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SCHINKEL, KARL FRIEDRICH. 



SCHINKEL, KARL FRIEDRICH. 



What distinguished Schiller, and made him the idol of all his 

 nation, was a fine rushing enthusiasm, an exalted love of mankind, and 

 an earnest faith in ideal excellence. Schiller could paint little except 

 himself; but this personality, as in the case of Rousseau and Byron, is 

 one of the causes of his success. All his women are formed from one 

 type. Amalia, Leonora, Louisa, Thekla, Isabella, &c., gentle, loving, 

 affectionate beings, with little individuality, but always surrounded 

 by the halo of a poet's ideal love. The exceptions to this are his 

 meretricious women (Julia, Lady Milford, Princess von Eboli, and 

 Agnes Sorrel are all of one type), -and Joanna d'Arc, who is In- 

 spiration personified. His men are either villains, lay figures, or himself. 

 This want of pliancy of imagination is a consequence of his exclusively 

 subjective tendency, and he has no comedy for the same reason. 

 On this head wo may contrast him with Gothe, whose objective tend- 

 ency enabled him to look out upon nature, and reflect as a mirror the 

 whole universe of things. Schiller was consequently deficient in two 

 essential qualities of a great dramatist, that intellectual faculty which 

 enables the poet to go out of himself, and speak through his characters 

 as they would speak and feel ; and the power of selecting a few hints 

 to typify a character, and of avoiding all extraneous matters. Shak- 

 spere and Gothe are the two models of dramatic writing in reference 

 to the faculty of lightly touching on every subject without exhausting 

 it. Schiller always exhausts, and hence the length and occasional 

 tediousuess of his dialogue ; he leaves nothing to the imagination. 

 So with his pathos; he is not pathetic, because he dwells on the 

 minutest points of suffering till our sensibility, unrelieved by the 

 imagination, remains deadened and drowsy. Schiller says of himself 

 that he had not Gothe's manifold richness of ideas, but that his great 

 endeavour was to make as much as possible out of a few. This is in 

 other words admitting his subjective and personal constitution. As a 

 consequence he is obliged to work out his problems by means of 

 violent contrasts, instead of evolving them from their own bases; thus 

 Posa must be contrasted' with Philip; Wurm and the President with 

 Ferdinand ; Karl von Moor with Franz ; Wallenstein with Octavio ; 

 Protestantism with Roman Catholicism in ' Mary Stuart ; ' Repub- 

 licans with the Doge in ' Fiesco.' This is the strong use of light and 

 shade by a Rembrandt, rather than the dramatic composition of a 

 Raffaelle. Schiller's lyrics are the most perfect of his poems, because 

 in them his own feelings only came into play. He has been called the 

 ^Eschylus of Germany, with that blind designation which, seeing two 

 points of resemblance (both being dramatists, and the most admired 

 of their time), instantly concludes the resemblance of the whole. If 

 compared to any one, it should be to Euripides, whom he resembles 

 in his exhaustive, aphoristic, and rhetorical modes of writing : but he 

 has an intensity and an earnestness which Euripides never had. His 

 verses are in every mouth ; his memory is revered ; and his works, in 

 spite of their defects, contain the purest spirit of poetry, which the 

 world will not willingly let die. 



SCHINKEL, KARL FRIEDRICH, in the opinion of his own 

 countrymen the great architectural artist of his age, and whose name 

 has obtained European and permanent celebrity, was born on the 13th 

 of March 1781, at Neu-Ruppin in Brandenburg, where his father was 

 ' super-intend ent.' When only six years old he lost his father, and 

 was placed by his mother in the Gymnasium of his native town, 

 where he remained till the age of fourteen, when he removed to 

 Berlin. Soon afterwards an opportunity presented itself of becoming 

 a pupil of the elder Gilly (David Gilly, born 1745, died 1808), a 

 clever practical man in his profession, and author of several works on 

 subjects relating to it. Hardly could he have been more fortunately 

 placed ; for about a twelvemonth afterwards, the younger Gilly 

 (Friedrich) returned from his travels with an imagination warmed by 

 his recent studies, and from him it was that Schinkel derived his best 

 instruction, and, together with an ardent relish for his art, more 

 liberal and enlightened ideas of its powers as a fine art than were 

 generally entertained in those days, when a system of mere routine 

 both in theory and practice prevailed almost universally. Friedrich 

 Gilly was a truly genial mind, who was ambitious of elevating archi- 

 tecture to the level of the other arts of design, and to bring it into 

 immediate contact with them, whereas it was then, and perhaps now 

 is, too much regarded as one entirely apart from and independent of 

 them. What Gilly himself would have achieved in his profession can 

 only be conjectured, for he died within two years after his return, in 

 August 1800, before he had completed his thirtieth year, leaving 

 Schinkel to inherit the fame that might else perhaps have been divided 

 between them. 



