The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In our last lecture we showed the period of Art which finally merged into that of the great masters of the Renaissance. We ended by revealing the connecting threads in the artistic world of feeling, which finally led up to what was so wondrously united in Leonardo, in Michangelo and in Raphael. Yet at the same time, in these three masters we must also see the starting point of the new age, in an artistic sense. It is the dawn of the 5th post-Atlantean age, which is heralded in the realm of Art. All three were living, at the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean age. Leonardo was born in 1452, Michelangelo in 1475 and Raphael in 1483; Leonardo dies in 1519, Raphael in 1520, and Michelangelo in 1564. Here we find ourselves at the starting point of the new age. At the same time, something is contained in these artists which we must undoubtedly regard as a culmination of the spiritual stream of preceding ages, inasmuch as they poured their impulses into the realm of Art. It is true, my dear friends, that in our time people have little understanding for what is important in this respect, for in our time—I do not say this as mere criticism—art has been far too much expelled from the spiritual life as a whole. It is even considered a failing of the historian or critic, if he seeks once more to give Art its place in the spiritual life as a whole. People say that our attention is thus diverted unduly from the artistic or aesthetic impulses as such, attaching an excessive value to the content, to the subject-matter, and yet, this need not be the case at all. Indeed, it is only in our own time that this distinction has acquired so much importance. It had no such direct significance in former epochs—epochs when the artistic understanding was more developed in the ordinary common sense of the people. We must not forget how much has been done to extirpate a true artistic understanding by all the atrocities which have been placed before the human mind of men in recent times, by way of pictorial representation and the like. True understanding for the manner of representation has been lost. European humanity, in a certain sense, no longer cares how a given subject-matter is presented to it. In wide circles, artistic understanding has to a large extent been lost.

Speaking of former epochs, and especially of the epoch to which we are now referring, we may truly say artists such as Raphael, Michelango and Leonardo were by no means one-sidedly artistic, but carried in their souls the whole of the spiritual life of their time and created out of this. In saying this, I do not mean that they borrowed their subject-matter from the spiritual life of their time. I mean far more than this. Into the specifically artistic quality of their creation, in form and colouring, there flowed the specific quality of the world-conception of that time. In our time, a world-conception is a collection of ideas which can, of course, be represented in sculpture or in painting and it is frequently embodied, needless to say, in forms and colours and the like which to the true artistic sense will nevertheless be an atrocity. In this respect, unfortunately, we must repeatedly utter warnings, even within our anthroposophical stream of evolution. The feeling for what is truly artistic is not always prevalent among us. I still remember with a shudder how at the beginning of the theosophical movement in Germany a man once came to me in Berlin, bringing with him reproductions of a picture he had painted. The subject was: Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. It is true there sat a huddled figure under a tree, but the man—if you will pardon me the apt expression—understood as little of Art as an ox, having eaten grass throughout the week, understands of Sunday. He simply thought, here is the subject; let us paint it, and it will represent a work of Art. Of course, it represented something. Namely, he who imagined the scene to himself—“Buddha under the Bodhi Tree”—could see it so, no doubt. But there was absolutely no reason why such a thing should ever have been painted.

It is a very different thing when we say of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, that they bore within them the whole way of feeling which permeated the Italian civilisation of their time. For this civilisation entered livingly into the artistic quality of their work, into their whole manner of presentation; nor can we fully understand these artists if we have no feeling for the civilisation in the midst of which they lived. Today, indeed, people believe the most extraordinary things. They will believe, for instance, that a man can build a Gothic church even if he has not the remotest notion of High Mass. Of course, he cannot do so in reality. Or they believe that one can paint the Trinity even if one has no feeling for what is intended to be living in it. In this way, Art is expelled from its living connection with the spiritual life as a whole. At the same time, on the other hand, people fail to understand the artistic element as such, imagining that with aesthetic views and feelings which happen to be prevalent today they can set to work and ciriticise Raphael or Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose whole way of feeling was quite different. It was only natural (though I should need many hours to say in full what should be said on this point), it was only natural for them to be living in the whole way of feeling of their time. We cannot understand their creative work unless we understand the character which Christianity had assumed at the time when these artists blossomed forth. You need only remember that at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century Italian Christianity witnessed the rise even among the Popes, of men who truly cannot be said to have satisfied even the most rudimentary demands of morality, nor need one be in any way a pietist to say so. And, of course, the whole army of priests were of like character. The idea that a specific moral impulse must be living in what goes by the name of “Christian” had been lost sight of, comparatively speaking. And when in later times it emerged again—in pietist and moralising forms, by no means identical with what I described the other day when speaking of St. Francis,—it was imbued with quite a different feeling of Christianity than inspired those who lived, for instance, under an Alexander VI, a Julius II or a Leo X. If, on the other hand, we consider the Christian traditions, the concepts and ideas (and when I say ideas I include “Imaginations”) connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, we find them still living in the souls with an intensity of which the man of today has little notion. Human souls lived in the ideas connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, as in a world that was their very own, and they saw Nature herself in the midst of this same world. We need but call to mind: In that time, even for the most educated, this Earth, of which the Western half was still unknown (or was only just begining to be known and was not fully really reckoned with),—this Earth was the centre of the whole Universe. Going down beneath the surface of the Earth, one found a subterranean kingdom; going but a little way above, a super-earthly. We might almost say, it was as though a man only need lift his arm, to grasp with his hand the feet of the heavenly beings. Heaven still penetrated down into the earthly element. Such was the conception—a harmony, an interplay of the spiritual above and the Earth beneath it, with the world of the senses which contained mankind. Even their view of Nature was in this spirit.

