Recent scholarship has insisted that Goethe is not merely a “poet” contemplating the visual arts, but a profoundly visual subject. From adolescence onwards he takes drawing lessons, watches painters at work, experiments with graphite, pen, watercolour and modelling, accumulating thousands of sheets of landscapes, architecture, anatomical and botanical studies.

Goethe as a Visual Subject

The Italienische Reise (journey 1786–1788, publication 1816–1817) marks a turning point in this trajectory. In Rome, integrated into the community of German and Swiss painters, lodging with Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein and in contact with artists such as Jakob Philipp Hackert and Angelika Kauffmann, Goethe pushes to the limit his temptation to become a visual artist. He draws daily, takes lessons, tries his hand at sculpture; he even comes to consider abandoning literature for painting, before scaling back this ambition. In a letter from Rome he expresses his limits with self-irony: «Zur bildenden Kunst bin ich zu alt, ob ich also ein bißchen mehr oder weniger pfusche, ist eins».

It is therefore incorrect to imagine Paestum as the “first time” Goethe attempts to fix the world visually or relies on a gesture of graphic documentation. What takes place at Paestum is rather a change of scale: from personal, formative drawing practice to structured delegation to a professional view painter.

Christoph Heinrich Kniep in the Context of the Grand Tour

Christoph Heinrich Kniep (Hildesheim 1755 – Naples 1825) belongs to that constellation of German artists who, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, turned Italy into a laboratory of landscape and ruin. Initially trained as a portraitist in Germany, thanks to the support of the bishop and writer Ignacy Krasicki he was able to move to Italy in 1781; he settled in Rome and then in the Naples area, where the combination of sea, volcano and Graeco-Roman archaeology offered ideal material for his views.

Current research emphasises the almost “documentary” quality of his works: the views of Paestum, Pompeii and the Neapolitan countryside show meticulous attention to proportions, terrain morphology and architectural detail, to the point of being useful for the history of archaeology as well. The exhibition “L’Italia in linee. Disegni di Christoph Heinrich Kniep” at the Casa di Goethe (Rome, 2025–26) and its catalogue have consolidated this reading, presenting Kniep as a visual mediator between the experience of the Grand Tour and the iconographic stabilisation of landscape.

The First Meeting of Goethe and Kniep: Naples 1787

The sources agree in placing the first meeting between Goethe and Kniep in Naples in 1787, within the network of artistic relationships surrounding Tischbein. Goethe, who had left Weimar in September 1786, reached Rome in October, stayed there until February 1787, then continued to Naples (25 February) and from there to Sicily. It is in this context that, on the recommendation of Tischbein and other artists of the German circle, he learns of Kniep’s abilities as a landscape painter.

The decision to involve him systematically was taken shortly before, or at the time of, the excursion to Paestum. In the journal and its later reworkings Goethe describes the passage from a mere acquaintance to a “practical” relationship: Kniep is no longer just an artist met in a circle of friends, but a collaborator entrusted with a precise function, with a commission, a fee and defined rules.

Paestum: Aesthetic Experience and the Contract of the Gesture

The visit to Paestum is a pivotal moment. On Goethe’s side, it offers one of the most studied cases of a “conversion of the gaze”: the initial impact of the three Doric temple masses – squat, closely spaced columns, proportions far removed from the neoclassical canon – produces a sense of dismay that scholars have related to the eighteenth-century debate on the “disproportion” of Paestum.

The poet moves from a perception of oppression to a form of familiarity: he reactivates his knowledge of art history, places the temples in an archaic context, interprets them as evidence of an earlier stage of the classical form; the architecture ceases to appear “monstrous” and becomes the laboratory of his own aesthetic transformation. The Italienische Reise records this shift with great lucidity, and recent historiography regards it as a paradigmatic example of the encounter between the modern subject and the classical “primitive”.

On Kniep’s side, Paestum is the place where a genuine economy of the gesture takes shape. Goethe describes the draughtsman’s modus operandi with precision: framing the sheet with a rectangle, the use of “the best English pencils”, the almost ritual habit of sharpening them again and again. Above all, he establishes an agreement: all the Umrisse (outlines, sketches of landscape and ruin) will be Goethe’s property; after their return, Kniep will work up some of the views in sepia or watercolour, for a fee set according to the quality and importance of the subjects.

In theoretical terms, Paestum shows the convergence of two gestures: that of Goethe, who takes upon himself the task of working through the experience in discursive and poetic form, and that of Kniep, who establishes a stable protocol for the graphic translation of landscape.

Delegating the Gaze: Goethe between Drawing and View Painting

The decision to “engage” Kniep should not be read as Goethe’s complete renunciation of drawing, but rather as a redefinition of roles. Throughout the Italian journey the poet continues to draw, as the surviving albums and sheets demonstrate, comprising landscapes, architectural motifs and studies from nature. The collaboration with Kniep arises from the recognition of a limit: Goethe understands that, for an accurate graphic documentation of the journey – especially in territories such as Sicily – his own level of skill is not enough; a landscape painter is needed to stabilise visually what he, as writer and observer, is passing through.

Paestum thus becomes a “case study” of the transition from amateur artistic practice to professional delegation. Goethe does not stop looking, but concentrates his energy on interpretation, writing and theoretical elaboration; Kniep takes on responsibility for topographical fidelity and for building up a corpus of views. The memory of the journey is constructed as a double helix: texts and drawings.

