Wilhelm Waiblinger in Italy



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Wilhelm Waiblinger in Italy

lawrence s. thompson

UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures
Number 9



Copyright © 1953

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd 
license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.
org/licenses.

Suggested citation: Thompson, Lawrence S. Wilhelm Waiblinger in Ita-
ly. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953. doi: https://
doi.org/10.5149/9781469658544_Thompson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thompson, Lawrence S.
Title: Wilhelm Waiblinger in Italy / by Lawrence S. Thompson.
Other titles: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic

Languages and Literatures ; no. 9.
Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1953]

Series: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic 
Languages and Literatures. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: lccn 53062851 | isbn 978-1-4696-5853-7 (pbk: alk. paper)
| isbn 978-1-4696-5854-4 (ebook)

Subjects: Waiblinger, Wilhelm Friedrich, 1804-1830.
Classification: lcc pd25 .n6 no. 9

http://creativecommons.org/licenses
https://doi.org/10.5149/9781469658544_Thompson
https://doi.org/10.5149/9781469658544_Thompson
http://creativecommons.org/licenses


To 

KENT J. BROWN 

(1880-1944) 

and 

RICHARD JENTE 

(1888-1952) 





PREFACE 

This study of Wilhelm Waiblinger attempts to give him a 
definitive position as a German author and to examine the im-
portance of Italy as a source of literary inspiration during the 
early nineteenth century. The most fruitful years of Waib-
linger's short life were spent in Italy, and consequently this 
phase of his career is the most important one. Nevertheless, 
it is given little attention in the published critical works on 
Waiblinger. Over and above the significance of Waiblinger's 
personal experience in Italy, his work is characteristic of many 
ideas that were current in his day. 

Waiblinger left Germany in 1826 and remained in Italy until 
his death in 1830. During this time he had ample opportunity to 
travel throughout the peninsula and to become thoroughly ac-
quainted with Italian arts, life, and cultural traditions. There 
was hardly any aspect of Italy that he did not know and love, 
for the scope of his interests was as broad as that of any previous 
German writer in Italy. Waiblinger saw so much in Italy that a 
detailed classification of his interests has been rather difficult. 
The chapters dealing with art, literature, and music cover his 
interest in the humanistic tradition in Italy; those dealing with 
Italian landscape and people, his interest in Italian life; and 
those dealing with antiquity, Renaissance, and the Roman Cath-
olic Church, his interest in the great intellectual currents in 
Italy. 

The present study is not an attempt to make a stylistic analysis 
of Waiblinger's works. Hagenmeyer has already provided a 
sensitive and elaborate appreciation of Waiblinger's Italian 
poems. My purpose has been to analyse and classify Waibling-
er's comments on various aspects of Italy in the light of literary 
tradition and of his own creative writing, introducing observa-
tions on his style only as a secondary matter. 

The advice and constant guidance of the late Richard J ente 
and the late Kent J. Brown were invaluable to me at the time the 
investigation was conducted. I am also indebted to A. E. Zucker, 
who helped to formulate the original plan of the study. 

Lexington, Kentucky 
January, 1953 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

Preface .. ............................................ ix 

Chapter 

I. Biographical Introduction 1 

II. W aiblinger and Italian Art .................... . .... ......................... 13 
I 

III. Waiblinger and Italian Literature and Music ...................... 28 

IV. Waiblinger and the Italian Landscape.................................. .. 41 

V. Waiblinger and the Italian People ................................................ 54 

VI. Waiblinger and Antiquity ........................ 71 

VII. Waiblinger and the Renaissance . ............... 81 

VIII. Waiblinger and Catholicism . .. ....................................... ..... . .... 87 

IX. Conclusion 

Bibliography 

Indices 

I. Names of Persons ............................... . ................................... . 

I. Names of Places, Buildings, and Worh of Art 

94 

·····•·········· 99 

101 

104 



Wilhelm Waiblinger 
in Italy 





CHAPTER I 

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

Wilhelm Waiblinger has been the subject of relatively few 
critical works, and most of the interest in him has come from 
patriotic Swabians and a few bibliophiles who have collected 
him. There is no good edition of his collected works, and no 
competent modern editor attempted to establish a definitive text 
until 1893 when the noted collector Eduard Grisebach edited the 
poems. Since Grisebach's edition Waiblinger has attracted the 
attention of only one other scholarly editor, Andre Fauconnet, 
who published Waiblinger's Liebe und Hass, an early drama, 
with an introduction as a Paris "these complementaire" in 1913. 
Waiblinger's other editors have not been as meticulous as Grise-
bach and Fauconnet. In 1839 a certain "H. v. Canitz" published 
Waiblinger's works in nine volumes, an edition full of misprints 
and including among Waiblinger's poems three passages from 
the first part of Faust as well as a long excerpt from Lessing's 
Laokoon.1 Moreover, this edition is incomplete. Its errors, ex-
cept for the passages from Goethe and Lessing, also appear in 
the editions of 1842 and 1859. 

In the case of one edition we find an interesting literary 
problem. In 1844 E·duard Morike attempted an "edition" of 
Waiblinger's poems, and he altered the poems to suit his own 
tastes,. by no means parallel with Waiblinger's. He excused 
himself with the comment, "Gleichwohl ist nichts gewisser, als 
dass der Verfasser sie bei einer spa.tern Sammlung ... vielfach 
verbessert haben wiirde."2 A good example of Morike's editorial 
efforts may be seen in the first poem, "Lied der Weihe.'· 
W aiblinger wrote : 

Drum hofft der Sanger, auch willkommen 
Mit seinem Herzensgruss zu sein: 
Denn ob ihm schon das Gliick genommen 
Was wild und zart, was gross und klein 
Das heisse Herz ihm einst erfreute, 
Der Heimat wie der Liebe Lust; 
Ach, W onnen, die er nie bereute, 
Die Sehnsucht jeder Menschenbrust ... 3 

1. For information about "H. v. Canitz" see Frankel, p. 90-95. 
2. Gedichte, p. v. 
3. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 8. 



2 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Morike changed it to read : 
Drum hofft willkommen auch der Sanger 

Mit seinem Herzensgruss zu sein: 
Es mische nun sich auch nicht !anger 
Verlorner Tage Gram darein; 
Schiichtern verhiiUt er selbst der Freude 
Erinn'rung sich und Lieb' und Lust--
Ach W onnen, die er nie bereute, 
Die Sehnsucht jeder Menschenbrust.4 

There is an edition of the Bilder aus N eapel und Sicilien ci.nd 
another of Die Britten in Rom, but both are out of print. In 
both, however, the texts are accurate. Less valuable are two 
editions by Paul Friedrich, one of Waiblinger's essay on Holder-
Jin and another in the form of a Waiblinger vademecum. In 
the former Friedrich prints an accurate text; but there is a 
questionable introduction. The latter is a respectable piece of 
work, but the cover title, Waiblinger, der Sanger Jtaliens, is mis-
leading, since a good deal of the book is devoted to Waiblinger's 
essay entitled "Aus der Kindheit". The "Nachwort" is valuable 
for a hitherto unpublished letter to Morike. Phaethon was re-
printed in 1920, but the text is inaccurate. 

Critics and biographers have not done full justice to Waib--
linger. Seventeen years after Waiblinger's death Moritz Rapp 
published a 'Useful study in the Tubinger Jahrbuch der Gegen-
wart for 1847. Karl Frey recognized the value of this essay in 
his biography and quoted practically everything of any signifi-
cance that Rapp had to say. Rapp had known Waiblinger in 
Tiibingen, and-he was well acquainted with his friend's writings 
from the Italian period. His essay consists mainly of personal 
reminiscences and sensitive critical comment on Waiblinger's 
early work; but, unfortunately, it is devoted almost exclusively 
to Waiblinger's German period, and we find relatively little that 
is pertinent for this study. A half century after Rapp's article 
appeared Hermann Fischer published an article on Waiblinger 
in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie; and while this essay is 
characterized by Fischer's proverbial erudition in matter.~ 
Swabian, it is factual rather than critical. In 1904 Karl Frey 
published the definitive biography of Waiblinger in which he 
exploited all known material on Waiblinger, including letters 
and the unpublished diary from the Stuttgart period. His work 
is tedious and has been aptly described by Fauconnet as "detaille 

4. Gedichte, p. 4. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 3 

mais touffu." 5 The next study of any importance is a Tiibingen 
dissertation by Friedrich Gluck, Byronismus bei Waiblinger, 
presented in 1920. It is a comparison of the sources, subject 
matter, and style of Childe Harold and the Vier Erzahlungen aus 
der Geschichte des jetzigen Griechenlands. Two years later 
Ilse Ruland presented her dissertation, Wilhelm Waiblinger in 
seinen Prosawerken, at Tiibingen. This work gives important 
background material on Waiblinger's prose works, but there are 
no structural or stylistic analyses. In 1930 Gerhard Hagen-
meyer published his Wilhelm Waiblinger's Gedichte aus Italien, 
the most important study that has appeared to date. It is an 
exhaustive critique of all aspects of Waiblinger's Italian poetry. 
In the first part Hagenmeyer examines the literary and social 
background of the period with special reference to Italy; but the 
major portion of the work is a detailed mechanical analysis of 
the poems from the standpoints of form, language, rhythm, and 
structure. He is concerned neither with the picture of Italian 
life and culture found in these poems nor with the prose writings 
dealing with Italy. 

In addition to the critical material in these editions and 
studies there have been a number of articles on Waiblinger in 
minor Swabian journals and newspapers; for the reading of the 
works of the colorful enf ant terrible of Swabian letters has pro-
vided many a vicarious thrill for Stuttgarters and Tiibingers. 
This sort of biography and criticism has perpetuated many 
doubtful legends about Waiblinger, for example, the tale that 
he died of syphilis, which may be traced back through Gliick, 
Goedeke, and Rapp to a letter by Platen. 6 Of the some half-
dozen newspaper articles on W aiblinger that have been in-
spected, all speak of his "ziigelloses Leben in Italien" and of his 
death resulting from the "italienische Krankheit". The popular 
mind entertains a conception of W aiblinger as a second-rate 
Byron with all the Englishman's vices and none of his virtues.1 

With the exception of the work of Grisebach, Hagenmeyer, 
Frey, and possibly Ruland, the critical studies on Waiblinger 
are of slight value. The editions are scattered and often in-

5. Liebe und Hass (1913). The reprint of the text published in 1914 
as no. 148 in the series "Deutsche Literaturdenkmale des 18. und 19. 
Jahrhunderts" does not contain the formidable introduction that appears 
in the French edition. 

6. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 203. 
7. E. g., Ubell. 



4 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

accurate. No one has given any considerable attention to the 
most important phase of W:aiblinger's life, the experience in Ita-
ly, and to the significance of Italy for him as a German poet. 
Hagenmeyer has suggested this problem, but neither he nor 
anyone else has studied Waiblinger's ideas on Italian culture, 
ancient and modern, on the people, and on the country itself. 
Most of Waiblinger's published writings on Italy appeared in 
periodicals and Taschenbilcher, thus giving him an audience 
that makes his role as the interpreter of Italy for early nine-
teenth century Germany all the more important. While we can 
find only a few isolated examples of direct influence on later 
writers, it is reasonable to assume that his semi-journalistic 
work must have made some impression on the popular thinking 
of his contemporaries. 

A knowledge of Waiblinger's early life in Germany is per-
tinent for the proper understanding of his Italian experience. 
His childhood and youth 1up to his sixteenth year are of no im-
portance here, since that period of his life contains no more in-
dications of his future career than the childhood of any other 
precocious youngster. Heilbronn, Reutlingen, and Urach meant 
relatively little to him in comparison with Stuttgart, where he 
began attending the Obergymnasium in 1820 at the age of six-
teen. There he pursued his studies with reasonable diligence; 
but a more important factor in the life of the young man was 
his association with the intellectual elite of the city, such men as 
Gustav Schwab, the Boisserees, Dannecker, and other writers and 
artists. Schwab must have meant a great deal to Waiblinger to 
judge from entries in his diary, for the young man speaks con-
tinually of the fatherly advice in matters relating to both life 
and art that he received from the older poet.8 At the same time, 
however, the spirited young man did not hesitate to speak of 
Schwab as "brav" or even "bieder". In any event, however, 
W aiblinger was intrigued by the provincial literary society to 
which Schwab introduced him in Stuttgart. At this time he 
planned several dramas, Theoderich, Die Maler, Franz von 
Sickingen, and Liebe und Hass, but we have only the last. 

Liebe und Hass is immature and cannot compare in literary 
merit with the work of a more talented seventeen-year-old such 
as Hugo von Hofmannsthal. However, it is important for our 

8. Werke, IV, 340 et seq. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 5 

purpose in that it is set in Italy and represents the young 
author's early conception of his future home. At this time 
Waiblinger was infected with an even wilder idea of Italian life 
than that reflected in Fiesco or Vulpius' Rinaldo Rinaldini. The 
Italy of Liebe und Hass is more similar to the land depicted by 
Monk Lewis in his most extravagant moments. Beautiful 
countesses, dashing marchesi, intrigue, lust, and murder a.re the 
background of a poor treatment of the Romeo and Juliet theme. 

In 1822 Waiblinger entered the Protestant seminary at 
Tu.bingen, a classmate of Eduard Morike, whom he had known 
in Stuttgart, and Ludwig Bauer. More important, however, 
was his association with the mad Holderlin, whose works in-
spired him to look again to southern lands for settings. In 
Tu.bingen Waiblinger produced two books with a Greek back-
ground, the novel Phaethon and the very short cycle of poems, 
the Lieder der Griechen. The Greece of Phaethon is no more 
realistic than the Italy of Liebe und Hass; but, under the in-
fluence of Hyperion, it is not quite so exaggerated. In it we 
find the same pantheistic longing for ancient Greece that charac-
terizes Holderlin's novel, and the contrast with Germany is 
brought out sharply. On the other hand, the Lieder der Griechen 
were inspired chiefly by the Greek wars for independence. 

In 1823 two important events occurred in Waiblinger's life. 
In the spring he received a letter from his Stuttgart friend, 
Theodor Wagner, who was in Rome, and Waiblinger wrote in 
his diary that he read the letter "mit einem unsaglichen Gefilhl".!J 
He was so enchanted with Wagner's account of Italy that he 
started south in the early fall. He travelled over St. Gotthard 
down to Bellinzona, then to Locarno and over Lago Como to his 
destination, Milan. All of his hopes were fulfilled here. He was 
thrilled by the great cathedral, the life of the metropolis, and 
the art collection of the Brera. It is thoroughly consistent with 
this experience t};iat he referred to "meine sildliche Natur" when 
he returned to Tilbingen. 10 

Toward the end of this year and on through the summer of 
1824 Waiblinger went through a moving personal experience, 
the ultimate outcome of which may have been a primary factor 
in driving him from Germany to Italy. He met in Tu.bingen a 

9. Frey, p. 106. 
10. Ibi.d., p. 114. Note 11 



6 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

beautiful Jewess, Julie Michaelis, whose father was a local attor-
ney, and whose brother was a professor in the legal faculty at 
Tiibingen. Despite her frail physical condition, she became his 
mistress. Waiblinger describes in his diary long hours with 
her; and it is difficult to agree with Otto Giintter, editor of the 
Hausbuch schwiibischer Erziihler, that Waiblinger's relation-
ship with Julie did not go beyond the platonic stage.11 In 
August 1824, they were discovered by her father, and the old 
man made Waiblinger swear never to see his daughter again. 
To forget his troubles Waiblinger set out once more for Italy, 
this time not with a heart full of hope and expectation, but 
deeply embittered. Again he went over St. Gotthard to Verona, 
Venice, and back home through Tirol. While this trip did not 
make the same powerful impression on him as the first journey, 
it seems to have crystallized his love for Italy and her culture. 

Upon his return to Tiibingen in November he discovered that 
his affair had become common gossip. Professor Michaelis' 
home burned twice, and his secretary and factotum, a deformed 
servant named Domeier, was arrested for arson. In an attempt 
to save himself, Domeier said that he was God's instrument to 
punish the wicked Jews, alleging that Professor Michaelis lived 
in incest with Julie, who had already borne him one child and 
was about to give birth to another, and that Waiblinger had 
simply been a scape-goat. Domeier's story was clearly a false-
hood, but the case dragged through the courts until the end of 
May, 1825. By that time Waiblinger had become a sort of a 
pariah. Morike wrote him a letter chiding him for the affair 
and declaring that the circumstances made it necessary for him 
to put an end to their friendship, but the letter was never 
mailed.12 

Waiblinger was wild with anger about the whole affair, but 
he continued to write. He completed Vier Erziihlungen aus der 
Geschichte des jetzigen Griechenlands and a novel, Lord Lilly, 
of which, however, nothing is known except that he mentions 
its composition in his diary and later its total destruction. 
Neither the Vier Erziihlungen nor any of Waiblinger's other 
works had met with any success, but the ambition to win literary 
fame spurred him on. Completion of his work at the seminary 

11. P. 501. 
12. Morike, p. 24-26. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 7 

was impossible not only because of the affair with Julie but 
also because of his state of mind. He turned to his literary 
friends in Stuttgart to help him find a patron or some respect-
'able sinecure such as that of attache under Wiirttemberg's 
minister in London. All such attempts failed, and even less 
ambitious hopes for a position as a tutor vanished. Finally, 
in the spring of 1826, through Johann Christoph Haug, editor 
of the Schwiibisches Magazin, Waiblinger secured a verbal 
agreement from Baron Cotta to finance a trip to Italy in re-
turn for contributions to Cotta's various serials. Cotta agreed 
to pay Waiblinger 2,000 florins at once, but when the latter 
requested a written contract, Cotta pretended to be insulted 
and finally gave him only one-tenth of the original amount. 
Waiblinger felt that even this pittance was enough to start him 
on his way, and in October 1826 he left his native land forever. 

From October 1825 until his departure for Italy he paid little 
attention to his studies. Indeed, he took every opportunity to 
get away from Tiibingen and visit Stuttgart. Even before his 
trip to Italy he had written in his diary: "Mein Reich ist nicht 
von diesem Stift. Darum such' ich auch nicht meinen Lohn in 
ihm. Die Welt ist mein Reich." 13 In his sp.are time, when he 
was not looking for a position, he composed several works, a 
tragedy, Anna Boleyn, which was never performed, and two 
satires, Drei Tage in der Unterwelt and Olura der Vampyr. The 
latter has never been published in full, but the former came out 
anonymously and enjoyed a considerable degree of success. In it 
Waiblinger attacks certain pseudo-romantic authors such as 
Clauren (Karl Gottlieb Samuel Heun), Fouque, Van der Velde, 
Karolina Pichler, and Johanna Schopenhauer, who, he argued, 
lost any claim to art as a result of their "poetische Onanie". 
As the title indicates, Drei Tage in der Unterwelt is fashioned 
after Dante's Divine Comedy. Adolf Mullner has the role of 
Cerberus at the gate of Hades, and Franz Horn is Waiblinger's 
Virgil. The work shows Waiblinger's intense interest in con-
temporary literature and a rather good critical sense. Most 
important is the influence of Dante, which shows that Italy was 
foremost in Waiblinger's mind during these troubled days. 

From the standpoint of intellectual stimulation, Waiblinger's 
two trips to Italy had been highly satisfactory, and his diary 

13. Apud Frey, p. 132. 



8 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

contains frequent entries indicating his desire to return as soon 
as possible.14 Perhaps the source of his yearning lay even 
deeper, for Rapp tells us that Waiblinger often referred to 
himself as "eine nach Norden verirrte sildliche Natur." This 
notion came out in the open when Waiblinger was inspired by 
reading Holderlin to describe an idealized Greece in the Lieder 
der Griechen, Vier Erzahlungen, and PluLethon. 

There was also the influence of the age in which Waiblinger 
lived. The most important names of the day were Schopen-
hauer, Grabbe, Heine, Platen, Rilckert, and Lenau. It is diffi-
cult, indeed, practically impossible, to find a formula that 
describes all of them, but the famous quotation on epigoni from 
Karl Immermann seems to be the best available common de-
nominator: 

Wir sin<l, um in einem Wort das gauze Elend auszusprechen, 
Epigonen und tragen an der Last, die jeder Erb- und Nach-
geborenschaft anzukleben pflegt. Die grosse Bewegung im Reiche 
des Geistes, welche unsere Viiter von ihren Hutten und Hiittchen 
aus unternahmen, hat uns eine Menge von Schiitzen zugefiihrt, 
welche nun auf allen Markttischen ausliegen.16 

Neither Waiblinger nor any other contemporary fits this 
description exactly, but his works do show the influences of 
his literary ancestors from both classical and romantic genera-
tions. Certainly he has all the earmarks of the zerrissener 
U ebergangsmensch. On the other hand, he gradually attained 
a certain literary perfection in Italy; and, while Immermann's 
theory may be considered satisfactory for much of his early 
work, we begin to find in his last years a new synthesis of the 
classic and the romantic such as Strich describes in the last 
chapter of his Klassik und Romantik. 

Another factor in Waiblinger's migration to Italy was the 
interest shown in that country by earlier German literary men 
during the preceding half century. In the latter part of the 
eighteenth century such authors as Goethe, Heine, Karl Philipp 
Moritz, and Maler Muller had visited Italy and written widely 
read accounts of the country; and in the early nineteenth cen-
tury the Schlegels, Madame de Stael, and Chateaubriand trav-
elled in Italy and wrote about the country. Waiblinger knew 
and read the famous author of De l' Allemagne, and he was un-
doubtedly impressed by Corinne. 16 He was acquainted not 

14. Ibid., p. 117. 
15. Cited apud Hagenmeyer, p. 21. 
16. Werke, IV, 218. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 9 

only with the numerous translations from the Italian that were 
produced by the romanticist<!, but he also had a good knowledge 
of the literature in the original. 

It might be said that the ultimate cause for Waiblinger's 
trip to Italy was the somewhat fortuitous agreement with Baron 
Cotta, made at a time when he was willing to accept almost any 
position; but in the last analysis he could hardly have been expect-
ed to have accepted the offer so enthusiastically, especially when 
it was reduced to a tithe, unless he was spiritually prepared to 
go to Italy. After his first two trips to Italy the country almost 
became an obsession with him, and he felt toward it much as 
Holderlin did toward his imaginary Greece or as Lenau towarrl 
the backwoods of North America before his disappointing visit. 

Hardly any document is as convincing for Waiblinger's en-
thusiasm for Italy as the account of his journey. Hastening 
through Switzerland with a light heart by way of Zurich, Bern, 
and Geneva, he passed over Mont Cenis and descended at once 
into Piedmont. At Susa, the first Italian city on his route, he 
enjoyed the figs and grapes ripening in the Italian sun; and 
then, passing through Genoa, whose magnificent color contrasts 
delighted him, he went on into Tuscany. In Pisa he began to 
understand why Lord Byron could have tarried here so long, 
for he cried out, "Das ist eine siidliche Jugend und Zartheit in 
diesem Toskana !"17 Leaving Pisa for "la bella Firenze" he 
found there the most pleasing city he had seen. In spite of 
physical discomforts and financial difficulties which had already 
begun to afflict him, he found that the great galleries of Pitti 
and Uffizi fully repaid any pains he had taken to come to Italy; 
and he said that in the Palace of the Uffizi, he, poor boy from 
Swabia, felt like Thucydides when he first listened to the 
histories of Herodotus. In Siena he made a pilgrimage to the 
shrine of some of Raphael's works, and in Montefiascone he 
sampled the famous "Est, Est" and was as enchanted with it 
as the legendary German prelate. After passing through Hora-
tian country, Soracte and the Sabine hills, he arrived in Rome ; 
and one would like to add that he might well have passed through 
the Porta del Popolo with its hospitable inscription, "SAL US 
INTRANTIBUS !" 

In Rome he entered at once into the life of the city, not only 

17. Apud Frey, p. 163. 



10 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

visiting the show places but also mixing with the people and 
participating in the carnivals and other celebrations. Cotta, 
however, failed to send funds, and the poet usually found him-
self financially embarrassed ; but he bore his misfortunes with 
a good humor, as we see in Das Abentheuer von der Sohle, in 
which he pokes fun at his miserable existence. The Eternal 
City offered too many attractions for him to allow such a trivial 
consideration as money to stand in the way. He was determined 
to make a thorough and profound acquaintance with the city 
that would transcend the superficial knowledge gained by the 
young Englishman on his "Grand Tour"; and in his well known 
satire, Die Britten in Rom, he tells how not to enjoy the glories 
of Rome. 

During 1827 Waiblinger eked out a miserable existence by 
his contributions to newspapers in Germany. This material, 
which is gathered in the last two volumes of the collected works 
along with similar work from the years 1828 and 1829, deals 
with his excursions into the Sabine hills. These little trips 
meant much to W aiblinger, for here among the simple country 
folk he was able to gain real insight into the national character 
and forget his troubles. Early in 1828 his fortunes took a turn 
for the better when the Berlin publisher Georg Reimer re-
quested him to edit an Italian Taschenbuch for the year 1829. 
Waiblinger was to be rewarded handsomely, and he turned to 
his task with a full pocket-book and renewed enthusiasm. He 
completed it in March, 1828. It contained Die Britten in Rom, 
Lieder des romischen Carnevals, and two inferior stories, Das 
Blumenf est and Die heilige Woche. The work was published in 
a large edition toward the end of 1828. 

On his feet financially, Waiblinger acquired a mistress in the 
summer of 1828, a woman whom he called Cornacchia and who 
seemed to be quite satisfied to live with him without the benefit 
of the sacrament. He loved the woman dearly, but she could not 
hold him at home, for in September of the same year he took a 
strenuous trip to the vicinity of Naples and back. He enjoyed 
the winter of 1828-29 in Rome with Cornacchia, who provided 
him with a happy domestic life while he pursued his work. In 
the spring of 1829 Reimer published a collection of poems, 
Bliiten der Muse aus Rom, and his tragedy written some four 
years earlier, Anna Boleyn, and gave him a commission to edit 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 11 

another Taschenbuch. The full title of this almanac was 
Taschenbuch aus Jtalien und Griechenland auf das Jahr 1830, 
but it contained nothing about Greece. It was solely the work 
of the editor except for a romance by August Kopisch, Konig 
Jakob vor Belvedere. Waiblinger's contributions were Frances-
co Spina and Das Miirchen von der blauen Grotte, both long 
narrative works, and Bilder aus Neapel, a series of impressions 
of that city from his journey during the previous fall. Among 
his other work of this year is an autobiographical sketch drawn 
from his diary, Erinnerungen aus der Kindheit, which his friend 
Winkler published in his Dresdner Abendzeitung. Another 
work drawn from the diary of his Tilbingen years is Friedrich 
Holderlins Leben, Dichtung und Wahnsinn, an evaluation of the 
great poet both in sanity and in insanity. This latter was pub-
lished by Brockhaus in his Zeitgenoss'en. Throughout his 
stay in Italy Waiblinger sent travel sketches regularly to Cotta's 
Stuttgart newspapers. 

With his literary work for the year complete, Waiblinger 
left Rome immediately after the installation of Pius VIII in 
May for an extended southern tour which took him down 
through Naples and Sicily. Upon his return to Rome in October 
1829 he took sick as a result of hardships endured on the trip 
and died after a lingering illness on 15 January 1830. One of 
his last acts was to entrust the diary covering the last five years 
to his friend, Wilhelm Schluttig, a young Saxon philologist; but 
Schluttig died soon thereafter, and the valuable document was 
lost. Both Waiblinger and Schluttig are buried in the Cimitero 
de' Protestanti near the Pyramid of Cestius. 

Waiblinger's Italian experience was rich and fruitful. Italy 
was the fulfillment of his dreams, for here he found the broadest 
field for his literary activity. He was prolific, but at the same 
time his work shows constant improvement and promise of 
future achievement. Italy was in no way a strictly personal 
matter with him, for he had his task to perform. He had gone 
to Italy under specific instructions from Cotta to write accounts 
of his travels for German newspapers, and while he soon broke 
with Cotta, he did not forget this mission. He wrote for many 
different papers, contributing travel sketches, tales from 
Italian life, and poetry inspired by Italian scenes, manners, and 
customs. From the style of his travel essays it is evident that 



12 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

he wrote for a wide public, and his work is distinguished by 
clarity and objectivity. 

In identifying the most important aspects of Italy for 
Waiblinger one finds that he has covered nearly all the subject 
matter contained in the works of other writers who deal with 
Italy. He chose that which seemed to have the broadest appeal, 
and under the next seven chapters his broad interests will be 
examined in detail. 



CHAPTER II 

W AIBLINGER AND ITALIAN ART 

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Italian art failed 
to receive the same attention from travellers that it enjoys today. 
Spon, a minor travel writer in the late seventeenth century, said, 
"C'est seulement !'amour de l'antiquite qui m'a fait entreprendre 
le voyage d'Italie et de Grece," 1 and he defined antiquity as the 
literature and history of Greece and Rome. In the eighteenth 
century up to the time of Rousseau the aristocratic tastes of the 
age of Louis XIV prevailed, and admiration of the Italian 
masters was restricted to such painters as the Raphael of the 
later manner and the Bolognesi, especially Guido Reni. The 
remains of antiquity which travellers found attracted them 
principally because of possible associations with Latin author::'!. 

During the middle of the eighteenth century there was a 
European-wide revolution in art criticism. Winckelmann broke 
with prevailing tastes in painting and sculpture when he sought 
to return to the basic principles of great art which he found 
in the masterpieces of the ancient Greeks; and from the date of 
the publication of his famous Gedanken ilber die Nachahmung 
der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst 
(1754), pseudo-classicism and rococo were on the wane. 
Exactly ten years later came his monumental Geschichte der 
Kunst des Altertums, and his work not only caught the attention 
of such leading writers in Germany as Lessing, Herder, and 
Goethe, but also became known in France and England. From 
this time on the art of antiquity was examined with a pro-
fundity of insight that Renaissance travellers had never dis-
played, and appreciation of the art of more recent times also 
reflected changing tastes. 

The generation following Winckelmann began to inspect once 
more the neglected works of modern Italian artists. Such trav-
ellers as Adler,2 Karl Philipp Moritz, and Wilhelm Heinse began 
to look for something new and distinctive-"romantic" was the 
word used by the next generation-in Italian art of the early 
and high Renaissance. In a similar spirit Elector August III 

1. Apud Von Klenze, p. 8. 
2. Ibid., p. 46-53. 



14 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

of Saxony fostered the collection of Italian Renaissance art for 
the Staatsgalerie in Dresden. When Goethe went to Italy he 
sought that which was representative in the realm of classic 
beauty, but his universal interests did not allow him to over-
look other possibilities. One passage from the Italienische 
Tagebiicher on the legend of the Holy Virgin reads like the work 
of Wackenroder or Ruskin: 

Es ist ein Gegenstand, vor dem einem die Sinne so schon 
still stehn, der eine gewisse innerliche Grazie der Dichtung hat, 
iiber den man sich so freut und bey dem man so ganz und gar 
nichts dencken kann; dass er so recht zu einem religiosen Gegen-
stande die Geissel der Mahler gewesen und Schuld dass die Kunst 
gesuncken ist, nach dem sie sich kaum erhoben hatte. 3 

With Romanticism there was a rehabilitation of the neglected 
aspects of Italian art. Wackenroder insisted on the charm and 
beauty of the simple and unlearned artists like Fra Angelico, 
and Mme. de Stael had Corinne to plead in favor of the religious 
masters like Perugino. Many of these critics at the turn of the 
century even argued that the primitives were superior 
to the Bolognesi and the Raphael of the second manner 
( e. g., Friedrich Schlegel) . 