Those, however, among whom we find the three great masters of the Renaissance were striving forth from yonder age. And the one who harbours within him, as in a seed, all that came forth since then—nay, much that is still destined to come forth,—that one is Leonardo. The soul of Leonardo was equally inclined to the feelings of the former time and of the latter. His soul had most decidedly a Janus head. By his education, by the habits of his life, by all that he had seen, he lived with his feelings still in the olden time. Yet he had a mighty impulse to that conception of the world which only came forth in the succeeding centuries. He had an impulse, not so much towards its width as to its depth. From various indications in my other lectures, you know that the Greeks—and even the men of later times during the 4th Post-Atlantean age—knew life quite differently than we do,—that is to say, out of a different source of knowledge. The sculptor, for example, knew the human figure from within—from a perception of the forces that were at work within himself, the forces which we today describe in Anthroposophy as the etheric. Out of this inner feeling of the human figure the Greek artist created. In course of time this faculty was lost. Another faculty now had to appear: the power to take hold of things with outward vision. Man felt impelled to feel and understand external Nature. I showed you last time, how Francis of Assisi was among the first who sought to perceive Nature through a deep life of feeling. Now Leonardo was the first who endeavoured in a wider sense to add to this feeling of Nature, a conscious understanding of Nature. Because it was no longer given to him, as to the men of former ages, to trace from within outward the forces that are at work in man, he tried to know these things by contemplation from without. He tried to know by outward vision what could no longer be made known by inward feeling. An understanding of Nature as against a feeling for Nature: this is what distinguishes Leonardo da Vinci from Francis of Assisi, and this determines the whole constitution of his spirit. He was all out to understand. And though we need not take it word for word—for the sources, as a rule, relate only the current legends—nevertheless, the legends themselves were founded upon fact, and there is truth in it when we are told how Leonardo took especial pains to study characteristic faces, so that by dint of outward contemplation the working of the formative forces of the human organism might become his own inner experience. Often he would follow a character about for days and days, so that the human being might become as if transparent to him, revealing how the inner being works into the outer form. Yes, there is truth in this,—and that he invited peasants to his house and set before them tasty dishes or told them stories, so that their faces assumed every possible expression of laughter and contortion and he could study them. All this is founded upon fact. And when he had to paint a Medusa he brought all manner of toads and reptiles into his studio, to study the characteristic animal faces. These are legendary anecdotes; and yet they truly indicate how Leonardo had to seek, to discover the mysterious creation of Nature's forces. For Leonardo was truly a man who sought to understand Nature. He tried in an even wider sense to understand the forces of Nature as they play their part in human life. He was no mere artist in the narrower sense of the word; the artist in him grew out of the whole man, standing in the very midst of the turning-point of time. The church of San Giovanni in Florence had sunk a little, owing to a subsidence of the soil. He wished to raise it again—a task that could easily be carried out today; but in that time such a thing was considered absolutely hopeless. He wanted to have it raised bodily, as it stood. Nowadays, as has justly been observed, it would only be a question of the cost; in his time it was an idea of genius, for no one beside Leonardo thought such a thing was possible. He also thought of constructing machines whereby men would be able to fly through the air; and of irrigating great areas of swamp. He was an engineer, a mechanic, a musician, a cultured man in social intercourse, a scientist according to his time. He constructed apparatus so unheard-of in that age that no one else could make anything of them. What poured into his artist's hand was working, therefore, from a many-sided understanding of the world. Of Leonardo we can truly say, he bore his whole Age within him, even as it came to expression in the profound external changes which were then enacted in Italy. Leonardo's whole life—his artistic life included—bears the stamp of this his fundamental character. In spite of the fact that he grew out of the Italian environment, he was not altogether at home there. True, he was a Florentine, but he spent only his youth in Florence, and then went on to Milan, having been summoned thither by the Duke Ludovico Sforza—sommoned by no means (as we might naively imagine) as the great artist whom we recognise in him today, but as a kind of court entertainer. From the skull of a horse, Leonardo constructed an instrument of music, from which he enticed various notes, and was thus able with great humour to entertain the ducal house. We need not say that he was intended as a kind of “fool,” but as an entertainer to amuse the Court, most certainly. The works of Art which he produced in Milan, to which we shall presently refer, were certainly created out of the very deepest impulse of his own being. But he had not been summoned to the Court of the Sforza's for this purpose; and though he entered well into all the life at Milan, we find him afterwards, on his return to Florence, working at a battle-picture, intended to glorify a victory over Milan. Then we see him end his life at the French Court.