The Contemporary Gesture: Speed, Sedimentation, Memory

If a contemporary device – a smartphone, a digital recording system – is introduced into this scene, the structure of the gesture changes radically. The time of capture shrinks: a video or a photograph can fix in a few instants what Kniep takes hours to translate into lines; distribution shifts from the slow circuit of prints, albums and catalogues to the immediate one of social media and sharing platforms.

From an essayistic point of view, the point is not to set slowness and speed against each other in moral terms, but to observe the effects on the process of sedimentation. In the Goethe–Kniep model, memory is deferred: it arises from the combination of diary notes, later reworkings (the Italienische Reise was only fully written up decades later) and the graphic corpus produced during the journey. In the contemporary model, memory tends to coincide with the first capture: image, video and caption are already “narrative” at the very moment of the gesture.

The risk, in terms of experiential depth, is that the phase of “conversion of the gaze” – that shift from surprise to familiarity which Paestum exemplifies – is compressed or replaced by the immediate gratification of publication. The historical case does not invite us to reject technology, but to ask which slow gestures are worth preserving within a fast system.

What Has Changed in the Gesture

Chronologically, the answer to the question “how many years have passed?” is simple: more than two centuries lie between 23 March 1787 and our present. Aesthetically and anthropologically, the answer is more complex: in the meantime the way we measure the time of experience has changed, as has the way we articulate gesture, vision and memory.

The comparison between Goethe–Kniep and the contemporary gesture highlights at least three differences: the different duration of the gesture (hours of sitting and work vs. seconds of capture), the different temporality of memory (deferred and stratified vs. immediate and often ephemeral), and the different distribution of roles between observer and producer of images (poet-draughtsman + landscape painter vs. a subject who often coincides with author, director and distributor of their own content).

In this framework, the case of Kniep – and Goethe’s decision to rely on him – continues to offer a discreet lesson: slowness is not a value in itself, but a condition that allows the world to “teach” its own forms. The contemporary challenge lies in finding spaces in which the gesture, even when it makes use of fast devices, grants time enough margin to accomplish that transformation of the gaze which, at Paestum, took “less than an hour”.

NOTES:
«Zur bildenden Kunst bin ich zu alt, ob ich also ein bißchen mehr oder weniger pfusche, ist eins.» Translation: “I am too old for the visual arts, and so it does not matter how much, or how little, I botch things.” (trans. Robert R. Heitner). Letter from Rome of 6 February 1788, in Italienische Reise (Second Roman Sojourn) and in the critical editions of the Italian letters. ^{[projekt-gutenberg][litwiss-online.uni-kiel][litwiss-online.uni-kiel][goethezeitportal]}

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italienische Reise, various editions (German editions and translations); English quotations from Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, Suhrkamp, New York 1989.[gutenberg][de.wikipedia]
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Briefe. 18. September 1786 – 10. Juni 1788, ed. V. Giel, Berlin 2012.[litwiss-online.uni-kiel]
Goethezeitportal, “Goethe als bildender Künstler”, “Goethe: Zeichnungen aus Italien”.[goethezeitportal][goethezeitportal]
Goethezeitportal, “Christoph Heinrich Kniep”, with biographical profile and analysis of his journeys in Italy.[goethezeitportal]
Casa di Goethe (Rome), L’Italia in linee. Disegni di Christoph Heinrich Kniep, exhibition catalogue.[casadigoethe][casadigoethe]
Joselita Raspi Serra (ed.), La fortuna di Paestum e la memoria moderna del dorico 1750‑1830, 2 vols., Florence 1986.[iconografiacittaeuropea.unina][zobodat]
Studies on the Italienische Reise and Paestum: J. Busch, «Unklassische Italienreisen» (2010); contributions on the eighteenth-century debate on the “disproportion” of the temples of Paestum.[journal.eahn][archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg]

L'articolo Gesture and Time: Goethe, Kniep and the Memory of Landscape proviene da Unreal Goethe.

To do so he follows the route every eighteenth-century traveller knew. By carriage as far as Resina — today’s Ercolano — then by mule through the vineyards climbing the flank of the volcano. Those vineyards already produced Lacryma Christi, and they grew on one of the most fertile soils in Europe: decomposed volcanic ash. Vesuvius killed and gave life at the same time. Goethe records it without comment, but anyone who climbs those slopes today, among the same vines, understands at once what he was seeing.
Beyond a certain point one dismounts. One goes on foot.

“next, on foot over the lava from the year ’71, which had already grown a covering of fine but sturdy moss; then up alongside the lava.”

The lava of ’71. Sixteen years earlier. It is the great flow of May 1771, the one that inspired Pietro Fabris to paint the celebrated night view of the lava stream, later published in Sir William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei. That lava had descended towards Resina, along the very slope on which Goethe is walking. The moss on the stone means that nature had resumed its work. Sixteen years — and already moss.
There is something vertiginous in this detail, which Goethe registers without emphasis. He is walking on a recent eruption. He walks on living matter, cooled. He walks over a flood of fire turned to stone.

Higher up he passes the hermit’s hut — a Frenchman who would live there for fifteen years. It was a customary stop for travellers. Goethe leaves it “to my left on the heights”, without stopping. He has not come for local colour.
Then begins the great cone of ash.
“Then up the mountain of ashes, which is hard work.”

