In the name of flowers : the romantic view of nature embodied in Philipp Otto Runge's new art of landscape

Abstract

The German early Romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge devoted his brief career to the first decade of the nineteenth century. A scholarly artist with a discursive mind, Runge’s art practice was synchronized with his somewhat scattered theory. Departing from a pantheistic and mystical stance, in 1802 he proposed to establish a new type of landscape that would address a series of crises in art, society, and ideology. Runge’s landscape art is not a strict pictorial genre, but rather a botanically based formal language used to communicate the relationships within the plant kingdom as well as those to humans and the divine spirit. His series of drawings Times of Day (1805) and its oil painting versions Morning of small (1808) and large (1810) are among his oeuvre that best exemplify this idea. Because Runge was well versed in the theoretical resources of his contemporaries and continued to assimilate them into his own understanding of art, the imagery in these works, such as flowers and children, cyclical time, and the study of plant forms, can all be traced back to early Romantic notions of nature, in particular hieroglyphics, temporality, and plant archetypes. Based on Runge’s works from 1802 to his death in 1810, this dissertation investigates the interplay between Runge’s constantly updated art and the ever-changing Romantic discourse on nature that permeated it. I argue that by incorporating the results of nature studies into his painting, Runge makes the floral ornament believable and palpable, highlights the interconnectedness and vitality of the natural world, and thus truly realizes his idea of landscape art.