The one dominating impulse in Leonardo is to see and feel what interests the human being of his time; the political events, complicated as they were, more or less swept past him. He only skimmed off them, as it were, the uppermost and human layer. Indeed, in many respects he rather gives us the impression of an adventurer, albeit one endowed with colossal genius. He bears his whole Age within him; and out of this feeling of his Age as a whole, his creations arise. We shall present them not in chronological but in a freely chosen order, for in Leonardo the main point is to see how he creates out of a single impulse, and for this reason the chronological sequence is less important.

An altogether different nature, though possessing the characteristics of the Renaissance in common with him, was Michelangelo. If we can say of Leonardo that he bore the whole forces of his time within him (and for this very reason often came into disharmony with it and remained misunderstood, just because he understood it in its depths, in the forces that only found their way to the surface during later centuries), of Michelangelo, on the other hand, we may say: he bore within him, above all, the Florence of his time. What was the Florence of his time? It was, in a sense, a true concentration of the existing order of the world. This Florence he bore within him. Unlike Leonardo, he did not stand remote from political affairs. The complicated political events around him—and the whole world-order of that time played into these politics—entered again and again into the soul of Michelangelo. And when again and again he went to Rome, he bore his Florence with him, and painting and sculpting a Florentine element into the Roman setting. Leonardo bore a universal feeling into the works he created; Michelangelo carried a Florentine feeling into Rome. As an artist he achieved a kind of spiritual conquest over Rome, making Florence arise again in Rome.

Thus Michelangelo entered intensely into all that was taking place through the political conditions in Florence during his long life. We see this in the succession of his life-periods. As a young man, when his career was only just beginning, he witnessed the reign of the great Medici, whose favourite he was, and by whose favour he was enabled to partake in all that the Florence of that time could offer to a man's spiritual life. Whatever of ancient Art and artistry was then available, Michelangelo studied it under the protectorate of the Medici; and it was here that he produced his earliest work. Indeed, he loved his protector, and grew together in his own soul with the soul-nature of the Medici. But presently he had to realise that the sons of his patron were of quite a different kind. He who had done so much for Florence—out of an ambitious disposition, it is true, yet cultivating largesse and freedom—died in 1492; and his sons proved themselves more or less common tyrants. Michelangelo had to experience this change in comparatively early youth. Whereas at the beginning of his career the mercantile spirit of the Medici had allowed free play to Art, he must now witness this mercantile spirit itself masquerading as a political spirit, and striving towards tyranny. Yes, he witnessed on a small scale the rise in Florence of what was afterwards to take hold of all the world. It was a terrible experience for him, and yet not unconnected with the whole surrounding world of the new Age. It was now that he first went to Rome, and we may say: In Rome he mourns the loss of what he has experienced as the true greatness of Florence. We can even recognise how the plastic quality of his work is connected with this great change in his feelings: Into the very line we notice what the political changes in Florence had brought about in his soul. Any one who has a deeper feeling for such things will see in the Pieta in the Vatican a work which in the last resort is born out of the mourning soul of Michelangelo—Michelangelo mourning for the city of his fathers.

