Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich

WACKENRODER, WILHELM HEINRICH. - Writer, b. in Berlin on 13 July 1773, d. there on 20 Feb. 1798. Historically he forms part, together with his friend Ludwig Tieck, of the first Romantic group.

Unsuited to legal studies, to which his father wished to destine him, during his university years at Erlangen and Göttingen he devoted himself to music, to the figurative arts and to poetry, especially to the study of medieval German poetry. From those years dates the project of a journey to Rome together with Tieck, where the latter was to have been the poet and W. the musician. Overpowering indeed was his desire to live only by art and for art; and to this he knew how to draw near with a new, almost religious feeling of rapt ecstasy: a mystical abandonment, made of self-effacement and humility, which is the revelation of the Romantic soul and, with it, of 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 the ancient cities, such as Nuremberg, Ansbach, Bamberg, visited in 1793 together with Tieck, 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 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 some additions by Tieck in 1797. In it is exalted the religious love for the art of Raphael, of Francia, of Leonardo, of Dürer, of the imaginary musician Joseph Berglinger, in whom he conceals himself; but of particular note, besides many bold intuitions, is the chapter How and in what manner the works of the great artists of the earth should properly be considered etc., where 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 Romantics' Wilhelm Meister; but his untimely end cut short his fervent activity. Posthumously Tieck published the Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (1799), which gather the Romantic reflections on art of W. and of Tieck (in 1814 the latter published W.'s original part under the title Phantasien über die Kunst von einem kunstliebenden Klosterbruder); and also posthumously appeared his correspondence with Tieck from the years 1792-93, in which he is most limpidly mirrored.

Sergio Lupi