5 - Portable Museums: Imaging and Staging the “Northern Gothic Art Tour” – Ephemera and Alterity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2021
Summary
Abstract
During the early nineteenth century, the voyage to the past was to become a central destination for the discerning art tourist as for artists and writers. Yet, such voyages were as much ephemeral as actual, virtual creations of burgeoning antiquities tours in print and image. This chapter explores the pivotal, yet neglected significance of Northern European Gothic ‘tours’ flourishing between Britain and the Low Countries from the 1830s–1860s. It sheds new light on trailblazing accounts by Romantic tourists, Maria Graham (Lady) Callcott, Johann David Passavant, and the Gothic revivalist, W.H. James Weale, examining their fascination with Northern medieval Gothic architectures, art, and spaces of unseen heritage, constructed via ephemeral tour experiences as complex palimpsests of memory, modernity, and its other.
Keywords: Gothic, art tour, Romantic, modernity, liminality
Traveling and Staging “North:” Romantic tours and exotic Gothics
The “Gothic North” was the paradoxical creation, the virtual spectacle, and destination of post-Napoleonic upheavals. Along with “Waterloo tourism” and princely plunder, early nineteenth-century art travelers, especially to the Southern Netherlands and German lands, doubtless experienced frissons on a par with eighteenth-century Grand Tourists to the Roman Campagna and post-Vesuvius Pompeii, exposed to a cultural displacement of vertiginous proportions. In this panorama of spoliation, as Francis Haskell observes, travelers could hunt trophies from looted monuments, light upon art treasures piled high in transient spaces, visit backstreet antiquaries and auction houses, witness the churches and aristocratic treasure houses of continental Europe thrown open to the highest bidder. Ephemeral and precarious, in particular, the spoils of a Northern Gothic and Renaissance heritage were everywhere on display as war trophies: pre-1815, as educational showpieces in Dominique-Vivant Denon's Musée Napoléon. But post-Waterloo, they were increasingly of fascination as “destinations” for collectors, writers and artists. Indeed, Friedrich von Schlegel writing during the high-watermark of Napoleonic displacements in his Letters on Christian Art (1802–1804), was amongst the first of his generation to perceive in the scattered art of Northern Europe's medieval Gothic past especially from the German Lands, “peculiar beauties” and “the hidden charms of soul and expression.”
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- Information
- Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums1750–1918, pp. 131 - 158Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021