In the next generation Waiblinger was the foremost in-
terpreter of Italian art. Men like Platen and Heine who had 
travelled extensively in Italy had hardly touched on the subject. 
Waiblinger was too late to be included among the first roman-
ticists, yet he was early enough to feel the full impact of both 
classicism and romanticism. 4 Accordingly, we should expect 
some kind of a synthesis between the classic and the romantic 
viewpoints which had saturated the aesthetics of the immediate-
ly preceding periods. We may expect no startling new con-
cepts from Waiblinger, but rather a broad and liberal recapitula-
tion of previous ideas. 

That Italy is a land peculiarly conducive to the development 
of talent in plastic art and music has been a prevalent idea 
since Mme. de Stael and Eichendorff presented to the world the 

3. Ibid., p. 68-69. 
4. Strich defines an absolute polarity between the two sty;Jes. It is a 

natural corollary that the following generation, characterized by fmmer-
mann as epigoni, should establish some kind of middle-of-the-road pro-
gram in the realm of style and thought. Intimately connected with this 
problem is the well-known Generationsprinzip of Wilhelm Dilthey (cf. 
Schumann). 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 15 

possibilities of romanticism in the southern European countries. 5 
Even if Waiblinger was primarily interested in Italian life and 
the Italian landscape, as Hermann Fischer maintained,6 he 
could not avoid a consideration of Italian art, not merely because 
of the force of tradition, but also because of the intimate relation 
of art with those two aspects of Italy which, according to 
Fischer, interested Waiblinger above all else. 

It will be noted later that Waiblinger ordinarily revealed good 
taste in his discussions of the arts ; and this we may set to the 
credit of two groups of Waiblinger's associates, each deriving 
ultimately from the same school. Toward the beginning of the 
last century plastic art in Europe was dominated by Antonio 
Canova, an Italian who sought (rather unsuccessfully) to revive 
classic Greek sculpture along the lines of the current literary 
idealism. His principal disciples were three northern artists, 
the Englishman Flaxman, the Dane Thorwaldsen, and the 
German Dannecker, and Waiblinger was closely associated with 
the latter two. While it is true that the product of these artists 
verges on false elegance and insipidity, Waiblinger learned 
much from them about the history and theory of art. Waib-
linger knew Dannecker in Stuttgart, where the two were thrown 
together in the salons of a little group of poets, artists, and 
critics, among whom were Matthisson, Haug, the Boisserees, 
Schwab, and Ludwig Bauer. 7 He visited Dannecker's studio 
regularly during his first semester at the Stuttgart gymnasium," 
and he gained considerable insight into the practice of the 
sculptor's craft there. Moreover, he was a good friend of the 
Boisserees. Sulpiz even wrote to Goethe recommending 
Phaethon. 9 Armed with this early training, Waiblinger's 
knowledge of art was further strengthened in Rome by his 
frequent contacts with Albert von Thorwaldsen and his school. 
Although he learned much about art from this group at gather-

5. J. P. F. Baldensperger pointed out in his lectures on European 
;omanticism at Harvard in 1935-36 that late eighteenth century exoticism 
1s _n~t to be confused with the romanticism of the next generation. When 
Wilham Beckford wrote about Portuguese monasteries and Mrs. Rad-
cliffe about Italian castles, they were merely fooking for a colorful back-
ground; but Taugenichts and Corinne are efforts to reveal the living 
spirit of Italy. 

6. P. 64. 
7. For a discussion of Waiblinger's relations with these men especially 

Schwab and Dannecker, see Uebe und Hass (1913), p. xxxi-lx.' · 
8. Frey, p. 48. 
9. Schultz, p. 10-21. 



16 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

ings in the Cafe Greco on the Via de' Condotti,10 his panegyrics 
on his friends are hyperbolic and lacking in taste. For example, 
Waiblinger's "Ode an Albert von Thorwaldsen"11 contains little 
more than a series of brilliant metaphors on the work of his 
friend. Nevertheless, we will see that Waiblinger maintained 
an objective attitude toward the art of other periods, and his 
enthusiasm for his contemporaries is a fa ult in the same sense 
as Goethe's bad taste with respect to the music of his day. It 
is to Waiblinger's credit that he maintained a consistent modesty 
in advancing his own opinions. The truth is that Waiblinger's 
artist friends were better versed in theory than in practice; and 
if Waiblinger profited from their knowledge, it is excusable that 
he failed to appreciate their work correctly. 

With this background Waiblinger set out to review the art of 
Italy in his poetry, Taschenbucher, and Reiseskizzen. Since he 
discussed in one place or another nearly all the major monu-
ments of Italian art from Roman times down to Canova, and 
since he showed no great prejudice for or against a particulat' 
school or period,12 it is best to study Waiblinger's criticism of 
Italian art chronologically. 

Waiblinger went to Italy still enthused to some extent by the 
neo-hellenism acquired from Holderlin and Byron; and while 
he gradually lost his interest in the cause of Greek freedom, he 
never became indifferent to Greek antiquity. Once in Rome he 
continually visited museums containing the masterpieces of 
Greek sculpture, and he recorded his reactions i~ a series of 
epigrams. One of the most interesting is on the colossi falsely 
attributed to Phidias and Praxiteles and which had been set up 
against a Roman background on Monte Cavallo (Piazza del 
Quirinale) : 

Quirinalischer Stolz, Colossen des Monte Cavallo, 
Wie ihr mir tiiglich ersteigt, seid mir im Liede gegriisst ! 

Ewiger Jugend Bilder, der Kraft erhabne Gestalten, 
Blieb euch die Jugend, und blieb's mitten im alternden Rom. 

Ja, ich glaub's, eure Viiter sind nicht die griechischen Bildner, 
Sterbliche nicht, doch der Gott hat euch, der Donnerer, 

gezeugt,13 

10. Frey, p. 168 et seq. 
11. Gedickte aus Italien, II, 92. 
12. Cf. Werke, II, 242-246, for an example of Waiblinger's objectivity. 

Here he satirizes an Englishman who has read about Raphael's "Trans-
figurazione" but fails to understand how the simple piety of a madonna 
by Fra Giovanni da Fiesole may represent beauty in another style. 

13. Gedichte aus Italien, If, 49-50. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 17 

Here W aiblinger touches upon several of the most characteristic 
points of Greek sculpture, the youth and strength of the figures 
and the sublimity of their conception. Likewise he character-
ized aptly the Venus de Milo, a work discovered barely a half 
dozen years previously: 

So zum vollendetern Bild <lurch ein machtiges Wunder verwandelt, 
Lenkest den irdischen Sinn du auf das Himmlische hin.14 

In the Apollo de Belvedere he read into the expression of the 
figure a contrast between classic Greek ideals and the inferiority 
of modern times : 

Gottlicher Sieger, du ziirnst, dein Angesicht flammet von Unmuth? 
Ist's, weil die bessere Welt, weil der Olymp dir entflohn? 

Ach dir nahen die Musen nicht mehr, du ziirnst zu gewaltig, 
Ach das verdorbene Geschlecht schirmet Apollo nicht mehr.16 

In a longer poem of considerable beauty he recalled the Niobe 
legend while standing before the ancient statue. A passage 
from it indicates how Waiblinger was inspired by a piece of this 
sort: 

0 so Jang' eine Mutter noch heilig ist, und nur Eine 
Mutterbrust noch furs Kind ihrer Umarmungen gliiht; 

Eine Seele noch leidet, und Eine den Schmerz noch der Liebe 
Den unsaglichen fiihlt, Eine fiir andre noch seufzt, 

Eine mit menschlicher Kraft noch gefiillt ist, Eine mit Treue, 
Eine das klopfende Herz liebend dem Tode noch weiht, 

Bleibst du das heiligste riihrende Biild; denn es schuf dich die 
Liebe, 

Sanft wie ein Muttergemiith, stark wie Olympische sind. 
Reiche dem Tod nur den Busen, empfange den Pfeil nur und driicke 

Sterbend dein furchtsames Kind schirmend und zartlich an 
dich. 

Dein erbarmen die Gotter sich schon, ja die himmlische Schonheit 
Zaubert ihr siissestes Licht schon auf die Stirne dir hin. 

Kaum noch gewahr' ich den menschlichen Schmerz, dein erhabenes 
Antlitz 

Ist mir verklart, und du sinkst eben dem Himmel in Arm.16 

In addition to Greek statuary in Italian museums, Waiblinger 
displayeJ much interest in the Greek traditions in Sicily. On 
this island where Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Moslem, and 
Norman ruled successively, the German poet found the country-
side studded with the gems of Grecian art. Here he was able to 
transpose himself perfectly into the spirit of an art conceived 
in a style completely different from the austerity of the Roman 

14. Ibid., p. 48. 
15. Ibid., p. 50. 
16. Ibid., p. 49. It is impossible to tell from the context whether 

W aiblinger refers to the famous group by Scopas, now in Florence or to 
another of the several surviving representations. ' 



18 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

forum. In his ode on "Die Tempel von Agrigent" there is a 
profound understanding for the beauty of the Greek temple: 

Glanzreichste Tochter, dor'sche, des Ruhmes voll 
Und Goldes, stolz am Ufer des Akragas, 

Am Heerd, dem nahrenden der W affen 
Blut'gen Triumph mit der Lust vertauschend, 

Die aus olymp'schem Gottergelage nur 
Dem Sterblichen hehlen'scher Geburt des Zeus 

Huldgottinnen ins schone Leben 
Hauchten, Persephones heil'ger Wohnsitz, 

Noch sinn' ich, ob Ortygias Fall, ob nicht 
Dein Sturz ein schicksalsschwereres Loos dem Gott 

In zweifelhafter Hand geschwanket, 
Konigin, holde, der blum'gen Hugel.17 

Not merely did the actual structure express a supreme beauty 
for Waiblinger, but also the Sicilian background offered an 
incomparable setting: 

Dem Berg entsprosst grossblattrig lndiens Frucht 
Voll Purpurfeigen, auch die Cypresse ragt, 

Es reift die Goldorang' und lieblich 
Birgt sich im ewigen Grun die Muhle. 1s 

When Waiblinger looked on these noble ruins so strongly remi-
niscent of the luxury of life and art among the ancients, he was 
affected with a sadness and pessimism rather unusual for his 
Italian period : 

Giganten trugen, machtigen Arms, die Last 
Des Riesenhauses, dass es der Ewigkeit 
Den Dienst des Donnerers bewahre; 

Selbst die Giganten zertrummert sind sie.19 
But Agrigentum had made an indelible impression on him with 
its magnificence, and when he left he wrote, "Girgenti ... ist 
mir mit goldener Schrift ins Herz geschrieben." 20 

When we turn to Waiblinger's comments on the remains of 
ancient Rome, a definite contrast to his attitude towards Greek 
antiquity becomes apparent. Greek art inspired in him the 
spirit of individual strength and serenity that are its chief 
characteristics. In Rome, however, Waiblinger was overwhelm-
ed by a spirit of intense reverence. In the presence of the 
Pantheon he was awestruck by the grandeur that had survived 
nearly two thousand years: 

0 wie mit namenlosem Schauer 
Hangt Herz und Auge da an dir, 
Und wie voll schwermuthsvoller Trauer, 

17. Ibid., p. 143. 
18. Ibid., p. 141. 
19. Ibid., p. 145. 
20. W erke, IX, 208. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Voll hei<l'gem Ernst erscheinst du mir, 
Du Stolz der Vorwelt und der Ahnen, 
Du Riesenkind voll Majestat, 
Von Volkerstiirmen und Orkanen 
Fast zwei J ahrtausende umweht ... 21 

19 

The men who left these majestic remains are no less imposing 
from the historical perspective. The poet felt that the empire-
building Romans were as great in their own way as the more 
intellectual Greeks. In "Das Grab der Scipionen" Waiblinger 
wrote: 

In diesem Sarge ruht der Eroberer 
Lukania's: die Seele begrub der Leib 

In dem Gestein, und seine Inschrift 
Trugen die Gotter ins ew'ge Buch ein. 

Denn Mannerkraft stirbt nie: und wenn Helden auch 
Geboren sind vom Weibe, sie sterben nicht ... 22 

Moreover, Waiblinger emphasized, the ancient Romans left a 
tradition of noble character as well as of great deeds ("Nicht 
Lorbeer, aber Tugend erstrebte sie."23 ). Thus Waiblinger saw 
in the visible remains of the ancient Italian peoples all of their 
most admirable qualities. 

Waiblinger, who came to feel that he was born an Italian 
in spirit, was always angered by ignorant foreigners who came 
to Italy to find a playground and were unaware of the beauty 
of antique ruins. Nothing illustrates this attitude better than 
the engraving that appears at the beginning of the second 
volume of the collected works. Waiblinger had ordered it to 
illustrate the Taschenbuch aus Italien und Griechenland fur 
1829.24 A young woman and a young man, obviously Anglo-
Saxon by their features, dress, and haughty bearing, dash 
through the Forum for a cursory glance at the ruins of ancient 
Rome before they return to the whist table. They are too busy 
gathering material for a superficial description of the Forum 
for friends at home to notice that they have run down two un-
fortunate Italian hucksters. Waiblinger, on the other hand, . 
tried to appreciate the ancient ruins in any setting; and at the 
same time he viewed the modern surroundings, whether they 

21. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 91. 
22. Ibid., II, 17. 
23. Ibid., p. 18. 
24. A copy of this rare Taschenbuch is in the University of Chicago 

Library. It contains all the engravings used by "H. v. Canitz" in the 
collected works except the engraving in the first volume, a bust of Waib-
linger from a bas-relief by Theodor Wagner. 



20 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

were man, beast, or thing, with a sympathetic eye. In a letter 
to Morike dated 21 January 1826 Waiblinger exclaimed: 

Welch' einen Christentag hab' ich auf dem Palatin des Romuilus 
gelebt ! Von den Triimmern der Kaiserpalaste aus und dem gold-
enen Haus des Nero starrt' ich den halben Tag iiber das Limonien-
und Myrtengriin und seine unsaglich goudenen Friichte hinab aufs 
romische Forum .. ,25 

The poet, in contrast with the English tourist, spent long days 
enjoying the remains of ancient Rome, and modern changes only 
enhanced their beauty for him. Unlike Frau Buchholz and the 
Englishmen in Rome, Waiblinger looked at everything in the 
old city with intelligence and understanding. 

Like the preceding generation of romanticists, Waiblinger 
attempted to strengthen the effect of the ruins by visiting them 
in the moonlight. In the same letter to Morike he says: 

Im alten Rom ist mir das Colosseum und das Pantheon das 
Hochste, ersteres als riesenhafte, und dieses als durch vollendete 
reine Architektur. Beyde aber !assen sich erst im Mondschein am 
herrlichsten geniessen. Ich mein' ich konne nicht leben, wenn ich 
vor Bettegehn nicht noch einmal <las Pantheon ansehe, ich bin 
sogar etwas aberglaubisch damit. Seine Schonheit iibersteigt 
aber auch alJe Vorstellung ... 26 

Karl Philipp Moritz had been among the first to attempt to make 
the reminiscences of past glory more colorful by the addition of 
modern scenes. Take for example, his account of a nocturnal 
visit to the Forum : 

Nun warder Platz ganz leer; die Geschichte der Vorwelt stieg 
vor meiner Seele empor; aber der Schleier der Nacht verbreitete 
sich iiber die glanzende Erscheinung; und in der Ferne ertonte 
die Sterbeglocke der Vergangenheit aus dem dumpfen Kloster.27 

In the first decade of the nineteenth century the cult of M ondro-
mantik flourished with such men as N ovalis and Fouque, and 
Eichendorff was able to exploit it effectively in Italy. 

In this connection it is interesting to point out Waiblinger's 
concept of Ruinenromantik. In most poetry of this genre we 
find the poet conjuring up an image of mediaeval grandeur, 
often with a nostalgic longing, and usually ending with some 
reflection on the transitory nature of earthly things.28 Waib-
linger did not write about Rhenish castles, but he did use this 
same technique in describing the ruins of Greek and Roman 
antiquity in verse and in prose. Such a poem is "Die Tempel 

25. Friedrich, p. 399. 
26. Ibid., p. 400. 
27. Apud Von Klenze, p. 47-48. 
28. E. g., Eichendorff's "Da steht eine Burg iiberm Tale" and Heine's 

"Steiget auf, ihr alten Traume !" 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 21 

von Agrigent". The poet envisioned a pagan ceremony and 
procession : 

Und priesterlicher Teppiche Pracht be<leckt 
Und hold verschleiert wandelt in Schiichternheit 

Der Jungfraun aufgebliihte Jugend 
Rosen urns Antlitz und Rosen ahnlich ... 2 9 

But all that has disappeared, even the mightiest have fallen: 

Seitdem mich solche Triimmer umstarrt, seitdem 
Zernichtet mich ein ganzer Olymp um,graust, 

Der Yater und die Kinder alle; 
Glaub' ich, dass bald von gedriickter Schulter 

Die Welt dem grossen Trager entsinkt, und ba,ld 
AU unsres Lebens Mutter Natur der Macht, 

Der dunkeln, unterliegt, die endlich 
Selbst sich zerstort im zerstorten Weltall.30 

The eternally compelling beauty of Greek and Roman architec-
ture, even in a state of decay, had the same effect on Waiblinger 
as mediaeval ruins had on his contemporaries in Germany. 

Waiblinger also inherited the respect of the previous genera-
tion for mediaeval culture. One couplet from a series of epi-
grams on Fra Giovanni da Fiesole might serve to illustrate 
Waiblinger's attitude toward mediaeval Italian art: 

Dir ist <lie Kunst ein Gebet, worin du die liebende Seele 
Immer nach Gottes Thron, immer zum Himmel erhebst.31 

In his restless life Waiblinger missed that feeling of piety and 
devotion to God which is so characteristic of the simple beauty 
of Italian painting before Raphael. In a poem on Syracuse he 
stopped for a moment in the midst of his enthusiasm for Greek 
ruins to refresh himself with a quiet walk in "Des Klosters 
stiller Garten und Blumenweg", 32 and he expressed himself in 
language contrasting sharply with that of the preceding stanzas 
on the violent deeds of the Greek tyrants and Roman conquerors. 
Waiblinger has found some kind of a retreat here from the 
blinding majesty of ancient ruins and the brilliance of the 
Italian Renaissance. 

Other aspects of mediaeval culture were equally intriguing 
to Waiblinger. He was especially interested in Sicily, virtually 
a terra incognita until the end of the eighteenth century,33 and 
its mediaeval monuments were still little known even in the early 

29. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 143. 
30. Ibid., p. 145. 
31. Ibid., p. 50. 
32. Ibid., p. 140. 
33. Von Klenze, Chap. IV ("Sicily"). 



22 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

nineteenth century. In a poem on Palermo Waiblinger lists the 
great monuments of mediaeval architecture in Sicily: 

Aber warum von Palermo du schweigst? Normannischer 
Baukunst, 

Gothischer Kirchen ist dort, maur'scher Palaste so vieil. 
Denke des Domes nur in Monreale, des alten, 

Frommer Mosaik, des Styls der nur gerecht ist vor Gott. 34 

Before Waiblinger's day Sicily had been explored by Winckel-
mann in his quest for Greek art and for the same purpose by 
Goethe. The latter explored everything that Sicily had to offer 
the traveller, whether geology, history, architecture, or folklore. 
Goethe noted evidence of mediaeval civilization wherever he 
found it; but his classical orientation during his Italian period 
kept him from enjoying the full extent of the beauty of the 
cathedral of Monreale or the Islamic monuments. 35 Again the 
romanticists were so preoccupied with their search for southern 
color that they sometimes failed to do full justice to the imposing 
remains of Greek and Roman civilization. It remained for 
Waiblinger and his generation to consider both antiquity and 
the middle ages in all their ramifications through the long span 
of Sicilian history. 

As a good Swabian Waiblinger could not fail to include some 
notes on the Hohenstaufen emperors in Italy. The subject had 
fascinated Waiblinger, and in his early youth he had planned to 
compose a series of fifteen dramas, almost as extensive as Ernst 
Raupach's work. 36 This dream never materialized, but when 
Waiblinger arrived in Sicily we find him composing an ode in 
the form of a panegyric entitled "Kaiser Friedrichs des Zweiten 
Sarg." 37 Here, with a background as mediaeval as Walther's 
"Ich saz ftf eime steine," Waiblinger apotheosized the emperor 
for his heroic struggles against Innocent III, Gregory IX, and 
Innocent IV; and some of the stanzas in this poem are so im-
passioned that they might have been written by one of Waib-
linger's own Ghibelline ancestors. What interests us particular-
ly in this poem is that Waiblinger was stirred to patriotism by 
visible evidence of the rule of a German emperor in Sicily. The 
poet presented a motley array of figures adapted to the Sicilian 
scene in which he pointed out how Gothic art is an essential 

84. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 159. 
35. Von Klenze, p. 114, note 1. 
86. Frey, p. 130, 132, et passim. 
87. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 146-148. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 23 

part of the Sicilian mosaic. For example, the ode opens with a 
line recalling the Greeks in Sicily, "So je im Tempel Ernstes 
und Heiliges ... ," but we soon hear of Friedrich, " ... des Domes 
Saulen stiirzend ... " Waiblinger's greatest enthusiasm was 
reserved for the masters of the Italian Renaissance, the period 
in which, he believed, the finest aspects of Italian genius were 
expressed. In a discussion in Francesco Spina Waiblinger set 
up Michelangelo as the representative Italian genius alongside 
Aeschylus and Shakespeare in their respective nations.38 In 
a series of epigrams on Michelangelo39 . the poet used figurative 
language that expressed for him the collective genius of the 
Renaissance: "Sttirmest, Titanen gleich, du in den Himmel 
empor," "die gigantische Wahrheit," "ein anatomischer New-
ton," "dem eigenen Herzen Tyrann." 

Waiblinger found the tradition of the Renaissance every-
where in Italy, and he wrote more about the art of this period 
than about that of any other. Among Waiblinger's most in-
teresting poems are the short epigrams to which reference has 
just been made, "Kunst und Antike," verses on the most famous 
artists and works of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance. 
The enthusiasm of these lines expresses the· spirit of the age 
which Waiblinger wanted to describe, and yet Waiblinger was 
sufficiently discriminating to discover what is characteristic in 
the work of each artist. Frequently he was able to define the 
essence of an artist in a couple of lines. Of Titian he wrote : 

Ware nur sinnliche Wahrheit, und keine hohere, geist'ge, 
Kame Coreggio dir nicht, Raffael selbst dir nicht gileich.40 

Andrea del Sarto, a long and patient sufferer in matrimonial 
duress, comes in for two appropriate lines : 

Weil du die Hcille nur fand'st im Weibe, so hat die Madonna 
Dir den Himmel dafiir in ihrem Antlitz gezeigt.41 

Waiblinger found that the artists of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries gave him precisely what he was looking for in 
Italy, a joie de vivre, but at the same time pride and respect for 
the worth of the individual. The former characteristic seemed 
to the poet to be something deeply rooted in Italian character : 

Was fur ein Unterschied ist zwischen Romer und Deutscher? 
Jener schafft nicht und lebt, dieser, er lebt nicht und schafft.42 

38. Werke, II, 150. 
39. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, p. 54-56. 
40. Ibid., p. 56. 
41. Ibid. 
42. Ibid., p. 89. 



24 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

On the other hand, Waiblinger felt that there was something 
peculiar to the Renaissance that other periods of Italian history 
have not known. In the case of Filippo Bruneleschi, the re-
former of architecture around the middle of the fifteenth 
century, Waiblinger stated that the artist lived in "herrliche 
Zeiten, da einst in geselligem Bunde die Kiinste ... " 43 Choice 
men lived in those days, men whose greatness could not be 
matched by the products of the next century when the age of 
genius had spent itself in Guido Reni and the other Bolognesi. 
In a couplet on Guido's famous "Aurora" Waiblinger wrote: 

Abendrothe der Kunst ist deine Aurora geworden, 
Warum brachte sie nicht neuen unsterblichen Tag? 44 

Waiblinger admired Benvenuto Cellini as one of the finest 
products of the Italian Renaissance, a man who was a synthesis 
of the most characteristic features of the age. In a short poem 
we see how Cellini combined a strong sense of Diesseitigkeit with 
high aesthetic ideals : 

Gerne bekenn' ich, du hist der Ulyss der Kiinste, so vielfach 
Trug dich dein guter Humor, Kraft und Genie durch die Welt. 

Langst schon sperrte die Zeit, die schwarze Zauberin Circe 
Deine Genossen im Stall ew'ger Vergessenheit ein, 

Aber <lurch manche Charybdis erreichtest du endlich die Heimath, 
Deine Penelope schloss dich in die Arme--die Kunst.4 5 

Waiblinger's point of view in his discussion of ancient art 
was determined chiefly by the extent to which a particular object 
reflects the spirit of its age. When we come to the middle ages 
there is a romantic longing for the simple life of that period 
and for the culture that it represents. Accordingly, when Waib-
linger wrote a poetical or a prose description of some masterpiece 
from a particular period, we do not find a detailed stylistic 
analysis but rather Waiblinger's own reactions to what he con-
ceived to be the spirit of the work. Thus we find him putting 
the following words into the mouth of the young artist Eduard 
in Die heilige Woche when he reflects on the art of the Renais-
eiance: 

Es ist in der That ein schwieriges Unternehmen, in heutigen 
Tagen noch eine heilige Familie zu malen. Es gab eine Zeit, wo 
derlei heilige Stoffe frisch und lebendig aus dem Geist des Volks, 
des a1lgemeinen Glaubens, der gesammten Religion, aus den Wiin-
schen des Einzelnen, so wie aus den Bediirfnissen des Ganzen 
hervorgingen. So entstanden die ersten Versuche von Cimabue und 
Giotto, so die frommen, gemiithlichen Bilder des wohlmeinenden 

43. Ibid., p. 51. 
44. Ibid., p. 56. 
45. Ibid., p. 51. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Fiesole. Es war eine Welt fiir den tiefen, reinen Sinn Perugino's, 
fiir die himmlische Schopferseele Raffaels, fiir den hohen Andrea 
del Sarto ... 46 

25 

Waiblinger's Renaissance was neither that of Heinse nor that 
of Goethe, although he had many of the main ideas of both. 
Heinse, who found in Italy something to stimulate and to satisfy 
his yearning for titantic emotions,47 was related to Waiblinger 
in his extreme enthusiasm and his attempt to incorporate the 
Italian spirit into his own thinking, but he lacked the philosophic 
insight of Goethe, whose interest was almost purely historical 
in many instances.48 Waiblinger resembles Goethe in trying to 
interpret the Renaissance without giving himself over completely 
to the age which inspired him. Today Goethe's intellectual atti-
tude has proven its strength by dominating the thought of most 
travellers in Italy during the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies49; but the fusion of this viewpoint with the enthusiasm 
of Heinse, as we observe it in Waiblinger, has also borne fruit. 
Among the distinguished travellers in Italy during the latter 
part of the nineteenth century are Ferdinand Gregorovius, Guy 
de Maupassant, and Paul Bourget. Each of these men set up cri-
teria by which the Renaissance may be judged, and yet their final 
concept was always modified by the subjective. Goethe's method 
of intellectual apprehension was used by all, but in addition we 
find an active imagination in Gregorovius, a keen and subtle 
Stimmung in Maupassant, and an idea of "feeling" in Bourget. 
Waiblinger had a notion that the Renaissance was so rich in 
treasures of art that these masterpieces were well-nigh infinite 
in scope, thus precluding a strictly intellectual method of per-
ception. His lines on Raphael have a ring of modernity: 

Es giebt Seelen, <loch wen'ge, die reiner, als andre vom Urquell 
Sich, vom unendlichen Grund alles Lebend'gen, gelost.50 
If the Italian Renaissance was the most glorious period of 

that country's aesthetic history, then we may properly expect 
Waiblinger to be less interested in the relatively less important 
art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the other 
hand, the same urgent need that drove him to seek the anima of 
Renaissance Italy led him to a more tolerant attitude toward 
the following period. Yet he showed sufficiently good taste to 

46. Werke, V, 21. 
47. Cf. von Klenze, p. 43. 
48. Ibid., p. 81 et seq. 
49. Ibid., Chap. VIII. 
50. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 51. 



26 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

distinguish that which is bad or displeasing. He was far more 
tolerant toward Guido than the critics of the preceding gen-
eration, 51 but he saw Guido's faults clearly. Waiblinger had 
little use for Caravaggio, who deliberately renounced idealism 
and sought to return to nature, not beautiful, but brutal and 
ugly.52 He praised Guercino in lukewarm terms.ti3 Indeed, of all 
the Bolognesi, only Guido and Guercino attract any attention 
from Waiblinger; and his attitude reflects the ideas of the ro-
manticists, for whom this group of painters was little more than 
a nightmare. 

We have already observed in another connection that Waib-
linger showed poor taste in his high praise of Canova and his 
school. Otherwise he was silent concerning Italian art in the late 
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Waiblinger saw clearly 
that the Renaissance had set a mark which was unequaled in the 
following two centuries, but he realized that there was a con-
tinuing tradition of artistic accomplishment in Italy following 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries just as there had been 
previous to the Renaissance. All of this he has summarized in 
a sort of an eclectic canon for the painter and sculptor.54 

This _survey of Waiblinger's attitude toward the art of Italy 
through eighteen hundred years has revealed much about the man 
and his generation. He is far removed from those early travellers 
in Italy such as Montaigne, who looked only for the remains of 
Roman antiquity, or even from the age of Louis XIV, when men 
could see no further than Horace's villa or Raphael's Transfigura-
zione. Waiblinger represents the culmination of the gradual 
process of uncovering the treasures of Italy which had been going 
on for some two centuries. To be sure, Goethe had been exposed 
to nearly everything Italy had to offer; but he cherished a bias 
against the middle ages, and his classical restraint did .not 
permit him to give fiull expression to the exuberance of the 
Renaissance, two periods that had to be discovered by the ro-
manticists. Waiblinger effected a synthesis of these different 
attitudes, and this is the fundamental characteristic of his work. 

Waiblinger went to Italy with the firm resolution to explore 

51. Werke, IV, 24. 
52. Werke, V, 220. 
53. Werke, IV, 24. 
54. Ibid. This is a passage in which he appraises all important painters 

and sculptors in Italy from the primitives to the Bolognesi. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 27 

every corner of the land and to delve deeply into its history and 
culture. Frey has put together from Waiblinger's letters a good 
account of his first trip to Rome in which we note clearly the 
young man's enthusiasm for the country he was to make his 
home. 55 Waiblinger greeted mediaeval Pisa and Florence with no 
less eagerness than he greeted the Rome of antiquity and Renais-
sance. The ideal of his youth always hovered before him: 

Staubbedeckte Biicherbande, 
Moge mancher gern drin blattern, 
Aber ohne Mass und Ende 
Will ich, Leben, dich vergottern.56 

Waiblinger visited every corner of the land, and he observed 
the work of all great artists from the unknown architect of the 
mausoleum of the Scipios down to Canova, all of whom repre-
sented and interpreted for him the culture of Italy, uninterrupted 
for two thousand years. Ordinarily he revealed himself as a 
fairly well informed critic, but occasionally he tended to exag-
geration as the result of excitement or enthusiasm. He always 
went behind the work to immerse himself in the cultural back-
ground of the age that produced it and tried to find some sig-

. nificance for the modern world. His sins of commission outweigh 
those of omission, for his zeal to see everything sometimes went 
beyond his ability to comprehend. 

