Le manteau et le tablier. La réflexion sur l'autonomie de l'œuvre d'art dans le poème Die Kathedrale de Rainer Maria Rilke

Abstract

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s Neue Gedichte, the “cathedrals cycle” is a dialogue with Auguste Rodin who admired gothic architecture and wrote a book on Les Cathédrales de France in 1914. The texts of the cycle – and especially the poem Die Kathedrale – offer a fulfillment of the aesthetic program of the Neue Gedichte in the light of Rodin’s work as well as the images gathered from a visit to Notre-Dame de Chartres : it consists of taking the essence of the gothic cathedral and transcribing it into another artistic language. In the poem Die Kathedrale the evocation of gothic art becomes the starting point for a reflection on the autonomy of the work of art. The motif of the “pleated mantle of the buttresses” of the cathedral has an essential place in this aesthetic reflection : as protecting wall it is the warrant of the autonomy, indeed the autarky of the building, while stylized drapes signal the belonging of the building to the privileged sphere of the “things of art”.