The Role of Pictures in the Late Baltic Enlightenment

• Authors: Kadi Polli
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Johann Wilhelm Krause's drawings and Johann Christoph Brotze's collection can be seen as storehouses of Baltic pictorial memory, which has been abundantly reproduced in 19th century Baltic German visualia, as well as in the national cultures of Latvia and Estonia – albeit from new and modified positions. What features of the Estonian and Livonian landscapes were chosen to be depicted, or what was considered to be worth depicting and therefore remembering was in turn determined by the broader conventions of the written and pictorial culture, accessible to the local intellectuals and art-amateurs thanks to the reading and pictorial revolution of the 18th century. Indirectly it can be said that, with his collection 'Sammlung ...', Brotze did the same thing that the Enlightenment-era picturesque painters (artists of the pittoresque voyage genre), who mapped the peripheral areas of Europe or faraway civilisations, and who, with their classical pictorial compositions, provided the Europeans with a discernible face. The drawings of Brotze, as well as those of his co-authors Krause and Grass, depicted Livonia and Estonia through the eyes of enlightened Europeans. They placed value on the picturesque castle ruins, introduced the coats of arms and family trees of the local German nobility; they presented the history and buildings of the Lutheran Church, the architecture of the cities and nature of the landscape, and the ethnic and social composition of the population.

Keywords

EN

VISUAL CULTURE; BALTIC ENLIGHTENMENT; AMATEUR DRAWINGS; JOHANN CHRISTOPH BROTZE; JOHANN WILHELM KRAUSE

• Publisher: Institute of Art History of the Latvian Academy of Art and Art History Research Support Foundation
• Journal: Makslas Vesture un Teorija
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 18
• Pages: 18-33

Contributors

author

Kadi Polli

• Art History Department, Institute of History and Archaeology, University of Tartu, Ülikooli 18, 50090 Tartu, Estonia