Anyone who has climbed Vesuvius knows what that means. Every step sinks. For every metre gained, half a metre is lost. The ash gives way under one’s shoes like wet sand. It is the most thankless labour a mountain can impose — not the steep ascent, not the altitude, but ground that will not hold. Hard work — the understatement is exact.
They reach the top. And here the defeat begins.
“Two thirds of this summit was covered with clouds.”
Two thirds. Goethe has reached the top of the cone and sees nothing. The clouds are inside the crater. The mountain is telling him no.

But Goethe does not go down. He looks for another way.
He finds the ancient crater, now filled with recent lavas. He studies them, he dates them: “two months and fourteen days” old. And he also notes “a meager one five days old, already cooled”. He records the dates like an investigator at a crime scene. It is living matter, fresh, still warm until only very recently. Five days earlier — on 25 February — lava was flowing here, while Goethe was entering Naples for the first time.
The volcano and he had arrived at the same appointment, five days apart.
He walks over a hill smoking on every side. The wind drives the smoke in the opposite direction — a stroke of luck, almost an invitation. Goethe seizes it. He wants to see the true crater. He advances.

“We were approximately fifty paces into the smoke when it grew so thick that I could scarcely see my shoes.”

Fifty paces. Then the wind turns. The smoke closes in. Goethe can no longer even see his own shoes. Holding a handkerchief to his mouth is of no use. The guide has vanished into the fog. Underfoot lie “little fragments of lava that had been cast up” — unstable, treacherous.
And here Goethe does something the Romantic poet would not have done. He stops. He turns back.
“I thought it best to turn back and save the desired sight for a sunny day with less smoke.”
I thought it best. No epic, no sublime, no heroic flight. Only the lucid judgement of a man who is learning how one works with a volcano: with prudence. What is more, he adds at once, he has learned how difficult it is to breathe in such an atmosphere. Even defeat is a lesson. Defeat above all is a lesson.
And here is the sentence that changes everything.

“Now that I have reconnoitered it, I can, so to speak, besiege it as soon as the weather consents to improve.”

Besiege it. In the German: um ihn förmlich … zu belagern — to lay formal siege to it, where the translator’s “so to speak” softens what the original states outright. It is no literary hyperbole: it is a deliberate military lexicon. Goethe no longer speaks as a tourist, nor even any longer merely as a poet. He speaks as a general. Vesuvius has become an adversary — not in a hostile sense, but in a cognitive one. A problem to be surrounded, explored, and finally understood. The first ascent was not a failed excursion. It was a reconnaissance.
In that verb — reconnoitre — something is being born.
From Rome until that moment, Goethe had looked at Italy above all as an artist and a humanist. The ruins, the statues, Raphael’s paintings, the Iphigenia to be reworked. On Vesuvius, by contrast, he looks at a natural phenomenon with a different disposition: he observes, compares, measures, renounces, plans his return. The word “siege” is not emphasis: it is a method.
Goethe will return to Vesuvius twice more: on 6 March, with Tischbein, when he reaches the rim of the crater in the interval between two eruptions and has to flee under a shower of lapilli and ash; and on 20 March, alone, to follow a lava flow towards Ottaviano and walk on the lid of glowing stone that forms over the torrent of fire. Three ascents. Three attempts. Three progressive victories over the same problem. Belagerung — siege — is the exact word.

But there is something more in that first, lost ascent. Something the hasty reader does not see.
Goethe does not come down from the mountain empty-handed. He brings back a hypothesis.
In the last paragraphs of the entry, after recounting the smoke, the retreat, the resolutions, he writes:
“But I discovered a phenomenon that seemed very remarkable to me, and I want to investigate it more closely and get information from experts and collectors.”
It is a stalactitic, greyish coating on what he calls a “volcanic chimney”. And then the sentence that deserves to be read again, slowly:
“I believe that this solid, grayish, stalactitic mineral must have been formed through sublimation of the very most delicate volcanic exhalations, unassisted by moisture and without fusion. It occasions further thought.”
Sublimation of volcanic exhalations. Unassisted by moisture and without fusion. It is a technical proposition. It is a causal hypothesis. It is one of the first moments in the Vesuvian narrative in which Goethe moves from describing the phenomenon to formulating a possible mechanism. Not a mere impression, not an emotion: a proposed explanation of the how.
And it must be said: his intuition was, in principle, remarkably close to the modern explanation. Many fumarolic incrustations do indeed form through the direct deposition of mineral species from hot volcanic gases, without passing through a liquid phase. Goethe could not identify their mineralogical composition with the instruments of later science, but he had grasped the essential point with extraordinary precision: the deposit arose neither from water nor from fusion, but from exhalations.

Three years later, in 1790, a small book of 86 pages appears in Gotha, from Carl Wilhelm Ettinger: Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären. An essay on the metamorphosis of plants. It will be Goethe’s first independent work of natural science. From then until his death he will write on optics, mineralogy, comparative anatomy, geology, meteorology. The Farbenlehre, the theory of colours, will be the scientific work to which he binds a decisive part of his intellectual identity.
Goethe the scientist is not born here alone. He already has anatomical, mineralogical and botanical interests behind him; and he will be born again elsewhere: in a botanical garden in Padua, in a public garden in Palermo, on the rocks of Paestum. But perhaps here, on Vesuvius, that disposition takes on for the first time an exemplary narrative form: observation, failure, hypothesis, return.
It is born on a cone of ash, amid smoke that robs him of the sight of his own shoes, before a volcano that refuses to show itself. It is born at the exact moment in which a thirty-seven-year-old German poet, defeated by a cloud, decides not to give up and notes — calmly, in an almost cool syntax — that he will lay formal siege to it.
Goethe had not come to Vesuvius only for the sublime. He had come to understand. And when he could not, he organised himself to return.
That is how science is done. That is how, very often, it always has been done.

