A HAGIOGRAPHIC PAINTING suggests an emphatic connection between the visual cultures of virgin martyrdom and the figure of Goethe's classical heroine, Iphigenie. On 19 October 1786, Goethe writes:

The internal turbulence and external equipoise that propelled Goethe's “flight” from Weimar to Italy intersect in his desire to experience remaindered antiquity, the classical world, and his own ability as a visual artist. In an essay simply entitled “Goethe,” Walter Benjamin describes this disruption in Goethe's public life as rooted in a kind of self-loathing: “Goethe began to discover in himself a resistance to the climate, landscape, history, politics, and nature of his own people.” Benjamin further observes that while in Italy, Goethe's artistic gaze failed “to distinguish clearly [the art of the Italian Renaissance] from that of Antiquity” (Benjamin 160). In the excerpt above, Goethe in fact celebrates his classical creation, Iphigenie, resurrected from the cycle of Greek tragedy, and imbued with the feminine characteristics of Renaissance beauty. While Benjamin casts the anachronistic mixing of different epochs as a shortcoming, Goethe recuperates it as ideal. The placid observation of the painting, however, further suggests that the Goethean gaze elides gender-specific credentials that are inscribed on the body.