55. Frey, p. 162-164. 
56. W erke, VI, 28-29. 



CHAPTER III 

WAIBLINGER AND ITALIAN LITERATURE AND MUSIC 

It is quite natural that Waiblinger's comments on the litera-
ture and music of Italy are not as extensive as his treatment 
of her great works of art. In point of time the twenty-five hun-
dred years of art in Italy represent a much longer period than 
the relatively brief history of her modern literature and music. 
Moreover, serious attention was given to the theory and history 
of art as early as the day of Vitruvius and Pliny, whereas nothing 
of corresponding significance on music has survived, and the 
modern literary tradition is quite different from the ancient. 
On the other hand, the romantic generation had done much to 
reveal the qualities of Italian poets and musicians just as it had 
lent a new interpretation to the primitives in art and the re-. 
ligious masters such as Perugino. 

The Italian literature of the Renaissance was a fountainhead 
for the revival of letters in Europe; but, outside of Italy, early 
Italian literature was almost unknown, and even the literature 
of the High Renaissance suffered an eclipse in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries. An eighteenth century traveller like 
Lalande gave us a quite inadequate picture of Italian literature,1 
and Casanova de Seingalt was totally unappreciative of Dante. 2 
Even a man of such fine sensibility as Winckelmann could see 
no beauty in the Florentine literary tradition.3 The interest 
in Italian literature in England has been traced by Marshall, 
and his results bear out in detail the rather general remarks 
made by von Klenze with regard to European literature as a 
whole. Italian literature only gradually secured a firm hold on the 
minds of English men of letters; and it was not until the time 
of William Roscoe, who wrote lives of Lorenzo de' Medici ( 1795) 
and Leo X (1805), that the appreciation of Italian literature 
was an accomplished fact in England.4 Essentially the same 
chronological development holds for Germany, where, in 1796, 
Goethe translated Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography for Schill-

1. Von Klenze, p. 27-28. 
2. Memoires, II, 142 et seq. 
3. Von Klenze, p. 38. 
4. Marsha.U, p. 271 et seq. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 29 

er's Horen, the first notable example of German interest in 
Italian literature since the sixteenth century. Likewise, Goethe 
showed considerable interest in recent Italian literature with 
such essays as "Klassiker und Romantiker in Italien, sich heftig 
bekampfend" (1818) and "Manzonis II Conte Carmagnola" 
(1820). Early in the nineteenth century August Wilhelm Schlegel 
had translated Dante, and Lord Byron had translated the Fran-
cesca and Paolo episode from the Inferno and the first canto of 
Pulci's Morgante Maggiore. The new respect for national culture 
born in the early years of the nineteenth century opened the way 
for a genuine appreciation of all periods of Italian literature. 

Like Italian literature of the High Renaissance, Italian music 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the foundation of 
much that we call modern in musical technique and taste. Italian 
operas and Italian prima donnas have remained in fashion all 
over the world for three hundred years, but it was primarily the 
writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries 
who gave a distinctive interpretation to Italy as the land of music 
par excellence. In the eighteenth century the English poet Thomas 
Gray had been the first traveller in Italy to show an apprecia-
tion of Italian music as an integral element in the national cul-
ture. 5 Some fifty years later in 1795-96 we find an entire novel 
in which Italian music is a major theme, Heinse's Hildegard von 
Hohental. Madame de Stael's Corinne (1807) is especially im-
portant for interpreting the Italian attitude toward music in a 
new light, emphasizing natural ability to compose and sing al-
most as a national characteristic. 

From the time he learned to read Italian, W aiblinger had a 
broad interest in Italian literature, especially the standard class-
ics. He read Dante and Petrarch daily, and he ranked the former 
with Shakespeare and Goethe. 6 In an epigram on Dante W aib-
linger epitomized his approach to Italian literature: 

Alle beten dich an, und keiner versteht <lich, die Frage 
Ist es nun einzig, was sie thaten, verstiind€n sie dich.7 

Waiblinger saw in a nation's literature the master-key to the 
understanding of its cultural life in the broadest sense. He read 
not only Dante and Petrarch, but all representative Italian poets, 
from the middle ages and the Renaissance up to the nineteenth 

5. Von Klenze, p. 18, note 2. 
6. Friedrich, p. 398 (letter to Morike). 
7. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 61. 



30 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

century, for almost every one of any importance is mentioned 
and often evaluated by Waiblinger. In literature as in art Waib-
linger tried to look at each period impartially rather than to 
glorify one at the expense of another. Casanova scarcely knew 
any writers in his own language other than Boccaccio, Machia-
velli, and Castiglione, but Waiblinger did full justice to these 
along with the others. Another important characteristic of Waib-
linger's consideration of Italian literature was his interest in 
mediaeval authors and in the romantic epics, an interest in-
herited from the preceding generation. The works of Pulci, 
Boiardo, and Ariosto took on a new charm for the nineteenth 
century after the revival of interest in the mediaeval themes 
they treat. 

Waiblinger knew and loved the literature of Italy before he 
visited the country. Before his trip in 1826 he had spent many 
hours with Dante8 and had written a satire on pseudo-romanti-
cism in the style of the Inferno.9 Throughout Waiblinger's life 
Dante was his favorite poet. Sometimes Waiblinger expressed 
misgivings and fear that he was merely indulging in a temporary 
enthusiasm for an unduly resurrected poet: 

Sage mir redlich, mein Freund, wie gefiillt dir Dante's Comedia ?-
"Ei, ich bin orthodox, halt' an der Mode mich fest."-

Aber wie so? "Nun ja, <las Centrum aller Romantik 
Ist es nach Schlegel, und ich Iese die Dichter nach ihm."10 

However, Waiblinger was quite happy to follow the current 
fashion after he read the poet and convinced himself of his 
greatness: 

Hier gilt nur <las Commando, man stosst in die stolze Trompete, 
Und als gemeiner Mann folg' ich den andern getrost.1 1 

On the other hand, Waiblinger contributed some sound criti~ism 
of the great Italian poet. In one passage he described Dante as a 
good antidote for German sentimentality: 

Mochtest du reine poetische Form, so :find' im Homer sie, 
Sophokles zeigt sich, es zeigt selbst sich Anakreon dir. 

Warest du sentimental nach deutscher Mode, so giebt dir 
Dante nicht viel fiir dein Herz, aber fiir deinen Verstand.12 

In another epigram this contrast between Homer's hellenic clarity 
and Dante's mediaevalism is expressed in a cosmic figure: 

Bist du gewohnt, mit Homer <lurch Himmel und Erde zu wandern, 

8. Frey, p. 113. 
9. Drei Tage in der Unterwelt (Werke, IV, 115-193). 

10. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 60. 
11. Ibid., p. 61. 
12. Ibid., p. 62. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Suchst du die KJarheit und gern sicheren Boden und Tritt, 
So erscheint dir der Geist Alighieri's, fantastische Wolken 

Tragen im dusteren Sturm dich ins Unendliche hin. 13 

31 

Waiblinger lent intimacy to his remarks on Dante by occasional 
bits of local color such as a reference to the Sasso di Dante in 
front of the cathedral at Florence.14 

Petrarch, the other great poet of mediaeval Italy, also found 
an appreciative reader in Waiblinger. In one charming little 
poem devoted to Petrarch, the German poet contrasted the ether-
eal world of love with the prosaic life of those who would see in 
the Laura sonnets only a glorification of sensual passion. He who 
is in love with love finds a favorite in Petrarch: 

1st dir die Liebe der Faden, woraus <las Weltall gesponnen, 
Der alles W esen und selbst Griischen und Sterne verknupft, 

Dann in Francesco vielleicht hast du den Dichter gefunden, 
Der <las geheime Gespinnst bis an <las Ende verfolgt. . . .15 

But if the reader cannot conceive of this idealized concept of love, 
then Petrarch's sonnets seem little more than vulgar rimes: 

Oder es langweilt dich: er leiht dir die magische Brille, 
Aber dein kiilterer Sinn siehet zuletzt nur ein W eib,16 

In connection with Petrarch, Waiblinger made satirical com-
ments on the degeneracy of the sonnet as a literary form in his 
own day. He felt that the purity of the sonnet had been impaired 
by literary dilettanti, that the genre had seen its best days in the 
age of Petrarch : 

Tausende liest man vor in den Akademien am Tiber, 
Professoren sind es, Monsignori dazu, 

Cavalieri, Grafen, Abbati, Barone, Doktoren, 
Alle Staude, <loch fehlt einzig der Dichter dabei.1 7 

Like Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio had enjoyed a wave of 
popularity toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, and 
Waiblinger caught this sentiment with more than the ordinary 
enthusiasm: "Immer hab' ich ja gern lustige Schwanke ge-
hort ... " 18 Waiblinger, like Heine, rejoiced in the thought that 
intellectuals belonged to a higher sphere than Philistines, and 
on this weak premise he based his appreciation of the great 
mediaeval story teller : 

... Doch uber den Alpen versteht man die Spasse 
Nicht mehr, in Deutschland ist man allzu gebildet und fein. 

Man erriithet, man spricht von Mora:l, und sie im Munde, 

13. Ibid., p. 61. 
14. Ibid. 
15. Ibid., p. 62. 
16. Ibid. 
17. Ibid., p. 66. 
18. Ibid., p. 63. 



32 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Aber im Herzen ist man, aber im Leben ihr Feind. 
Doch so ist's immer. Man trieb in Eden Alles in Unschuld, 

Und nach dem Siindenfall kam erst der Teufel in Ruf.19 

Waiblinger greeted the romantic fantasies of Ariosto with 
an enthusiasm equal to that which he had for the mediaeval 
authors. In the first line of an epigram on Orlando Furioso we 
are introduced to the magical atmosphere of romance in Ariost.o: 
"Schwing' auf den Hippogryphen dich auf ... " 20 And it is this 
world of fancy that Waiblinger liked to conjure up for his German 
readers: 

Still, mit der alten Mama, der Natur, ihr Gesetz ist voriiber, 
Und von Magiern und Feen, zaubernden Todten und Frau'n, 

Fliegenden Rossen, krystallnen Kastellen und Wundern des Meeres, 
Lanzen und Hornern und Schild ist sie verlacht und geneckt.21 

Nor is it this one quality of romance that distinguishes Ariosto, 
for Waiblinger felt that he could sing of love as tenderly as 
Petrarch: 

Suchst du die brennendste Gluth der Liebe, die Schi:inheit der Treue, 
Hat Beatrice dir nur Andacht und Schwindel erweckt, 

Ist dir auch Laura's Bild im unendlichen Aether verschwunden, 
Ach, so hast du gewiss mit Bradamanten geweint!22 

In a few prettily turned verses Waiblinger described the dis-
tinguishing quality of Ariosto, the humor that sets him apart 
from the naive poets of the middle ages whose unqualified apo-
theosis of their heroes betrays lack of sophistication: 

Dante'n fiihrte Virgil und die iiberschwiingliche Freundin, 
In den Tiefen und Hohn droht dir der Athem zu fliehn, 

Aber der heitre Humor, der begeisterte, wohnte der holden 
Grazie bei, und es kam so Lodovico zur Welt.23 

Unfortunately, the great tradition of Italian literature in 
the late middle ages and in the Renaissance was soon to fade, 
and Waiblinger saw clearly how the literature from the latter 
part of the sixteenth century on was below the standard set by 
the Renaissance. Even the romantic appeal of Torquato Tasso 
meant little to Waiblinger.24 Minor seventeenth century poets 
are not mentioned in Waiblinger's works. However he viewed 
the rebirth of Italian drama and opera in the eighteenth cen-
tury in the works of Alfieri, Goldoni, and Metastasio as char-
acteristic of Italian genius. 

19. Ibid. 
20. Ibid. 
21. Ibid. 
22. Ibid., p. 64. 
23. Ibid. 
24. Ibid. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 33 

Waiblinger was less enthusiastic for Alfieri than for Goldoni 
and Metastasio. Alfieri's severity of form groups him with the 
wave of neo-classical trends in the latter part of the eighteenth 
century, and Waiblinger felt that this trait set him apart from 
the more characteristic Italian poets. Thus he tried to imagine a 
literary synthesis of Shakespeare and Alfieri, 25 and he believed 
that Alfieri's basic modernity was ill-suited to his classic models: 

Mannlich sprichst du, ja selbst der Kothurn ist dir nicht erhaben, 
Noch genug und du streckst gar mit Gewalt noch dich aus. 

Das ist traurig, den Griechen allein nur ware die Roheit 
Tragischer Sprache Natur, aber der Nachwelt nicht mehr? 26 

On the other hand, Metastasio represents everything that is 
typically Italian. Waiblinger thought that this poet had the 
truest and most profound understanding of his native country,27 
and he pointed out that his exquisite use of the Italian language 
was not only charming in itself but also well suited to the libretto: 

Lieblich hist du, ich Iese dich gern, ich hore dich lieber, 
Wenn dich ein romischer Mund, wenn der Gesang dich beseelt.2 8 

In connection with Metastasio he contrasted the Italian and 
German languages : 

Deine Sprach' ist entziickend, ich lausche dem zartlichen Dichter, 
Aber sprachest du deutsch, fand' ich den Dichter nicht mehr. 29 

Strangely enough, Waiblinger's enthusiasm did not extend to 
Apostolo Zeno, the master and the superior of Metastasio. 

Goldoni, who revived and remodeled the old commedia dell' 
arte, was highly praised by Waiblinger as a poet who elevated 
a type of literature as· indigenous to modern Italy as the satire 
was to ancient Rome. 30 His lively Venetian sketches in the local 
vernacular delighted Waiblinger quite as much as they did th~ 
native Venetian Casanova.31 However, Waiblinger also saw faults 
irr Goldoni, recognizing him as abundantly freudvoll but neither 
leidvoll nor gedankenvoll: 

So auch ware Goldoni mir viel, doch Talent und Gedanken 
Seh' ich nun leider im Meer seiner Komodien verschwemmt.32 

Waiblinger was particularly pleased with the popular theater 
of Italy. He was always excited by the burratini (marionettes), 
and in a note to one verse he spoke of the large crowds that were 
likely to watch the ingenious operator put Cassandro and Pul-

25. Ibid. 
26. Ibid. 
27. Werke, VIIf, 233. 
28. Gedichte aus ltalien, IT, 64. 
29. Ibid. 
30. Werke, IX, 213. 
31. Ibid. and Casanova, Memoires, II, 79. 
32. Gedichte aus Italien, If, 65. 



34 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

cinella through their paces.33 He was equally intrigued by the 
San Carlino theater in Naples, a very popular and typically 
Neapolitan institution. While this group produced nothing of 
permanent value, Waiblinger's essay on it indicates that here 
he found something which, in his opinion, was perpetuating a 
genuine dramatic tradition in Italy. He wrote that the spectator 
should not expect "lauter Stiicke von poetischem Werth,"34 but . 
he did praise the "Eigenthiimlichkeit, Derbheit und Original-
itat der Stucke." The theater poet and manager was a certain 
Filippo Cammarano, a man well versed in the tastes of Neapoli-
tan audiences. His plays seem to have been characterized largely 
by stock characters from the traditional drama, loose plots with 
all manner of intrigue, considerable local color based on an appeal 
to local sensibility, and the Neapolitan dialect. Here one might see 
Pulcinella, the Buffo Biscogliese, the Buffo Scarola, and the 
attrice caratterista carry on in the Neapolitan dialect and revel 
in local humor. Waiblinger thought that here in the San Carlino 
he had found an indigenous, characteristic drama illustrating 
the very essence of Italian life and that this circumstance com-
pensated for the lack of any literary merit in the works of Filippo 
Cammarano. 

Waiblinger wanted to drive home two points about Italian 
literature to his German readers. First, he emphasized that Italy 
had a national, characteristic, romantic literature that was com-
parable to anything that the early romanticists had excavated 
for Germany. The Schlegels and their group had pointed out 
that Dante and Boccaccio were mediaeval authors without rivals; 
and Waiblinger, writing directly from Italy, furnished his read-
ers with the intimate notes that a native critic might have offer-
ed. He pronounced Petrarch the greatest of all the love poets, a 
poet who sang with an inspiration as compelling as any in the 
whole lyrical tradition. After Waiblinger wrote, Ariosto ceased 
to be merely a name in the German romantic periodicals and be-
came a poet who added a peculiar quality of genial Italian humor 
to his romantic themes. In the second place, Waiblinger sought 
everything in Italian literature that sprang from the people. He 
was especially pleased to hear a native Roman singing the verses 
of Metastasio, and from the extensive works of Goldoni he 

33. Ibid., p. 89 and 171. 
34. Werke, IX, 205. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 35 

selected the folk pieces as his favorites. In the folk theater he 
found something that recalled the great tradition of the commedia 
dell' arte. He was coldly distant toward Alfieri's classic tragedies 
without any native background. 

Both tendencies were implied in the search for an Universal-
poesie by the early romanticists. Waiblinger applied these no-
tions to Italy just as the Grimms had applied them in Germany. 
Waiblinger was one of the first travellers in Italy to delve into 
her literature as a means of illuminating her culture and tra-
ditions; and in so doing he treated his subject without prejudice 
and fulfilled his mission of interpreting Italy to Germany .. His 
criticism does not add a great deal to the interpretation of the 
literature, but his comments are an integral aspect of his efforts 
to interpret Italy to Germany 

* * * * * * * * * 
Closely allied with Italian letters, at least for Waiblinger, 

was the music that he found in Italy. It was neither the delight-
fully graceful music of the eighteenth century nor even the 
Italian opera of the period that attracted him. Rather it was 
the remarkable quality of the Italian language and the talent 
of the Italian people that allows free improvisation of verse 
and melody. Of all the great contemporary Italian composers 
Waiblinger mentioned only Rossini, and his remarks about him 
were none too complimentary.35 

We have noted that Heinse and Mme. de Stael, together with 
the long tradition of itinerant Italian maestros and prima don-
nas, had given Europe the impression of Italy as the Urheimat o:f 
music. Waiblinger's special interest lay in the imp1·ovisatori, and 
an important factor in directing his attention to these poets and 
singers was Corinne. While there is no statement in his works 
that he had read Mme. de Stael's novel, he speaks of Rosa Taddei, 
a well known improvisatorice, as "Italiens neue Corinna."36 

Two points in particular connected literature and this form 
of art for Waiblinger. In the first place, the improvisatori repre-
sent a semi-sophisticated folk art; and, as we have noted in con-
nection with Goldoni, Metastasio, and the popular theater, 
Waiblinger carefully sought in literature whatever bore the mark 
of the people. He found improvisation cultivated not only in the 

35. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 85. 
36. Werke, rv, 218. 



36 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

fashionable salons of Rome but also in the Sabine hills and in 
the country around Olevano. Secondly, improvisation consists of 
verses not only composed by the individual but also sung by him; 
and therefore Waiblinger saw in the work of the improvisatori a 
genre halfway between literature and music, a conception simi-
lar to Wagner's famous ideas on opera and drama. Not only 
straight lyrical songs but also more complicated types such as 
sonnets and even tragedies were composed by these talented 
artists. Waiblinger marvelled especially at the Cavaliere Sgricci, 
who, at the Roman carnival of 1827, improvised two tragedies 
on consecutive evenings: 

Sicherlich ist's zum Erstaunen, er improvisirt mir im Fluge 
Wie der Wind so ein Ding, wie 'ne Tragotlie, her. 

J ahre studieren andre daran, ein Abend geniigt ihm, 
Wie sie an Einem entsteht, so auch vergeht sie an ihm.37 

Of all the improvisatori that Waiblinger met, he was im-
pressed most deeply by Rosa Taddei. One of his most enthusias-
tic epigrams is dedicated to her: 

Traumt' ich die Muse zu sehn, so lass mir den Wahn! auf Papier 
nur, 

Doch auf lebendigem Mund sah ich noch nie ein Gedicht.as 

There are extended remarks about her in an essay entitled "Rosa 
Taddei" from the year 1828. Waiblinger described her per-
formance in an "academy" of improvisatori: 

Es hat jeder, der eine Akademie besucht, das Recht, ein Thema 
abzugeben. Sind alle beisammen, so werden sie zuerst von einem 
Geistlichen ( !) untersucht, ob ja kein unerlaubtes darunter sey, 
und unter solche zahlte man auch: il Pellegrino. Sodann werden 
sammtliche Themen von der Dichterin vorgelesen, und man hat Ge-
legenheit, zu bemerken, <lass mancher im Theater ist, der eben nicht 
den feinsten Sinn fiir Poesie hat; gewohnlich sind es Themen 
aus der Mythologie, aus der Geschichte, die sich unzahligemal 
wiederholen, und Dante, Petrarca und Tasso fehlen niemals. Je 
nach Ton und Inhalt werden sie fiir dieses oder jenes Versmaass 
bestimmt, und in eine Kapsel geworfen, sie wird dem Publikum zur 
Ziehung prasentirt, und gleich nachdem die Themen gezogen wer-
den, beginnet die lmprovisatrice die Ausfiihrung ... das heftigste 
Mimenspiel beg,leitet den Gesang und seinen oft dramatischen In-
halt, und wenn sie zuweilen-doch ist's hochst selten-fehlt und 
den Vers wiederholen muss, so erinnert uns <las nur daran, dass sie 
thatig, dass sie Dichterin, Schopferin ist, und nicht bloss vortragt, 
was nicht mehr lebendig ist.39 

It is interesting to observe that Waiblinger emphasized the 
genius and originality of the poetess as primary qualities. This 

37. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 67. 
38. Ibid., p. 66. 
39. Werke, IV, 199-201. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 37 

idea goes back to some of his earliest notions of poetic genius. 
An entry from his diary reads : 

Dem Dichter, welcher <las Wesen seiner Kunst im Mittelpunkt 
ergriffen hat, erscheint nichts widersprechend und fremd, ihm sind 
die Rathsel der Natur gelost, durch die Magie der Phantasie kann 
er alle Zeitalter und Welten verkniipfen, die Wunder verschwinden 
und doch verwandelt sich alles in Wunder.40 

Waiblinger felt that the extemporaneous recitations of this 
poetess were endowed with "eine hiibsche reine Sprache, eine 
lebendige Phantasie, ein richtiges, edles 'Gef iihl,"41 and these 
qualities elevated the simple improvisations of Rosa Taddei to 
lyrical heights. 

Waiblinger constantly brought out the great difference be-
tween the Italian and the German. The latter could not possibly 
perform the feat of a Sgricci in composing a tragedy. Compar-
ing Schiller with Sgricci, he observed: 

Eine Tragi.idie zu improvisi:ren, worin gegenwartig Sgricci von 
Arezzo der beriihmteste ist, das scheint fiir uns Deutsche anfangs 
eine Unmi.iglichkeit. Wir wissen, wie lange Geburtsschmerzen unsere 
ersten dramatischen Autoren gelitten, wissen, wie lange Schiller 
seinen Wallenstein in sich trug, wir wissen, welch reifes Studium, 
welch anhaltende Uberlegung die Struktur einer Tragi.idie ni.ithig 
macht, und sprechen darum einem Improvisatore jede MogJichkeit 
ab, auch nur ein mittelmassiges Werk aus dem Stegreif zu liefern. 
Aber wir bedenken dabei nicht, wie verschieden eine italienische 
Tragodie von einer deutschen ist. Nehmen wir den grossten Dram-
atiker Italiens, Alfieri, zur Hand, so werden wir bald unsere Mein-
ung andern. Seine Tragodie ist so einfach in der Intrike und in 
der Anlage, in Akten und Personen, dass es uns denselben Genuss 
verschafft, ob wir sie vorlesen, oder auffiihren hi.iren. Das Person-
aJ.e beschrankt sich auf vier oder fiinf Individuen, jeder Aufwand 
und Pomp der Scenerie ist verbannt, die drei Einheiten sind hier in 
derHeimath, es fallt nicht einmal der Vorhang, und die ganze Tra-
gi.idie ist kaum so Jang, als ein Akt des Don Carlos. Lesen wir oder 
sehen wir die Werke Alfieris auf der Biihne, und Iangweilen uns die 
unablassigen Declamationen, und die hochtragenden Darstellungen 
von Affekten, so finden wir's wohl mi.iglich, <lass ein Werk der Art 
an einem Abend entstehen konnte, wenn wir einmal von der Vir-
tuositat des Dichters iiberzeugt sind; wie wir denn in der That im 
Jahr 1827 den gefeierten Sgricci auch eine Tragi.idie hier haben im-
provisiren horen, die sich noch iiberdies durch die reine toskanische 
Sprache auszeichnete.42 

Even if it is out of the question to conceive of a German im•• 
provisation of a tragedy, it is equally difficult to imagine even 
a German improvisation of verses: 

Aber sie sind mir lieber, denn ihresgleichen in Deutschland 
Die man zwar nirgends Hest, aber zu Tausenden druckt.43 

40. Ibid., p. 232. 
41. Ibid., p. 201. 
42. Ibid., p. 197-189 
43. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 67. 



38 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Just as Mme. de Stael found the improvisatore a useful 
fictional character, so also Waiblinger used improvisatori as 
characters in two of his novels, Francesco Spina and Das 
Blumenf est. Francesco Spina, hero of the novel by the same 
name, and Oda, a quondam bandit chieftain, carry on an im-
provised conversation in verse at one of the most dramatic 
points in the story. Waiblinger forgot his own statement about 
the possibility of improvisation in German and "reproduced" 
about three pages of this material in German "translation".44 
Elsewhere, he passed over the improvisations of Spina with two 
sentences merely describing the effect of his song. Waiblinger 
was equally inconsistent in Das Blumenf est, but in one passage 
he was able to represent in German fairly successfully the 
manner in which one would imagine that the improvisatore 
Cecco might sing: 

Viel oder wenig 
Was kiimmert's mich? 
Bettler und Konig 
Plagen sich. 
W em ohne Sorgen 
Fur heut und morgen 
Lustig das Leben verstrich, 
Nennt man am End~ noch liederlich.45 

Very interesting to Waiblinger was his observation that even 
the most humble social groups in Italy could produce men of 
high poetic talent, e.g., Cecco, the poor shepherd. Waiblinge:r 
wrote: 

Wie sie singen, wie sie die Muse befeuert, wie wiithend 
Sich im entziindeten Kampf wechselnd beginnen ein Lied: 

Bauern sind es zwar nur, Sacktrager und Pizzicarole, 
Stiefelputzer und solch Lumpengesindel der Stadt.46 

In a note to these verses W aiblinger wrote : 
Wer hat nicht schon von dem Dichtertalent des gemeinen Yolks 

in Italien gehort? Ich habe anderswo dariiber manches mitgetheilt. 
Im verflossenen Winter brachte ich halbe Nachte im beriichtigten 
Caffe degli Specchi auf der Piazza Colonna unter der niedrigsten 
Volksklasse zu, welche sich mit Improvisiren unterhielt, bis man 
drei oder vier Stunden nach Mitternacht sie forttrieb. Ein Pizzi-
carol, oder Wurst- und Kasehandler, hatte vor einigen Jahren in 
Rom einen besonderen Ruf. Scharen von Menschen liefen ihm oft 
nach, wenn er <lurch die Stadt ging, und er sang auf alien PJatzen, 
an allen Ecken.47 

Waiblinger found the common people improvising in the country 

44. Werke, II, 141-143. 
45. Werke, III, 106. 
46. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 67. 
47. Ibid., p. 168. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 39 

even more than in the city. In Olevano he found a confirmed 
alcoholic, ironically enough by the name of Michel Angelo, who 
was especially adept when he had been drinking heavily. 48 The 
German poet, incidentally, was put to shame by this born poet, 
whose every sentence could be perfectly scanned.49 In the 
summer of 1828, a year after his first visit to 'Olevano, Waib-
linger fell sick there. After exhausting himself with the dull 
biographies of Nepos and some saints' lives, he turned in des-
peration to his notes on the folk-song and improvisatori. Even 
the folk-song failed to interest him, but finally he rallied his 
enthusiasm by copying improvisations for his readers.50 He 
included a few stornelli (folk epigrams) in these notes, but h-9 
turned to the improvisatori after preserving this information. 
He was compelled to satisfy the curiosity of readers whose in-
terest in popular poetry had been excited by Des Knaben Wun-
derhorn and Alte hock- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder; but once 
this service was dutifully performed, he immediately returned 
to his favorite theme of the elements of genuine lyricism as re-
vealed by the improvisatori. 

Waiblinger also found another form of folk music that 
appealed to him in the piferari, pious hill priests who came into 
the market towns to play their bagpipes and collect alms for 
needy parishioners. The observant traveller may still find them 
today in Italian provincial capitals, if he seeks out the shrines 
devoted to the cult of the Virgin. The engraving at the be-
ginning of the ninth volume of Waiblinger's collected works, 
originally selected for the Italienisches Taschenbuch fiir 1829, 
represents a group of piferari. Waiblinger's explanatory note is 
valuable for the insight it gives into his conception of folk-
religion and its musical manifestations: 

... Niemals fiihlte ich mich tiefer in die Marchenwelt versetzt 
als dann, wenn jene Musik vereint mit den Glocken des nahen Ka-
puzinerklosters, erweckend in meine Morgentraume tonte, die ver-
hiillten Kapuziner vor meinem Fenster voriiber aus der Kirche zog-
en und die heroischen Spielleute mit ihren scharfen, aber gutmiithig-
en Gesicht~rn, . ihren funkelnden Augen, den schlanken, kraftigen 
Gestalten, m Z1egenfellen gehiillt, von farbigen, malerisch iiber die 
Schulter geworfenen Manteln umfaltet, mir ihren Morgengruss 
entgegenriefen ... 

Die Piferari bringen ihre Andacht der Mutter Gottes dar, <lurch 
Aufbietung aller lieblichen Tone, die ihr gliiubiges Gemiith und 

48. W erke, VIII, 243 et seq. 
49. Ibid., p. 245. 
50. Ibid:, :p. 275-276. 



40 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

ihre Geschicklichkeit nur zu geben vermag und neu gekriiftigt 
ziehen sie dann mit heiterem Muthe vom Morgen bis zum Abend 
<lurch die ewige Stadt, um das Herz der Menschen, das leicht beweg-
liche und doch oft so harte, zu erfreuen und zur Spende fur den 
Genuss zu veranlassen. W o sie auch weilen, sie konnen sicher seyn, 
stets einen Kreis Horlustiger um sich zu bilden, und wenn auch 
nicht alle zahlen, iirndten sie <loch genug fur ihre leicht befriedig-
ten Wunsche, um ohne Sorgen hinzuleben, ja nicht selten mit einem 
ersparten Siimmchen ihren heimathlichen Bergen wieder entgegen 
zu ziehen.51 

For Waiblinger the music of the piferari was parallel to the 
paintings of Perugino and Fra Angelico, and this peculiar 
Italian religiosity among the common people was something he 
admired alongside the great masters of primitive painting. 