The Vesuvius of 1787 belonged to the long phase of persistent activity that began after the great eruption of 1631 and ended with the eruption of 1944, which closed that eruptive cycle and profoundly altered the structure of the summit crater. The “hermit’s hut” that Goethe passed stood not far from the spot where, between 1841 and 1845, the Vesuvius Observatory would be built: the first volcanological observatory in the world. Climbing to the terminal cone today, on the way to the crater, one passes it twice.

Sources
J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, Suhrkamp, New York 1989, entry of 2 March 1787.
J.W. Goethe, Italienische Reise, German reference edition, Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. XI.
J.W. Goethe, Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, Gotha, Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1790.
William Hamilton, Campi Phlegraei. Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies, Naples, 1776.
Pietro Fabris, volcanological views for William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei , in particular the depiction of the lava stream of May 1771 towards Resina.
Boris Behncke et al., Vesuvio: Activity from 1632 until 1794, University of Catania, historical-eruptive database.
Roberto Scandone, Lisetta Giacomelli, Vesuvius and Vesuvians: A Geophysical Story, in Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, Elsevier.
H. Frank, entry «Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften», in Goethe Handbuch, J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart, 1996-1997.

L'articolo The First Ascent of Vesuvius proviene da Unreal Goethe.

Then comes the decisive sentence: “He is one of those noble young men who work for the happiness of human beings and their honorable freedom.”

Happiness. Not well-being, not progress, not public order. Happiness. In Goethe’s German the word is Glück — which means both happiness and good fortune, as though the two were inseparable. But for Filangieri happiness is not fortune. It is a project. The entire Scienza della Legislazione — whose publication began in 1780 — rests on an idea that sounds obvious today but was explosive in the eighteenth century: laws do not exist to preserve power, but to produce happiness. “Good laws are the sole support of national happiness,” Filangieri writes. And that national happiness is no abstraction: it is the sum of the happiness of individual citizens. Every individual counts. Every person has a right to fare well.

Gaetano Filangieri is thirty-four. He is a nobleman, a Neapolitan, already famous throughout Europe — in 1787 probably more so than Goethe himself. The Scienza della Legislazione has been translated into French, Spanish, German and English. Benjamin Franklin owns two copies in his personal library and corresponds with him directly — while on the other side of the ocean a Constitution is being written that will place in its preamble the pursuit of happiness, the right to seek happiness. It is no coincidence. Filangieri’s ideas cross the Atlantic before he does.
And yet he lives in Naples, in the ancestral palace at Largo Arianiello, in what Goethe, a few days later, will describe as living “respectably but modestly”. He is not a rich man. He is a man who thinks on a grand scale.
What strikes Goethe is not the fame. It is the bearing.
“His deportment bespeaks the soldier, the cavalier, and the man of the world, yet this correctness is tempered by the fine moral feelings expressed in his whole personality and very charmingly evident in his words and ways.”
It is an exact portrait. Filangieri is not the abstract intellectual reasoning in the void. His ideas inhabit the body, issue from the voice, can be read in the way he shakes a hand or chooses his words. Goethe — who is a connoisseur of physiognomies — recognises something rare: thought become presence. As though the happiness Filangieri theorises in his books were already written upon him.

Then comes the political man.
Filangieri is “sincerely committed to the king and his kingdom”, but he does not approve of everything that happens in the realm. And there is something that truly frightens him: the shadow of Joseph II of Austria, whom many in Naples fear to have designs on Italy. “The image of a despot, even though it may still be just hovering in the air, is terrible to noble-minded persons.”
The despot is the exact opposite of Filangieri’s happiness. The despot decides for everyone. Happiness, by contrast, belongs to individuals — and it is just laws that protect it. That is why Filangieri speaks to Goethe “quite candidly” about what Naples has to fear. It is not fear. It is lucidity.
He discourses on Montesquieu, on Beccaria, on his own works. Always, Goethe notes, showing “the same best intentions and the same warm youthful desire to accomplish good”.
That word — youthful — is not incidental. Filangieri is thirty-four and reasons as though the world were still entirely to be built. The good to be done, happiness to be founded. Not as utopia but as engineering: law by law, article by article.

Then Vico arrives.
At a certain point in the conversation Filangieri introduces a name: Giovan Battista Vico — a Neapolitan philosopher of the previous century, at that time virtually unknown outside Italy. His Scienza Nuova, published more than sixty years earlier, still has no German translation — it will have none until 1924, the work of Erich Auerbach. And yet these “modern Italian devotees of law” rank him above Montesquieu. The book is handed to Goethe “as a holy relic”.

