Captions within Goethe's Landscapes

On Thursday, April 10, the Institute of Italian Studies (ISI) at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) hosted the workshop titled "Landscape with Captions. Intermedial Combinations Beyond the Human." Michele Cometa, Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo and guest speaker at the event, shared his reflections on Goethe's landscapes during an interview with Alphaville (Rete Due – RSI).

Commenting on the title of the workshop, Michele Cometa explained that it refers to a centuries-old practice: inserting words into the landscape at various levels, both in garden design and in visual representations. “However, the issue is much broader,” the scholar noted. “The project by my colleague Marco Maggi, who conceived and organized the workshop, is rooted in the context of ecocriticism, which is a way of looking at literary production that takes into account ecological and evolutionary concerns, as well as the crucial role literature plays in our bios and ecological niche.”

As Cometa pointed out, even in the Baroque era, literature entered the garden-system, which he described as a multimedia system: “A garden includes plants, rocks, rivers, but also inscriptions and bodies performing actual choreographies.”

Another key aspect is the intercultural dimension: “There are different ideas of the garden and of intermediality. It’s clear that a Chinese garden incorporates other media differently than a Western one. In my talk during the workshop, I will focus on Goethe, one of the most important writers of the Western canon, while one of my colleagues will speak about Chinese gardens.”
Indeed, Michele Cometa’s talk was followed by that of Yolaine Escande, Research Director at the CNRS and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and a scholar of Chinese language, literature, and culture.

Delving deeper into Goethe’s view of landscape, Cometa highlighted the value of a notebook left behind by the German author, often overlooked by critics: “Goethe bought a specially formatted album in which he collected a series of drawings reflecting his lifelong experiences with landscapes. It includes Italian and German scenes and essentially encompasses everything he knew and did up to 1806. We could consider this notebook an incunabulum of Goethe’s entire body of work, and it’s a pity that Germanists have largely ignored it.”

Cometa also emphasized the significance of the title Goethe gave the notebook: “Beyond being a travel and leisure diary, it is also a Trostbüchlein, a little book of consolation, since Goethe dedicated it especially to Anna Amalia, a figure of great importance to him, and to her niece Carolina Louise. It also contains many private moments: Anna Amalia died in 1807, so Goethe paid tribute to her by drawing landscapes in which her name is literally inscribed in bold letters. Furthermore, he was emerging from a dramatic personal period — it was the era of the Napoleonic wars. Curiously, Goethe sought comfort for himself and his readers through these idyllic passages, building a kind of monument to Anna Amalia.”

Goethe’s personality also featured a distinctive trait: “He may have been one of the last figures capable of bridging artistic and scientific experience. This is evident in his works — for example, the attention he pays to the rocks on which the names of Anna Amalia and other figures are inscribed is a testament to his deep knowledge of geology. This knowledge plays a key role in the construction and interpretation of the landscape. It’s also reflected in his focus on rivers, mountains, and even clouds, which he studied as both poet and scientist,” Cometa explained.

In Goethe’s work, one can also find a medieval approach, in which every single element of the natural landscape is symbolic of something transcendent — an idea that guided the design of gardens: “Goethe, therefore, created a liber naturae, a book of nature, even before it was a tribute to the Duchess of Weimar or a reflection on the dramatic times he lived through.”

Michele Cometa concluded by highlighting Goethe’s anthropological curiosity during his travels in Italy: “When he undertook his journey to Italy, Goethe paid close attention to the political and economic situation, as well as to the general anthropology of Italians — especially those in the South. He was less concerned with aesthetic questions, although the final volume resulting from the journey turned out to be a general summa of his anti-Romantic aesthetics. However, by reading between the lines, one can see that Goethe did not miss any of the major cultural milestones of the time.”

The full interview with Professor Michele Cometa on Alphaville (Rete Due – RSI) is available at the following link.