Waiblinger went a step beyond the romanticists in his study 
of folk poetry. True, the Germans of his day were well ac-
quainted with the unsophisticated reciter, but to create ex-
temporaneously was an art that excelled even the skilled recita-
tion of traditional songs. Repeatedly Waiblinger drew the con-
trast between the German and the Italian with a didactic in-
sistence. He told his German readers that in the south they 
could find genuine poetry, genuine music, "den Dichter, welcher 
das Wesen seiner Kunst im Mittelpunkt ergriffen hat." The 
careful cultivation of some fortuitous gift of nature distin-
guished Italian folk music, and the living spirit was present. 

51. Werke, IX, i-ii. 



CHAPTER IV 

WAIBLINGER AND THE ITALIAN LANDSCAPE 

Italia! oh Italia! thou who hast 
The fatail gift of beauty,1 

Such was Byron's enthusiasm for Italy as he passed from 
the rolling plains of Lombardy across the rugged Apennines 
and down to the sunny fields of Campania. During the middle 
ages, however, and up to a half century before his time, trav-
ellers in Italy displayed no more of a feeling for the color of 
the land "wo die Zitronen bliihn, im dunklen Laub die Gold-
orangen gliihn" than they could imitate from the epitheta 
ornantia of the classical poets. Typical of this e/il,rly attitude 
and in strange contrast to his famous son, Johann Caspar Goethe 
was completely obtuse to the natural beauties of Italy in the 
900 pages of his tedious Viaggio per l'Italia fatto nel anno 
MDCCXL. 2 Joseph Addison's sensitiveness to the beauty of 
the Alps and the hills of Latium was unusual for his period.3 
Other travellers showed an occasional appreciation of the land-
scape, but the first to strike a new note was Georg Christian 
Adler, whose Reisebemerkungen auf einer Reise nach Rom 
appeared in Altona in 1784. He enjoyed the effects of moon-
light on natural scenes, spoke of the "Pracht der Verwiistung," 
and described the waterfalls of Tibur as "die romantischste 
Aussicht, die man sich vorstellen kann." 4 Still, the tradition of 
Watteau's fetes chamP,etres and the age that produced them con-
tinued to influence travellers in their estimation of nature as 
she manifests herself in Italy up to the age of romanticism. 
Charles Dupaty, whom von Klenze calls the "Rousseau of Italian 
travellers," shows Rousseauistic enthusiasm but no real appre-
ciation. Baron J. H. Riedesel, a disciple of Winckelmann, was 
likewise quite unable to interpret for his German readers the 
natural beauties of Sicily.5 

Here, as elsewhere, it was Goethe who fashioned the new 

1. Childe Harold, IV, xlii. 
2. See von Klenze. op. cit., p. 20, note 1; the elder Goethe's manuscript 

is in the Goethe-Schiller Archiv in Weimar. 
3. Ibid., p. 22. 
4. Ibid., p. 40 et seq. 
5. Ibid., p. 60. 



42 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

style. His Tagebilcher und Brief e aus ltalien and his Italien-
ische Reise were internationally famous. Biese speaks in glow-
ing terms of Goethe's development in Italy, of the influence of 
the country on his conception of nature : 

. . . sein N aturgefiihl wandelt sich von anakreonth,chem Ge-
tiindel, von Sentimentalitiit, die in Sturm und Drang heisser Lyrik 
sich austobt, zu gesunder Mannlichkeit und Geistesklarheit, die den 
Denker und den Dichter auf die Hohen der Menschilichkeit empor-
trug und ihn zum Begriinder moderner Kultur und zum lebens-
wahrsten Deuter der Natur nach ihren Weiten und Tiefen 
machte.6 

Speaking more specifically of Goethe's Italian experience, Biese 
writes: 

In dem Mignon-Liede "Kennst du das Land?", dem hohen Liede 
der Sehnsucht, hatte sich schon 1784 die Liebe zum farbenreichen 
Siiden und die Plastik der Zeichnung mit einschmeichelndster 
Musik der Worte verbunden. Und als die Erfiillung nahte, als er 
iiber den Brenner fuhr, da iiberstrahlte ein langentbehrtes, se!iges 
Behagen auch die schonen Landschaften. Aber er legt nicht 
mehr seine Empfindungen in sie hinein-"ich sehe-sagt er-
neuerdings nur die Sachen und nicht wie sonst bei und mit den 
Sachen."7 

Goethe's important new ideas about Italy meant much to the 
world of literature, and after 1783 we can find very few accounts 
of trips to Italy that ignore nature completely. Even if the 
next generation did dilute Goethe's plastic imagery with the 
subjective, the fact remains that it was highly sensitive to line 
and color in Italy. 

Chateaubriand looked for the effects of light and shadow 
in Italy,8 and Lamartine was enchanted by the Gulf of Naples.0 
The opening lines of N ovalis' hymn, 

Welcher Lebendige, Sinnbegabte, :liebt nicht vor allen Wunder-
erscheinungen des verbreiteten Raums um ihn <las allerfreuliche 
Licht mit seinen Farben, seinen Strahlen und Wogen, seiner 
milden Allgegenwart, als weekender Tag?lO 

were transposed into reality by Karl Blechen (1798-1840), 
whose Landschaft bei Benevent and Golf von Spezia have been 
called "kleine Wunder an Licht und Farbe."11 In German 
literature Eichendorff capitalized on the M ond- und Ruinen-
romantik of Italy in Taugenichts, and Platen has given us un-
forgettable descriptions of Venice in his sonnets. While these 

6. Biese, p. 135. 
7. Ibid., p. 148. 
8. Von Klenze, p. 90. 
9. Ibid., p. 92. 

10. "Hymnen an die Nacht," I. 
11. Brinckmann, p. 16. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 43 

poets and painters were typical of the new feeling for Italian 
landscape that captured the fancy of the romanticists, the most 
important figure of the generation for Waiblinger was Byron, 
The Englishman not only supplied Waiblinger abundantly with 
ideas and stylistic devices, but he also gave him an abiding 
feeling for the Italian landscape, as Gluck indicates. According-
ly, the two most important influences on Waiblinger in his 
appreciation of Italy's natural beauty were Goethe and Lord 
Byron; but much of what Waiblinger wrote about the Italian 
landscape is original and individualistic, the product of his 
boundless enthusiasm for the country. 

Waiblinger's constantly developing sensitivity to the Italian 
landscape is reflected in his style. His earliest writing is 
marked by all the e~uberance and exaggerated pantheism of the 
Sturm und Drang. 12 In Italy, however, this ethereal roman-
ticism that turns nature into a sort of Aeolian harp is gradually 
changed into an objectivity similar to that cultivated by an 
Augenmensch of the Goethean variety. 13 While Waiblinger's 
life was cut short before he was able to perfect his style and 
thought, it is significant that he was able to show rapid progress 
in descriptive techniques. He was able to describe Italy's 
natural beauties in a lucid and effective style, an essential for 
successful interpretation of Italy to German readers. 

But how, precisely, did the Italian landscape affect Waib-
linger? It did inspire a stylistic improvement, but this sprang 
ultimately from the change he underwent as an individual. 
The revealing letter to Morike tells us something about Waib-
linger's first impression of Rome: 

... Es sind nun 7 W ochen, dass ich hier bin, und ich fiihle mfoh 
auf dem Campo Vaccino zu Hause, wie Du Dich im Garten von 
Beinhausen. Dennoch aber hab' ich noch nichts weiter als Ein-
dri.icke erhalten, und getraue mir nur i.iber Weniges ein Urteil zu: 
denn das glaube mir, Du magst auch denken und lesen und fiihlen 
iiber Rom, was Du willst, <las ist alil' nichts. lch habe mich seit den 
friihesten Knabenjahren an nach den sieben Hiigeln gesehnt, und 
ich habe dort keine Vorstellung von all' der Herrlickeit gehabt. Man 
wundert sich aber auch, <lass ich jetzt schon in den ersten Wochen 
mich so einheimisch fi.ihle.14 

Waiblinger developed an immediate affinity for Rome and the 
whole peninsula. He sought at once the joyous side of Italy. 

12. See Phaethon, p. 213-214, for an example of an immature and un-
disciplined description of a classica,l landscape. 

13. A passage describing Lago Albano in Werke VIII 33-34 reveals 
this change quite clearly. ' ' ' 

14. Friedrich, p. 397-398, 



44 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

He wrote in the spirit of a native, and Rapp described him 
accurately as "eine nach Norden verirrte siidliche Natur."15 

In general Italy had a softening effect on Waiblinger. His 
satire lost much of its bitterness. Drei Tage in der Unterwelt, 
an acrid literary polemic from the Tiibingen period, is character-
ized by strong feelings and a bad temper; but Die Britten in 
Rom, much like Julius Stinde's Buchholzens in Italien, relies for 
its effectiveness on a genial humor. The process is obvious 
in Waiblinger's descriptions of nature when we observe the 
contrast between the undisciplined imitator of Holderlin iu 
Phaethon and the careful but delighted traveller in Italy. This 
whole process is brought out clearly in the first stanza of the 
"Lied der Weihe," one of Waiblinger's first attempts to compose 
poetry under the inspiration of Italy: 

Ein Sanger, der in weiter Ferne 
Vom deutschen Vaterlande lebt, 
In <lessen Geist und Herz so gerne 
Der Heimat Bild heriiberschwebt, 
Singt unter FriihlingsJ.aub und Blute 
Zurn ersten Mal voll stiller Ruh 
Im tiefbesiinftigten Gemiithe 
Sein Lied euch in den Norden zu,16 

Waiblinger used imagery from Italian landscape in both 
prose and poetry. Many of his poems from the Italian period 
deal with themes taken from the inspiration of historic or 
picturesque localities in the Italian countryside : "An die Veil-
chen des Albanersees," "Quelle der Nymphe Egeria in Nemi," 
"Die Grotte der Diana am Albanersee," "Der Tiber,'' "Die 
Felsen der Cyklopen,'' "Der Berg von Trapani,'' etc. Waib-
linger sings of all the most colorful and famous spots from the 
Abruzzi on down to Sicily, Tibur, the mountains of Latium, 
Sorrento, and Capri. The characteristic element in all these 
poems is a profound and loving appreciation of the Italian 
landscape, enthusiastic in the Byronic sense and yet tempered 
with a Horatian strain of refined pleasure. One group of tliese 
poems, the "Lieder aus Capri,'' is of considerable importance, 
since it is one of the few products of Waiblinger's pen that 
had a direct effect on other writers. Johannes Prolss has 
shown in the introduction to his little chrestomathy of Deutsch-
Capri in Kunst, Dichtung und Leben that Waiblinger's poems 
on Capri were known and admired by such well known writers 

15. Rapp, p. 256. 
16. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 7. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 45 

as August Kopisch, Joseph Viktor von Scheffel, Julius Grosse, 
and Paul Heyse.17 

Waiblinger generally selected well known localities as the 
setting of his poems on the Italian landscape. The opening lines 
of the first of the "Lieder aus Capri" take a typical scene that 
many a traveller has known on the famous island and suffuse it 
with an appropriate poetic atmosphere: 

Dem Horizonte nahert sich die Sonne, 
Versinke sie im Meer, in goldnen Bergen, 
Ich fiihle stets die reinste Herzenswonne. 

Doch welche Lust, wie alle Liifte schweigen, 
Und die Natur zur Ruhe sich bereitet, 
Den jahen Pfad zum Fels hinanzusteigen.1s 

The image of the setting sun is carried out through five more 
stanzas, and in the final three lines there is the interpretatio: 

So g,leich dem holden Wunderspiel der Sonne 
Verharrt nur kurz in ungetriibter Schone 
Und schwindet bald des Lebens hochste Wonne. 19 

A further illustration of this technique may be seen in the poem 
"An die Veilchen des Albanersees." The poem opens with a 
fine expression of the delicate beauty of the humble flower: 

Euch die Friihlingserde: zum erstenmale 
!hr verborgnes Schmachten bekennend, lachelt 
Sie aus blauen Augen zum Himmel, ihrem 

Ewig Geliebten.20 

Then, after several stanzas, the distinctly romantic thought of 
the transiency of life leads to a consideration of the fall of 
Rome: 

Und wie selbst die riichende Hand des Schicksals 
Rom auch traf, und furchtbar die Tempel stiirzten, 
Wo Triumphatoren den nun gefallnen 

Gottern die Schatze 
Der besiegten Ertle zum Opfer brachten. . .21 

Waiblinger composed similar odes and elegies dedicated to other 
famous sites such as the spring of Egeria in N emi, the sepulcher 
of the Scipios, Sorrento, and the mountains of Latium. After 
a description of the scene often characterized by striking poetic 

17. Pro:l_ss, p. 12 et seq., and Ruland, p. 91. 
18. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 114. Waiblinger frequently showed a pref-

erence for Italian verse forms (e. g., terza rima, siciliano the sonnet 
the epigram _a la Martial) whenever he was not using the Greek meter~ 
(mostly alca1c and sapphic, but occasionally asclepiadic) inherited from 
Holderlin. 

19. Ibid. 
20. Ibid., p. 12. 
21. Ibid., p. 12-13. 



46 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

imagery, there is usually a reflective element. An epigram on 
Tivoli illustrates this method: 

Haine gliinzen, es donnern die Stiirze des Anio, es stiiuben 
Kaskatellen, es grau'n Tempel und Villen umber. 

Wunder bietet die Vorwelt dir an, und Wunder die Mitwelt, 
U eber die schiiumende Kluft herrscht die Sibylle noch heut.22 

In this short poem the first two lines together with the last are 
strictly descriptive, but the third line contains recollection and 
reflection. 

Frequent among the elements that enter into Waiblinger's 
nature descriptions are references to the glory of antiquity. In 
an epigram on Ariccia 23 W aiblinger was pleased with the cool 
and healthy atmosphere of the ancient city in contrast with the 
late unlamented Pontine Marshes, and he recalled the adven-
turous Sicilians under Archilochus who chose this favored spot 
as a settlement. After a charming little note on the Bandusian 
Fountain and its environs, he added a cleve.r turn referring to 
Horace: "Trink ! noch sprudelt der Quell, aber der Genius 
fehlt." 24 The naked mountains and the scrubby pine near 
Palestrina caused the German poet to utter a sympathetic word 
about its present sad estate: "Stolzes Praneste, und so schmach-
test in Armuth du denn !"25 

Antiquity is not the only setting for Waiblinger's poems on 
the Italian landscape. As he said in the little epigram on Tivoli, 
"Wunder bietet die Vorwelt dir an, und Wunder die Mitwelt," 
we find scenes from modern Italy and the life of modern 
Italians as well as from the ancients. There is no suggestion of 
ancient Tusculum in an epigram entitled "Frascati": 

Lorbeer griint und Cypresse, die Myrthe bliiht, die Fontaine 
Pliitschert und rauscht, aus dem Haine glanzet der stolze Palast. 

Alles that die Natur, ein Paradies zu erschaffen ... 26 

In addition to natural beauty Waiblinger found that the 
creations of man and even man himself constituted further 
elements of scenic beauty: 

Gerne bliebst du im Kloster, im Rosengiirtchen, das lieblich 
Wi!l ein Miirchen so hoch iiber dem Anio hiingt. 

Aber em Frauengeschlecht von vollendeter iippiger Schonheit 
Zieht aus dem Himmel, es zieht dich auf die Ertle zuriick.27 

22. Ibid., p. 47. 
23. Ibid., p. 45. Cf. Horace, Serm., I, v, 1. 
24. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 47. 
25. Ibid. 
26. Ibid., p. 46. 
27. Ibid., p. 47. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 47 

He summarized his formula for the program of an ideal tourist 
in a few lines on his beloved Tivoli. Significantly, it is entitled 
"Classisches in Tibur," and the content explains the title: 

J agst du dem Classischen nach, und ist's dem Barbaren Entziicken, 
Nun so sieh, wie mich hier Vorwelt und Mitwelt erfreut ! 

Ueber der Grotte Neptun's wird gezeeht, im purpurnen Becher 
Spiegelt sich Tempel und Berg, Hain und Villa Lukulls.28 

Waiblinger's nature poetry illustrates the traditions of the 
ancients as well as the moderns. His tribute to Lago Fucino23 
recalls Catullus' tender words dedicated to Sirmio on the Lago 
di Garda (Carm. XXXI), and his ode to the spring of Egeria 
in N emi30 the deep attachment of Horace to his Bandusian 
Fountain ( Carm. III, 13) . Waiblinger knew the Roman poets 
well; but, on the other hand, it may have been a common inspira-
tion and a common atmosphere that brought about this simi-
larity. Geikie speaks of this type of affinity in The Love of 
Nature among the Romans : 

A land so varied in its scenery, so benign in its climate, so fer-
tile in its soil, so exuberant in its vegetation, so prolific therefore, 
in its ministration to the well-being of man, has been feelingly 
claimed by one of its modern poets_ to have been dowered with the 
gifts of beauty. Two thousand years ago the same natural charms 
existed, and it would have been strange had the Romans proved 
insensible to them.31 

Whether Waiblinger imitated the ancients or unconsciously 
wrote in their manner would require detailed stylistic com-
parisons, but it is safe to make the generalization that Waib-
linger observed Italian scenery in the same calm and compre-
hensive manner that distinguishes Horace and Goethe's Italian 
poems. On the other hand, Waiblinger never freed himself 
completely from the spell of romanticism, as we may see in the 
following passage from the "Erstes Lied aus Olevano": 

Deine Felsen, die zeitgetrofl'nen, aber, 
Mein Olevano, sind's, wo sich der hohe 
Diistre Geist der Natur mit ernsten Schauern 
Seiner Einsamkeit gerne mir befreundet. 
Finstre Walder des Apennins, in deren 
Melancholischen Schluchten ii.her Triimmer 
Blitzgespailtenen Wipfeln oft der Wind ein 
Lied hinhaucht, das, verwandt mit meinen Leiden, 
Meinen Schmerzen, wie wilde Geisterliebe 
Mit ertonet, das ich versteh' und kenne. . .s2 

28. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 41. 
29. Ibid. 
30. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 15. 
31. Geikie, p. 17. 
32. Gedichte aus ltalien, 1, 44. 



48 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

But this mood is not permanent, for we hear in "Zweites Lied": 
... an Quelle 

Treuer beil'ger Natur sass' icb, in ibrer 
Unerschopflichen Flut mich taglich badend, 
J eden Flecken vertilgend .. ,33 

The next two songs from Olevano are glorious tributes to Italian 
sunshine and joy, and an occasional fit of northern melancholy 
is merely a painful memory of the night before in dark Swabia. 

Waiblinger's successful use of Italian landscape in his poems 
is paralleled in his prose. All of his stories set in Italy and the 
travel sketches are saturated with pictures of Italian mountains, 
lakes, forests, and rivers. In the travel sketches a successful 
description of nature was essential above all else to fulfill the 
purpose of giving to Germany a complete picture of Italy, for the 
physical aspects of a country are one of the greatest forces in 
the formation of national character. In the tales, Das Blumen-
fest, Die heilige Woche, Das Marchen van der Blauen Grotte, 
and Francesco Spina, all of which are set against an Italian 
background, the role of nature is equally important. 

In Die heilige Woche there is a strange mixture of biograph-
ical material taken from Waiblinger's experiences in both Italy 
and Germany. For example, the German Graf Eduard, the 
central figure, is modelled on himself and Morike, and his friend 
LO'uis is Ludwig Bauer, the literary friend of both Morike and 
Waiblinger at the University of Tiibingen.34 On the other hand, 
Vighi, the Italian painter, has many characteristics ascribed by 
Waiblinger in Das Abenteuer van der Sohle to the typical Grub 
Street artist in Rome. The melancholy Graf Eduard is enter-
tained by Vighi's lady friends with a lively tarantella, and there 
is a colorful background for these festivities: 

... Ein entziickender B:lick ist von bier aus das Bild des iippi-
gen, reichen Gianicolo, aus <lessen immer griinen, siissen Luftbainen 
die lieblichsten Kliister, Kirchen und Villen berausscbauen, und 
dessen sanft gezogene Linie ein Paradies von schlanken Pinien 
kront. Sodann das alte Rom, iiber das man frei hinwegblickt, er-
offnet iiber der Fiille der angranzenden Haine, der lichtgriinen 
Garten, der schwarzen Cypressen, der reizendsten Lorbeergange 
vo11 Nachtigallen, voll weisser Bilder seine melancholischen, nun 
in einem Meer von Sonnengold und Duft gliihenden Wunder! 
Dort ersteht die furchtbare Wand des Colosseums, dort liegen die 
Triimmer von den Thermen des Titus wild umber, dort ragen die 
Kaiserpalaste grausig aus dem lieblichen Grun vor Evanders Berg 
hervur; den Friedenstempel bedeckt der Orangengarten der an ihm 
binaufblickt, und bier ganz in der Nahe, in der man~igfaltigsten 

33. Ibid., p. 47. 
34. Ruland, p. 40. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Gartennatur, neben den dunkeln Hainen der Villa Giustiniani graut 
der runde Tempel der Minerva medica! 35 

49 

Waiblinger had a highly developed sense for line and color, and 
the application of these qualities to his narrative is an unusual 
note in early nineteenth century German fiction, for so many 
other romanticists depend solely on fantasy for their color. 

Das Miirchen von der Blauen Grotte is resplendent with na-
ture imagery, since the setting throughout the tale is the pic-
turesque Bay of Na pies. One of the most successful passages 
in this story is the description of the Blue Grotto itself: 

... Schon ist eine Mondnacht im S"liden, und die Blaue der Liifte, 
so wie des Wassers ist bezaubernd, aber was sind solche Farben 
gegen <las brennende Blau, das diese hohe Felsenhohle wie mit der 
Kraft einer optischen Magie durchschimmerte, gegen die Klarheit 
des Meeres, <las sie mit dem Kristall einer bis auf den tiefsten 
Grund durchsichtigen Fluth anfiillte, gegen die unbeschreihliche 
Helle, die sich wie ein susses Feuer von ihrem Spiegel aus iiber 
die seltsam gebildeten Felswande verbreitete, <lass auch sie in 
phosphorischen Flammen zu gliihen schienen, gegen die Wirkung 
von Nahe und Ferne, von Licht und Schatten, gegen die Lieblichkeit 
des Bildes, <las die ,lautern Wasser von den mannichfaltigen Fels-
gestalten zuriickspiegelten, ja gegen die Schwimmenden selbst, die 
mit entziickender Lichthelle aus dem blauen Zauberbad hervor-
leuchteten.36 

Francesco Spina and Das Blumenfest are hack-work, and both 
stories reflect hasty and thoughtless composition. However, 
Waiblinger did not lose his sense for the background of Italian 
landscape, and many of the nature descriptions in these stories 
are equal to those in the rest of his work. Still, the inspiration 
that we find elsewhere is not present here. 

In Waiblinger's two most successful pieces of fiction set in 
Italy, there are many good nature descriptions. He knew and 
loved the country so well that he could paint its natural beauties 
in glowing colors. Except for Heine and Goethe, few other 
writers about Italy prior to Waiblinger have been able to give 
northern European readers an equally vivid picture of the coun-
try. Goethe surpassed Waiblinger in the field of geological 
observations, and Winckelmann was a more learned student of 
the arts ; but these closet diversions are not dependent upon a 
thorough and loving acquaintance with the whole country that 
is so characteristic of Waiblinger. The Swabian's ability to 
incorporate this material into his fiction is a step forward in 
the appreciation of Italy as a physical entity. 

35. Werke, IV, 104. 
36. W erke, III, 25. 



50 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Of all Waiblinger's works the stories and the travel sketches 
were perhaps the most widely read, and the latter were even 
better known than the former. 37 The travel sketches, printed in 
the Taschenbucher and collected in the eighth and ninth volumes 
of the works, cover almost all of the best known localities and 
many of the lesser known ones from the Abruzzi south. Waib-
linger travelled in historic territory, but the most important ele-
ment in these travel essays is his appreciation of the landscape. 
Some of the titles are even suggestive of this element: "Der 
Fruhling in den Gebirgen Latiums," "Wanderung ins Sabiner-. 
land," "Sommerausflug nach Olevano." He travelled on foot and 
with a donkey constantly from his arrival in Italy up until the 
time of his death; and according to Frey and Grisebach, Waib-
linger died as the result of consumption contracted after the 
hardships of his journeys.38 

Some samples of the descriptions in the Reiseschilderungen 
will show the literary quality of this work. Waiblinger rarely 
indulged in the satire and pleasant small talk that are character-
istic of Heine's Italienische Reise, for he took the title of his 
work more seriously and attempted to give his readers a com-
prehensive picture of Italy. To be sure, he was interested in 
the people, as we shali see in another connection, but this in-
terest was of quite another type from Heine's, who found 
company among the fashionable travellers. An account of 
Civitella's site demonstrates Waiblinger's approach fairly: 

Civitella lag lange schon vor uns auf seinem rippigen, grauen, 
nackten, wiisten, furchtbaren Berge, und schien kein Dorf, sondern 
nur ein Haufen iibereinandergeworfener Steine. So aber beinahe 
alle Oerter in diesen wilden Gebirgen; wenn sie nicht gerade auf 
der Spitze einer Anhohe hiingen und <lurch einen Thurm sich aus-
zeichnen, so kann man sie oft kaum nach Farbe und Form vom 
Berge unterscheiden, an den sie angeklebt sind. Auf der andern 
Seite lachten uns die frischen elisischen Kastanienwiilder zu, unter 
denen der W eg nach Civitella hinauffiihrt, und bald hatten wir 
einen Standpunkt oben auf der Rohe der Serpentara gewonnen, wo 
wir, umgeben von uralten herrlichen Eichen, eine entziickende Aus-
sicht vor uns hatten. Nordlich <las grauenweckende Civitella in 
den Liiften, nordwestlich die vielfachen Abstufungen und Formen 
des Aequergebirgs, nun, da die Sonne ziemlich hinter ihnen stand, 
in einem herrlichen Schattentone, iiber den vielen Olivenhiigeln 
und Wiildern an der Stirne eines Berges St. Vito, oben auf windiger 
Hohe Kapranica und Tocca di Cavi, ein Oertchen, das kaum ein 
Adler erschwingen zu konnen scheint.39 

37. Ruland, p. 4. 
38. Frey, p. 238, and Gedichte aus Italien, II, 203-206 (Grisebach's 

appendix). 
39. Werke, VIII, 185-186. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 51 

In this SBlection Waiblinger did not attempt to spare the barren, 
forbidding Apennines, but he was not blind to the natural beauty 
of the spot. Just as we have seen in other instances, his land-
scapes in prose are filled with the contrast between north and 
south, Germany and Italy. In Sorrento he ran into bad weather 
and made the following comment: 

Wenn uns der Anblick des Piano di Sorrento, diese ungeheuren 
Orangengiirtchen, dieser eigentliche Pomeranzenwald, aus dessen 
Dunkelgriin hundert lustige Hauser und Hofe hervorschauen, aller-
dings einige W orte der V erwunderung abnothigte, so war es doch 
natiirlich, dass wir uns sogleich wieder iiber das nordische Un-
wetter beklagten, das diese gliickseligen Strecken umnachtete und 
verwiistete. 40 

In connection with this passage it is important to note that 
Waiblinger always looked for characteristic scenery in the 
"Land der Citronen und Goldorangen," places that brought 
out all the brilliance and sunlight traditionally associated with 
the peninsula. Such is his description of sunset at Olevano: 

Welch ein gottlicher unvergesslicher Tag! Meine Freunde bese-
hen sich die N atur, und ich babe meine besondern Freuden. Wir sa-
hen endlich die Sonne hinter den Aequerbergen in blendendem Golde 
untergehen. Alle unaussprecbliche Schone, Fiille, Klarheit und 
Siissigkeit Hesperiens liichelte aus den Bergen von Anagni und 
Segni, wie aus dem Aufenthalte der Seligen, heriiber. Daran reichen 
Worte nicht, und wenn ich Ihnen auch jene tausend und aber taus-
end Farbentone angeben konnte, die in der Landschaft in einander 
spielten, so gabe es doch kein Bild von alle dem iiberschwang.lichen 
Glanze.41 

He haunted the footsteps of the anci~nts as we have seen in 
his poems on the ancient villas at Tivoli, the site of ancient 
Lavinium where he conjured up visions of Aeneas' landing on 
Italian soil, and Girgenti where he imagined that he saw a coy 
nymph hiding behind the pillars of an ancient temple. His 
passage on Lavinium is representative: 

Unmittelbar unter dem elysischen Gartchen gruppirt sich das 
niedere Cora zum Theil hinab, ihm gegeniiber wolbt sich ein wollii-
stig rundlicher Berg in sanfter W ellenlinie, und <las Silbergriin 
seiner Oliven bildet einen erquickenden Contrast mit Feigen, Kas-
tanien und Vignen. Durch zwei junge Cypressen, welche am Rande 
des Giirtchens ihr schlankes, dunkles Gewiicbs emporheben, entfaltet 
sich, wie in einen Rahmen zusammengezogen, die Ferne, gleich 
schon durch den Reiz ihrer Farbe, <lurch die unendliche Weite 
ihres Raumes, als durch die Mythe, <lurch die Geschichte, die sie 
vorzugsweise geheiligt. Denn hier spielt die altest'e Fabel Italiens, 
die sich an die griechische ankniipft, bier ein Stuck aus der Odys-
see, und die vaterliindische Dichtung der Aeneide, bier bebt sieh 
<las wundersame blauduftige Vorgebirge der Circe wie ein Zauber-
drache aus dem Meere, bier ist der Boden, wo Ulysses gelandet, 

40. W erke, IX, 149. 
41. Ibid., p. 103. 



52 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

hier wo Aeneas, nach der Zerstorung Troja's, vor drei Jahrtau-
senden Lavinium gegriindet. Hier ist die Wiege Roms! Als eine 
weite heitere Flache voll saftigen Griins breiten sich die pontin-
ischen Siimpfe aus, und man gewahrt die Appische Strasse, die 
nach Parthenope fiihrt: hoch und herrlich erstreckt sich dariiber 
bin die Riesenlinie des Tyrrhenischen Meeres, und die drei Ponzain-
seln duften mit ihren dammernden Felsen wie neptunische Wunder 
aus ihm heriil>er ... 42 

In Waiblinger's travel sketches, better than in any other part 
of his work, his devotion to the physical and the human aspects 
of Italy is unmistakable. He was able to incorporate this feel-
ing for Italy's scenery into prose essays, poems, and tales. 
Everywhere some image from Italian landscape appears, for 
Italy is the fundamental theme of all his mature work. A few 
previous travellers in Italy had observed and appreciated her 
natural beauty in parts of their works, but all of Waiblinger's 
writings are filled with it. 

Antiquity and modern times are revealed alike in Waib-
linger's work. In Subiaco he faced the dilemma of choosing 
between a visit to the ancient monastery and enjoying the com-
pany of a charming young girl; and, much to the disgust of the 
latter, he gave up neither and tried to make love to her in the 
garden of the monastery.43 This eagerness to see and do every-
thing is typical of his attitude. At times he may describe the 
pleasing sight of orange groves and vineyards bathed in warm 
sunshine, and then he falls at once into reveries on the glories 
of ancient times. 44 • · 

Waiblinger maintained a critical attitude in general, but he 
rarely failed to exhibit his boundless enthusiasm for everything 
Italian. He could see little beauty in the rocky and barren slopes 
of the Apennines, and his displeasure at the filth he saw in 
Benevento caused him to rechristen the town with the ancient 
name of Maleventmm.45 On the other hand, a shady nook beside 
the Lago Albano or a pleasing view from Monte Cavo called 
forth an appropriate tribute. 