Goethe leafs through it. He takes away an oblique impression: he glimpses in it “sibylline presentiments of a goodness and justice which would or should come some day, presentiments based on a serious contemplation of life and traditions.” He does not, perhaps, understand everything. But he understands the gesture. Filangieri is not only a cosmopolitan man of the Enlightenment with his gaze on Paris and Philadelphia. He is also the guardian of something older and deeper — a tradition of thought that, from the depths of the South, seeks to explain how peoples are born, grow, and strive for the good. A philosophy that does not separate happiness from history.
“It is really fine for a nation to possess such a patriarch,” Goethe writes. And he adds that some day Hamann will become “a similar codex” for the Germans.

Before closing the page, one last note.
“He may still be in his thirties.”
Goethe writes it as one records a detail. One thing among others. Sixteen months later, on 21 July 1788, Gaetano Filangieri dies of consumption at Vico Equense. He is thirty-five. The Scienza della Legislazione remains unfinished — of the seven books planned, he has completed four and part of the fifth.
The happiness of mankind that he had in view remains an open project. But Filangieri knew it. He had written it himself: “The philosopher must be the apostle of truth. If the light he spreads is not useful to his own century and his own country, it will surely be so to another century and another country.”

L'articolo Glück – The Meeting with Filangieri proviene da Unreal Goethe.

To grasp the weight of that encounter one needs to know who Hackert was in February 1787.
Jakob Philipp Hackert is forty-nine. He was born in Prussia, at Prenzlau, into a family of painters. He studied in Berlin and passed through Paris, where he met Claude-Joseph Vernet — the great French landscape painter — and learned the lesson that would change his life: to paint from nature. He has lived in Italy since 1768. For almost twenty years he was in Rome, where he became the point of reference for the landscape painters from the North — French, German and Dutch artists who, in the wake of Claude Lorrain, Poussin and Dughet, populated the Eternal City. In 1786 he moved to Naples, summoned as court painter by Ferdinand IV of Bourbon.
Goethe knows him even before he meets him.
In Rome, in the autumn of 1786, he had taken part in the Frascati gatherings: artists and amateurs who met in the evening, laid on the table the sheets drawn during the day and discussed them. That system — practical, communal, almost artisanal — had been devised by Hackert. Aulic Councillor Reiffenstein had inherited it after his move to Naples. “This laudable society was actually founded by Philipp Hackert,” Goethe would write, “who could draw and finish the real views in a very tasteful fashion.” When, on 28 February, Goethe crosses the threshold of the Palazzo Francavilla on the Riviera di Chiaia, he is meeting a man who, without knowing it, had already taught him something.

The Palazzo Francavilla is one of the finest aristocratic residences in Naples. Built in the sixteenth century and enlarged in the eighteenth, it is known today as Palazzo Cellamare. Hackert has an entire wing at his disposal. The journal notes — with a gentleman’s restrained envy — that the painter has had it “furnished with artistic taste” and lives in it “contentedly”. In plain terms: he lives well. A royal salary, a house befitting his station, a privileged relationship with King Ferdinand IV and Queen Maria Carolina. He gives drawing lessons to the princesses. In the evening he is invited to court for conversations on art. He is working without respite on the series of the ports of the kingdom — an enormous commission modelled on Vernet’s in France, now preserved at Caserta — and on the Four Seasons for the hunting reserve at Fusaro, which he would consider his major work.
And he is happy.
That is the point. Goethe is not used to it. Goethe comes from a German court where he served Duke Karl August as Geheimer Rat, overseeing mines, roads and finances, and felt himself suffocating. He had fled. He had left Weimar in secret, entered Italy under an assumed name, and travelled as Philipp Müller. Fleeing the court had been his way of saving the artist within him.
Hackert stayed at court. And saved himself all the same.

“He knows how to combine incessant hard work with enjoyment of life.”

Naples, 28 February 1787

This is no neutral description. It is a programme. In Hackert Goethe sees the man who has done what he himself does not yet know whether he can do: hold together two things that seemed mutually exclusive. German rigour and southern sweetness. Work and joy. Service and freedom.
Hackert works incessantly. The same note returns two weeks later, when Goethe sees him again at Caserta: “he is always busy drawing and painting”. He is no dilettante who indulges in art as a pastime — he is a professional who produces, every day, panel after panel, landscape after landscape. And yet he is not grey, not bitter, not obsessive. He knows how to enjoy life. He knows how to move at court. He knows how to be affable. He knows, as Goethe would write shortly afterwards, how “to attract people by making each one his pupil”.
In German terms, Hackert is the very opposite of the young Sturm und Drang type — the titanic, solitary, rebellious artist. He embodies another model: the artist as a cultivated craftsman, integrated into society, productive, serene. It is the model Goethe is beginning to desire for himself. The flight to Italy will not end in a final farewell to Weimar — it will end in a return, and in a new arrangement: less administration, more art and science, but always within the court. Hackert is the prototype of that arrangement. Goethe looks at him and understands that it can be done.

