German Artists and Subjects
Melville’s collection of prints after German artists is lacking in engravings after famous Old Master paintings such as those that anchored his collections of prints after Italian, French, Flemish, and Dutch artists. When Melville briefly visited Cologne in 1849, and several German cities along the Rhine River in 1857, the loosely confederated German states had not yet consolidated into a nation state. That transformation occurred in dramatic fashion when a united German Empire emerged from the victory of the Prussian army over the French Empire in 1871. That was the year in which the Metropolitan Museum was chartered in New York and Melville was becoming a serious collector of prints in his home on East 26th Street.
Culturally, the loose confederation of German states was beginning to exert a strong intellectual influence over its European neighbors a century before the consolidation of its political and military power. In the late 18th century, the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and the embrace of Italian Renaissance humanism by German archaeologists (led by Winckleman), poets (including Lessing and Schiller), philosophers (including Kant and Herder), and polymaths (such as Goethe) were creating a German Enlightenment pre-Romanticism that was already influencing the cultural life of Europe from the time of Goethe’s first journey to Italy in 1786-88 to the publication of the revised diary of that visit as Italienische Reise (Travels in Italy) in 1816-17.
Melville acquired Goethe’s Travels in Italy, in a volume entitled Goethe’s Autobiography, from its London publisher on Christmas Day, 1849, immediately before sailing home from his three-month trip to London and the Continent (Sealts no. 228; MMO 288; NN J 144). Melville had another copy of that same book when he arrived in Rome for the first time in 1857. He marked the passage in which Goethe, seventy-one years earlier, declared that “I reckon a new birth-day—a true new birth from the day I entered Rome.” Goethe in this passage applied the cultural idea of a “renaissance,” a new-birth, directly to himself.
These two men, though born generations apart, were the same age when they arrived in Rome. Melville calculated in his copy of Goethe's book that Goethe had then been “37” (the same age at which Melville arrived in Rome). Goethe’s text and Melville’s markings were recorded by Walker Cowen in Melville’s Marginalia in 1965 (Cowen 5: 199-206). But you can see all the actual annotations, pencil checks, and even folded corners that Melville made in his copy of Travels in Italy in Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO 228, pp. 349-403). This link takes you directly to the page on which he calculated Goethe’s age as 37 and drew a marginal line along the rest of the opening paragraph: https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=47&PageID=11080.
Like Goethe, Melville was reborn in Rome as a student of art. He marked the passage in which Goethe declares that “a new life begins when a man once sees with his own eyes all that before he has but partially heard or read of.” This was especially true when Goethe saw “the subjects of the first engravings I ever remember seeing . . . stand boldly before my sight” (MMO no. 228). The journal Melville kept during February and March of 1857 is full of such moments. How immediately he processed such impressions is seen the lecture on “Statues in Rome” he gave in sixteen American (and Canadian) cities beginning in November of the same year (NN PTO 398-409, 723-53). Goethe after returning from Rome eventually amassed a collection of 11,500 prints, declaring that “I learned something from every piece in my collection" (Gleisberg 44).
Goethe left his prints to the city of Weimar on the condition that they be preserved and documented in a museum devoted to his collection. Melville lacked the cultural status in New York that Goethe had in Weimar when he died, and the 420 prints he is now known to have collected were dispersed and preserved in an extended, undocumented familial diaspora until they began to surface from one collection after another in five different states in in the 1980s and 1990s, leading a sequence of essays whose findings are now being consolidated on this website (Key to Primary Sources on Prints from Melville’s Collection).
Goethe had himself found time to begin consolidating and integrating his own collection when Napoleon’s conquering army was approaching Weimar in 1813. “During this confused time,” he wrote to a friend, “I know no better way of being diverted than putting my art works, especially my prints in order. I am beginning to place then according to schools and to join the various collections; in context each print becomes instructive, and you have more than you believed” (Gleisberg 11). For a detailed comparison of Goethe and Melville as print collectors, see the section “Goethe Yes and No” in our introduction to “Herman Melville as Print Collector”
Melville, like Goethe, felt himself a citizen of all of Europe when contemplating the visual arts. Six years before calculating Goethe’s age upon arriving in Rome at the time of his own arrival in 1857, Melville had been comparing Goethe’s “massive chest” to a “Roman triumphal arch” in Moby-Dick in 1851 (NN MD 376). Young Melville’s first deep immersion in German intellectual culture had begun in October 1849 during the three-week voyage from New York City to London in which he spent much of his time with George Adler, a scholar, translator, and professor of German Literature at New York University who was a native of Leipzig. During their second day on the ship Southampton, Melville wrote in his journal that Adler “is full of the German metaphysics, & discourses of Kant, Swedenborg, &c. He has been my principal companion so far.” The next day the two new friends “walked the deck . . . till a late hour, taking of ‘Fixed Fate, Free-will, foreknowledge absolute’" (NN J 4). These conversations continued in London for two more weeks as Melville and Adler sallied out almost every morning to visit the city’s churches, galleries, taverns, and other cultural attractions until Adler left for on Paris on November 19 (NN J 4, 12-22).
When Melville arrived in Paris at the end of November, he spent another week with Adler before traveling to Germany for the first time. In Paris, Melville saw the Louvre, Versailles, Hotel de Cluny, and the “Bibliotheque Royale,” where Adler introduced him to prints by the German artists Albert Durer & Holbein (before they had a leisurely dinner together and “talked high German metaphysics” in Adler’s room).
Melville made the most of his first, short visit to Germany. On his one full day in Cologne, he went immediately, before breakfast, to its “famous cathedral, where the everlasting ‘crane’ stands on the tower.” After visiting another church and a museum, Melville went to St. Peter’s Church to see “the celebrated Descent from the Cross by Rubens.” That evening he boarded a boat and spent the night sailing up the Rhine to Coblenz. Three times he went up on deck “to find the boat gliding between tall black cliffs and crags.” During the day in Coblenz, from the summit of the fortress at Ehrenbreitstein, he savored the “superb” view of the “far away” Rhine as it “winds . . . between its castellated mountains.”
Declaring himself “Homeward Bound,” young Melville then sailed back down the Rhine to Cologne and traveled through Ostend and Dover to London and its public and private galleries, where he spent one highly stimulating week before sailing home to New York (NN J 35-39).
Melville’s list of “Books obtained in London 1849” included two English translations of books by Goethe, probably recommend by Adler: Autobiography and Letters from Italy. Howard Horsford, editor of the 1849 journal of the journey to London and the Continent, suggests that Melville’s “congenial companionship with Adler on the ship, in London, and in Paris” was “as momentous as anything on Melville’s whole trip, in its aftereffects on upon his thought and writings” (NN J 144-45, 170).
Those aftereffects began when Melville compared Goethe’s “massive chest” to a “Roman triumphal arch” in Moby-Dick in 1851 (NN MD 376), took note of “Goethe’s statue” in Frankfort in 1857 (NN J 126, 521), and collected, by the time of his death in 1891, the 35 prints after German artists and subjects to be cataloged, displayed, and interpreted in this chapter.