It is not unusual that Waiblinger wrote nothing about Italy 
north of the Abruzzi and Rome, for the most important historic 
and scenic localities are in the southern part of the peninsula. 
The rocky coast of Liguria and Lombardy offer entirely differ-
ent opportunities from the Bay of Naples, Rome and her environs, 

42. Ibid., p. 112-113. 
43. Ibid., p. 87. 
44. Ibid., p. 199-200. 
45. Ibid., p. 234. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 53 

Syracuse, or Girgenti. Waiblinger, who was liable to go to ex-
cess at times even in his later period, did not attempt the im-
possible task of surveying Italy as a totality; rather, he selected 
the most characteristic scenes and tried to omit nothing of im-
portance. 

At the beginning of this chapter we noticed the development 
in Waiblinger's ability to record his appreciation of nature. 
While these comments are still valid, we are now in a position 
to expand them. None of the excerpts quoted in this chapter 
show absolute stylistic perfection. Indeed, there are some rather 
shabby spots in them. Still the improvement over the early 
writings is obvious, and even more important, Waiblinger at 
last found a central theme for his creative work. 



CHAPTER V 

WAIBLINGER AND THE ITALIAN PEOPLE 

In this chapter we come to one of the most productive aspects 
of Waiblinger's Italian experience. Whether or not he exer-
cised any direct influence in orienting the modern tourist toward 
the Italian people, we find that von Klenze records no previous 
traveller who made such extensive tours through the cities and 
the country and who delved into the life and customs of indi-
viduals and groups as thoroughly as Waiblinger. The German 
poet would tarry on the Molo in Naples to hear a public reading 
of Ariosto by a disabled sailor, he would haunt the lowest and 
rowdiest taverns of Rome to follow some locally famous im-
provisatore, he would pause in Genzano to take a second look 
at the pretty face and buxom figure of a village beauty, and, 
like Horace, lost sleep when she failed to keep a rendezvous 
(Serm. I, v, 82-85). 

Earlier travellers in Italy had paid little attention to the 
people. Indeed, we find not merely indifference, but indignant 
commentaries on the lack of sanitation.1 Montaigne, to be sure. 
had shown a strong interest in people during his Italian sojourn; 
but he was a Renaissance philosopher who sought universal 
human traits rather than peculiar national or local characteris-
tics. In short, Italians were scorned by visitors as the unworthy 
and degenerate heirs of the great traditions of antiquity and 
Renaissance. 

Goethe was far more tolerant of the people than earlier trav-
ellers. His essays on "Das romische Carneval" and "Die Taran-
tella" show a genuine interest in the festive aspects of the lane! 
he learned to love, and the little article entitled "Frauenrollen 
auf dem romischen Theater durch Manner gespielt" illustrates 
his preoccupation with indigenous art. Still, Goethe was too 
much of a classicist, too much a lover of antiquity, too aristo-
cratic to seek out friends among the people and acquaint him-
self with their daily life and customs. Even his Faustine was 
hardly representative of Italian womanhood, for she was rather 
the incarnation of southern life in general that Goethe was so 

1. English travellers on the "grand tour" were especially guilty. (Stein-
itzer, p. 25). 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 55 

eager to know. Waiblinger, on the contrary, would see in a 
village girl of Olevano the characteristic Italian beauty. 

It remained for the romanticists to exploit popular color and 
tradition, and this task was nobly executed in Italy. Arnim, 
Brentano, Philipp Otto Runge, Gorres, and, above all, the 
Grimms, discovered and described the German people and _their 
folkways. This movement occurred primarily before the politi-
cal reaction of 1815. After that date Gorres and Brentano retired 
to a quiet, unproductive life of mystical speculation; and those 
who remained in active life such as the Grimms and Uhland had 
unending trouble with academic authorities. Others emigrated. 
Heine and Borne went to Paris; Alexander von Humboldt trav-
elled through South America, Mexico, Java, and other exotic 
lands; Chamisso took a trip around the world. Except in the 
first two cases, this tendency to expatriation cannot be attri-
buted directly to political circumstance; but there does seem to 
have been a definite trend for the German intellectual to expand 
his perspective by more travel abroad. 

Such is Waiblinger's case, and we have already seen that 
the reasons for his trip to Italy were numerous. When he went 
to Italy, he carried with him all that he had learned from 
Schwab and Uhland; and he was prepared to meet the people 
and to interpret them to Germany as the romanticists had dis-
covered Germans for Germany. In addition, he was not merely a 
tool for the romanticists in the execution of their program, but 
he was also a member of the new generation that fostered a 
new type of internationalism and discouraged cheap chauvinism, 
although reserving a healthy respect for the dignity of national 
traditions. Waiblinger's interest in the Italian people is not 
to be considered in the light of any school of literature or 
thought, but strictly as an individual matter, the efforts of one 
man to find and interpret another culture. 

In Italy Waiblinger found a land that, in many respects, had 
been changeless through the centuries. Whether in Rome or 
in the country, he was delighted to find a people little different 
from those of two thousand years ago, and he constantly cited 
the ancient authors to support this point. His sly comment on 
Roman women: · 

Alte Sitt' ist heilig: die Frau gab dem Manne den Schlachthelm, 



56 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Einst auf <las Haupt, und noch jetzt reicht sie den Kopfputz 
ihm dar.2 

is remarkably similar to the more serious complaint of Juvenal 
in his "Vision of Foul Women:" 

Tarpeium limen adora 
pronus et auratam Iunoni caede iuvencam, 
si tibi contigerit capitis matrona pudici.3 

When he travelled in Latium he was constantly reminded of the 
simple life portrayed by Livy in the early books of his history 
and the parallels that he found in the Italian countryside. En 
route to Naples he described wayside companions who might 
have had a role in Horace's "Trip to Brindisi". 

In addition to the eternal Italy, there was further inspiration 
for his lively interest in the people. One of his favorite literary 
exercises was to draw a contrast between Italians and Germans 
with didactic intent. For example: 

Italiiiner und Deutscher sind nie vereinbare Pole, 
Jener ist ein Kind, dieser dagegen nie.4 

With a wry smile he commented on the easy morals of Italian 
women and at the same time satirized the excessive prudery of 
the middle class German: 

Zucht und Sittlichkeit wohnt in Deutschland, aber Italien 
1st der Freude, der Lust, iippiger Sinnlichkeit Land. 

0 welch ein Unterschied, ein moralischer ! Dort sind die H .... 
Jungfern und Miidchen, in Rom haben sie gar einen Mann.5 

Waiblinger learned to appreciate the Italian people as per-
sonalities and to initiate himself into their habits and traditions. 
He was impressed by the phrase "dolce far niente" as the most 
beautiful sounds in the language. Once he heard of a baker who 
dwelt all his life on the Piazza Rusticucci and never took the 
trouble to cross the square and visit St. Peter's. Waiblinger 
commemorated the anecdote with an epigram on "Romische 
Faulheit :" 

Zwanzig J ahre wohn' ich nun schon auf dem Platze St. Peters, 
Doch in die Kirche hinein kam ich per bacco noch nicht.6 

The poet enjoyed a little fun over the deadly feud of the 
Trasteverini and the Montigiani, although many a foreigner 
might have condemned it as a barbarian custom of a degenerate 

2. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 86. 
3. Sat. VI, 42-44. 
4. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 89. 
5. Ibid. 
6. Ibid., p. 91. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 57 

people. He wrote about the Trasteverini with a well developed 
sense of humor: 

Wir sind die einzigen Romer, dem Montigianer Verachtung! 
Wir sind noch frei, im Moment stosst man ihm's Messer im 

Leib.7 
Roman diversions offered him as much pleasure as any native 
might have derived from them : 

Corse, Theater und Akademie, Oktober und Giostra, 
Essen und Trinken, man lebt einzig, damit man's geniesst.8 

At the festival of October he joined the people at the Villa Bor-
ghese outside of the city to eat and drink and watch the saltarello, 
the national dance of the Romans : 

Weg mit der Arbeit! Man fahrt an den Monte Testaccio, man jubelt, 
Tanzet und spielet und trinkt, bis der Oktober vergeht.9 

Waiblinger even preferred to go hungry than to miss the festiv-
ities: 

Lieber drei W ochen gehungert, und dann mit waJlender Feder, 
Tamburin und Gesang nur zum Testaccio hinaus.1° 

Waiblinger's observations on Italian women are more ex-
tensive than on any other group or class of Italians. He had 
several liaisons with Italian women,11 and during the last two 
years of his life he lived with a widow whom he called "Cornac-
chia" (the crow) and who bore two of his children. Frey, who 
had access to unpublished letters to Eser, has described the ideal 
relationship of the couple with special emphasis on Waiblinger's 
appreciation of her typical Italian characteristics: 

Wenn je, so hat Waiblinger dem ganzen Zauber ehelichen und 
hiiuslichen Gliickes in den ersten Sommermonaten des Jahres 1828 
empfunden. Er hatte sich wieder, wie im vorhergehenden Jahre, 
von den Deutsch en · zuriickgezogen und lebte in verborgener Stille 
ganz nur seiner Freundin, die er scherzweise Cornacchia, zuweilen 
auch Carlenza nennt. Als junge Frau, deren Mann seinerzeit mit 
einer Engliinderin durchgebrannt war, hatte sie sich Waiblinger 
bald mit a,ll der Aufopferung und Anhiinglichkeit eines getiiusch-
ten Herzens hingegeben, das in der zweiten Leidenschaft die 
Schmach der ersten auszuloschen versucht. Aus ihr schaute die 
echte Romerin mit iippigem, kohlrabenschwarzem Haar und feu-
rigen Augen, nur wurde sie leicht etwas zu hitzig, so <lass sie zehn-
mal des Tags sich streiten und wieder versohnen konnte. Aber 
dafiir war ihr auch jene natiirliche Frische der Italienerinnen, 
grosse Giite des Herzens und iiberhaupt eine gesunde, kraftige 
W eiblichkeit eigens. Sie liebte, und die Liebe fiillte ihr stolzes Herz 
so aus, dass sie an eine formedle Heirat weiter gar nicht dachte, 
sondern unbesorgt nur ihrem Gliicke lebte. Trefflich verstand sie 

7. Ibid., p. 90. 
8. Ibid., p. 89. 
9. Ibid., p. 90. 

10. Ibid. 
11. Frey, p. 98, refers to Waiblinger's pride in his amatory prowess. 



58 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

es, den Geliebten an sich zu gewohnen, ohne ihm li.istig zu fallen. 
Sie machte ihn geordnet, nahm ihm die Sorgen fiir kleinliche 
Ausserlichkeiten ab, ja, sie hatte ihn am liebsten bestandig um sich 
behalten ... Der Brief vom 8. Juli 1828 an Eser beginnt mit einem 
wahren Jubelschrei: "Si! mio cuore! io sono felicel La prima volta 
lo posse dire senza paura d'ingannarmi ! Perche questa mia felicita 
none fondata nel cieco calore d'una sfrenata passione, or in un 
sogno piuttosta poetico che essenziale, ma nell' armonia interna, 
la quale mi restituisce a me ed a tutto il mondo, volesse l':Iddio, 
per sempre!" ... Nicht ohne Grund schreibt Waiblinger seinem 
Eser iiber dieses ihr tagliches Leben: "Cosi mio cuore, posse dire, 
che benche mi manchi il genio di Goethe, non mi manchi lo sua 
felicita romana !"I2 

Waiblinger saw in Cornacchia his ideal of the Italian woman, 
hot-tempered and yet capable of the tenderest emotions. He 
took his spedal pleasure in the Italian atmosphere of life with 
Cornacchia; and in this respect he differed from Goethe, who 
saw in Faustine the incarnation of southern life, but did not 
look upon her as distinctly Italian. 

Waiblinger always sought in other women the same things 
that appealed to him in Cornacchia. His "Lieder der Nazar-
ena"18 give the bare descriptive details of an idyllic affair amid 
a flood of tender lyricism in which the emotions of an Italian 
village maiden are quite obvious. His travel sketches are fiull 
of amusing little affairs (probably not too serious after his 
affection for Cornacchia ripened). His stories are full of 
Italian women whom he treats in quite realistic fashion. 

There are two canons for the beauty of Italian women which 
Waiblinger composed to accompany engravings he selected for 
his published writings. Both are reproduced in the collected 
works. The first engraving, entitled "Die Romerin''' is at the 
beginning of the fourth volume of the collected works and was 
originally an illustration for Die heilige Woche (in the Taschen-
buch aus Italian und Griechenland auf das Jahr 1829); and 
Waiblinger has given us an effective appraisal of her charms: 

... wem ist das romische Profil nicht bekannt? Und dennoch kom-
men so viele belesene und gebildete Fremde, kommen sogar viele 
Kiinstler nach Rom, und treffen ein ganz anderes Frauengeschlecht, 
als sie sich's entweder mit der Wililkiir ihrer Einbildungskraft 

· oder nach falschen Darstellungen vor's Auge gebracht. Besonders, 
wer die .Reise nach Rom Uber Paris gemacht, wer die Reize eines 
koketten Anzugs und franzosischen Benehmens, wer die schlanke 
Taille der Englanderin, wer die weisse Gesichtsfarbe, den senti-
mentalen Ausdruck unserer schonen Landsmanninnen als Richt-
schnur in der Beurtheilung weiblicher Schonheit annimmt, der sucht 
vergebens auf der Strasse, im Theater, im Festino, in der Akademie, 

12. Ibid., p. 208-209. 
13. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 53-67. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

in den Feuerwerken des Mausoleums eine Rchnerin, welche seinen 
Erwartungen geniigen konnte. Sie ist ihm zu derb, zu kraftig, 
selbst zu unzart, ja unweiblich, ihr Wuchs zu ungefallig, zu 
grandios, ihr Angesicht zeigt weder Milch und Blut, noch die Emp-
findung einer Deutschen, ihr Anzug weder den Geschmack, den 
er im Palais royal bewundert, noch den Reichthum, welcher die 
Brittin auszeichnet, ja wir haben schon von Deutschen und Fran-
zosen, besonders aber von Engliindern sagen horen, dass die 
Romerinnen geradezu das plumpste Weibergeschlecht auf Erden 
seyen. 14 

59 

Waiblinger had little sympathy with hypercritical travellers 
who failed to appreciate the better points of Italian women and 
contrasted them with their own countrywomen in respect to 
artificial decorations and material wealth. Waiblinger saw in 
the Roman woman a natural simplicity that did not occur in a. 
sophisticated salon of Paris, and yet he understood that this type 
of beauty might not have a universal appeal. He closed his 
little sketch with a remark on the shapely figures of Italian 
women, not for bidden by any northern prudery to clothe them-
selves lightly. 

In many of Waiblinger's works in which there is art criticism, 
he frequently revealed the influence of the neo-classicism of 
Canova and his school. Such is the case with the introductory 
statement on another engraving of an Italian woman, "Die 
Genzaneserin," which appears at the beginning of the eighth 
volume of his collected works.15 His characterization of her 
beauty was in line with the efforts of contemporary artists to 
revive the spirit of antiquity: 

... und so sind wir im Stancle, dir, lieber Leser, ein zieml'ich 
getreues Abbild eines Kopfes zu iibergeben, <lessen grandioser Geist, 
<lessen ideale Formen die schonen Frauen des Albanergebirges im 
Allgemeinen auf's wiirdigste charakterisiren kann. Suchst du 
Formen, wie sie die alten Kiinstler aus der reichen siidlichen Natur 
auslasen, um daraus jene vollkommenen Ideale zu erschaffen, welche 
wir noch in den unsterblichen Denkmalern der Vorzeit bewun-
dern und nachahmen, ohne ihnen nur gleichkommen, geschweige 
sie iibertreffen zu konnen; liegt es dir daran,, den Charakterkopf 
einer Frau kennen zu lernen, wie wir sie in iippiger, frischer Ge-
sundheit, in seltener Kraft und Starke in den Gegenden von Albano, 
Genzano, Frascati, oder auch in den Gebirgen der Sabiner, in jenen 
himmelhohen Felsennestern in den Umgebungen von Subiaco und 
Olevano finden. . _16 

14. Werke, IV, i. 
15. This illustration was originally printed in the "Supplementblatt" 

of the Stuttgarter Abendzeitung, nos. 52-58, 1-6 March 1827. The original 
was an oil painting by the German artist Grahl, who prepared it for an 
exposition of the works of German artists in Rome in honor of King 
Ludwig of Bavaria in 1827. Waiblinger states that much life and color 
was lost in the engraving. 

16. Werke, VHI, i. 



60 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Despite his desire to find a reincarnation of the classic type, 
the poet realized that after all such women might actually be 
found in modern Italy. He felt that they displayed their beauty 
to best advantage against native scenery rather than in lifeless 
marble. 

Waiblinger entertained liberal ideas about the easy morals 
of Italian women, but he was not able to adapt himself to every 
situation. On one occasion in Frascati he was strongly attracted 
by a young woman who repulsed him with the stock, "Dopo che 
io sono sposata, ma non primo."17 Still he praised the Italian 
woman who insisted on protecting her honor.18 While Waib--
linger, like Catullus, could sing high admiration for the virtuous 
woman, he was equally capable of writing bitterly satirical 
verses on the woman of few moral scruples : 

or: 

Immer spricht man vom Joch des Ehstands, wann denn vertauscht 
man 

Endlich das Bild und setzt Horner des Ehstands dafiir?l9 

Eingezogen und sittsam verfHesst die Zeit mir als Jungfrau, 
Ist die Hochzeit vorbei, fangt das Commercium erst an.20 

Waiblinger, whose youth was filled with excesses, had matured 
and learned to know the Italian people so well that he is able 
to give an objective account of the vices as well as the virtues 
of Italian women. 

Waiblinger found Italian men, in general, a merry lot, think-
ing more about panem et circenses than about the weightier 
problems of life, but he did not view them as the effeminate 
characters we know in cheap fiction. His Italian is a colorful 
individual, and the poet often forced this point with a contrast 
between the German and the Italian, for example, in a humorous 
sally on Roman gluttony and German drunkenness: 

Was ein Romer isst, und ein Deutscher trinket, das diinkt mir, 
War' am Ende sogar Gullivers Riesen genug.21 

He described these gentlemen as the lords of heaven and earth 
in their contentment with life : 

Wir sind die Herrn, wir haben den Schlussel zu Himmel und Erde, 
Keine Schatulle, der er, wenn sie nur voll ist, nicht passt.22 

<. 

17. Ibid., p. 2. 
18. E.g., Gedichte aus Italien, I, 60. 
19. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 91. 
20. Ibid., p. 90. 
21. Ibid., II, 85. 
22. Ibid. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 61 

A long parade of Italian men pass in review in Waiblinger's 
works. There are peasants, artists, Roman street rabble, gentle-
men of leisure, entertainers, and tradesmen. Perhaps the most 
striking are his peasants, who appear all through the travel 
sketches. He found in them many of the same general char-
acteristics that are attributed to the northern European peasant: 
sly trickery, good-natured fun making, suspicious attitudes 
toward strangers, and a confirmed belief in the goodness of their 
own life. On the other hand, they are hardly models of thrift, 
or, to piut the idea more broadly, of the old Roman frugalitas. 
Their extravagance is typified in the improvisatore Michel 
Angelo, who went out every night after he had earned a little 
money and spent it on strong drink to loosen his tongue and 
thereby enhance his poetic gifts.23 Typical of the limited out-
look of the Italian peasant are the verses that Waiblinger copied 
from a peasant's door: 

Jo <levo morire, e non so dove, 
Jo <levo morire, e non so quan<lo. 
Jo devo morire, e non so come.24 

Naturally there follows the unexpressed although quite logical 
thought of carpe diem in the commentary on these fatalistic 
lines, a peasant trait which Waiblinger also portrayed in his 
vivid scenes from the nightly festivities in the local osteria. 

Along with the peasant Waiblinger always found the village 
priest to be a man who shared the basic characteristics of his 
parishioners. Typical is the abbot of Palestrina: 

Der Abbate von Palestrina, der eine besondere Passion fiir 
mich gewonnen, wol,Ite mich heute mit einem Besuch beehren: ich 
sass aber auf meinem Felsen aussen im Ospidale und vergegen-
wartigte mir noch einmal meinen ganzen Aufenthalt in diesen 
Hernikerbergen, mit allen Freuden und Leiden, mit Furcht und 
Hoffnung, und allen seinen guten oder schlimmen Folgen. Den 
Abend aber erwischte er mich im Caffe. Ich schaute einer lustigen 
Scene hier zu. Einige Kapuziner von St. Francesco in Civitelila 
kamen, und zogen dem Caffeewirth einen Zahn heraus. Der Abbate 
war erfreut, und bat mich, mit ihm einen kleinen Spaziergang 
zu machen. Er schien mir ein wenig Libertin zu seyn. Endlich aber 
drang er auf's heftigste in mich, meine Abreise auf tl'bermorgen 
zu verschieben, und den kommenden Tag ihm zu widmen. Ich ent-
schuldigte mich mit <ler Unmoglichkeit, allein er Iiess keine Griinde 
gelten. Als wir in der Dammerung nach Hause kamen, rief uns 
Domenico, <ler Vater, einen lustigen Gruss zu, und verrieth Wein-
hitze. Ich bat den Abbate, mit mir zu kommen, und Angelo besorgte 
eine Bocchia Wein; auf der Loggia wurde er getrunken. Der 
Abbate erwies mir aLle moglichen Hoflichkeiten und drang immer 

23. W erke, VIII, 224 et seq. 
24. Ibid., p. 212. 



62 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

gewaltsamer in mich, zu bleiben. Zuletzt verrieth er sich und ich 
merkte, dass der Grund seiner eminenten Passion fiir mich, Liebe 
zur Poesie war, die auch er, wie er sagte, zuweilen nur bei Gelegen-
heit treibe.25 

Waiblinger was particularly fond of participating in rural 
fiestas, for here he found the true spirit of dolce far niente. 
During the last days of his summer visit to Olevano in 1828 he 
was present at such a festival and described it with sympathy 
and enthusiasm.26 

Waiblinger's interest in the men of the cities was related to 
his attitude toward the peasant. He observed the evil traits 
of the Italian city dweller such as meanness and untrustworthi-
ness, but he found one redeeming feature, his zest for Iif e so 
typical of his nationality. Night life in Rome appealed strongly 
to Waiblinger, particularly when he was able to participate 
personally. He took the greatest pleasure in following a certain 
sausage dealer who enjoyed a local reputation as an improvisa-
tore, often until three or four in the morning.27 Again, he liked 
to indulge in the carefree Bohemian atmosphere of Rome, a 
city of freedom and romantic adventures at that time without 
the modern bustle. At the Cafe Greco he felt perfectly at home 
among the German and Italian artists who frequented the place: 

Dutzende sitzen beisammen in uralt' romischer Hohle, 
Kaum durch ein diisteres Loch stiehlt hier der Tag sich herein, 

Unser Mahl ist frugal, doch trinken wir gern und im Dampfe 
Derben Tabakes vergisst leicht man den heimlichen Feind.28 

Still he took .special delight in his association with Italian men 
by mixing with the lowest groups. We have an intimate picture 
of the so-called minenti29 on a hot summer day gathered in the 
Temple of Peace to pass the time: 

Um Vergebung, der Tag ist zu heiss, und ein Haufen Minenti 
Findet's im Heiligthum selber zum Mora bequem.so 

Little details like this appear constantly in the poet's works, and 
it is clear that he not only appreciated the life of the average 

25. Ibid., p. 241-142. 
26. Ibid., p. 279-280. 
27. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 169. 
28. Ibid., p. 44. 
29. The minenti were from the lowest social groups and were dis-

tinguished by a special costume, viz., a round hat, a Manchester jacket 
hung carelessly over one shoulder, and a sash around the middle. They 
were frequently contrasted with the baine, who dressed in French style. 
See Gedichte aus Italien, If, 169. 

30. Ibid., p. 80. Mora is a kind of finger play of the Italians with 
which they amuse themselves hours at a time. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 63 

Italian but that he had also participated in the daily round of 
activity. 

Waiblinger was no less interested in the customs and tradi-
tions of the Italian people. To be sure, he executed for them no 
such monumental works as the Grimm brothers did in the field 
of German folklore and antiquities, but he did display broad 
interest in the customs of the people. He made no great collec-
tion of folksongs, but he frequently noted catchy verses and 
good improvisations with such care that any careful investiga-
tion of the Italian folksong should take. his work into account. 
Nor did he collect proverbs, tales, and local traditions in any 
scientific manner, but this material is found everywhere in his 
work. 

We have already noted Waiblinger's interest in such folk 
artists as the improvisatori. He was no less interested in the 
drunken Michel Angelo improvising atop a rocky crag in the 
Alban hills than he was in the more sophisticated performances 
of Rosa Taddei and the Cavaliere Sgricci. If he lacked the 
money to travel or the necessary prestige for admission to an 
academy, he would stand on the street corner to watch for any 
fortuitous item of interest.31 Even here he never failed to find 
some folk artist. It might be the lowly sausage dealer whose 
improvisations were locally famous, or it might be a puppet 
show, where the improvisatori combined their poetic gifts with 
dramatic talent. 32 The burratini or marionettes were set up in 
Waiblinger's day in vacant lots and unfrequented alleys through-
out Rome. There were usually six or seven characters support-
ing Cassandro and Pulcinella in all manner of slapstick, and they 
always had large audiences. 

Waiblinger paid due attention to Italian legends. We have 
noted his tendency to give the ancient Roman legends a modern 
background to show their full significance for modern Italy. 
The legends of mediaeval and Renaissance Italy do not figure 
as prominently in his work as do the legends of antiquity. 
Occasionally Waiblinger may introduce a miracle of St. 
Francis,33 or he will repeat the pretty story that Tasso died 
under a great oak on the 'Gianicolo where he had climbed for 

31. "Mein Vergnugen ist . . . Hab' ich kein Geld mehr, so pflanz' ich 
an die Ecke mich auf." Ibid., p. 89. 

32. Ibid. 
33. Werke, VIII, 9. 



64 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

a final panorama of his country.34 Again we have the story that 
the Romans insist that the beauty of Andrea del Sarto's 
madonnas was simply an escape complex acquired from life 
with a nagging wife ; or we read a prank of Bartoldo, the Italian 
N esreddin Hoca.35 

The aspect of Italian life that appealed to Waiblinger above 
all else was the continual atmosphere of fiesta. Goethe appre-
ciated the carnivals, but even in his indulgences he revealed a 
restraint that Waiblinger never knew. Goethe saw in the 
Roman carnival the brilliance of a southern land as contrasted 
with the gloom of melancholy Germany, whereas Waiblinger 
expanded this idea to a conception of the carnival as an absolute 
virtue of the Roman people. 

The best evidence for Waiblinger's love of Italian festivities 
is his "Lieder des Romischen Carnevals," which he composed 
in 1828. Here he described all the color and the merry-making 
of the carnival season in a highly exuberant tone. At the very 
beginning of the collection he offered his reasons for choosing 
the carnival as a poetic theme: 

Und warum nicht, heitere Muse, 
Lied und Lob dem Carnevale? 
Bienen konntest du besingen, 
Konntest schone Frauen ehren, 
Selbst den Duft der Blumen preisen-
U nd warum nicht all die Schwiirme 
Lust'ger, honigsiisser Feen, 
Rom in Kriinzen un<l in Blumen ?aG 

He provided all the necessary orientation for a full appreciation 
of the carnival : 

Nur ein fliichtiger Bewohner 
Dieser Welt, zum Scherz geboren, 
Zurn Moment, will er sein Dasein, 
Gleich dem Schmetterling geniessen, 
Und dem dumpfen Haus der Puppe 
In vollendeter Entfaltung 
Nun entnommen, flattert er 
Buhlend unter seinen BJumen.37 

This festival was unlike the procession of distinguished 
prelates in a church celebration or the exdusive atmosphere of a 
brilliant society ball, for here democracy reigned sup\reme. 
Aristocrats rubbed shoulders with plebeians, and all social classes 
were completely obsessed by the carnival spirit: 

34. Gedichte aus ltalien, l, 93. 
35. Werke, IX, 17. 
36. Gedichte au.a Italien, I, 13. 
37. Ibid., p. 15. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Armuth gibt's nicht mehr und Reichthum. 
Eine Maske deckt sie beide, 
U nd geduldig nimmst du j eden, 
Wie er scheint; Gesicht und Hiille, 
Wort und die Geberde tauschen. 
Die Geschlechter selbst, das Alter 
Lachelt dich in Locken an, 
Und die Jugend geht an Kriicken.ss 

65 

The poet was attracted by the different costumes and the numer-
ous amusing incidents at carnival time. He saw attractive 
young women who assumed unusual liberties sanctioned by the 
season, but allowed no extraordinary freedom to men: 

Holde, junge Gartnerinnen 
Reichen Veilchen aus den Korben, 
Und die breite Arlecchina 
Fliegt mit Schelilenklang voriiber ! 
Wie das weisse Hemdchen jene, 
Wie die Busenscharpe kleidet ! 
Bleibe Fern! Nimm dich in Acht, 
Ihre Scheeren sind gefahrlich !39 

Waiblinger described the carnival with well chosen metaphors 
such as the one involving the butterfly, and his jocular, half-
serious expressions were consistent with the spirit of the carni-
val. He wrote with such ease that he left the impression of a 
genuine experience in the record of his participation in the 
crowning event of Roman life. 

Another festival of which Waiblinger was unusually fond was 
the floral celebration in Genzano, an annual affair at the 
summer solstice, and he has provided a compact description of 
the pageantry in a note to one of his poems : 

Am 21sten Juni lockt das Blumenfest in Genzano die Bewohner 
der ganzen Umgebung, ja sogar von Terracina und von den See-
stadten, besonders auch <lie Fremden in Rom an diesem Wohnsitz 
des ewigen Friihlings zusammen. Dieses Fest ist einer begeister-
ten Dichterschilderung an anderm Ort wert. Fiir uns Nordlander 
scheint es eine Fabel, ein Marchen zu sein. Die Strassen sind 
von den schonsten Blumen iibersaet, mit welchen alle moglichen 
Zeichnungen, Tempel, Garten, Altare, Wappen, Arabesken und 
Ornamente auf der Flache ausgefiihrt sind. Auf ihnen wandeln 
die Schonheiten Albano's und dieses ganzen gliicklichen Land-
striches, Profile, deren Hoheit und Charakter an Niobe erinnern, 
die iiberaus reiche und reizende Tracht dieser antiken Frauen, die 
vielen andern Kostiime vom Meer her, welche orientalischen Ge-
schmack haben, die Gesundheit, Fiille, Kraft und Frische in diesem 
weiblichen Heldengeschlecht, der Jubel den ganzen Tag iiber, die 
angefiillten Strassen, die tumultuarischen Osterien, die Bekannten 
die man find et, der kostliche Wein, nahezu der beste im ganzen 
Kirchenstaat, und vorziiglich <lie elysaische Natur, die immer-
griinen Eichenhaine, die Pappelufer des Sees von Nemi, die herr-

38. Ibid., p. 17. 
39. Ibid., p. 20. 



66 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

liche Meeraussicht--das a11es kommt zusammen, um einen solchen 
Tag unvergesslich zu machen.4° 

Das Blumenfest is a weak story in most respects, but a con-
temporary critic praised Waiblinger's successful use of local 
color against a plausible sixteenth century background with the 
statement that " ... sie zu den italienischen Novellen der deut-
schen Erzahler sich verhalte wie wirkliche Blumen zu italien-
ischen."41 The plot of the story is quite fantastic, and the one 
redeeming feature is Waiblinger's intimate and realistic picture 
of the carnival. 