The afternoon does not end in the palace. Hackert takes them down to the sea to watch the fishermen. “We saw all sorts of fish and curiously shaped creatures pulled from the waves.”
An apparently decorative sentence. In reality it is one of the small miracles of the Italian Journey. Goethe has been in Naples for three days. In forty-eight hours he will climb Vesuvius for the first time. In three weeks he will be at Paestum. Seven weeks later, in a garden in Palermo, the intuition of the Urpflanze, the primal plant, will come to him. Goethe the scientist, Goethe the naturalist, the Goethe of botany and volcanism — is being born in precisely those days.
And he is born, symbolically, in Hackert’s company.
For Hackert already was what Goethe was about to become: an exact observer of the real. Not a dreamer of ideal landscapes — a punctilious, scientific draughtsman, who wanted plants and trees to be botanically correct and places to be recognisable at first glance. When, two weeks later at Caserta, Hackert tells Goethe his most famous sentence — “You have talent, but you cannot do anything” — it will not be merely a criticism of his drawing. It will be the handing over of a method. Precision in drawing, sureness and clarity in the disposition of light and shadow. The three rules that held for the brush would soon hold for Goethe’s eye upon the whole of nature.
The fish drawn from the waves on that first evening are already a lesson. Hackert looks at them as a painter. Goethe will learn to look at them as a naturalist. But the gesture is the same: to bend over the real and take its measure.

Twenty years later, on 28 April 1807, Hackert dies on a small estate near Florence, San Piero di Careggi, where he had taken refuge after fleeing Naples during the Parthenopean Republic of 1799. He leaves precise instructions: his autobiographical notes are to go to Goethe.
The papers reach Weimar on 5 June. Goethe reads them on the 7th and 8th. As early as 29 and 30 June he publishes a first excerpt in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. Four years later, in 1811, the complete volume appears in Tübingen from the press of J.G. Cotta: Philipp Hackert. Biographische Skizze, meist nach dessen eigenen Aufsätzen entworfen — a biographical sketch, largely drawn from his own writings.
It is the only book Goethe ever devoted to the life of another artist. Not to Winckelmann, not to Tischbein. To Hackert.
In that choice, posthumous and silent, lies the meaning of that afternoon of 28 February 1787. Goethe had not met a painter. He had met a possibility of life. And he repaid it, twenty years later, with the gift a writer can make to a dead friend: to remember him in writing.

The Palazzo Francavilla still stands on the Riviera di Chiaia. Today it is called Palazzo Cellamare. No plaque records that the German painter of a Bourbon king lived there, or that one February afternoon in 1787 a traveller incognito, who went by the name of Müller, climbed its stairs. The Riviera di Chiaia is still beautiful. And the fishermen, now and then, still draw curiously shaped creatures from the waves.

Sources
J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, Suhrkamp, New York 1989 (entries of 15 November 1786, 28 February and 14-16 March 1787)
J.W. Goethe, Philipp Hackert. Biographische Skizze, meist nach dessen eigenen Aufsätzen entworfen, J.G. Cotta, Tübingen 1811
W. von Löhneysen, entry «Hackert, Philipp» in Neue Deutsche Biographie 7 (1966), pp. 410-411
Wolfgang Krönig et al., Jakob Philipp Hackert. Der Landschaftsmaler der Goethezeit, Köln-Weimar-Wien 1994
Claudia Nordhoff, Jakob Philipp Hackert 1737-1807. Verzeichnis seiner Werke, 2 vols., Berlin 1994
H. Frank, entry «Philipp Hackert» in Goethe Handbuch, ed. B. Witte and P. Schmidt, J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1997

L'articolo Jakob Philipp Hackert proviene da Unreal Goethe.

Vesuvius kept to our left, violently emitting smoke, and I was filled with quiet delight at seeing this remarkable sight with my own eyes.

25 February 1787

The carriage rolls on between fields of green wheat, already a span high. Rows of poplars hold up the vines, the tendrils swaying from tree to tree like nets. The sky opens. The sun beats down.

“We approached Naples in an atmosphere of the purest brightness.”

And then the sentence worth the whole journey:

“And now we really found ourselves to be in a different country.”

The carriage rolls on between fields of green wheat, already a span high. Rows of poplars hold up the vines, the tendrils swaying from tree to tree like nets. The sky opens. The sun beats down.

Not another city. Another country. Anyone who has made the journey from Rome to Naples, even today, knows what he means. There is a point at which the light shifts register, houses change shape, people’s gestures change speed. Goethe grasps it with a precision that has something physical about it: the flat-roofed houses, the people swarming in the street, the Neapolitan convinced he lives in paradise and holding a dismal idea of the North.

In Rome, at the end of 1786, Goethe had written an enormous sentence:
“I count the day when I entered Rome as my second natal day, a true rebirth”.

It was not rhetoric. In Rome he had truly been transformed. He had completed the definitive version of Iphigenia in Tauris, studied Winckelmann to the point of obsession, learned to look at a statue as one looks at a living face.

“The rebirth, which is remolding me from within, is still in progress”, he had written from Rome.

Rome had been the second birth — slow, disciplined, wholly inward.

But a birth, at some point, needs the world.
In Naples, looking is not enough. One has to understand. And to understand, one has to surrender. Every traveller arrived with his prejudices — Volkmann’s guidebook spoke of thirty to forty thousand idlers in the streets — and Goethe dismantles them one by one. At one point he stops to watch a troop of ragged boys crouching in a circle on a square, their hands turned towards the ground. He does not understand. He racks his brains. Then he discovers that a smith had heated an iron wheel-rim on that very spot, and the stone had kept the warmth. The children stayed there, in silence, warming their hands on that little. It is not misery — it is intelligence. It is not idleness — it is a form of life governed by laws other than those of the North.

“Everything points to the fact that a happy land which abundantly supplies the prime necessities of life also produces people with a happy disposition.”

The most revealing thing, however, is not what Goethe sees. It is what Naples does to him. In Rome he organised his days methodically — drawing in the morning, visits in the afternoon, Winckelmann in the evening. In Naples the programme collapses.

