Not so parallel lives: the Exempla Virtutis in the German and Italian tradition

ABSTRACT

In the eighteenth century, public statuary shifted from the commemoration of princes to the celebration of ‘great men’: men, less so women, who had excelled in the arts and sciences, on the battlefield or in the political-administrative realm. Reflecting ancient and Renaissance virtue ethics, these public recognitions of virtuous behaviour (exempla virtutis) were intended to encourage emulation in order to rally the nation to the revolutionary and Napoleonic war effort. This article analyses the gradual nationalization of the exempla virtutis in early nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. It retraces the creation of spaces to commemorate great men and charts the changing biographies of those selected for inclusion in the Roman Pantheon and Walhalla respectively. The article argues that rather than overcoming national divisions the eclectic selection of ‘great men’ actually functioned as a magnifying glass for tensions within the nation, thus undermining the very notion of a ‘national monument’.

RIASSUNTO

Nel corso del Settecento i soggetti commemorati dai monumenti pubblici non furono più soltanto principi e sovrani, ma anche ‘grandi uomini’: uomini e in alcuni casi eccezionali anche donne che si erano distinti in ambito scientifico, artistico, militare oppure politico. Mentre la definizione di questi modelli di virtù si rifaceva alla tradizione dell’etica antica e rinascimentale, il riconoscimento pubblico delle exempla virtutis aveva l’obbiettivo di presentare un canone da imitare, mobilitando così gli sforzi necessari per affrontare le guerre napoleoniche. Questo saggio analizza la graduale trasformazione dei modelli di virtù in senso nazionale nella prima parte dell’Ottocento. L’articolo ripercorre la creazione di nuovi spazi per commemorare i ‘grandi uomini’ in Italia e Germania e esplora le biografie di coloro che furono inclusi nel Pantheon romano e nel Walhalla. Infine, il saggio si sofferma sul fatto che la selezione piuttosto eclettica dei ‘grandi uomini’, invece di contribuire a superare le divisioni nazionali, costituì piuttosto una lente di ingrandimento delle tensioni interne alle due nazioni, distaccandosi quindi nettamente dal concetto di ‘monumento nazionale’.

KEYWORDS:

• Germany
• Italy
• nationalism
• monument
• hero glorification
• classical tradition

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Germania
• Italia
• nazionalismo
• monumenti
• glorificazione eroica
• tradizione classica

Notes

1. ‘Pantheon’ consists of pan (‘all’) and théon (genitive plural of théos, god). It literally means ‘to all gods’.

2. Denis Diderot to Etienne Falconet, 15 February 1766 (Diderot 1994-97, V, 622).

3. Earlier, both Florentines and Dutchmen had raised pantheons to ‘national’ heroes in Santa Croce and Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk respectively (Bouwers 2012, 19–21).

4. A ‘herm’ is a sculpted portrait in which the shoulders have been cut off.

5. Clemens von Metternich to Melanie von Metternich (19 July 1837), in: von Metternich 1883, III, 207–8.

6. ‘Walhalla’s Genossen von Ludwig Bayern’s Kronprinz’, 7 August 1823, in: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich, Germany) Ludwig I. Archiv 22.

7. Architect Leo von Klenze went even further when he claimed how the ancient Greeks had ‘found’ (gefunden) rather than ‘invented’ (erfunden) the classical style. His assumption rested on the idea that Germans and Greeks had both originated in the Caucasus, from where they had wandered towards Europe before parting ways at the Black Sea, making the classical style as much Greek as German (Klose 1999, 165).

8. Ludwig of Bavaria to Heinrich von Kreutzer (11 August 1840), in: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, Geheimes Hausarchiv, Nachlass Ludwig I. 54/2/6.

9. Leo von Klenze, ‘Memorabilien I’, in: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich, Germany) Klenzeana I/1, fols. 185v–186r.

10. “Die Eröffnung der Walhalla”, Allgemeine Bauzeitung 7, 1842, 329–42, 341.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eveline G. Bouwers

Eveline G. Bouwers is a comparative historian of modern Europe and senior research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. Having previously worked on commemorative practices in revolutionary Europe, her more recent research focuses on religion and violence in the nineteenth century.