DOI article:
Szybisty, Tomasz: Between light and shadows: reflecting on varied conceptual perspectives on the peculiar lambency suffusing gothic churches as evidenced by German literature from the latter decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51154#0008
7
last surviving scion of the Westerburger house, falls in
love with Regina, the daughter of a knight named Otte-
weil, who will by no means assent to the lovers’ marriage.
Rudolph decides to abduct his beloved and together they
journey to Westerburg Castle, where the priest who is to
solemnize their union has suddenly been laid low with
an infirmity depriving him of any speech faculty The lov-
ers have to wait until a monk summoned from the near-
by cloister can perform the nuptial rites, albeit not until
the following day They treat themselves to a sumptuous
feast, whereupon Rudolf wants to usher his companion
to an improvised chamber. During the passage, Reginas
attention is arrested by the spellbinding moon, peeking
in through the lancet windows.11 She registers a sudden
desire to step outside the castle to appreciate the beauty
of the scene, so the pair makes for a summerhouse in the
nearby forest. The dim, shaded ambience of their shelter
releases both of them from the shackles of propriety. Half
an hour later the distraught and horrified girl rushes out
of the forest. Tormented by a sense of guilt, she commits
suicide before the night has passed. Here, the elements
of Gothic architecture, silhouetted only by virtue of the
glinting reflections of the moonlight, forebode the viola-
tion of the norms of morality, which triggers the tragic
twist of the plot and leads to the death of Rudolf s beloved.
The arranged marriage, brokered by eighteenth centu-
ry ‘matchmaking’ writers, between all things Gothic and
shade or darkness has exhibited enormous longevity to
date, and is still highly regarded as part of the staple in-
ventory of key tropes and motifs employed by the liter-
ary genre of horror. In the latter decades of the eighteenth
century darkness or subdued light was deemed an almost
requisite circumstance for the full appreciation of Gothic
architecture. The encapsulation of this sentiment can be
discerned in one of Goethe’s juvenile works, entitled Von
deutscher Baukunst (1772), where the elucidation of the
principles underlying the architectural concepts intrin-
sic to the design of Strasburg cathedral takes place by the
subdued light of evening, rather than by daylight. This is
the necessary facilitation empowering the observer to ‘to
enjoy and to understand’12 the quiddity of the building.
And the twilight prevailing in the interior came to the no-
tice of Heinse, who visited the cathedral in 1780, en route
to Italy. He later phrased his impressions in a laconic way:
‘the area in close proximity to the choir becomes [...] more
sacrosanct [...] and darker, too’.13 Even though Heinse does
not transcend the confines circumscribing the eighteenth
century aesthetic concepts and perceives the cathedral’s
interior as a sublime environ, it can be suggested that he
11 Ch.H. Spies, Das Petermänchen. Geistergeschichte aus dem drei-
zehnten Jahrhunderte, part 1, Prague, 1791, p. 40.
12 J. W. Goethe, ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’, in Von deutscher Art und
Kunst. Einige fliegende Blätter, Hamburg, 1773, p. 129.
13 W. Heinse, Die Aufzeichnungen. Frankfurter Nachlass, ed. by
M. Bernauer et al., vol. 1: Aufzeichnungen 1768-1783, Munich and
Vienna, 2003, p. 450.