Then, when better times returned and he went back to Florence, he stood once more under a new impression. He felt uplifted in his soul,—Freedom had entered into Florence once again. He poured out this new feeling into the indescribably great figure of his David. It is not the traditional David of the Bible. It is the protest of free Florence against the encroaching principle of “great powers,” of mighty States. Its colossal character is connected with this very feeling.

Again, when he was summoned by Pope Julius to decorate the Sistine Chapel, now in a far fuller sense than before, he bore his Florence with him into Rome. What was it that he bore with him? It was a whole world-conception, of which we can say that it shows the rise of the new age, just as truly as we can say, on the other hand, that in the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, representing the creation of the World and the great process of Biblical history, we have the twilight of an ancient world-conception. Thus Michelangelo carries with him a whole world to Rome,—carries with him something that could never have arisen at that time in Rome itself, but that could only arise in Florence: the idea of one mighty cosmic process with all the Prophetic gifts and Sibylline faculties of man. You will find further explanations on these things in earlier lectures. These inner connections could only be felt and realised in Florence. What Michelangelo experienced through all the spiritual life that had reached its height in the Florence of that time, cannot, in truth, be felt today, unless we transplant ourselves through Spiritual Science into former epochs. Hence the usual histories of Art contain so many absurdities at this point. A man can only create as Michelangelo created if he believes in these things and lives in their midst. It is easy for a man to say that he will paint the world's creation. Many a modern artist would credit himself, no doubt, with this ability,—but one who has true feeling will not be able to assent. No one can paint the evolution of the world who does not live in it, like Michelangelo, with all his being.

But when he returned once more to Florence, he was already driven, after all, by the new stream, which—to put it bluntly—replaces the sacramental by the commercial character. True, he was destined still to create the most wonderful works, in the Medici Chapel. But in the background of this undertaking was an element which could not but inspire him with melancholy feelings. The purpose was the glorification of the Medici. It was they who mattered,—who in the meantime had become powerful, albeit less in Florence than in the rest of Italy. Then once more the political changes drove him back. The betrayal of the Malatestas, their penetration into Florence, drove him back again to Rome. And now he painted, as it were, into the Last Judgment, the protest of a Florentine, the great protest of humanity, of the human individual against all that would oppose it. Hence the real human greatness of his Last Judgment, the greatness which it undoubtedly breathed forth, as it proceeded from his hand. For now, also, parts of it have been completely spoiled.

But he still had to undergo experiences which entered very, very deep into all the impulses of feeling in his soul. How many events had he not experienced, how much did they not signify for the development of his picture of the world: For the things I have indicated were of great importance to him. They may be taken abstractly today, but in the soul of Michelangelo they worked without a doubt as very deep soul-impulses. But we must add that I have mentioned the fact that he witnessed, too, the great change which came over Florence through the appearance of Savonarola. This was a protest within the life of the Church against what was characteristic of that time in Christianity. So free an Art as was developed in Leonardo and in many others like him could only unfold in this way inasmuch as the ideas of Christianity were lifted out of their context and taken by themselves. I mean the ideas connected with the Mystery of Golgotha—the conception of the Trinity, of the Last Supper, of the connection between the earthly and the spiritual realms, and so forth. All these conceptions, lifted right out of the moral element, assumed a free imaginative character which the artist dealt with at his pleasure, treating it like any worldly subject, with the only difference that it contained, of course, the sacred figures. These things had been objectified, loosed from the moral element; and thus the Christian thought, loosed from the moral element, slid over by and by into a purely artistic sphere. All this took place quite as a matter of course, and the gradual elimination of the moral element was a natural concomitant of the whole process. Savonarola represents the great protest against this elimination of the moral element. Savonarola appears; it is the protest of the moral life against an Art that was free of morals,—I do not say, void of morals, but free. Indeed, we must study Savonarola's will if we would understand in Michelangelo himself what was due to Savonarola's influence.