At the beginning of the fifth volume of the collected works 
there is a copper engraving illustrating the flower festival in 
Genzano. Like the others, it first appeared with the author's 
explanation in the Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1829. The picture 
is entitled "Landliches ·Fest im Kirchenstaat", and it shows a 
large number of country people gathered in a courtyard where 
there is about to be a dramatic representation of some religious 
interest. The inevitable Arlequino is outside dressed in a 
clown's costume and going through his repertory to attract a 
crowd while the spieler is pointing to some important episode 
in the drama shown on a large picture hung up against the side 
of a building. The original, a painting by Mlle. Lescot, appears 
to have been done with all the graphic realism of the Hogarth 
tradition; and it must have left a strong impression on Waib-
linger in his constant search for incidents from the life of the 
people. 

Another significant engraving heads the seventh volume of 
the collected works. It is entitled "Der Vorleser in Neapel," 
and, appropriately enough, it is at the beginning of the volume 
containing Waiblinger's poetry. A motley group has gathered 
around an old sailor who has taken his stand on an open wharf 
to declaim poetry for whatever pittance his audience may be 
willing to contribute. We are told that the old fellow is reading 
or reciting from Ariosto, and a special point is made of the 
Italian's natural appreciation of poetry.42 This enthusiasm 
for a popular literature was completely in harmony with the 
ideas that had been presented in northern Europe by the pre-

40. Ibid., p. 108. The second sentence refers to Das Blumenf est, in 
W erke, III, 79-219. 

41. Apud Ruland, p. 51. 
42. W erke, VII, i-ii. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 67 

ceding generation, but in addition we have here the conception 
of natural poetic genius innate in the Italian people. Even if 
the old sailor were an exception to the ordinary run of humanity, 
his remarkable audience would seem to prove for Waiblinger 
that even those Italians who did not possess the gift of declama-
tion were capable of appreciating the best in poetry: 

Hochst anmuthig diinkt uns die Gruppe der drei Lazzaronen 
zu seyn, welche wir oben als die regelmlissigsten Skolaren be-
zeichnet. Jener mit dem Strohhut raucht sein Pfeifchen in voller 
Behaglichkeit, fiir einen halben Gran so kostliche Dinge von Heiden 
und Schlachten; Konigen und Mohren, Zauberern und Kastellen 
zu horen; die beiden andern gaffen den Votleser mit offenem 
Mund an, nicht ohne Respekt vor dem trefflichen Manne, der so 
vollkommen zu lesen versteht. 43 

Waiblinger has accentuated this picture of everyday Neapolitan 
life by bringing out not only the carefree nature of an audience 
none too hospitable to work but also the natural feeling for 
poetry which he assumed to be .inherent in every Italian. 

Other scenes reflecting the Italian bent for indulgence in play 
rather than in serious work are numerous in Waiblinger's works. 
The scenes that have already been mentioned are representative 
of what may be found in the tales, poems, and travel sketches. 
Six of the eight engravings chosen by Waiblinger to accompany 
his Italienisches Taschenbuch fur 1829 represent scenes from 
Italian life or interesting individuals whom he encountered in 
Italy, and three of them depict the atmosphere of the carnival.44 

Somewhat less important than the material on the Italian peo-
ple contained in Waiblinger's lyrical and journalistic works are 
the Italian characters in the tales. None of Waiblinger's fiction 
is of great significance in the history of the German Novelle, 
but in certain details some pieces show how Waiblinger was 
gradually approaching literary maturity. He was a lyric poet at 
his best; and, like many other Swabian poets, his dramas and 
tales suffer in comparison. Accordingly we must not expect the 
realism and careful detail in scenes from Italian life that we have 
found elsewhere. Many isolated points such as Waiblinger's use 
of the improvisatori and the carnival atmosphere in his tales 

43. Ibid., p. iii-iv. 
44. An engraving of a scene from Das Miirchen von der blauen Grotte is 

in vol. III, and a picture of Tenerani's statue of Cupid and Venus is in vol. 
VI. Vol. IV contains "Die Romerin," and vol. VIII contains "Die Gen-
zaneserin." Vol. If has an engraving illustrating the contemptuous at-
titude of Englishmen toward Italians. The three illustrating Italians at 
play are "Llindliches Fest im Kirchenstaat" (vol. V), "Der Vorleser in 
Neapel" (vol. VII), and "Die Piferari" (vol. IX). 



68 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

have been discussed in other connections, and here we will ex-
amine only those typically Italian traits and situations which the 
poet used in the delineation of his characters. Moreover, this 
material is interesting in comparison with two of Waiblinger's 
earliest works, Phaethon and Liebe und Hass, both of which are 
set in the south, one in Greece and the other in Italy. The latter 
is a motley combination of characters and episodes that Waib-
linger found in such works as Rom.ea and Juliet, Em.ilia Galotti, 
and the Riiuberrom.ane dealing with life in wildest Italy. The 
later tales, however lacking in psychological motivation, are af-
flicted with no such unrealistic ideas about Italy. 

Die heilige Woche presents a Roman painter and his family as 
typical Italians, and, significantly enough, it bears the sub-title, 
"Charactergemalde aus Rom." The characters, especially the 
women, are drawn clearly and objectively in contrast with sever-
al Germans who are in the story. The wife of the painter is a hot-
blooded, impetuous woman who is infatuated with Eduard and 
for gets all marital responsibilities in her efforts to win his love. 
One lively scene depicts her in the midst of the tarantella cal-
culated to excite Eduard to return her advances. A pretty ser-
vant girl and the children reflect the older woman's fiery Italian 
personality in minor details. 

Das Blumenf est is a historical tale, and the characters are 
fictitious, but still they display certain traditional Italian traits. 
Vittoria, the peasant sweetheart of Prince Giulio, is perhaps 
the outstanding character. She is proud and emotional, yet her 
magnanimous behavior toward her lover and her boldness in af-
fairs of the heart set her off as a typical Italian woman similar to 
the wife of the painter in Die heilige Woche. Her mother is also 
an Italian type. She shows considerable apprehension for the 
good name of her daughter, and her conduct on the occasion of 
the visit of Prince Giulio's father is marked by feelings of fear 
and respect. Finally we have the impoverished shepherd• Cecco 
who has gambled and drunk away his patrimony until he is re-
duced to a bottle of bad wine and a couple of volumes of his favor-
ite poet. Yet he is happy with these poor belongings, for even 
when they are gone he can still amuse himself with his impro-
visations. It is interesting to note in this tale that Waiblinger 
was at his best in his portrayal of folk characters rather than 
aristocrats. 

Of the three serious stories with an Italian background, 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 69 

Francesco Spina is probably the weakest, since it was composed 
quickly as hack work. None of the main characters are from the 
humbler classes. An aristocratic lady, a Spaniard, a German, and 
an Italian painter are the chief characters, and even the last is 
weak. Still, we have an earthy figure of a bandit chieftain and a 
sly rustic who earns a double fee for guiding Emil and Francesco 
to the Villa of Horace. Oda, the Spaniard, is a somewhat inappro-
priate individual to be endowed with the gift of improvisation, · 
while the bandit fits the same role quite naturally. 

The humorous stories, Das Abenteuer von der Sohle and Die 
Britten in Rom, introduce Italians as subordinate figures. In the 
former the artist Scaramuzza is a typical figure from the bo-
hemian life in Rome that Waiblinger knew so well. Die Britten in 
Rom is quite interesting as a satire on the Englishman on the 
grand tour. The Englishmen, among whom Waiblinger himself 
figures as Ironius, take unfair advantage of the poverty-stricken 
Romans and show no respect for human values. 

Waiblinger's tales are not as effective in illustrating Italian 
character as his other writings are, but we find much that is 
valuable in them, especially such unusual figures as improvisa-
tori, artists, and bandits. Frequently he shows lack of discipline 
in letting his imagination run riot in these characterizations; 
and the essential lack of merit in his tales is responsible for many 
of his shoddy characters. His characters drawn from the aristo-
cracy are the poorest of all, and, unfortunately, most of the ch1ef 
figures in his tales come from this source. Most of his interesting 
Italian characters are subordinate. 

On the whole, however, Waiblinger was original, constructive, 
enthusiastic, and well acquainted with the people among whom 
he spent his last years and who figure so largely in his works. In 
his fairness to the Italian people he was able to pick out both 
vices and virtues of Italian character, and he defended Italians 
as a loyal friend against the scorn of other foreigners. In dis-
cussing their vices he rarely spoke with too sharp a tongue, and 
he disguised his criticism with a veil of good humor. 

Waiblinger's consistent effort to interpret Italy to his Ger-
man readers and his natural love of the Italian people are per-
haps his most important characteristics as an author. He liked 
to contrast German dullness with Italian vivacity, German phil-
istinism with Italian bohemianism, German pedantry with Ital-
ian originality. He found in Italy his lost horizon of escape from 



70 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

all that he disliked in Germany just as Goethe and Zacharias 
Werner had before him; and like Goethe, but unlike Werner, he 
never forgot his native land and his task of bringing to her what-
ever good Italy could offer. He would not attempt to graft any 
unnatural custom or tradition on the German stem, for he had 
learned the great lesson of his age, recognition of the legitimacy 
of all national cultures. He showed that Italy had a folklore 
comparable to anything excavated from German tradition by the 
romantic folklorists. He referred constantly to the legends of 
antiquity, he gave encyclopaedic information on Italian women, 
and he described Italian festivals with tireless enthusiasm. Every-
where he sought traces of folk art and folk artists. 

Waiblinger found his Schlaraffenland in Italy. His case has 
few parallels as a man who found a second home in Italy and 
lived intimately with the people as one of them. He was not only 
in a better position to interpret the Italian people for Germany, 
but he also found a haven and sympathetic friends for his own 
sildliche Natur. Holderlin never got beyond Provence in the 
search for his idealized Greece, Byron was disappointed in what 
he actually found, and Lenau's gypsy blood drove him to seek the 
noble savage in America, where he too was disillusioned. Wai-
blinger expressed most poignantly his spiritual satisfaction and 
his happiness among the Italian people in the "Oden an seinen 
Eser." 45 Here we feel that the happiness he found with his Cor-
nacchia could not have been attained in life with the prudish 
Philippine Heim or with the unstable Julie Michaelis. Italy did 
not prove a false illusion to him, nor was he untrue to her once 
he had established congenial relationships with her people. 

45. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 108-113. 



CHAPTER VI 

W AIBLINGER AND ANTIQUITY 

Although Waiblinger may have explored some new facets of 
Italian life and culture unknown in northern Europe, no travel-
ler in Italy since the Renaissance failed to give due attention to 
the remains of classical times. Above all, it was Roman antiquity 
that attracted men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
for the old lands of Magna Graecia were not properly described 
by moderns until the age of Winckelmann. Although Waiblinger 
frequently grouped Greek and Roman antiquity together as a 
part of the general dichotomy of north and south so popular in 
his day, his interests in Greece and in Rome spring from dif-
ferent sources and, accordingly, will be handled differently here. 

Von Klenze gives a typical reaction to Italy in his summary 
of Montaigne's visit: "Only ancient Rome inspires him to a burst 
of enthusiasm worthy of so great a stylist."1 Even narrower was 
Joseph Addison's approach to Italy and Roman antiquity, for the 
worthy author of Coins and Medals found inspiration only in 
places mentioned by the Latin poets,· ignoring almost completely 
the prose authors. Horace Walpole and Lalande, the French 
traveller, found every step of the way between Rome and Naples 
-sacred primarily because of associations with Horace, Virgil, 
and Silius Italicus. 

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the con-
~eption of Italy was broadened considerably, but there still re-
mained the eternal attraction of ancient Rome. Chateaubriand 
could dream of how "Rome sommeille au milieu de ses ruines," 2 
for the romanticists were still spellbound by Rome. Waiblinger 
fell heir not only to the romantic tradition, but also to the ideas 
of travellers of nearly three centuries about Rome. 

Waiblinger was well prepared to understand the ancient 
world, for he had acquired unusual proficiency in Latin. He is 
able to quote extensively from Horace. The well known "Possis 
nihil urbe Roma visere maius" ( Carm. saec., lines 11-12) serves 
as the motto for "Oden und Elegien aus Rom." At Lake N emi 
Waiblinger remembered how the Romans, despairing of victory 

1. Von Klenze, p. 2. 
2. Ibid., p. 89. 



72 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

over the Veii, sent to Delphi, where the oracle told the emissaries 
to drain off part of the lake by a subterranean tunnel.3 Waiblin-
ger must have known Roman topography well, for in the letter to 
Morike dated only a few weeks after his arrival in Rome he 
showed a comprehensive knowledge of the ruins and their loca-
tions. 

Even though Waiblinger went to Italy with a classical back-
ground comparable to that of any of his predecessors, he did not 
follow beaten paths in his ideas on antiquity. Indeed, the preced-
ing generation had received from Goethe an original and stimula-
ting treatment of Italian antiquities as symbols of a glorious 
classicism rather than as museum pieces; and with Waiblinger 
we may expect similar originality, although as widely variant 
from Goethe's work as Goethe himself was from the travellers 
of the Renaissance. Quite early Waiblinger had realized that the 
poet might select the most banal themes and the oldest material 
for new and original interpretation.4 

One of the most striking aspects of Waiblinger's treatment 
of classicial antiquity is his ability to revive scenes from ancient 
Rome against a modern Italian background. We have noted the 
little couplet on "Classisches in Tibur" 5 where he found his plea-
sure in both "Vorwelt und Mitwelt." He saw - or imagined that 
he saw - classic profiles in modern Italians, the same landscape 
that inspired Horace and Virgil, the same places and temples 
that the ancient poets knew, all a part of eternal Italy: 

Da sich die Zukunft eint mit Vergangenheit, 
Beid' aber unverglingliche Gegenwart; 

Ohn' Anfang beid' und ohne Ende, 
Beide die gottliche Ewigkeit sind.6 

Waiblinger's idea about the reflection of ancient Rome in 
modern Italy appears in his treatment of Italian women. In one 
of the ''Lieder des Romischen Carnevals" there is a description 
of a young woman who might have been a worthy consort of 
great Zeus: 

Blumen liicheln aus der Haare 
Rabendunkel, und des Schleiers 
Weisse Masse sen kt sich iippig 
Auf ein Schulternpaar, wie Marmor, 
Und aus hochgeschwelltem Tuche 
Tritt ein N acken, des sen Reize 

3. W erke, VIII, 32. 
4. Werke, IV, 232. 
5. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 41. 
6. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 109. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Nur des grossen Donn'rers Arm 
Zu umschlingen wiirdig scheinet.7 

73 

When the gaily clad mob began to indulge in all the joys of the 
carnival, the poet envisioned the women as modern maenads: 

Weisse freudentrunkne Madchen, 
Arlecchine und Doctoren, 
Gartnerinnen und Bajacci, 
Und der plumpe Pulcinella, 
Leichte Schafer, farb'ge Tiirken, 
Schwarzvermummte, schlanke Feen, 
Ahles in Manadenwuth, 
Saturnalischem Vergniigen.s 

The southern beauty of Italian women so strongly reminiscent of 
antiquity appealed to Waiblinger. The longer he looked at Roman 
women, the more he believed "eine Lucretia, eine Clolia, eine 
Cornelia, eine Porzia aus ihnen heraus zu finden," 9 and in Gen-
zano he saw figures "wie sie die alten Kiinstler aus der reichen 
siidlichen Natur auslasen." 10 

The whole natural environment recalled antiquity for him. 
Even one of his early poems such as "Das Pantheon" expressing 
melancholy and nostalgia shows how an ancient monument could 
stir him emotionally to the extent of referring to the structure 
as the "Opf erschaale meiner Thran en" .11 

Later, when Waiblinger enjoyed a more stable life in Italy and 
some degree of financial security, he gave up this early Byron-
ism, and there is nothing but pure joy in his references to an-
tiquity. In Sicily he passed by the Villa of Timoleon and sketched 
an idyllic scene in which he imagined that he was suddenly trans-
ported to the ancient world: 

War's eine Nymphe, die in der Einsamkeit 
Dem Wandrer sich verrath? Im Gebiisch vielleicht 

Verborgen lauscht das holde W esen 
Und dem Erschopften ertont die Stimme: 

Komm, labe, Wandrer, dich und Epipoli 
Gestarkt besteigst du 112 

Ancient Rome stamped Italy with a national tradition that can-
not be effaced by time. The villages of the Alban hills were not 
mere hamlets for Waiblinger, but "dreitausendjahrige Stadte"13 ; 
and the grotto of Diana on Lago Albano more than simply 

7. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 19. 
8. Ibid., p. 30. 
9. W erke, IV, ii. 

10. W erke, VIII ,i. 
11. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 91-92. 
12. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 141. 
13. Ibid., p. 29. 



74 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

one of nature's beauty spots, it was "heiliger Boden der Fabel-
welt."14 Whether Waiblinger was visiting some ancient monu-
ment or even enjoying the unadorned aspects of the countryside, 
his images from the ancient world are an important element in 
his poetry and prose. 

When Waiblinger visited the villa of Horace in the spring of 
1823, he composed a delightful account of the ancient Sabine 
farm as a traditional aspect of the Italian landscape. After an 
amusing experience with a rascally guide he was relieved to rest 
beside the Bandusian Fountain and repeat the famous ode 
( Carm, III, 13). As he made his arduous way to the villa he re-
membered the words of Horace in Epod. I, 7: 

Mihi jam non regia Roma 
Sed vacuum Tibur placet! 

At any time we may find some reminiscence of antiquity, re-
gardless of present surroundings. W aiblinger showed both the 
enthusiasm of a Renaissance traveller discovering some vestigial 
remnant of ancient Rome and the dreamy speculation of his 
romantic contemporaries. He enjoyed his classical oackground 
because it helped him to understand the same eternal Italy that 
Horace knew. Waiblinger believed that he could appreciate Italy 
as well as any poet of antiquity. 

Most characteristic of this attitude is an account of his visit 
to Pompeii in 1829. Waiblinger felt at home in the ancient city,· 
and he showed not only the scientific interest of the archaeologist 
but also the sensitivity of the romanticist for the ancient ruins. 
The first of the Briefe uber Pompeji 15 describes the natural set-
ting of the old city with an unusually realistic account of Vesuvi-
us, all calculated to acclimate the reader to the world of the first 
century of our era. When he arrived in the ancient city, he was 
overjoyed by scenes of two thousand years ago that revealed all 
the intimacies of daily life from that period. He felt that he had 
found the true key to the beauties of antiquity, that here was .a 
summary of all the scattered information about ancient life that 
he had picked up from his reading of the classics. He showed a 
background of sound scholarship to temper this enthusiasm, for 
he carefully inspected inscriptions for whatever explanatory 
material they offered for the surroundings. When he described a 
dwelling house, he gave exact details such as we might expect 

14. Ibid., p. 19. 
15. Werke, IX, 246-277. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 75 

from a modern investigator. He felt that meticulous examination 
of the ancient ruins would open the way for a broader under-
standing of ancient civilization. In the fifth letter, for example, 
there is a description of a Pompeiian house that brings out essen-
tial principles of domestic architecture of the ancients. 16 

Waiblinger probably appreciated his trip to Pompeii as fully 
as any other single event during his four years in Italy. Ancient 
culture came to life for him with a vividness that rivals the 
verses of Martial and Horace, and the German poet acquired a 
new sense for "der unerschopfliche Kunstsinn der Alten" that 
served him well in his study of ancient art. This experience com-
pletely reformed his conception of antiquity and gave him a far 
more substantial classical background than that which appears 
in the rather unsatisfactory Phaethon. After his visit to Pompeii 
he gave more attention to detail, to fine technical points that 
form the basis of true understanding. 

While Pompeii was more significant to W aiblinger than any 
other Roman ruin, there were other monuments of ancient Italy 
that were of importance for him. Usually he created some image 
illustrating the meaning and importance of the particular ruin. 
At the sarcophagus of the Scipios we catch a glimpse of the life 
that surrounded this ancient family which contributed so much 
to the building of Rome's empire: 

Jubelnder Heere Zug, 
Festtrunkene Volker folgten dem Rossgespann, 

Der Aar vom Donnrer in den Himmeln 
U eber den Hiiuptern der Herrn der Erde 

Ragt' er, ein Kampfgespiele von stolzer Art, 
Der iiber Asia, iiber Brittania, 

Der Korsen Eiland und Lukania, 
Afrika's Reiche den Fittig wolbte.17 

He rarely composed a strictly descriptive poem, although he did 
several capable pieces of this sort, notably an epigram on a 
temple in Cori : 

Bist du des Helden Tempel, der bier dem blumigen Felsen, 
Ein~m Elysium hier, Myrthen und Rosen entragt, 

Wahrhch dann bauten die Grazien dich, zum Jieblichsten Denkmal, 
Dass dir die Gottin den Trank ewiger Jugend gereicht.18 

More often he had a motive for such descriptions, perhaps to con-
jure up a for gotten scene or for a satirical purpose. His admira-
tion for the ancient Romans and his dislike for the Trasteverini 

16. Ibid., p. 261-262. 
17. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 16-17. 
18. Gedichte aus Italien, I, 39. 



76 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

is brought out in an epigram on the stone bridge of M. Fulvius 
the Censor: 

Eine zerbrochene Briicke, was ist's kein Wunder am Ende! 
Alles vergeht, und der Welt wird's nicht viel besser geschehn. 
Dererlei merkt man sich nicht, auch wenn die Briicke sich 

weigert, 
Mit dem gefallnen Geschlecht iiber <lie Tiber zu gehn.1 9 

As we have seen, much of Waiblinger's early work reflected 
a Byronic Weltschmerz, for example, his description of the crum-
bling glory of the Campo Vaccino and the Pantheon standing as 
a solitary symbol of ancient Rome at her height. As he matured 
he was less concerned about the sad state of the ancient Roman 
monuments in modern times. In a few short verses on the temple 
of Jupiter Stator he tells of triumphant Rome ruling the world 
with Augustus at the helm: 

Dir erbaute das siegende Rom, o Jupiter Stator, 
Dankbar ein Saulenhaus, wei,l du es siegen gelehrt. 

Herrscher, <lurch deine Macht triumphirte der Romer und beugte 
Seinem Scepter die Welt, die du fur deinen bestimmt. 

Freilich warst du ein heidnisher Gott, und glichest den Menschen, 
Doch die Menschen dafiir glichen dem Gottergeschlecht.20 

Here is a poet not merely dreaming among the ruins but writing 
with life and energy that rivals that of a contemporary of the 
great events such as Horace. 

Waiblinger, as nearly every traveller before him, found at 
once that the most obvious characteristic of Italy was the re-
mains of ancient Rome; but he sought to give to his German 
readers an original and individualistic impression of Roman 
antiquity. He neither annotated his works with dry citations 
from Lucan and Silius Italicus in the fashion of Addison nor 
bored his readers with melancholy laments on the fallen glory of 
Rome in the manner of the romanticists. Breaking with these 
worn-out conventions, he made his material as realistic as pos-
sible. His explorations of Pompeii and the descriptions of the 
ancient city are scientifically accurate and yet done with an ef-
fectiveness that would do credit to a trained archaeologist. Else-
where when he described ancient monuments he tried to give us 
a picture of them in their greatest magnificence. His lines on the 
temple of Jupiter Stator contain no obscure urge to be a "pagan 
suckled on a creed outworn" but rather a beautiful tribute to the 
spirit that motivated the Peace of Augustus. Waiblinger occas-

19. Gedichte aus ltalien, II, 81. 
20. Ibid., p. 82. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 77 

ionally fell into the tiresome style of gloomy romanticists pining 
among the ruins, but the work of his last years shows none of 
this and is characterized by a new orientation toward a person-
alized style and care in executing his purpose of untangling 
the remaining threads of antiquity that he found in Italy for his 
German readers. 

* * * * * * * * * * * 
For several reasons we must consider Waiblinger's treatment 

of Greek and of Roman antiquity under different headings. In 
the first place, ancient Italy saw the two nations flourish side by 
side, and Magna Graecia was as distinct from central Italy and 
Rome as Rome herself was from the Celtic north. In the second 
place, since the middle of the eighteenth century modern scholar-
ship has carefully distinguished Greek and Roman cultural tradi-
tions, a distinction to be found in Waiblinger's own works even 
before he went to Italy. 21 The young author of Phaethon compos-
ed works with such suggestive titles as Lieder der Griechen and 
Vier Erzahlungen aus der Geschichte des jetzigen Griechenlands 
under the influence of his master, Holderlin; and Gustav Schwab 
spurred him on to read Xenophon, Homer, the Batrachomyoma-
chia, Lysias, Isocrates, Plutarch, Sophocles, Euripides, and An-
acreon. 22 In the poet's early diaries the pages are filled with 
quotations from Greek authors, and his phrase "die Alten" was 
practically synonymous with "die Griechen". When he went to 
Italy, he could not help but observe the distinctive qualities of 
Greek art in the museums. 

Waiblinger was almost as well versed in Greek literature as 
he was in Latin. The diaries show numerous comments on Greek 
authors, quotations from them, and discussions of ideas taken 
immediately from Greek classics. Among other things, we have 
a short summary of Plato's Symposium, and accompanying this 
entry are his own "Aphorismen iiber die Liebe" in which he pre-
sents such concepts as that of "eine edlere und eine unedlere 
Liebe." 23 In other passages he speaks of favorite philosophical 
ideas and literary works adopted from Greek literature. 

Although Rome was the material fulfillment of Waiblinger's 
ideal of the south, the most important formative influence on 

21. For a careful distinction between Greek and Roman influence on 
Germany see the introduction to Butler. 

22. Frey, p. 46 et seq. 
23. Werke, IV, 240. 



,78 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

him in creating this ideal was not so much the ideology ot mod-
ern writers as Waiblinger's own study of Greek literature and 
art. Waiblinger's early work, for example, the Erziihlungen aus 
der Geschichte des jetzigen Griechenlands, like Goethe's "Land 
der Citronen und Goldorangen," is basically the product of an 
indefinite yearning for the south. It was only after Waiblinger 
arrived in Italy and saw the splendid remains of the lands of 
Magna Graecia that he was able to formulate his ideas on Greek 
culture. 

In exploring the remains of ancient Greece in Italy Waibling-
er followed Winckelmann's methods. Just as Winckelmann had 
worked quietly in the Roman museums and made occasional 
trips to southern Italy to visit Greek ruins, so Waiblinger or-
ganized his program. Most of Waiblinger's comments on Greek 
art are based almost exclusively on his experiences in Sicily and 
in Roman museums. 

Among Waiblinger's earliest exercises were essays on Greek 
art. It is difficult to estimate the degree of originality he attain-
ed, since he undoubtedly adopted uncritically many ideas that 
were current in the Stuttgart group surrounding the Boisserees 
and Dannecker. Nevertheless, many entries in his diary from 
this period show a fine appreciation of what little he had gleaned 
about the masterpieces of Greek art without ever having seen 
them.24 He had a broad knowledge of Greek sculpture, and in 
Rome he increased it by haunting the museums. However, in 
Italy there was a change. He was no longer so interested in aes-
thetic theory as in the interpretation of the art of the ancients as 
a part of his entire picture of Italy. His lines on the Venus di 
Milo give us his conception of the idealism of Greek art: 

Menschen steigen zum Himmel: zur schonen olympischen Blume 
Schliesset der irdische Keim driiben im Lichte sich auf. 

Geist verschmilzt sich mit Geist, und im freier entfalteten Leben 
Wird die sterbliche Form schoner und heil'ger verkJii.rt.25 

The Venus of the Capitol appears in a quite different light as 
the representative of all the sensual tendencies of antiquity, a 
sensualism that Waiblinger felt was closely related to the nature 
of the southern peoples : 

Gotter steigen herab in menschliche Hiille sich bergend, 
Und dem Sterblichen mischt gern sich das Himmlische bei. 

Sinnlicher Fu.He hast du, uranische geistige Schonheit, 

24. E.g., Werke, IV, 224-226. 
25. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 48. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 79 

All' dein Wesen und Sein, all' dein Geheimniss vertraut. 
Weib ist die Gi:ittin, vergiingliche Form hat das Ew'ge gewiihlet, 

Aber <las Sinnliche wirkt auch auf das Sinnliche nur.26 

However, the clarity and beauty of the Greek spirit transcended 
everything else for Waiblinger. The Venus who rose from the 
blue Mediterranean and shed her radiant beauty over all anti-
quity resembled the Venus di Milo in her highest qualities. He 
wrote of the Venus dei Medici : 

Nie ist die Gottin geworden, von Anfang ist sie, vollkommen 
Stieg sie der Welt aus des Meers rauschenden Wassern empor. 

In der fliichtigen Natur ist sie die dauernde Seele, 
Und im Wechseil der Form ist sie <las ew'ge Gesetz, 

Unter sichtbar Gemischtem die tief unsichtbare Einheit, 
Unter dem Einzelnen ruht bleibend als Ganzes sie fest. 

Und also vollkommne !dee gereifter dauernder Schonheit 
Zeigt sie dem Sinn nicht, dem Geist nur die olympische Macht. 27 

An age of fable surrounded these remarkable works of art for 
Waiblinger, and he felt that the fable giving the theme to many 
pieces was as pure and beautiful in its conception as the repre-
sentation in stone, for example, the Niobe legend as conceived by 
Scopas in his group now in Florence.28 

Roman antiquity could off er W aiblinger no such outstanding 
monuments of art which interpreted the soul of a highly gifted 
people. The remains of ancient Rome had given him an idea of 
the private life and character of the conquerors of the world. In 
Sicily Waiblinger learned about Greek history and Greek daily 
life, for on that island the culture of ancient Greece had trans-
planted itself completely. Waiblinger's "Oden und Elegien aus 
Sicilien" consist of a series of poems on Sicilian antiquities and 
Sicilian landscape, and there are pieces on such suggestive 
themes as Syracuse, Timoleon, and Girgenti as well as on the na-
tural beauties of Sicily. 

When Waiblinger first sailed into Syracuse, he must have 
thought of the chaotic political history of the island, plagued by 
tyrants and the Athenian wars and Roman conquerors. He open-
ed this series of odes with a fearful picture of the raging Mar-
cellus destroying Syracuse, but at the same time he recalled that 
the Greeks had given Sicily a tradition that continues to reflect 
the bright genius of the Hellenistic peoples. 29 The poet gave an 
account of the positive accomplishments of the Greeks in Sicily 

26. Ibid. 
27. Ibid., p. 49. 
28. Ibid., p. 139. 
29. Ibid., p. 139-141. 



80 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

and did not repeat the turbulent political history of the island. 
He tarried at the villa of Timoleon and composed verses to glori-
fy the political idealism of the liberator of Sicily; and at Girgenti 
the ruins of the ancient temple baking in the hot Sicilian sun 
brought to his mind's eye an image of the colorful religious cere-
mony of the ancients, of all the beauty of formal Greek relig-
ion.30 

These brilliant pictures of Greek life and legend show a re-
markable imagination able to create brilliant pictures of a dead 
civilization from modern ruins. Just as Waiblinger felt that he 
saw classic faces and figures in modern Italian women and Vir-
gilian landscape in the valleys and hills of Latium, so also he 
found the magic of Greek life enduring in the atmosphere of 
Sicily. Indeed, he almost carried this notion to an unreasonable 
extreme, for he never mentioned Sicilian squalor so repulsive to 
most northern Europeans. Like Washington Irving, who ignored 
the industrial revolution in England to hunt down every trace 
of old English life, Waiblinger, undisturbed by the pitiful aspect 
of the modern Sicilian, thought in terms of the wealthy, luxmr-
iant granary of the ancient world. 