“The place inspires indolence and leisurely living”, he writes, and it is no complaint — it is the astonishment of a man who discovers himself changed. Naples is slowing him down. It is absorbing him into its rhythm.

“Naples itself appears to be happy, free, and lively.”

Three words that belong to Naples alone.

On 26 February — so the Italian Journey has it — Goethe opens his first Neapolitan page with his address.
“Alla Locanda del Sgr. Moriconi al Largo del Castello.”
He writes it with the pleasure of someone savouring a sound: “Letters from all four corners of the world could reach us now at this address, which sounds both cheerful and grand.” A small vanity. I have arrived. Write to me here.
The Largo del Castello was the great open space before the Maschio Angioino, facing the sea. The room is beautiful. Spacious, on the corner, with an iron balcony running round the building and a view over the ever-moving square. The ceiling decorated with a hundred panels of arabesques — Pompeii is near, and it already shows.
Only one thing is missing.
Heating.

February in Naples does what February does — it asks no one’s leave.
“There is no fireplace, no flue to be seen, even though February exercises its rights here too.”
Goethe is unwell. He is cold. They bring him a tripod bearing a flat brazier, full of gently glowing coals under a smooth layer of ash. To get warm one must draw the ash away with the lug of a key — slowly, delicately, unhurriedly. Whoever stirs up the embers for more heat at a stroke puts the whole fire out, and must then pay to have the pan refilled.
A fire that punishes impatience. A perfectly Neapolitan fire.
For the icy floor, a reed mat. For the body, no furs — here they were a rarity. Goethe opens his luggage and takes out a seaman’s cowl that he and Tischbein had brought along as a joke, a curiosity they had never really thought of using. He puts it on. He ties it round his body with a portmanteau cord.
“I had the very odd feeling that I was something halfway between a sailor and a Capuchin.”
When Tischbein returns from visiting Neapolitan friends, he finds the poet muffled in a sailor’s cowl tied with a cord, seated on a reed mat before a brazier that barely gave off heat, in a room with a hundred arabesques and not a single fireplace.
He cannot keep from laughing.

There is something immensely consoling in this scene.
Goethe had waited all his life to reach Naples. His father had been there before him, and had never stopped speaking of it. On 27 February, after seeing the grotto of Posillipo at sunset, he will write a sentence that weighs like a stone:

“it might be said of my father, in reverse, that he could never become completely unhappy, because he returned to Naples again and again in his thoughts.”

For months, from Rome, he had looked southward with the impatience of one who knows the best is yet to come.
And the first page he writes from Naples — the cold, the brazier, the cowl — is no disappointment. It is Goethe sparing himself no ridicule even in the place of his dreams. Great writers know that the sublime and the grotesque always coexist — indeed, they are often one and the same. The journey of a lifetime, the long-awaited place — and there you are in a sailor’s cowl bound with a cord, blowing on a brazier with the lug of a key.
On 27 February he wakes up recovered. And he writes the sentence that already contains everything Naples will be for him — Vesuvius, Pompeii, Pozzuoli, Filangieri, Hamilton, Paestum, the sea:
“Today we feasted.”

In Rome he had been born a second time. In Naples that new life found its rhythm.

The Locanda of Signor Moriconi no longer exists. It was Benedetto Croce, in his Volfango Goethe a Napoli of 1903, who reconstructed its exact location: the houses between Vico delle Campane and Vico Sant’Antonio Abate, the owner Teresa Prencipe, the innkeeper Domenico Moriconi. The entire block was demolished at the end of the nineteenth century in the great urban renewal scheme known as the Risanamento. Whoever wishes today to find the spot where Goethe wrapped himself in that sailor’s cowl must stop at the entrance of the Galleria Umberto I, on the Piazza Municipio side.
No plaque recalls that February of 1787.
Vesuvius is still there. It has not erupted since 1944 — the great cone is silent, without smoke, without lava flows. But it looms exactly as it did then, and whoever arrives from the North for the first time still understands, at first glance, why Goethe wrote “at last”.

Sources
J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, Suhrkamp, New York 1989
Benedetto Croce, Volfango Goethe a Napoli. Aneddoti e ritratti, Napoli, Luigi Pierro, 1903

L'articolo Goethe Arrives in Naples proviene da Unreal Goethe.

Vincenzo’s Tavern
The official version has Goethe dining at the Osteria della Campana, frequented by the German artistic aristocracy. The accounts tell a different story. In the evenings Goethe almost always went out, and the place he frequented was the tavern of Vincenz Roessler — known as «da Vincenzo» — in Via dei Condotti, between that street and Piazza di Spagna.
Vincenz Roessler was an innkeeper of German origin, but his extended family was Roman, the cooking was Roman, the customers were Roman. With him lived his wife Teresa Kronthaler and six children. Two of them — Costanza, twenty-one, and the younger Maria Elisabetta — caught the poet’s attention to such a degree that Goethe, early in 1787, commissioned two portraits from Tischbein. He kept them until his death.
This is no mere detail. It is a signature.