stole a march on tradition, as the association between
shade and sanctity espoused by him had hitherto been
lost on German scholarship and lore at large. Therefore,
it seems plausible that Heinses pronouncement spurred
the development of Romanticism’s perception of shad-
ows. A similar feeling of lofty sublimity evoked by dark-
ness can be spotted in Georg Forster’s comments in the
wake of his visit to Cologne cathedral in 1790.14
Subdued light is also a feature elevated to the status
of key significance for the perception of the Gothic in
Goethe’s novel published in 1809 and entitled Elective Af-
finities. It strikes readers as an occasionally ironic polemic
with biological, philosophical and cultural conventional
wisdom and discourse of the day.15 The plot of the nov-
el is set in the microcosm of a park, where Goethe cho-
reographs the arrangement of stylistically and function-
ally diverse free-standing architectural structures. One of
them is ‘an old-German church with a cemetery situated
nearby. Charlotte, one of the four main characters of the
novel, decides to have the gravestones from the cemetery
embedded in the walls of the building. Thus the Gothic
church metamorphoses into a lapidarium of sorts almost
substantively entwined with death, thereby foreshadow-
ing the subsequent development of the plot. In the course
of a detailed inspection of the condition of the church,
the main characters chance upon a chapel, which is lat-
er subjected to thorough refurbishment. The placement
of the stained-glass window as the crowning glory of the
renovation works is the moment when Ottilie experiences
a ‘mystical’ vision in this newly restored interior:
A solemn, beautiful light streamed in through the
one tall window. It was filled with stained glass, grace-
fully put together. The entire chapel had thus received
a strange tone, and a peculiar genius was thrown over
it. [...] The parts which she knew so well now meeting
her as an unfamiliar whole delighted Ottilie. She stood
still, walked up and down, looked and looked again; at
last she seated herself in one of the chairs, and it seemed,
as she gazed up and down, as if she was, and yet was not
- as if she felt and did not feel - as if all this would van-
ish from before her, and she would vanish from herself;
and it was only when the sun left the window, on which
14 G. Forster, Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern,
Holland, England und Frankreich, im April, Mai und Junius 1790,
part 1, Berlin, 1791, pp. 70-75. For more on the sublimity experi-
enced by Forster in Cologne cathedral see among others J. Bisky,
Poesie der Baukunst. Architekturästhetik von Wicklemann bis
Boisserée, Weimar, 2000, pp. 181-190.
15 More on the significance of light in Goethe’s novel: T. Critzmann,
Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften als Jahresmärchen. Ein Dialog zwi-
schen Aufklärung und Romantik, Cologne, 2006, pp. 239-258; T.
Szybisty, “‘Durch das einzige bunte Fenster fiel ein ernstes bun-
tes Lichte herein”. Zu einem Motiv in Goethes Roman “Die Wahl-
verwandtschaften”, Estudios Filológicos Alemanes. Revista de in-
vestigación en Linguistica, Literatura y Cultura alemanas, 26, 2013,
pp. 93-юз-
last surviving scion of the Westerburger house, falls in
love with Regina, the daughter of a knight named Otte-
weil, who will by no means assent to the lovers’ marriage.
Rudolph decides to abduct his beloved and together they
journey to Westerburg Castle, where the priest who is to
solemnize their union has suddenly been laid low with
an infirmity depriving him of any speech faculty The lov-
ers have to wait until a monk summoned from the near-
by cloister can perform the nuptial rites, albeit not until
the following day They treat themselves to a sumptuous
feast, whereupon Rudolf wants to usher his companion
to an improvised chamber. During the passage, Reginas
attention is arrested by the spellbinding moon, peeking
in through the lancet windows.11 She registers a sudden
desire to step outside the castle to appreciate the beauty
of the scene, so the pair makes for a summerhouse in the
nearby forest. The dim, shaded ambience of their shelter
releases both of them from the shackles of propriety. Half
an hour later the distraught and horrified girl rushes out
of the forest. Tormented by a sense of guilt, she commits
suicide before the night has passed. Here, the elements
of Gothic architecture, silhouetted only by virtue of the
glinting reflections of the moonlight, forebode the viola-
tion of the norms of morality, which triggers the tragic
twist of the plot and leads to the death of Rudolf s beloved.
The arranged marriage, brokered by eighteenth centu-
ry ‘matchmaking’ writers, between all things Gothic and
shade or darkness has exhibited enormous longevity to
date, and is still highly regarded as part of the staple in-
ventory of key tropes and motifs employed by the liter-
ary genre of horror. In the latter decades of the eighteenth
century darkness or subdued light was deemed an almost
requisite circumstance for the full appreciation of Gothic
architecture. The encapsulation of this sentiment can be
discerned in one of Goethe’s juvenile works, entitled Von
deutscher Baukunst (1772), where the elucidation of the
principles underlying the architectural concepts intrin-
sic to the design of Strasburg cathedral takes place by the
subdued light of evening, rather than by daylight. This is
the necessary facilitation empowering the observer to ‘to
enjoy and to understand’12 the quiddity of the building.