Waiblinger's neo-hellenism did not come to full flower as 
Byron's did, but in Italy his Greek studies never flagged, and he 
was able to put them to good use. If Rome failed to bring forth 
the ideal of beauty that W aiblinger and most other travellers 
have felt to be native to southern lands, it was not lacking in 
other parts of Italy, for Greek culture had penetrated thorough-
ly the life of the peninsula. Thus Waiblinger was able to show 
that Italy preserved relics of Greek as well as Roman culture and 
that Italy alone could fulfill the thirst of the northerner for the 
glories of ancient civilization. 

30. Ibi.d., p. 144. 



CHAPTER VII 

WAIBLINGER AND THE RENAISSANCE 

Of all the ages when Italy has been a vital cultural factor in 
the evolution of western Europe, the period of the Renaissance 
stands out above all others. Not only is the Italian Renaissance 
the age which left the most pronounced effects on the national 
character of Italy herself, but it is also the one great movement 
without which our modern age would never have come into ex-
istence. Waiblinger's works dealing with Italy are filled with 
reminiscences of the Italy of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and six-
teenth centuries; but during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, writers on Italy and travellers in the country had been 
too interested in their decadent Italian contemporaries to pay 
ctue tribute to the masters of literature and the arts in the Ren-
aissance ;1 and it was only in the latter half of the eighteenth 
century that there was some genuine appreciation of the best 
in the Italian Renaissance. It is not surprising that the first im-
portant estimates of the Renaissance came from the incipient 
romanticism of Germany, the country where romanticism 
signified universality. Karl Philipp Moritz, best known as the 
author of Anton Reiser, was in Italy at the time Goethe was 
there, and he had earnestly tried to enter into the spirit of the 
Renaissance, although he was somewhat deficient in historical 
perspective. A half a dozen years earlier Wilhelm Heinse's Ar-
dinghello with its emphasis on "aesthetic immoralism" had been 
widely read. Heinse, like his hero, had been an enthusiastic 
admirer of the ideal of the "Renaissance gentleman," and actual-
ly he was able to understand the Renaissance considerably more 
effectively than the modest and often purblind plodder Moritz. 

Even more important was Goethe with his fine evaluation of 
the Renaissance in . the diaries and his Italienische Reise, in 
which he shows an appreciation of the masters of Renaissance 
art that can only come from a kindred spirit. His translation of 
Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography (1803) is especially signifi-
cant, for he gave to the German people through this translation 
a characteristic work of the period. The note struck by this work 

1. Von Klenze, p. 10. 



82 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

was taken up at once by the early romanticists, who demanded 
universality in life and art; and during the first years of the 
nineteenth century there was a flood of critical and historical 
material on all periods of the Italian Renaissance from the 
Schlegels, Tieck, and others. 

While the immediate background of Waiblinger's interest in 
the Renaissance comes from the German literary tradition and 
from his own environment during his sojourn in Italy, it is in-
teresting to observe the growth of English interest in the Italian 
Renaissance during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centur-
ies. Waiblinger read English well, and he was undoubtedly im-
pressed by many of Byron's glowing descriptions of Renaissance 
Italy. Marshall's study of Anglo-Italian literary relations just 
before the flowering of English romanticism traces the interest 
in the Italian Renaissance in England from 1755 to 1815. During 
the eighties, at the time when Heinse, Moritz, and Goethe began 
to intensify German interest in Italy, a similar rehabilitation of 
Italy took place in England, particularly evident in Sir Joshua 
Reynolds' interest in Italian Renaissance painters and in Hester 
Lynch Thrale Piozzi's encouragement of the study of Italian 
literature. By the beginning of the second decade of the nine-
teenth century Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage Landor, Byron and 
others had paved the way for a new tradition of Anglo-Italian 
literary relations that was to last through D. G. Rosetti and J. A. 
Symonds down to our own day. The German poet may well have 
been influenced by English writers other than Byron in the 
course of his wide reading. 

This parallelism between developments in England and Wai-
blinger's interests is even more obvious in Liebe und Hass, writ-
ten when he was seventeen years old. Fauconnet has pointed out 
the similarity with such works as Emilia Galotti and Fiesco in 
the treatment of the Renaissance background.2 This use of a 
Renaissance setting is also characteristic of some of the sensa-
tional books by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and "Monk" 
Lewis. Neither the Englishmen nor Waiblinger made any contri-
bution to a proper understanding of the Renaissance in these 
works. Waiblinger was destined to have a true concept of the 
Renaissance only after he extended his reading beyond the 

2. Liebe und Hass (1914), p. iv-v. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 83 

Gothic novels and actually saw the heritage of the Renaissance 
in Italy. 

Undoubtedly the greatest and most important accomplish-
ments of the Renaissance in Italy lie in the field of the arts. In 
this respect Italy was particularly important for Waiblinger, for 
he (like John Addington Symonds) realized that art was the 
"spiritual oxygen" on which the Renaissance man flourished. 
Every vestige of Renaissance art was important for him. An al-
tar in a monastery in the hills pleased him as much as the great 
masterpieces of the Vatican. On the whole, however, he limits his 
comment on the art of the Renaissance to the more important 
masters, to those representative spirits who have come to be 
identified with the age. Most of Waiblinger's criticism is sur-
prisingly close to standard modern opinions, and unquestionably 
he made his contribution toward the crystallization of modern 
ideas on Italian Renaissance art . 

Waiblinger's comment on Raphael's Stanzi reveals that he 
was able to perceive clearly the truism of modern art histories 
that Raphael is the harmonist of classical and Christian tradi-
tions in the arts. A splendid characterization of Raphael's art is 
in the little epigram on the "Madonna del Gran Duca," an /Un-
usually fine portrayal of the spiritual and human values in the 
same piece: 

Wie voU Unschuld du bist, du suss jungfrauliches Antlitz, 
So befangen, so sanft, kaum noch der Kindheit entbliiht. 

Schiichtern noch thust du, obwohil schon Mutter geworden, so 
bist du 

Dir's nicht bewusst, und weisst selbst noch nicht, wie dir 
geschah.3 

Likewise Waiblinger perceived clearly the point of distinction 
between the two great painters of the Renaissance when he 
spoke of "sanfter Raffael und harter Michelangelo."4 And just 
as we have seen the expansion of the adjective applied to the for-
mer, also we have a fine insight into the essential nature of the 
genius of Michelangelo: 

Deiner Brust hat die gut'ge Natur nicht den Frieden gegeben, 
Der, wie der Fruhling so zart, alles erheiternd verjiingt. 

Du verschmahest den sanften Verkehr mit dem Genius, ziirnend 
Stiirmest, Titanen gleich, du in den Himmel empor.5 

To what extent such observations as these two on Raphael and 
Michelangelo were original with Waiblinger cannot easily be 

3. Gedickte aus Italien, II, 54. 
4. Werke, II, 149. 
5. Gedichte aU8 ltalien, II, 54. 



84 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

determined. Frequently he mentioned Giorgio Vasari's Lives of 
the Painters, but this work is chiefly valuable as a contemporary 
record rather than as advanced criticism. To be sure, many of 
Waiblinger' s comments on Renaissance art were not entirely 
new, as, for example, his epigram on Titian's Venus: 

Das ist Venus, die Gottin, die hohe olympische Schonheit? 
Nicht die Venus ist das, aber der Venus Geschopf.6 

This comment is almost exactly the idea expressed some fifty 
years previously by Heinse in one of his travel essays,7 but we 
have no proof that Waiblinger took it from Heinse or even knew 
it at all. The important evidence for Waiblinger's originality is 
that his observations on the art of the Renaissance showed a re-
markable degree of consistency and accuracy in an age when the 
history of art had not yet fully developed as a scholarly disci- . 
pline. Even more important is the ease with which Waiblinger 
seems to have entered into the spirit of the Renaissance. His 
lines on Benvenuto Cellini, quoted in Chapter II,8 show a re-
markable insight into the man's personality and art. Similar 
understanding is revealed in the first two lines of the epigram 
on Filippo Bruneleschi, the reformer of architecture in the first 
half of the fifteenth century: 

Herrliche Zeiten, da einst in geselligem Bunde die Kiinste 
Sich in Einem zum Werk Aller so thiitig vereint!9 

Waiblinger found in Renaissance art the typical expression of 
the genius of the age; and whether or not his own thoughts on 
the subject were original, they represented a sympathetic ap-
proach and an effective interpretation for his German readers. 

No less significant is Waiblinger's feeling for the literature 
of the Renaissance, but his remarks here are not as extensive as 
we might expect. He was strongly attracted to Ariosto, who re-
presented for him at once a zest for life so typical of his age and 
an imaginative quality that surpassed that of his contemporaries. 
Waiblinger displayed much of the same enthusiasm for Ariosto 
that we find in that curious eighteenth century Englishman, Wil-
liam Huggins, who sought to acclimate the Italian poet to the 
north. Huggins, and later Waiblinger, found "satirical strokes of 
the sharpest poignancy, or poetical images of the sublimest in-

6. Ibid. 
7. Heinse, Werke, VIII, 143. 
8. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 54. 

9. Ibid. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 85 

vention."10 In Torquato Tasso Waiblinger found the beginning 
of a baroque tradition under which original genius had little 
chance: 

Du wirst bleiben, so lange Musik und melodischer Wohllaut 
Dein entziickendes Welsch noch sich zur Wiege bestimmt, 

Und so lange die Lieb' in zlirtlichem Feuer die Sprache 
Der Musik, und des Reichs lieblicher Tone sich wahlt. 

Aber Homer, er gefallt mir schon nicht im Virgi;l, wie gefiele 
Darum in deinem Gedicht, Tasso, mir gar nun Virgil ?11 

In addition to Ariosto, Waiblinger also admired Petrarch and 
Boccaccio as representatives of the Italian Renaissance.12 He saw 
in Petrarch the archipoeta of love interpreted in a new manner,13 
and in Boccaccio he saw the prime example of the great artist 
who maintained a healthy realism as an integral element of his 
art. 14 It is unfortunate that Waiblinger did not have more to say 
about the literature of the Italian Renaissance; but, just as in 
the case of art, he was more interested in catching the spirit of 
the age than in the details of scholarship. 

Waiblinger's interest in the Italian Renaissance comes into 
sharp focus in Das Blumenf est. It is an inferior tale composed 
mainly to fill space in the Alm.anach auf das Jahr 1829, but the 
sixteenth century setting lends it some value as a historical 
romance. Waiblinger attempted to create the atmosphere of the 
Renaissance through typical scenes, characters, and situations 
of the period; but sometimes these characters seem to be closer 
to the pulp literature of Waiblinger's day than to accurate his-
torical portrayal. The endless series of intrigues, treachery, and 
counter-plots might be characteristic of the Italian Renaissance, 
but they were even more characteristic of cheap novels of the 
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The same holds 
true for the stock characters of the proud, aristocratic old prince 
and his dashing son, the young Prince Chigi, and all the voluptu-
ous I tali an women who appear in the story. Of more abiding in-
terest are the scenes which attempt to give a picture of manners 
and daily life in the sixteenth century. For example, the descrip-
tion of the religious procession during the festival of flowers at 
Genzano illustrates how Waiblinger visualized the worldly re-

10. Apud Marshall, p. 33. 
11. Gedichte aus /talien, II, 64. 
12. However, neither author ever attained the importance of Ariosto 

for him. Cf. Friedrich, p. 328. 
13. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 62. 
14. Ibid., p. 63. 



86 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

ligion of the period.15 Again we find a colorful account of Gen-
zano decorated for a Renaissance festival: 

Unterdessen hatte man schon die Strasse, die zum Altar und 
zur Kirche hinauffiihrte, iiber und iiber mit Blumen bedeckt. In 
die verschiedenartigsten Bilder hatte man die Flora geformt; hier 
bemerkte man einen Tempel von weissen Blumen auf griinem 
Myrtengrunde, auf dessen Aftar eine Flamme von Purpurrosen 
brannte; dort schoben sich liebliche Arabesken durcheinander, 
architektonische Zierrathen, so niedlich, als man es nur mit der 
leicht verwehenden Fiille von so zarten Bliittern zu Stande bringen 
konnte. An manchen Orten sah man die W appen des Ha uses auf 
die Laubfl.iiche gezeichnet und mit Blumen gemalt; dann gewahrte 
man wieder Siiulen und kleine Obelisken mit lnschriften, Garten 
mit artigen Lusthiiusern, Aftare, Kirchen, menschliche Figuren, 
Amorinen, Engelchen, phantastische gefl.iigelte Thiere, Tauben 
und anderes hiibsches Gefl.iigel, das Alles die Lange der Strasse 
hin mit der sinnreichen Auswahl von Farben und Blattern geziert 
war, und das Bild der heiligen Mutter der allgemeinen Verehrung 
darbot. 16 

Thus Waiblinger envisaged the genius of the age of Renaissance 
with its tradition of display and pageantry, inherited in part 
from the middle ages, but arranging the whole with a fine artis-
tic sense. 

Waiblinger did not make a thorough investigation of the Re-
naissance comparable to the great works of Symonds and Burck-
hardt, but everywhere in his writings there are traces of his ap-
preciation of this greatest period in Italian history. None of Wai-
blinger's works is devoted to a special consideration of the 
Renaissance, but the poet felt the inescapable infliuence of the 
Renaissance, and his work is replete with notes and observa-
tions on the period. Waiblinger wanted to enter into the spirit 
of the age so that he might look at it as a high water mark of 
history. In considering the arts and the literature of the period 
he sought characteristic figures such as Benvenuto Cellini and 
Ariosto, men who might not have lived and created so success-
fully in any other age. In addition, Waiblinger portrayed in broad 
outline the life of the Renaissance as a background of one of 
his stories, and here he followed the tradition of the romantic 
novelists such as Arnim and Hauff. Thus we not only have in 
Waiblinger's works a sympathetic interpretation of the Renais-
sance, but in one case an effort to recreate the life and manners 
of the Renaissance. However inexact some of Waiblinger's work 
may be by modern criteria, he showed much insight into the age 
and was generally objective. 

15. W erke, III, 98. 
16. lbul., p. 97. 



GHAPTER VIII 

W AIBLINGER AND CATHOLICISM 

The predominance of the Roman ,catholic religion in Italy 
is one of the hallmarks of the country. Not only in Rome but also 
all over Italy the externals of the Church are as much in evidence 
as in any other country of the world. Some prominent figures, for 
example Zacharias Werner and Friedrich (Maler) Muller, were 
even converted to the Italian variety of Catholicism in Waib-
linger's own day. A classic expression of the attraction of Rome 
for men of the age is the famous speech of Mortimer Paulet in 
Schiller's Maria Stuart (lines 409-450). Driven by similar im-
pulses, other northern Europeans accepted the Catholic faith dur-
ing the reorientation toward Rome at the beginning of the last 
century. Much of the success of the Church might be attributed 
to the violent reaction against the Voltairean motto of "Ecrasez 
l'infame" and against other vestiges of rationalism; but when 
Waiblinger began to write, this movement had practical1y spent 
itself in Germany. Ultramontanism had retreated to the studles 
of Brentano and Gorres, and in literature there was a movement 
toward a new synthesis of rationalism and romanticism and 
thereby a more objective attitude toward the Church of Rome. 

Although Waiblinger never renounced his Protestant faith 
there is strong evidence of a passion for Catholicism not unlike 
that which attracted Novalis. 1 Waiblinger's own religious back-
ground had been strictly Protestant, and he had at one time even 
been a seminary student. At Tiibingen, however, he gradually 
moved away from the fundamentalist variety of Protestantism 
under the influence of such men as Morike and Ludwig Bauer. 
He fell in with the spirit of the times and began to entertain a 
healthy tolerance for all religions. Phaethon reveals a neo-
paganism reminiscent of Holderlin and Andre Chenier; and the 
diaries from this period are full of excerpts from Novalis and 
Gorres. 2 When Waiblinger went to Italy, he was prepared to 
view Catholicism objectively as a national religion of a country 
where he was a guest. 

In Italy Waiblinger sensed a distinctly religious atmosphere 
that is obvious to any observant tourist. Where else but Rome 

1. Cf. Frie<lrich, p. 66, 78. 
2. Frey, p. 64. 



88 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

could one hear "der Abendglocken tausendstimmig Gelaut,3 and 
where else but in the calm peace of a monastery in the Italian 
hills could one speak so feelingly of "Des Klosters stiller Garten 
und Blumenweg"?4 No other Catholic country, not even Spain, 
can show the pontifical glory of Rome flourishing side by side 
with a simple folk religion that pervades the entire country. In 
Rome Waiblinger became acquainted with all the public and 
private functions of the Roman See; and during his travels 
through the Sabine country, Latium, and the south he came into 
contact with the religion of the peasants. Waiblinger saw all as-
pects of the religious life of the country - the princes of the 
Church in Rome, the humble but sometimes worldly country 
priest, the riotous celebration of the carnival; and he properly 
concluded that in Italy the national religion had permeated 
every part of the life of the people, seven days a week, for better 
or for worse.5 

Waiblinger saw that the Catholic religion reflected not only 
the manners and daily life of the people, but also a thousand 
years of Italian history. He felt strongly about the political 
domination of Italy by the pope, especially in connection with the 
mediaeval struggles between the popes and the German emper-
ors. Of Friedrich II he wrote : 

Dein Feind, o Friedrich? Grossern bekampfte nie 
Ein Held, sei's denn der Engel des Schwerts vielleicht, 

Der Belial schlug. 0 Staub des Herrschers, 
Betet' ich Irdisches an, du warst es.6 

In the nineteenth century the German imperial dream of dom-
inating Italy lay peacefully with the ashes of the Hohenstaufen 
and remained a mere historical memory. Still Waiblinger had the 
most profound respect for the enduring contribution of the 
Church as an inspiration to artists, and he wrote of the great 
work of Michelangelo in the Vatican in glowing terms: 

Also thiirmt' er die Kuppel der Basilik' in die Liifte, 
Schuf er den Moses, und so selber den Reiland der Welt. 

Also malt' er das jiingst Gericht und die grossen Propheten, 
Um, wie kein Sterhlicher je, dreifach unsterblich zu sein.7 

Even if the Church had lost its political power, its powerful ap-
peal to the people and its importance as a social force was no less 

3. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 27. 
4. Ibid., p. 146. 
5. Cf. Werke, VIIf, 231. 
6. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 147. 
7. Ibid., p. 55-56. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 89 

significant, a point that Waiblinger made in the opening lines of 
his fragment, "Die Nacht in St. Peter."8 

Of all the material manifestations of the Church, the person-
nel of the Church impressed Waiblinger most. He was attracted 
by the hordes of priests and monks who seemed to him to make 
up a fourth of the total population of Italy9 and by the quiet and 
persistent manner in which they pursued their calling. He wrote 
of no scheming cardinals and inordinately ambitious princes 
of the church but rather of humble priests with no ambitions for 
secular or ecclesiastical distinction. Waiblinger sought in Italy 
the type of priest that he had known in the simple pastorates of 
his Swabian home, unassuming and yet eager to fulfill their 
mission on earth, for example, the pif erari. 

In Olevano Waiblinger stayed at the home of a typical coun-
try priest. He was a poor but sincere man and quite proud of his 
little bit of learning, which Waiblinger gently satirized.10 Again 
at Albano he stayed with a priest and reproached himself for 
having chosen the career of a wanderer and sacrificed similar 
happiness that he might have known in a German parsonage.11 
In Palestrina he appreciated the human qualities of the local ab-
bot, who seemed to Waiblinger to be "ein wenig Libertin" ;12 and 
the two men got along famously when Waiblinger became aware 
of the soundness of the man's learning and his modesty in con-
cealing it. Waiblinger's fundamentally genial personality came 
out in his description of an insane Capuchin monk who peddled 
crosses over the countryside and would have his customers kiss 
his own cross which he claimed to be from the original. The poet 
did his bidding and replied to his speech with a jovial but faintly 
ironical answer. 13 Waiblinger found the Italian clerics to be a 
familiar group in Italian society, and he treated them with the 
same broad tolerance with which he dealt with other classes of 
Italians. 

Although Waiblinger always maintained a feeling of superi-
ority over the average man, he thought of his own educational 
advantages merely as an accident of birth and environment.14 

8. Ibid., p. 94. 
9. Werke, VIII, 149. 

10. Ibid., p. 147. 
11. Ibid., p. 182-183. 
12. Ibid., p. 241. 
13. Ibid., p. 157. 
14 .. Rapp, p. 257. 



90 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

Accordingly Waiblinger was able to retain a generous but criti-
cal attitude toward his fellow men. Such was the case with religi-
ous ceremony and art, which Waiblinger recognized as exter-
nals but at the same time essential for the continuity of the in-
stitution. He was fully aware of the Church's policy of promot-
ing pomp and ceremony as a device to encourage solidarity, for 
he observed on more than one occasion how a religious festival 
attracted crowds from far and near, regardless of whether all 
were communicants. He admitted simply, "So kam auch ich mit 
ihnen," for, like a simple hill priest, he too was overawed by the 
magificent ritual at St. Peter's. He appreciated fully a work of 
art inspired by pure religious sentiment, but at the same time he 
denounced bad taste in religious art without reservation. He de-
scribed the Madonna di Foligno with utmost admiration: 

In den Himmel erhaben, zur Konigin herrlich verkliiret, 
Blieb dir <las Herz, wie es war, aber es wuchs dir der Geist. 

Denn man betet <lich an, du umgiebst dich mit strahlender Hoheit, 
Und <ler Vater hat dir liingst dein Geheimniss enthiillt.15 

But contrasting with these verses of admiration, he summoned 
all the venom of an irascible critic in condemning the tasteless 
version of the crucifixion by Guido Reni and the monstrous scene 
of the tortures of the saints by Nicolas Poussin: 

Nein, <lass nenn' ich Tortur, <las ist eine Strafe, so schrecklich, 
Dass sie der Maler al1lein, der sie gebildet, verdient.16 

Waiblinger's criticism is subjective, but it is to the point and ef-
fective. 

Waiblinger's description of the Roman holidays occasioned by 
church ceremonies echo plainly the panem et circenses charac-
teristic of Juvenal's pictures of pagan festivities, for he saw how 
the Roman mob congregated as eagerly to see the pope and all his 
splendor as they did to greet a conqueror returning to distribute 
grain and stage great public circuses. In the passages of Das 
Blumenfest describing the baptism of the Turkish lady Zuleika 
we have a cross-section of the mob gathered for the solemnity 
and brilliance of the papal ceremonies.17 Waiblinger described 
the entire ceremony, with the exception of certain passages inti-
mately connected with the plot, with the straightforward man-
ner of a Sabine peasant who had come to town for the brilliant 
occasion. 

15. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 54. 
16. Ibid., p. 74. 
17. Werke, III, 125-127. 



W AlBLINGER IN ITALY 91 

In more refined language and avoiding the garish tone of his 
descriptions of great papal holidays, Waiblinger often portrayed 
the lesser functions of the Church as a medium of communica-
tion between God and the individual. In the short elegy "Ora 
pro nobis" he could reveal the purest religious sentiment : 

Heil'ge Dammrung waltet durch der Rotunda 
Tausendjahr'ge Wolbung, der Geist des Abends 
Mahnt zum Beten, mahnet zur letzten Andacht, 

Ora pro nobis. 

Auf den Knieen umher in des Tempels hoher 
Rundung liegt das glaubige Volk, und Alles 
Tont einstimmig, Jungfrau, dein Lob und flehet: 

Ora pro nobis.18 
Waiblinger appreciated this aspect of the Church more than any 
other, for here he found a genuineness of emotion that is miss-
ing in the great spectacles. 

Nevertheless, Waiblinger felt that the sensational processions 
and celebrations were more characteristic of the Church than 
the unassuming worship of individuals. In the middle of his 
fragmentary "Die Nacht in St. Peter," a poem intended to illus-
trate his personal religion, he broke out with a colorful descrip-
tion of celestial courtiers, baroque in the brilliance of external::J 
and Swedenborgian in expanse of imagination. Quickly, how-
ever, he recalled the tone of his poem, waved aside the heirs of 
St. Peter with a scornful, "Sie alle sitzen stumm in ihrem Gold," 
and described the contrasting qualities of Christ in a simpler 
note. 19 Yet in spite of this feeling for the simple religion that 
Waiblinger always cherished, we know that his chief pleasures 
came from carousals at carnival time, the most worldly of all the 
secular functions of the Church. Here, as usual, we find Wai-
blinger projecting himself into the character of the Italian peo-
ple who knew nothing of the stern admonitions of Protestant 
ministers about a "Sunday religion." 

If religious ceremony appealed to Waiblinger as an outlet 
for the emotions of the people, then religious art appealed to him 
all the more as the highest expression of the creative artist. In 
the greatest works of religious art he found the purest and most 
beautiful sentiment transposed into enduring form by gifted 
men, from the primitives whose na'ive madonnas impart a feel-
ing of absolute trust in God to the artists of the Renaissance who 

18. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 33. 
19. Ibid., p. 102-103. 



92 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

glorified the power and the pomp of the papacy. He had the high-
est praise for Raphael's work in the Vatican;20 but Fra Giovanni 
da Fiesole did not suffer by comparison, for his expression of 
his convictions have their own beauty. 21 Waiblinger admired any 
art that revealed purity of thought and sincerity of purpose. 

Nor did Waiblinger confine his comments on ecclesiastical 
art to the Roman scene, for he found that every village chapel 
might offer something of interest. A monastery at Licenza, not 
far from the villa of Horace, revealed a distinguished structure 
combined with a landscape impossible at Rome. 22 At Civitella 
Waiblinger marvelled at the "wunderbare Einfaltigkeit" of the 
local Franciscan monastery,23 and at Torre dell 'Annunziata near 
Vesuvius he discovered a wayside chapel distinguished by a "herr-
liche Saulenreihe in kleinem Maasse." 24 In the country churches 
and homes of religious communities Waiblinger found a simple 
architectural style whose homely beauty was greatly enhanced 
by the landscape, and this he found to be a pleasing contrast to 
the brilliance of Rome. 

But this aspect of religious art, like the simpler religious cere-
monies, did not excite his interest to the degree which he reser-
ved for the great palaces of the Church in Rome. He was properly 
impressed with the colossal, the spectacular, and the famous. 
Eduard, the young German in Die heilige Woche, possibly a par-
tial self-portrait of the writer, stood in awe of the enormous art 
treasures amassed in the Vatican and reacted appropriately.25 

Waiblinger was not the man to take his religion too seriously, 
but he maintained the utmost tolerance toward Catholic Italy 
and tact in dealing with clerics and the more devout communi-
cants. He showed a deep respect for religious sincerity, even if 
he himself had no profound convictions. For this reason he was 
able to maintain a certain objectivity in describing the functions 
and achievements of the Church in Italy. He realized that the 
Catholic faith was more deeply rooted in Italy than in any other 
European country, and therefore he felt that it was necessary to 
give due attention to its most obvious characteristics in order to 
give a complete picture of Italy to his German readers. Natural-

20. Ibid., p. 53. 
21. Ibid., p. 51. 
22. Werke, VIII, 114. 
23. W erke, IX, 99. 
24. Ibul., p. 213. 
25. Werke, IV, 64-65. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 93 

ly, he dwelt for the most part on ecclesiastical ceremony and art, 
the two aspects of the Church in Italy that impress the traveller 
most; and he discussed the most colorful and grandiose cere-
monies and the most famous works of art. He wove these notes 
into his work with such skill that he has given us the proper com-
prehension of the omnipresence of the Church in Italian life. 



CHAPTER IX 

CONCLUSION 

Our investigation of Waiblinger's Italian experience has led 
us through nearly all the salient features of Italy, both as he saw 
it in the early nineteenth century and as he interpreted its bril-
liant history. At this point it is appropriate to recapitulate and 
coordinate the evidence in order to show at a glance the signifi-
cance of Italy for W aiblinger and in turn the significance of his 
work in the general literary tradition of Germany and Europe. 

In the first chapter we noted how Italy represented for Wai-
blinger a kind of a promised land; and, when he was casting 
about as a young man who had suffered several misfortunes, not 
the least of which was his failure to become well-known in liter-
ary circles at home, the opportunity to go to Italy came as a 
happy wind-fall for him. After the first few months in Italy he 
realized that he had discovered his true mission in life. He began 
to look upon Italy as his real home, the country of his heart's 
desire; and he envisioned his life's task as revealing the glories 
of Italy to his less fortunate countrymen. 

Waiblinger's Italian work shows superiority over his earlier 
publications in style and in content; but we are mainly interested 
in content, since he was more of an interpreter than a strictly 
creative artist. The early drama Liebe und Hass, although set in 
Italy, leaves us with an extremely vague conception of tlie char-
acters and their environment due to the faulty style and construc-
tion of the play. In contrast with the Italian travel sketches this 
early drama appears in an even more unfavorable light. The 
early work is all built on themes with which the poet was un-
familiar and was shaped in the form of purely imaginative work, 
but in Italy Waiblinger was able to observe life and record his 
reactions objectively. His major work in Italy was poetry on 
Italian themes, travel sketches, and short stories, the latter being 
of inferior quality because he tended to lose sight of the reality 
with which he was familiar. Receptive to everything that he 
saw, Waiblinger's fairness to all aspects of Italy, past and pres-
ent, is characteristic of his work. An unprejudiced attitude was 
a necessary prerequisite to an accurate account of Italy, and 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 95 

Waiblinger discovered it as an automatic virtue, a by-product of 
his enthusiastic approach. 

He was interested not merely in the cultural life of Italy, but 
also in her people, popular traditions, and natural beauties. 
Winckelmann had been exclusively interested in art. Goethe's in-
terests in Italy were intimately associated with the spiritual re-
juvenation that he underwent, and he did not go into the great 
detail that Waiblinger did in writing about Italy. Waiblinger en-
joyed the advantage of understanding the concept of a nation as 
the product of a totality of forces. To Mme. de Stael Germany 
was the land of Weimar classicism, but her friend August Wil-
helm Schlegel looked upon his native land as the product of cen-
turies of traditions, both literary and popular, of a people with 
distinct racial characteristics, of a landscape familiar as home, of 
a distinct religion. Waiblinger had a similar attitude toward 
Italy as a part of his romantic heritage; and his unsystematk 
presentation makes it none the less valuable, for his work is read-
able and may well have made at least as great an impression on 
the popular mind of Germany as the work of more scholarly 
romanticists. 

It matters little whether Waiblinger was a thoroughly sound 
critic in matters requiring taste and artistic perception, although 
he ordinarily displayed a fine sense of values. The importance of 
his work lies rather in his general orientation. Just as travellers 
of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had been 
inspired with the love of antiquity by the Renaissance and sought 
nothing else in Italy, so we may expect a new and different 
orientation toward Italy following the romantic upheaval. In 
Waiblinger's work we have a body of writings dealing exclusive-
ly with Italy and written by a man who spent the most fruitful 
years of his life there. Here is not only a compendium of what the 
age thought and wrote about Italy but also the ideas of a man 
who was eminently qualified for the position of Italy's inter-
preter to Germany. 

