connoisseurship of Italian Renaissance painting with a sense for other, simpler, less (or more?) rational ways of visual expression. Jean Paul Richter might be just an example of such a refreshing of one’s eyes by doing something else and new. And what might be seen here as a strengh might, under other circumstances, be seen potentially as a weakness. But in any rate: the shifting of one’s attention to the actually not seen might turn to be, as in the case of Jean Paul Richter and under particular circumstances, something of actual and finally biographical importance.

(Picture: EvgeniT)

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