Painting and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century Italy. 11

A Portrait of International Antiquarianism: Tischbien’s Goethe in the Roman Compagna.

Tischbein’s portrait of Goethe in the Roman countryside is a visual summary of the international antiquarian culture that was established during the era of the Grand Tour. Though the exact date of the painting is not known, there is reason to believe it was finished by Tischbein in Naples in 1786, who may have added certain associations between its subject and the antique itself. As Patrick Hunt says, some scholars claim that the pose of Goethe may owe something to figures on the frieze of the Elgin Marbles, which seems extremely likely. The poet records in his Italian Journey a visit to the house of Sir Richard Worsley in Rome who had returned from Greece with drawings of the Elgin Marbles. Goethe was fascinated by these figures and after some of them were removed to London between 1801 and 1812, Goethe asked British artists like Benjamin Robert Haydon to send him copies in black chalk so that he and his Weimar circle could study them.¹ One of the most important elements of the painting is the classical relief behind Goethe; this is an explicit reference to his version of Euripides’s play of Iphigenia at Tauris. During 1786 Goethe worked on his Iphigenia auf Tauris which he finished and read to Angelica Kauffmann in February 1787. Goethe and Tischbein would not have been unaware of “the extant Bourbon excavations at Pompeii and in the Neapolitan Campania” and perhaps other friezes representing Orestes and Pylades in the Villa Albani. There were many painted versions of this tragic story, and Gluck’s opera Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) would have been known to Goethe. One of the most famous painted versions during the Grand Tour period was the American Benjamin West’s Pylades and Orestes Brought as Victims Before Iphigenia, of 1766, now in the Tate. In showing the Iphigenia relief next to Goethe, Tischbein may have been hinting at the poet’s archaeological mission of saving the past. Is it significant that Goethe points down towards the earth, maybe signifying the remnants of an ancient culture that was slowly being unearthed as in the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum?

1Letter from Goethe to Haydon, 16th February, 1819.