Although so young, Schinkel had been intrusted by Gilly to super- 

 intend the execution of some of his buildings, and after his death, he 

 continued the engagements. Having acquired such proficiency in 

 practice, it would not have been difficult for him to have adhered to 

 that course under others in the profession, and in the course of time 

 establish himself in business : but he preferred pursuing his theoretical 

 and artistic studies; during which time he turned his exercises in 

 them to account by making designs of various ornamental articles for 

 modellers, metal-workers, and other artisans of that class. Out of 

 such earnings he laid by sufficient to enable him to accomplish his 

 cherished scheme of a pilgrimage to the " holy land of art." In 1803 

 he set out for Italy, first visiting Dresden, Prague, and Vienna; and 

 after extending his route to Naples and Sicily, returned to Berlin in 



BIOG. DIV. VOL. v. 



the spring of 1805. But there the state of things was at that juncture 

 anything but propitious to art, more especially architecture, to which 

 the state of public affairs in 180C and following years threatened a 

 complete stoppage. He turned to landscape-painting, therefore, as an 

 occupation and a resource, making use of the studies of scenery which 

 he brought home from Italy, and embellishing his compositions with 

 architectural accessories, or else making the architecture the principal 

 and the landscape the accessorial portion of the subject. One work of 

 note and which gained him distinction with the public was a large 

 panorama of Palermo ; and he also designed for the theatre many sets 

 of scenes, a collection of which, including those for the Zauberflote, 

 Die Braut von Messina, &c., were afterwards published in a series of 

 coloured engravings, whereby they are rescued from the usual fate of 

 similar productions of the pencil His various artistical labours during 

 this period were beneficial to him in his after-career, serving as they 

 did to call forth and exercise those two faculties in which those who 

 are otherwise able architects are generally deficient taste and imagina- 

 tion. Even had they been serviceable to him in no other respect, 

 they were eminently so in recommending him to the king, who, as 

 soon as restored tranquillity in public affairs permitted him to turn his 

 attention to the improvement and embellishment of his capital, began 

 to employ Schinkel on those structures which have stamped a new 

 aspect on Berlin, and conferred on it a high architectural character. 



One of the earliest commissions of importance which he received 

 from the king (who was then in London with the allied sovereigns) 

 was to make designs for a national cathedral intended to commemorate 

 the pacification of 1'urope ; but though the architect's ideas excited 

 great admiration, the scheme itself was dropt. Whatever the dis- 

 appointment may have been at first, he had no time to dwell upon it, 

 for from the period of 1815 he was incessantly and most actively 

 engaged. Among his earliest buildings were the Hauptwache, Theatre, 

 and Museum at Berlin, all of them treated in a pure Hellenic style 

 a style which had only been hinted at in such previous attempts at 

 correct Grecian architecture as Langhans's once celebrated ' Branden- 

 burg Gate.' The facade of the Museum more especially displays, 

 together with severe simplicity of outline, a fulness of refined ornate- 

 ness unknown to and uuthought of for any previous modern example 

 which is called Greek. The external elevation consists of merely a 

 single line of eighteen columns in autis (Erechtheum Ionic) raised on 

 a lofty stylobate, in the centre of which is a flight of steps, inclosed by 

 pedestal walls (in continuation of the stylobate) and forming the 

 ascent to the colonnade. Taken by itself however, there would be 

 nothing very remarkable in the general idea, whereas an extraordinary 

 degree and kind also of variety and effect are given to the whole by 

 the inner elevation or background behind the outer row of columns; 

 which presents in the centre portion of it a second colonnade (four 

 columns in antis), with a screen-wall rising about half of its height, 

 and above and beyond that the upper part of the open staircase, 

 whereby the whole composition acquires singular movement and play 

 both of perspective and light and shade; besides which the wall forming 

 the rest of this inner elevation, instead of being left a blank surface, 

 or nearly so, is completely decorated from top to bottom, the upper 

 division of it on each side of that inner colonnade being filled up by a 

 single large fresco, the cartoons or designs for which were prepared 

 by Schinkel himself, and have been executed under the direction of 

 Cornelius. 



Schinkel's ideas are exhibited to us in his ' Entwiirfe,' an unusually 

 full and extensive series of designs of all his principal buildings, some 

 of which are illustrated and explained far less sparingly than is the 

 custom in similar collections ; for besides ornamental details, many of 

 them strikingly original as well as tasteful, perspective views interior 

 as well as exterior, and different ones of the same building are given ; 

 besides which, the engravings themselves are illustrated by the infor- 

 mation contained in the letter-press. The publication of his designs 

 contributed no doubt to spread Schinkel's fame much more rapidly 

 than would otherwise have been the case ; and the work is one that 

 forms a very complete gallery of his unusually numerous and no less 

 varied architectural productions. With such ready materials, a de- 

 scriptive catalogue of his buildings might be easily drawn up, but we 

 can merely mention a few of them : the Werder Kirche (Gothic), Bau- 

 schule, and Observatory, at Berlin ; the Theatre at Hamburg ; Schloss 

 Krzescowice, Charlbttenhof, and the Nicolai Kirche at Potsdam, which 

 last would have been a most imposing structure had the design been, 

 carried out, instead of being cut down altogether by the omission of 

 the cupola. His ' Eutwurfe ' also contains his design for the Sing- 

 Academie at Berlin one of his happiest ideas, which was unfortu- 

 nately set aside for that by Ottmer [OTTMER, K. T.] ; and six several 

 designs for a monument to Frederick the Great, in which he gave free 

 scope to his imagination, and indulged in luxuriant architectural pom p. 

 Another publication, entitled ' Werke der Hoheren Baukuust," gives 

 us a series of designs by him for the Palace at Athens, which he pro- 

 posed to erect upou the Acropolis, forming an irregular assemblage of 

 courts, colonnades, and buildings, some of which, especially one magni- 

 ficent saloon, would have been marked by originality of character as 

 well as by striking effect. His design was much superior to that by 

 Klenze, which is also published among those of the latter architect s ; 

 but neither of them was adopted : the present barrack-like edifice is 

 from the design of Giirtner. Another remarkable project of Schinkel s 



