Abstract: A controversial and enigmatic author of the Romantic era, Heinrich von Kleist was fascinated by a painting which is now considered one of the most emblematic representations of the Romantic Sublime, The Monk at the Seaby Caspar David Friedrich (now at the Alte Nationalgaleriein Berlin – NG 9/85). When the picture was first exhibited, in October 1810 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, together with another painting by Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, it was not positively received by the audience (see Müller 1986; 1995; Begemann 1990; Rühse 2013); it became a controversial case because it radically disrupted the basic principles of the classical landscape (Greiner 1996, 160). At that time, Heinrich von Kleist, together with Adam Müller, edited a journal, Berliner Abendblätter, and they asked the writers Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim to write a review of Friedrich’s painting. But the text that Kleist published was radically re-written by himself, although he published it using the initials of Brentano’s name (cb), giving rise to a large quarrel (Kurz 1988). What struck Kleist so much to lead him to re-write the text emphasizing its aesthetic power and novelty, which the other authors did not understand as deeply as he did? Why is Kleist’s revolutionary ekphrasis of Friedrich’s painting so difficult to understand and interpret even now? The aim of this study is to highlight and explain the innovation in Kleist’s use of the traditional rhetorical strategy of ekphrasisin relation to the crucial question about the Sublime-debate in the eighteenth century: he attests to an anti- Kantian concept of the Sublime, intending it as a physiological experience of the body, deeply rooted in the senses. In this way he disrupts the transcendental and hegemonic conceptions of the aesthetic experience as related to the abstract intellect and that of the arts as depending on pre-established rules and principles.We argue in this paper1that Kleist’s text does not describe an art object, ac cording to the traditional ekphrastic strategy, but performs the aesthetic, emotional, dynamical, and immersive process engaged in by the reader. The immersion of the viewer-reader is elicited by stimulating embodied simulation, according to recent neuroscientific studies, and leads in Kleist’s representation to a new embodied experience of the Sublime. In this way Kleist takes a position in the eighteenth-century debate about the Sublime: the described experience echoes the concept of the Sublime theorized by Edmund Burke, in opposition to the Kantian one. While for Kant the Sublime results from a mental state of tension between nature and art, provoking an intuition of the supersensible (Logos), Burke intended the Sublime as bodily immersive experience, leading to the intuition of the sub-sensible (material essence). Kleist’s writing about the bodily experience of the viewer in front of the picture allows him to render the Sublime by calling on physical immersion and consequently on the emotional and imaginative power of the reader. Reconstructing the interwoven bodily and mental processes of the Sublime experience in front of a natural phenomenon, Kleist successfully links the natural to the artful Sublime in a very modern perspective. The Sublime becomes therefore a peculiar form of aesthetic experience rooted in the senses, an idea forecasting contemporary theories about embodied simulation. Experiencing beauty, according to Gumbrecht (2004)and Zeki (2008), always includes the construction of meaning on one side, and the bodily involvement of the image beholder on the other (see Gallese 2018). In Kleist’s opinion, there is almost no difference in the experience of a viewer whether they are before an artifact or a natural landscape, since both experiences are rooted in the body, although the artistic one involves imagination to create the situation models responding to the represented nature, while the experience of nature impacts directly on the body. The major difference consists in the role played by the imagination, which is able to trigger the bodily simulation of nature, thus enhancing the cognitive power of the image beholder or of the reader, who is able to overcome their perceptual and imaginative boundaries.
Embodied Sublime. A Case-Study from German Romanticism: Heinrich von Kleist’s Ekphrasis Feelings about a Seascape by Friedrich
Gambino R.
2025-01-01
Abstract
Abstract: A controversial and enigmatic author of the Romantic era, Heinrich von Kleist was fascinated by a painting which is now considered one of the most emblematic representations of the Romantic Sublime, The Monk at the Seaby Caspar David Friedrich (now at the Alte Nationalgaleriein Berlin – NG 9/85). When the picture was first exhibited, in October 1810 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, together with another painting by Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, it was not positively received by the audience (see Müller 1986; 1995; Begemann 1990; Rühse 2013); it became a controversial case because it radically disrupted the basic principles of the classical landscape (Greiner 1996, 160). At that time, Heinrich von Kleist, together with Adam Müller, edited a journal, Berliner Abendblätter, and they asked the writers Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim to write a review of Friedrich’s painting. But the text that Kleist published was radically re-written by himself, although he published it using the initials of Brentano’s name (cb), giving rise to a large quarrel (Kurz 1988). What struck Kleist so much to lead him to re-write the text emphasizing its aesthetic power and novelty, which the other authors did not understand as deeply as he did? Why is Kleist’s revolutionary ekphrasis of Friedrich’s painting so difficult to understand and interpret even now? The aim of this study is to highlight and explain the innovation in Kleist’s use of the traditional rhetorical strategy of ekphrasisin relation to the crucial question about the Sublime-debate in the eighteenth century: he attests to an anti- Kantian concept of the Sublime, intending it as a physiological experience of the body, deeply rooted in the senses. In this way he disrupts the transcendental and hegemonic conceptions of the aesthetic experience as related to the abstract intellect and that of the arts as depending on pre-established rules and principles.We argue in this paper1that Kleist’s text does not describe an art object, ac cording to the traditional ekphrastic strategy, but performs the aesthetic, emotional, dynamical, and immersive process engaged in by the reader. The immersion of the viewer-reader is elicited by stimulating embodied simulation, according to recent neuroscientific studies, and leads in Kleist’s representation to a new embodied experience of the Sublime. In this way Kleist takes a position in the eighteenth-century debate about the Sublime: the described experience echoes the concept of the Sublime theorized by Edmund Burke, in opposition to the Kantian one. While for Kant the Sublime results from a mental state of tension between nature and art, provoking an intuition of the supersensible (Logos), Burke intended the Sublime as bodily immersive experience, leading to the intuition of the sub-sensible (material essence). Kleist’s writing about the bodily experience of the viewer in front of the picture allows him to render the Sublime by calling on physical immersion and consequently on the emotional and imaginative power of the reader. Reconstructing the interwoven bodily and mental processes of the Sublime experience in front of a natural phenomenon, Kleist successfully links the natural to the artful Sublime in a very modern perspective. The Sublime becomes therefore a peculiar form of aesthetic experience rooted in the senses, an idea forecasting contemporary theories about embodied simulation. Experiencing beauty, according to Gumbrecht (2004)and Zeki (2008), always includes the construction of meaning on one side, and the bodily involvement of the image beholder on the other (see Gallese 2018). In Kleist’s opinion, there is almost no difference in the experience of a viewer whether they are before an artifact or a natural landscape, since both experiences are rooted in the body, although the artistic one involves imagination to create the situation models responding to the represented nature, while the experience of nature impacts directly on the body. The major difference consists in the role played by the imagination, which is able to trigger the bodily simulation of nature, thus enhancing the cognitive power of the image beholder or of the reader, who is able to overcome their perceptual and imaginative boundaries.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
