TY - BOOK AU - Goff,Alice TI - The God behind the marble: the fate of art in the German aesthetic state SN - 9780226827100 AV - N72.S6 G64 2024 U1 - 701/.03 23/eng/20230208 PY - 2024/// CY - Chicago PB - The University of Chicago Press KW - Art and society KW - Germany KW - Prussia KW - History KW - 18th century KW - 19th century KW - Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1815 KW - Campaigns KW - Art and the war KW - Lost works of art KW - Prussia (Germany) KW - Cultural policy KW - Fellow KW - Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History KW - Class of Spring 2021 KW - Written at the Academy N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index; Introduction -- To the vandals they are stone -- A brilliant place -- The state of the supplicant -- Uncertain saints -- Stepping onto the pedestal -- Hegel's neighbor -- Coda N2 - "This book tells the story of how Germans struggled to make art an autonomous instrument of social progress in the face of real-world challenges between 1790-1850. For philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller, a work of art was governed by its own laws and soared above trivial constraints; thus, a painting or sculpture could both model and stimulate the moral autonomy of its beholders. This "aesthetic education" (to be conducted in the newish institution of museums) would yield an "aesthetic state," born of the measured reason of its citizens rather than the fractious antagonisms of mobs and tyrants. But highbrows like Schiller failed to consider the tough realities facing art "on the ground." Not only were there no proper museums in the German states for presenting art to the public, the systematic looting of their art collections during the Napoleonic wars had thrown the very ontological status of art into serious question: What was a painted altarpiece supposed to be once it had been torn out of a Church and reinstalled in a secular space? How would a marble statue of a nude Apollo impact modern viewers-especially unmarried young ladies not used to such sights? And how could a stolen object symbolize freedom? As art works fell prey to the very violence they were supposed to transcend, social theorists began to wonder how art could deliver liberation if it could so quickly end up a spoil of war. Among the specimens considered are forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne in Aachen; the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; the Laocoön group from Rome; a bronze medieval reliquary from Goslar; a Last Judgment from Danzig; and, last, but surely not least, the mummified body of an official from the Rhenish hamlet of Sinzig"-- ER -