Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
Goethe in the Roman Campagna
1787
Painted by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein in Rome in 1787, 'Goethe in the Roman Campagna' is the defining portrait of Enlightenment Europe. Dressed in a long grey travelling cloak, the young Goethe reclines on a fallen block in the Roman campagna, gazing out at the classical landscape; at his feet lie fragments of an Egyptian obelisk and a relief of Iphigenia — direct references to the Italian journey that reshaped his aesthetics. The picture condenses the moment German Romanticism began to rediscover antiquity through him and remains the most reproduced German painting in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
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Image source: Wikimedia Commons