WACKENRODER, WILHELM HEINRICH. — Writer, born in Berlin on 13 July 1773, died there on 20 February 1798. Historically, together with his friend Ludwig Tieck, he belongs to the first Romantic group.
Denied the legal studies to which his father intended to direct him, during his university years in Erlangen and Göttingen he devoted himself to music, the visual arts, and poetry, especially to the study of medieval German poetry. From those years dates the plan for a journey to Rome together with Tieck, where the latter was to become the poet and W. the musician. Indeed, overmastering was his desire to live solely from art and for art; he knew how to approach it with a new, almost religious feeling of rapturous ecstasy: a mystical surrender, composed of self-effacement and humility, which reveals the Romantic soul and, with it, the new intuition of the divine value of artistic creation. In this sense he discovered the German Middle Ages, in poetic monuments no less than in those of ancient cities, such as Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Bamberg, visited together with Tieck in 1793; and in this sense his significance for the history of art criticism must be assessed. W.’s life task was in fact to see and describe the works of the ancient painters and sculptors; and these visions, especially those matured after a visit to the Dresden Gallery in 1796, were collected under the title Herzenergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders and published, with a preface and several additions by Tieck, in 1797. It exalts the religious love of the art of Raphael, Francia, Leonardo, and Dürer, as well as of the imaginary musician Joseph Berglinger, in whom he himself is concealed; but particularly noteworthy, in addition to many bold intuitions, is the chapter Wie und auf welche Weise die Werke der großen Künstler auf Erden eigentlich betrachtet werden müssen, etc., in which W. expresses the theory of the divinity of art, placed above man. He collaborated, or rather planned to collaborate, on Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbals Wanderungen, which would later become the Wilhelm Meister of the Romantics; but his premature death cut short his fervent activity. After his death Tieck published Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (1799), which gathers the Romantic reflections on art by W. and Tieck (in 1814 the latter published W.’s original portion under the title Phantasien über die Kunst von einem kunstliebenden Klosterbruder); and his correspondence with Tieck from the years 1792–93 also appeared posthumously, in which he is reflected with greater clarity.