The Note about the Fan
In the Weimar archives, inside a bundle of papers no one had ever read with attention, Zapperi found a note. Costanza had written it — or rather, had probably dictated it to a scribe, as was customary for women of the common people unaccustomed to the pen. It was in Italian. It read:
«Carissimo amico, ieri sera mi fu dato un ventaglio alla moda; poi mi fu ritolto, desidero da voi trovarmene subito un altro per far vedere a questo, che si trovano altri ventagli, e forse più bello di quello. Scusate l’ardire e resto, lo Costanza Releier.» [“Dearest friend, last evening I was given a fashionable fan; then it was taken back from me. I wish you to find me another at once, to show this one that other fans are to be had, and perhaps finer than that one. Forgive my boldness, and I remain, Costanza Releier.”]
A request for a fan. Innocuous, apparently. But Zapperi reads it as an indirect proposal of betrothal: according to the social codes of eighteenth-century Rome, the gift of a fan functioned as a pledge, a signal of intent, a way of asking whether the bond had a future.
Is the reading legitimate? Yes. Is it demonstrable? No. The reviewer Mauro Ponzi puts it with surgical precision: the document is authentic, the interpretation conjectural. There is no explicit evidence either of a physical relationship or of a formal promise. What remains is a tension — real, documented, unresolved.

That Damned Second Pillow
And this is where Tischbein enters the scene.
Not the Tischbein of the great portrait — Goethe in the Roman Campagna, the image everyone knows, the poet reclining among ruins in a broad-brimmed hat, the noble profile, the golden light. No. The other Tischbein. The private one, ironic, impudent among friends.
The drawing is entitled Das verfluchte zweite Kissen — that damned second pillow. It is not a work meant for the public. It is a quip, an inside joke among men who know each other well, who have shared months of daily life, taverns, Roman nights. Tischbein draws and laughs. Goethe, in all likelihood, takes the blow.
What does it depict? A bed. One pillow too many. The physical obstacle — real or metaphorical — between desire and its fulfilment. Zapperi reads it as an ironic allusion to the unconsummated embrace with Costanza: the drawing of one friend teasing another over a lost opportunity, a missed moment, that particular combination of shyness, social convention and a young woman who would not be persuaded — or who set conditions Goethe was not prepared to accept.
It is friendly satire, never vulgar. It is the idiom of people who live elbow to elbow and can permit themselves anything within the four walls of a tavern. It does not name Costanza. It might refer to a generic situation. But the context, the chronological coincidence, the commissioned portrait, the preserved note — everything points in the same direction.

What the Italian Journey Does Not Tell
Goethe returned to Weimar in June 1788. In the months that followed he began writing the Roman Elegies — twenty poems in elegiac distichs, the form of Tibullus and Propertius, in which a poet in Rome loves a woman of the people. The name he gives her is Faustina.
Who Faustina really was is one of the most debated questions in Goethe philology. Zapperi definitively resolves a historical misunderstanding: the widowed innkeeper whom some nineteenth-century scholars had identified as Faustina had died long before Goethe’s arrival in Rome. That trail was false. But a second note found in the Weimar archives — written in ungrammatical Italian by an unidentified woman of the people — reads:
«io vorei sapere perche sete ieti a sera un dato a cosi via senza dirmi niente io io credo che vi siete piliati colata ma io spero di no io sono tutta per lei amatima si potete come io amo a lei…» [“I would like to know why you went away like that last evening without saying anything to me I I think you have taken offence but I hope not I am all yours love me if you can as I love you…”]
A quarrel. A misunderstanding. A woman waiting for an answer who cannot even write properly, because what she feels is larger than the words at her command. Zapperi calls her Faustina for convenience. He shows that Goethe had a real, non-mercenary affair with her — a strong passion, kept secret not only out of personal discretion but because the Roman ecclesiastical authorities of the time could compel lovers to marry, on pain of imprisonment.
Of all this, the Italian Journey bears no trace.

The Book and the Life
Goethe returned to the Italian Journey decades later, reworking it several times. The third and final part dates from 1829 — more than forty years after the events. By then Rome had become aesthetic education, intellectual rebirth, a Platonic itinerary among ruins and museums. The taverns of Via dei Condotti, Costanza’s note, Tischbein’s drawing: filed away. Sublimated. Transformed into something else.
It is the principle that gives his autobiography its title — Dichtung und Wahrheit, Poetry and Truth. Life as raw material that literature shapes, selects, rearranges. It does not falsify: it chooses. It does not lie: it keeps silent.
But archives do not keep silent.
And Tischbein, with his damned second pillow, had left between the lines what the Journey would pass over in silence.

Sources:
Roberto Zapperi, Das Inkognito. Goethes ganz andere Existenz in Rom, Beck, München, 1999
Mauro Ponzi, review of Roberto Zapperi, Das Inkognito. Goethes ganz andere Existenz in Rom, in «Studi Germanici», n.s. 37 (1999), 3, pp. 539-542
J.W. Goethe, Roman Elegies
J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, Suhrkamp, New York 1989

L'articolo That Damned Second Pillow proviene da Unreal Goethe.

From this vantage point, history especially is read differently from anywhere else in the world. In other places one reads from the outside in, here we imagine we are reading from the inside out, everything lies spread around us and also extends out from us.

Rome, 1786

Today that apartment is the Casa di Goethe — the only German museum outside Germany. The window is still there. And whenever someone pauses before it — a tourist, a student, a passing visitor — they repeat, unawares, the same ancient gesture: looking out, and finding themselves within.

L'articolo The Departure for Naples proviene da Unreal Goethe.