The God Behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226827100)

A history of Germans' attempts to transform society through art in an age of revolution.

For German philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century, beautiful works of art acted as beacons of freedom, instruments of progress that could model and stimulate the moral autonomy of their beholders. Amid the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Germans struggled to uphold these ideals as they contended with the destruction of art collections, looting, and questions about cultural property. As artworks fell prey to the violence they were supposed to transcend, some began to wonder how art could deliver liberation if it could also quickly become a spoil of war. Alice Goff considers a variety of works--including forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne, the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Laoco group from Rome, a medieval bronze reliquary from Goslar, a Last Judgment from Danzig, and the mummified body of an official from the Rhenish hamlet of Sinzig--following the conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of German collections during the Napoleonic period and its aftermath.


Author: Alice Goff
ISBN-10: 0226827100
ISBN-13: 9780226827100
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 01/17/2024
Pages: 344
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.76lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.10d