And the twilight prevailing in the interior came to the no-
tice of Heinse, who visited the cathedral in 1780, en route
to Italy. He later phrased his impressions in a laconic way:
‘the area in close proximity to the choir becomes [...] more
sacrosanct [...] and darker, too’.13 Even though Heinse does
not transcend the confines circumscribing the eighteenth
century aesthetic concepts and perceives the cathedral’s
interior as a sublime environ, it can be suggested that he
11 Ch.H. Spies, Das Petermänchen. Geistergeschichte aus dem drei-
zehnten Jahrhunderte, part 1, Prague, 1791, p. 40.
12 J. W. Goethe, ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’, in Von deutscher Art und
Kunst. Einige fliegende Blätter, Hamburg, 1773, p. 129.
13 W. Heinse, Die Aufzeichnungen. Frankfurter Nachlass, ed. by
M. Bernauer et al., vol. 1: Aufzeichnungen 1768-1783, Munich and
Vienna, 2003, p. 450.
stole a march on tradition, as the association between
shade and sanctity espoused by him had hitherto been
lost on German scholarship and lore at large. Therefore,
it seems plausible that Heinses pronouncement spurred
the development of Romanticism’s perception of shad-
ows. A similar feeling of lofty sublimity evoked by dark-
ness can be spotted in Georg Forster’s comments in the
wake of his visit to Cologne cathedral in 1790.14
Subdued light is also a feature elevated to the status
of key significance for the perception of the Gothic in
Goethe’s novel published in 1809 and entitled Elective Af-
finities. It strikes readers as an occasionally ironic polemic
with biological, philosophical and cultural conventional
wisdom and discourse of the day.15 The plot of the nov-
el is set in the microcosm of a park, where Goethe cho-
reographs the arrangement of stylistically and function-
ally diverse free-standing architectural structures. One of
them is ‘an old-German church with a cemetery situated
nearby. Charlotte, one of the four main characters of the
novel, decides to have the gravestones from the cemetery
embedded in the walls of the building. Thus the Gothic
church metamorphoses into a lapidarium of sorts almost
substantively entwined with death, thereby foreshadow-
ing the subsequent development of the plot. In the course
of a detailed inspection of the condition of the church,
the main characters chance upon a chapel, which is lat-
er subjected to thorough refurbishment. The placement
of the stained-glass window as the crowning glory of the
renovation works is the moment when Ottilie experiences
a ‘mystical’ vision in this newly restored interior:
A solemn, beautiful light streamed in through the
one tall window. It was filled with stained glass, grace-
fully put together. The entire chapel had thus received
a strange tone, and a peculiar genius was thrown over
it. [...] The parts which she knew so well now meeting
her as an unfamiliar whole delighted Ottilie. She stood
still, walked up and down, looked and looked again; at
last she seated herself in one of the chairs, and it seemed,
as she gazed up and down, as if she was, and yet was not
- as if she felt and did not feel - as if all this would van-
ish from before her, and she would vanish from herself;
and it was only when the sun left the window, on which
14 G. Forster, Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern,
Holland, England und Frankreich, im April, Mai und Junius 1790,
part 1, Berlin, 1791, pp. 70-75. For more on the sublimity experi-
enced by Forster in Cologne cathedral see among others J. Bisky,
Poesie der Baukunst. Architekturästhetik von Wicklemann bis
Boisserée, Weimar, 2000, pp. 181-190.
15 More on the significance of light in Goethe’s novel: T. Critzmann,
Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften als Jahresmärchen. Ein Dialog zwi-
schen Aufklärung und Romantik, Cologne, 2006, pp. 239-258; T.
Szybisty, “‘Durch das einzige bunte Fenster fiel ein ernstes bun-
tes Lichte herein”. Zu einem Motiv in Goethes Roman “Die Wahl-
verwandtschaften”, Estudios Filológicos Alemanes. Revista de in-
vestigación en Linguistica, Literatura y Cultura alemanas, 26, 2013,
pp. 93-юз-