The German Romantic Reform of Education: Ph. O. Runge's Plan for Art

Abstract

By opening new horizons of religious sentiment, intellectual comprehension, political and social awareness, scientific knowledge, and psychological insight, the German Romantic movement had a lasting influence on the history of culture and the nature of artistic consciousness. In art, the Catholic Nazarenes in the south, the Protestant nature mystics in the north, and other artists elsewhere acted upon an urgent call of conscience to reform art and with it willed its course toward modernity. Less well known today, although gaining in recognition, are their seminal writings on general and speculative art theory and aesthetic education, academic reform, patterns of artistic organization, and techniques of ethical suasion and moral guidance. Complicating modern studies, these subjects were inextricably entwined with and motivated by concurrent developments in Romantic literature and philology, Idealist philosophy, ecclesiastical reform, and the burgeoning natural sciences. This whole range of subjects, which amounts to nothing less than the institutionalization of Romantic reform and its codification in dogma, is least well known today. Yet it is indispensable for a fuller understanding of the roots of Romantic aesthetics and, beyond that, the origins of modern art and modern art education.' It is within the context of these and similar, interrelated issues that we should evaluate Philipp Otto Runge's (1777-1810) dreams, projections, aspirations, and plans for a thoroughly reformed Romantic art and a new aesthetic system of the future. Among the most extensive and bold, albeit often misunderstood, theoretical forecasts for a future art and aesthetics ever compiled by any one individual, Runge's writings draw forceful con-