In the field of the arts we find that Waiblinger did not have 
a blind admiration of Raphael and his followers to the disad-
vantage of other Italian artists. Winckelmann had prepared the 
way for a thorough appreciation of the art of antiquity, and 
W aiblinger wandered through the villas and museums of Rome 
armed with the monumental Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums 



96 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

and had as comprehensive an understanding as possible in his day 
for the art of the ancients. Greek art was no longer simply an-
other aspect of classical civilization but rather the work of art-
ists comparable in their own right to the great figures of the 
Italian Renaissance. Similarly, the art of the middle ages, almost 
completely ignored up to the end of the eighteenth century, of-
fered to Waiblinger works that are thoroughly justifiable as ex-
pressing the spirit of the age that produced them. Perhaps the 
best evidence for Waiblinger's understanding in the fields of 
painting, sculpture, and architecture is the record of his exper-
ience in Sicily, where ancient, Islamic, mediaeval Christian, and 
Renaissance styles occur in motley confusion. Each is significant 
for him in the light of the civilization that produced it. 

Italian literature had undergone a wholesale re-evaluation 
in the hands of the German romanticists ; and W aiblinger, al-
ready acquainted with Italian literature during his German 
period as we note in Drei Tage in der Unterwelt, was able to add 
local color to his appreciation of Italian literature from his vant-
age point in the place of its origin. His remarks on the Italian 
drama are particularly noteworthy. He contrasted the stiff 
pseudo-classicism of Alfieri unfavorably with the merry operas 
and folk plays of Metastasio and Goldoni, which seemed to him to 
be more expressive of the national temperament. He found that 
Mme. de Stael's Corinne was not a mere fiction but typical of 
living people in Italy such as Rosa Taddei and the Cavaliere 
Sgricci, whose improvisations represented a popular poetry of 
equal merit with the folksongs rediscovered by the romanticists. 

Of utmost importance is W aiblinger's appreciation of the 
Italian landscape. To be sure, there were the same hills, :valleys, 
plains, and rivers that were described adequately enough by 
Virgil and Horace; but most earlier travellers seem to have been 
content with quoting the classics for any effect of Italian scen-
ery that they wished to convey. Waiblinger, well schooled in an-
cient literatures, might have done the same; but his personal 
affection for a scene such as the Bandusian Fountain was so pro-
found that he described it in his own words, quoting Horace only 
for the sake of comparison. In addition, he saw a landscape dif-
ferent from the one that the ancients knew because of the rise 
and fall of the works of man. The Campo Vaccino was hardly the 
busy Forum of antiquity, and the Appian Way certainly pre-



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 97 

sented a different scene from the festive thoroughfare of Roman 
conquerors. Ostia was but a shadow of its former self: 

Einsam graut das Kasten in weiter schweigender Wildniss, 
Triimmer der machtigen Stadt liegen wie Graber umher. 

Einst umspiilte sie Meer, nun zog sich's zuriick, und die Erde 
Mussen wir jegliches Jahr feuchter und trockener sehn. 1 

Thus Waiblinger described Italy as the modern traveller would 
see it, still possessing the charm of antiquity, but modified by 
the hand of time. 

His experience among the people has no parallel in the writ-
ings of other travellers in Italy. Before Waiblinger many visitors 
in Italy had considered the modern inhabitants to be degenerate 
heirs of the ancient Romans. The people were dirty, dishonest, 
illiterate, and completely unworthy of their ancestors. Waibling-
er was not affected by these conventional attitudes, and he 
wrote about any Italian who was colorful or otherwise interest-
ing. On the whole he found that the Italian people consisted of 
beautiful, sensuous women and extremely lazy men. Our modern 
popular conception of Italy as the land of dolce far niente checks 
closely with the idea 'that Waiblinger wanted to convey. How-
ever, Waiblinger did not dwell on this single superficial notion. 
He finds many individuals typical of the country and yet highly 
individualistic. Thus we are introduced to the bohemian painter 
in Rome, the kindly but ignorant country priest, the intoxicated 
improvisatore, the ex-bandit captain, and many others. Wai-
blinger found Italy rich not only in cultural traditions but also in 
the life of her people. 

Ancillary to Waiblinger's love for the people was the fascina-
tion that the Catholic Church, dominant in Italy for over fifteen 
hiundred years, had for him. He did not succumb to the spell of 
the Church as had certain German compatriots such as Friedrich 
(Maler) Muller, Zacharias Werner, Friedrich Schlegel, and 
Joseph Gorres; but he did feel the attraction of ecclesiastical 
ceremony and art, a factor that impresses travellers from Pro-
testant countries even today. He saw in the great cathedrals and 
religious paintings a genuine expression of the spirit of the peo-
ple, and in this way he portrayed to his German readers one of 
the most striking aspects of Italy. 

While Waiblinger understood quite well the cultural traditions 
of Italy, it was another matter to be able to identify the basic 

1. Gedichte aus Italien, II, 48. 



98 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

characteristics of the two great periods in her history, namely, 
classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Older travellers had, 
indeed, exploited classical antiquity, but they did not view it as 
one period in the development of a nation. Waiblinger was not 
only interested in ancient Rome for her own virtues but also for 
her influence on the life and civilization of modern Italy. Ac-
cordingly, he was able to make ancient Rome and Greece live as 
they never had in the works of earlier authors. He treated the 
Renaissance in much the same way, as a period that endowed 
modern Italy with a vitality and importance recognized by al! 
Europe. Waiblinger knew and loved antiquity and Renaissance 
so well that he re-lived them, and it was his very enthusiasm that 
gave his work historical perspective. 

These main points in this study represent a summary of Wai-
blinger's most important achievement in life. Other problems in 
his life and work are of minor importance in relation to the 
Italian experience and the content of his writings dealing with 
Italy. The problem of Waiblinger's subsequent influence is a dif-
ficult one. To what extent he influenced such men as Paul Heyse 
and Jacob Burckhardt would be difficult to ascertain without a 
careful analysis of the reading of these men. Beyond a few sur-
mises the most that one can say is that Waiblinger's Italy is es-
sentially the Italy that one finds in modern travel books, that no 
earlier writer presented his material with the same effective-
ness, and that the similarity between Waiblinger's attitudes and 
the notions of other travellers and historians suggests that his 
writings entered into the mainstream of European thought. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY1 

I. Editions of Waiblinger's Works 
Gesammelte Werke, mit des Dichters Leben von H. v. Canitz. Hamburg, 

Georg Heubel, 1839-1840. 9 v. Heubel published the second edition 
in nine volumes in 1842, and it has been used as the source for cita-
tions in this study. The second edition is identicail with the first with 
the following exceptions: ( 1) The first edition contained only one 
engraving, the bust of Waiblinger by Wagner in the first volume; 
(2) two early poems and three passages from Faust, erroneously at-
tributed to Waiblinger in the first edition, have been deleted and three 
new poems inserted in their place; (3) p. 241-276 of v. VI, which con-
tained the "Lieder der Griechen," have been deleted from the second 
edition; and (4) the excerpt from Laokoon attributed to Waiblinger in 
v. IV has been removed. A third edition from the same plates as the 
1842 edition was issued in Pforzheim by Flammer in 1859. Werke. 

Gedichte von Wilhelm Waiblinger, hrsg. von Eduard Morike. Hamburg, 
Georg Heubel, 1844. Gedichte. 

Bilder aus Neapel und Sicilien, hrsg. von .Eduard Grisebach. Leipzig, 
Richard Eckstein, 1879. Bilder. 

Die Britten in Rom, hrsg. von Edmund Zoller. Leipzig, Reclam, 1880. 
Die Britten in Rom. 

Wilhelm Waiblingers Gedichte aus Italien, hrsg. von Eduard Grisebach. 
Leipzig, Reclam, 1881-1893. 2 v. Gedichte aus Italien. 

Liebe und Hass, tragedie inedite de Wilhelm Waiblinger. Berlin, B. Behr, 
[1913?] (Paris "these compiementaire" of Andre Fauconnet.) Liebe 
und Hass (1913). 

Liebe und Hass, hrsg. von Andre Fauconnet. Berlin, B. Behr, 1914. 
("Deutsche Literaturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts," no. 148.) 
Liebe und Hass (1914). 

Der kranke Holderlin, hrsg. von Paul Friedrich. Leipzig, Xenien-Verlag, 
n.d. Der kranke Holderlin. 

Phaethon, hrsg. von Arthur Schurig. Dresden, Lehmannsche Vedags-
buchhandlung, 1920. Phaethon. 

Werke, ausgewahlt und hrsg. von Paul Friedrich. Berlin, Dom-Verlag, 
1922. Friedrich. 

II. Other Works Consulted 
Benda, Otto. Wilhelm Waiblinger. Prag, Calve, 1905. (Lese- und Re-

dehalle der deutschen Studenten in Prag, Bericht, no. 58; "Beilage" I.) 
Biese, Alfred. Das Naturgefilhl im Wandel der Zeiten. Leipzig, Quelle 

und Meyer, 1926. 
Brinckmann, Albert Erich. Landschaf ten der deutschen Romantiker. Ber-

lin, W oldemar Kilein, 1935. 
Butler, E. M. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany. Cambridge, Uni-

versity Press, 1936. 
Casanova de Seingalt, Giacomo Girolamo. Memoires. Brussels, J. Rozez, 

1876. 6 v. 
Fischer, Hermann. Die schwiibische Literatur im achtzehnten und neun-

zehnten Jahrhundert. Tiibingen, H. Laupp, 1911. 
Frankel, Ludwig. "Wilhelm Hauff, Wilhelm Waiblinger und H. v. Canitz." 

Schwabischer Schillerverein, Rechenschaftsbericht, XIX (1915), 90-95. 
Frey, Karl. Wilhelm Waiblinger, sein Leben und seine Werke. Aarau, 

Sauerlii.nder, 1904. 
Geikie, Archibald. The Love of Nature among the Romans. London, 

Murray, 1912. 

1. Immediately after each entry in the first part of the bibliography 
there is the abbreviated title by which the edition concerned is cited in the 
text. Works in the second part are cited in the text only by the last name 
of the author. 



100 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gliick, Friedrich. Byronismus bei Waiblinger. Tiibingen diss. Tiibingen, 
H. Laupp, 1920. 

Goedecke, Karl. Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung. Dres-
den, L. EMermann, 1884-1951. 13 v. 2nd ed. 

Groner, Otto. Waiblingers lyrische Gedichte. Leipzig diss., 1925. Type-
written. 

Giintter, Otto, ed. Hausbuch schwiibischer Erziihler. Stuttgart, Schwa-
bischer Schillerverein, 1911. 

Hagenmeyer, Gerhard. Wilhelm Waiblingers Gediehte aus Italien. Ber-
lin, Emil Ebering, 1930. ("Germanische Studien," no. 92.) 

Heinse, Johann Jakob Wilhelm. Sammtliche Werke. Leipzig, Insel Verlag-, 
1902-1925. 10 v. in 13. 

Klenze, Camillo von. The Interpretation of Italy during the Last Two 
Centuries. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1907. 

Mangere, V. L'Italie et la romantique. Paris, Klincksieck, 1902. 
Marshall, Roderick. Italy in English Literature, 1755-1815. New York, 

Columbia University Press, 1934. 
Meyer, R. M. Die deutsche Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Ber-

lin, Bondi, 1900. 
Morike, Eduard. Briefe, hrsg. von Will Vesper. Berlin, Deutsche Biblio-

thek, n.d. 
Porta, G. Madame de Stael et l'ltalie. Florence, Lapelli, 1902. 
Prolss, Johannes. Deutsch~Capri in Kunst, Leben und Dichtung. Olden-

burg, Schu[ze, 1901. 
Ranke, Leopold von. Zur eignen Lebensgeschichte, hrsg. von A. Dore. 

Leipzig, Reclam, 1890. 
Rapp, Moritz. "Wilhelm Waiblinger." Tiibinger Jahrbucher der Gegen-

wart, 1847, p. 254-287. 
Ruland, Ilse. Waiblinger in seinen Prosawerken. Tiibingen diss. Stutt-

gart, Kohlhammer, 1922. 
Schultz, Franz. "Goethe und Waiblinger." Goethe-Jahrbuch, XXIX 

( 1908), 10-21. 
Schumann, Detlev. "The Problem of Generations." PMLA, LI (1936), 

1180-1208. 
Steinitzer, A,lfred. Aus dem unbekannten Italien. Munich, Piper Verlag, 

n.d. 
Stinde, Julius. Buchholzens in Italien. Berlin, Freund und Jaeckel, 1884. 
Strich. Klassik und Romantik oder Vollendung und Unendlichkeit, ein 

Vergleich. 3rd ed. Munich, Meyer und Jessen, 1926. 
Symonds, John Addington. The Renaissance in Italy. New York, Modern 

Library, 1935. 2 v. 
Ubell, H. "Deutsche Graber in Rom." Wiener Abendpost, 1903, no. 43. 



Indices 
I. Names of Personsl 

A. 
Addison, Joseph, 41, 71, 76. 
Adler, Georg Christian, 13, 41. 
Aeneas, 51, 52. 
Aeschylus, 23. 
Alfieri, Vittorio, 32, 33, 35, 37, 96. 
Allegri, Antonio, see Coreggio. 
Anacreon, 30, 77. 
Angelico, Fra Giovanni, da Fiesole, 

14, 16, 21, 25, 40, 92. 
Archilochus 46. 
Ariosto, Lodovico, 14, 30, 32, 34, 

40, 54, 66, 84, 85, 86 
Arnim, Achim v., 55, 86 
August III ( elector of Saxony) , 

13-14 
Augustus (Roman emperor), 76. 

B. 
Baldensperger, J. P. F., 15. 
Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco, see 

Guercino. 
Bartoldo, 64. 
Bauer, Ludwig, 5, 15, 48, 87. 
Beckford, William, 15. 
Biese, Alfred, 42. 
Blechen, Karl, 42. 
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 30, 31, 34, 85. 
Borne, Ludwig, 55. 
Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 30. 
Boisseree Brothers (Sulpice and 

Melchior), 4, 15, 78. 
Bolognesi (painters), 13, 14, 24, 26. 
Bourget, Paul, 25. 
Brentano, Clemens, 55, 87. 
Brinckmann, Albert Erich, 42. 
Brockhaus, F. A., 11. 
Bruneleschi, Filippo, 24, 84. 
Burckhardt, Jakob, 86, 98. 
Butler, E. M., 77. 
Byron, George Gordon Byron, 3, 9, 

16, 29, 41, 43, 44, 70, 73, 76, 80, 
82. 

C. 
Cammarano, Filippo, 34. 
Canitz, H. v., 1, 19. 
Canova, Antonio, 15, 16, 26, 27, 59. 
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Amerighi 

da, 26. 
Casanova de Seingalt,. Giacomo 

Girolamo, 28, 30, 33. 
Castiglione, Baldassare, 30. 
Catullus, 47, 60. 
Cellini, Benvenuto, 24, 28, 81, 84, 

86. 

Chamisso, Adelbert v., 55. 
Chateaubriand, Rene de, 8, 42, 71. 
Chenier, Andre, 87. 
Cimabue, Giovanni, 24. 
Clauren, see Heun, Karl Gottlieb 

Samuel. 
Coreggio (i. e., Antonio Allegri), 

23. 
Cotta, Johann Friedrich, Baron v., 

7, 9, 10, 11. 

D. 
Dannecker, Johann Heinrich v., 4, 

15, 78. 
Dante, Alighieri, 7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 

32, 34, 36. 
Dupaty, Charles, 41. 

E. 
Eichendorff, Joseph v., 14, 15, 20, 

42. 
Eser, Friedrich, 57, 58, 70. 
Euripides, 77. 

F. 
Fauconnet, Andre, 1, 2, 82. 
Fischer, Hermann, 2, 15. 
Flaxman, John, 15. 
Fouque, Friedrich de la Motte-, 7, 

20. 
Frey, Karl, 2, 16, 22, 27, 30, 50, 

57, 77, 87. 
Friedrich II (Holy Roman em-

peror), 22, 23, 88. 
Friedrich, Paul, 2, 20, 29, 43, 85, 

87. 
Fulvius Nobilior, Marcus (Cen-

sor), 75. 

G. 
Geikie, Archibald, 47. 
Giotto di Bondone, 24. 
Gluck, Friedrich, 3, 43. 
Goedeke, Karl, 3. 
Gorres, Joseph, 55, 87, 97. 
Goethe, Johann Caspar, 41. 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang v., 1, 8, 

14, 15, 16, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 41, 

1 According to standard rules of 
library cataloging, entries are 
under the name by which the indi-
vidual is best known, with cross 
references from other names, 
whether real names or pseudonyms. 



102 W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 

42, 43, 47, 49, 54, 58, 64, 70, 72, 
78, 81, 82, 95. 

Goldoni, Carlo, 32, 33, 34, 35, 96. 
Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 8. 
Grahl, August, 59. 
Gray, Thomas, 29. 
Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 25. 
Gregory IX (Pope), 22. 
Grimm Brothers, (Jakob and Wil-

helm), 35, 55, 63. 
Grisebach, Eduard, 1, 50. 
Grosse, Julius, 45. 
Giintter, Otto, 6. 
Guercino, ( i.e., Giovanni Francesco 

Barbieri), 26. 

H. 
Hagenmeyer, Gerhard, 3, 4. 
Hardenberg, Friedrich v., see 

Novalis. 
Haudebourt-Lescot, Aintoinette Ce-

cile Hortense, 66. 
Hauff, Wilhelm, 86. 
Haug, Johann Christoph, 7, 15. 
Heim, Philippine, 70. 
Heine, Heinrich, 8, 14, 31, 49, 50, 

55. 
Heinse, Wilhelm, 13, 25, 29, 35, 81, 

82, 84. 
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 13. 
Herodotus, 9. 
Heun, Karl Gottlieb Samuel (Clau-

ren), 7. 
Heyse, Paul, 45, 98. 
Holderlin, Friedrich, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, 

16, 44, 45, 70, 77. 
Hofmannsthal Hugo v., 4. 
Hogarth, William, 66. 
Hohenstaufen emperors, 22, 88. 
Homer, 30, 77, 85. 
Horace, 9, 26, 44, 46, 47, 54, 69, 71, 

72, 74, 75, 76, 92, 96. 
Horn, Franz, 7. 
Huggins, William, 84. 
Humboldt, Alexander v., 55. 
Hunt, Leigh, 82. 

I. 
Immermann, Karl, 8. 
Innocent III (Pope), 22. 
Innocent IV (Pope), 22. 
Irving, Washington, 80. 
Isocrates, 77. 

J. 
Juvenal, 56, 90. 

K. 
Klenze, Camillo v., 20, 21, 22, 25, 

28, 29, 41, 42, 54, 71, 81. 

Kopisch, August, 11, 45. 

L. 
Lalande, Joseph Jerome Lefran1:ais 

de, 28, 71. 
Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis 

de, 42. 
Landor, Walter Savage, 82. 
Lenau, Nikolaus (i.e., Nikolaus 

Niembsch, Edler von Strehle-
nau), 8, 9, 70. 

Leo X (Pope), 28. 
Lescot, Mlle., see Haudebourt-Les-

cot, Antoinette Cecile Hortense. 
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1, 13, 

82. 
Lewis, Mathew Gregory ("Monk"), 

5, 82. 
Livy, 56. 
Louis XIV (king of France), 13, 

26. 
Lucan, 76. 
Lucullus, Lucius Licenius, 47. 
Ludwig I (king of Bavaria), 59. 
Lysias, 77. 

M. 
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 30. 
Manzoni, Alessandro, 29. 
Marcellus, M. Claudius, 79. 
Marshall, Roderick, 28, 82, 85. 
Martial, 45, 75. 
Matthisson, Friedrich v., 15. 
Maupassant, Guy de, 25. 
Medici, Lorenzo de', 28. 
Metastasio, Pietro Antonio Domen-

ico, 32, 33, 34, 35. 
Michaelis, Julie, 6, 70. 
Michelangelo Buonarroti, 23, 83, 

88. 
Morike, Eduard, 1, 2, 5, 6, 20, 29, 

43, 48, 72, 87. 
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, 26, 54, 

71. 
Moritz, Karl Philipp, 8, 13, 20, 81, 

82. 
Miiller, Friedrich (Maler Miiller), 

8, 87, 97. 
Miillner, Adolf, 7. 

N. 
Nepos, Cornelius, 39. 
Nero, 20. 
N esreddin Hoca, 64. 
Newton, Isaac, 23. 
Novalis (i.e., Friedrich v. Harden-

berg), 20, 42, 87. 

Penelope, 24. 
Persephone, 18. 

P. 



W AIBLINGER IN ITALY 103 

Perugino, Pietro, 14, 25, 28, 40. 
Petrarch, Francesco, 29, 31, 32, 34, 

36, 85. 
Phidias, 16. 
Pichler, Karoline, 7. 
Piozzi, Hester Lynch Thrale, 82. 
Pius VIII (Pope), 11. 
Platen, August, Graf v., 3, 8, 14, 

42. 
Plato, 77. 
Pliny, 28. 
Plutarch, 77. 
Poussin, Nicolas, 90. 
Praxiteles, 16. 
Prolss, Johannes, 44. 
Pulci, Luigi, 30. 

R. 
Radcliffe, Anne Ward, 15, 82. 
Raphael, 9, 13, 14, 16, 21, 23, 25, 

26, 83, 92, 95. 
Rapp, Moritz, 2, 8, 44, 89. 
Raupach, Ernst, 22. 
Reimer, Georg, 10. 
Reni, Guido, 13, 24, 26, 90. 
Reynolds, Joshua, 82. 
Riedesel, J. H., 41. 
Romulus, 20. 
Roscoe, William, 28. 
Rosetti, D. G., 82. 
Rossini, Gioachino Antonio, 35. 
Rousseau, J .• J., 13, 41. 
Riickert, Friedrich, 8. 
Ruland, Ilse, 3, 45, 48, 66. 
Runge, Philipp Otto, 55. 
Ruskin, John, 14. 

s. 
Saint Francis, 63. 
Sarto, Andrea del, 23, 64. 
Scheffel, Joseph Viktor v., 45. 
Schiller, Friedrich v., 28-29, 37, 82, 

87. 
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 8, 29, 30, 

34, 82, 95. 
Schlegel, Friedrich, 8, 14, 34, 82, 

97. 
Schluttig, Wilhelm, 11. 
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 8. 
Schopenhauer, Johanna, 7. 
Schultz, Franz, 15. 
Schwab, Gustav, 4, 15, 55, 77. 
Scopas, 17, 79. 
Sgricci, Tommaso, 36, 37, 63, 96. 

Shakespeare, William, 23, 29, 33. 
Silius Italicus, 71, 76. 
Sophocles, 30, 77. 
Spina, Francesco, 23, 38, 48, 49. 
Spon, Jacob, 13. 
Stael-Holstein, Anne Louise Ger-

maine (Necker), baronne de, 8, 
14, 29, 35, 38, 95, 96. 

Steinitzer, Alfred, 54. 
Stinde, Julius, 44. 
Strich, Fritz, 8. 
Symonds, J. A., 82, 83, 86. 

T. 
Taddei, Rosa, 35-37, 63, 96. 
Tasso, Torquato, 32, 36, 63, 85. 
Tenerani, Pietro, 67. 
Thorwaldsen, Albert v., 15, 16. 
Thucydides, 9. 
Tieck, Ludwig, 82. 
Timoleon, 73, 79, 80. 
Titian, 23, 84. 

u. 
Uhland, Ludwig, 55. 

v. 
Van der Velde, 7. 
Vasari, Giorgio, 84. 
Virgil, 7, 32, 71, 72, 80, 85, 96. 
Vitruvius, 28. 
Vogelweide, Walther von der, see 

Walther von der Vogelweide. 
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 87. 
Vulpius, Christian August, 5. 

w. 
Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 

14. 
Wagner, Richard, 36. 
Wagner, Theodor, 5, 19. 
Walpole, Horace, 71, 82. 
Walther von der Vogelweide, 22. 
Watteau, Jean Antoine, 41. 
Werner, Zacharias, 70, 87, 97. 
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 13, 

22, 28, 41, 49, 71, 78, 95. 
Winkler, Karl Gottfried Theodor, 

11. 

X. 
Xenophon, 77. 

z. 
Zeno, Apostolo, 33. 



104 WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 

II. Names of Places, Buildings, 
and Works of Art.I 

A. 
Abruzzi, 44, 50, 52. 
Aequa Mountains, 50, 51. 
Agrigentum, see Girgenti. 
Alban Hills, 59, 63, 73. 
Albano, 59, 65, 89. 
Albano, Lago, see Lago Albano. 
A.nagni, 51. 
Anio (river), 46. 
Apennines, 41, 47, 51, 52. 
Apollo de Belvedere, 17. 
Appian Way, 52, 96. 
Arezzo, 37. 
Ariccia, 46. 

B. 
Bandusian Fountain, 46, 47, 74, 96. 
Bellinzona, 6. 
Benevento, 42, 52. 
Bern, 9. 
Blue Grotto, 49. 
Borghese, Villa, see Villa Borghese. 
Brera (art collection, Milan), 5. 
Brindisi, 56. 

C. 
Cafe Greco (Rome), 62. 
Caffe degli Specchi (Rome), 38. 
Campania, 41. 
Campo Vaccino (Forum Roman-

um), 20, 43, 96. 
Capranica, 50. 
Capri, 44, 45. 
Cavallo, Monte, see Monte Cavallo. 
Cavo, Monte, see Monte Cavo. 
Cenis, Mont, see Mont Cenis. 
Cestius, Pyramid of, see Pyramid 

of Cestius. 
Civitella, 50, 61, 92. 
Colonna, PiazzaJ see Piazza Colon-

na. 
Colosseum, 20, 48. 
Como, Lago, see Lago Como. 
Cori, 75. 

D. 
Delphi, 72. 
Dresden Staatsgalerie, 14. 

E. 
Egeria, spring of (Nemi), 45. 

F. 
Florence, 9, 17, 27, 28, 31, 79. 
Forum Romanum, see Campo Vac-

cino. 
Frascati (and ancient Tusculum), 

46, 59, 60. 
Fuc~no, Lago, see Lago Fucino. 

G. 
Garda, Lago di, see Lago di Garda. 
Geneva, 9. 
Genoa, 9. 
Genzano, 54, 59, 65, 66, 73, 85, 86. 
Gianicolo, 63. 
Girgenti, (ancient Agrigentum), 

18, 21, 51, 53, 79, 80. 

H. 
Heilbronn, 4. 

J. 
Jupiter Stator (temple of), 76. 

L. 
Lago Albano, 43, 44, 45, 52, 73. 
Lago Como, 5. 
Lago di Garda, 47. 
Lago Fucino, 47. 
Lago Nemi, 65, 71. 
Latium, 44, 45, 50, 56, 80, 88. 
Lavinium, 51, 52. 
Licenza, 92. 
Liguria, 52. 
Lombardy, 41, 52. 
London, 7. 

M. 
Maleventum, see Benevento. 
Milan, 5. 
Minerva Medica (temple of), 49 •. 
Monreale, 22. 
Mont Cenis, 9. 
Monte Cavallo, 16. 
Monte Cavo, 52. 
Monte San Vito, 50:. 
Locarno, 5. 
Montefiascone, 9. 
Monte Testaccio (Rome), 57. 

N. 
Naples, 10, 11, 34, 42, 49, 52, 54, 

56, 67, 71. 
Nemi, 44, 45, 47. 
Nemi, Lago, see Lago Nemi. 
Neptune, grotto of (Tivoli), 47. 

0. 
Olevano, 36, 39, 47, 48, 50, 51,. 55, 

59, 62, 89. 
Ortygia (Delos), 18. 
Ostia, 97. 

1 Classical localities are entered 
under modern names (if any), with 
cross references from the ancient 
names. 



WAIBLINGER IN ITALY 105 

P. 
Palermo, 22. 
Palestrina ( ancient Praeneste), 46, 

61, 89. 
Paris, 58. 
Parthenope, 52. 
Piazza Colonna (Rome), 38. 
Piazza del Quirinale (Rome), 16. 
Piazza Rusticucci (Rome), 56. 
Piedmont, 9. 
Pisa, 9, 27. 
Pitti Gallery (Florence), 9. 
Pompeii, 74-75, 76. 
Pontine Marshes, 46, 52. 
Ponza Islands, 52. 
Praeneste, see Palestrina. 
Pyramid of Cestius, 11. 

Q. 
Quirinale, Piazza del, see Piazza 

del Quirinale. 

R. 
Reutlingen, 4. 
Rome, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 

20, 27, 33, 36, 38, 43, 44, 45, 48, 
52, 54, 55, 58, 62, 63, 65, 68, 69, 
71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 87, 88, 
92, 95, 97, 98. 

Rusticucci, Piazza, see Piazza 
Rusticucci. 

s. 
Sabine Hills, 9, 10, 36, 50, 59, 88. 
Saint Gotthard, 5, 6. 
Saint Peter's Cathedral (Rome), 

56, 89, 90, 91. 
San Carlino Theatre (Naples), 34. 
San Vito, Monte, see Monte San 

Vito. 
Sasso di Dante (Florence), 31. 
Scipios (Mausoleum of the), 19, 

27, 45, 75. 
Segni, 51. 
Sicily, 11, 17, 21, 22, 23, 41, 44, 46, 

73, 78, 79, 96. 

Siena, 9. 
Sirmio, 47. 
Soracte, 9. 
Sorrento, 44, 45, 51. 
Spezia, 42. 
Stuttgart, 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 15, 78. 
Subiaco, 52, 59. 
Susa, 9. 
Syracuse, 21, 52, 79. 

T. 
Terracina, 65. 
Testaccio, Monte, see Monte Testac-

cio. 
Thermae of Titus, 48. 
Timoleon (Villa of), 73, 80. 
Tivoli (ancient Tibur), 41, 44, 46, 

47, 51, 72. 
Tocca di Cavi, 50. 
Torre dell' Annunziata, 92. 
Trapani, 44. 
Troy, 52. 
Tiibingen, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 44, 87. 
Tuscany, 9. 
Tusculum, see Frascati. 
Tyrrhenian Sea, 52. 

u. 
Uffizi Gallery (Florence), 9. 
Drach, 4. 

v. 
Venice, 6, 33, 42. 
Venus of Milo, 17, 78. 
Venus of the Capitol, 78. 
Venus of the Medici, 79. 
Verona, 6. 
Vesuvius, 92. 
Villa Borghese (Rome), 57. 
Villa Giustiniani, 49. 
Vito, Monte San, see Monte San 

Vito. 

z. 
Zurich, 9. 



,!7IB4G9-gfifdh!


	Cover
	Wilhelm Waiblinger in Italy
	Title
	Copyright
	Dedication
	Preface
	TABLE OF CONTENTS
	Chapter
	I. Biographical Introduction
	II. Waiblinger and Italian Art
	III. Waiblinger and Italian Literature and Music
	IV. Waiblinger and the Italian Landscape
	V. Waiblinger and the Italian People
	VI. Waiblinger and Antiquity
	VII. Waiblinger and the Renaissance
	VIII. Waiblinger and Catholicism
	IX. Conclusion

	Bibliography
	Indices
	I. Names of Persons
	I. Names of Places, Buildings, and Works of Art