But this was not all. You must imagine Michelangelo as a man who in his inmost heart and mind could never think in any other than a Christian way. He not only felt as a Christian; he conceived the order of the World in mighty pictures, in the Christian sense. Imagine him placed in the midst of that time, when the Christian conceptions had, as it were, become objectified and could thus slide so easily into the realms of Art. Such was the world in which he lived. But he experienced withal the Northern protest of the Reformation, which spread with comparative speed, even to Italy; and he also witnessed the great and revolutionary change which was accomplished from the Catholic side as a counter-Reformation, against the Reformation. He experienced the Rome of his time,—a time whose moral level may not have been high, but in which there were free and independent spirits, none the less, who were decidedly agreed to give a new form to Catholicism. They did not want to go so far as Savonarola, nor did they want it to assume the form which afterwards came forth in the Reformation. They wanted to change and recreate Catholicism by continuous progress and development. Then the Reformation burst in like another edition, so to speak, of the Savonarola protest. Rome was seized with anxiety and fear, and they parted from what had pulsated through their former life. Michelangelo among others had built his hopes on such ideas as were concentrated, for example, in Vittoria Colonna, hoping to permeate with high ethical principles what had reached so great a height in Art. With a Catholicism morally recreated and renewed, they hoped to permeate the world once more. Now, however, there arose the great Roman powers, the strong Catholic ideas, the Jesuitical principle, and Paul IV became the Pope. What Michelangelo was now to witness must have been terrible for him, for he saw the seeds of an absolute break with what had still been known to him as Christianity. It was the beginning of Jesuitical Christianity. And so he entered on the twilight of his life.

Michelangelo, as I said, had carried Florence into Rome. With Raphael once again it was different. Of Raphael we may say, he carried Urbino—East-Central Italy to Rome. Here we come to that strange magic atmosphere whose presence we feel when we contemplate the minor artists of that region whence Raphael grew forth. Consider the creations of these artists—the sweet and tender faces, the characteristic postures of the feet, the attitude of the figures. We might describe it thus: Here there arose artistically somewhat later what had arisen earlier in a moralising and ascetic sphere in Francis of Assisi. It enters here into artistic feeling and creation, and leaves a strangely magic atmosphere—this tenderness in contemplating man and Nature. In Raphael it is a native quality, and he continues to express it through his life. This is the feeling which he carries into Rome; it flows from his creations into our hearts and minds if we transplant ourselves into the character they once possessed, for as pictures they have to a great extent been spoilt.

What Raphael thus bears within his soul, having evolved in the lonely country of Urbino, stnads, as it were, alone within the time; and yet taking its start from Raphael, it spread far and wide into the civilisation of mankind. It is as though Raphael with this element were carried everywhere upon the waves of time, and wheresoever he goes he makes it felt—this truly artistic expression of the Christian feeling. This element is everywhere poured out over the influence of Raphael.

Summing up, therefore, we may say: Leonardo lives in the midst of a large and universal understanding. He strikes us, stings us, as it were, into awakeness with his keen World-understanding. Michelangelo lives in the policical understanding of his time; this becomes the dominant impulse of his feeling. Raphael, on the other hand, remaining more or less untouched by all these things, is borne, as it were, upon the waves of time, and bears into the evolution of the ages a well-nigh inexpressible quality of Christian Art. This, then, distinguishes and at once unites the three great masters of the Renaissance; they represent three elements of the Renaissance feeling, as it appears to us historically.

Let us now give ourselves up to the impressions of Leonardo's works. We will first show some of his drawings, which reveal how he creates his forms out of that keen understanding of Nature which I sought to characterise just now. Thereafter, not quite in the historic order, we shall show those of his pictures which have the character of portraits. Only then will we go on to his chief creation, the “Last Supper,” Finally, we shall return and show him once more at his real starting-point. The first picture is a well-known Self-portrait.

This, then, is one of Leonardo's portraits. There follows the other one, still better known.

Here we have a picture from an early period of his development, showing how Leonardo grew out of the School of Verrocchio. Tradition has it that the finely elaborated landscape round this figure here was painted by Leonardo in the School of Verrocchio, and that Verrocchio, seeing what Leonardo could achieve, laid down his brush and would paint no more.

Here, again, you see how Leonardo drew—how he tried, even to the point of caricature, to extract the characteristic features by dint of studious contemplation, as I described just now.

We need not imagine that he stood alone in things like this; they had, indeed, been done by others in his time. Leonardo only stands out through his extraordinary genius, but it was altogether a quest of the time—this search for the strong characteristic features, as against what had come forth in earlier times from higher vision and had grown a mere tradition. It was characteristic of that time to seek for what appears directly to external vision, and thus bring out with emphasis whatever in the outward features of a being is most significant of individual character.

Far more important than the subject-matter, the point was to study and portray with precision the positions of the bones and so forth.

This is the portrayal of a thunderstorm.

The two pictures we now show are not attributed to him with certainty, nor are some others which we shall see presently, but they bear the character of Leonardo and are therefore not without connection.

In this famous picture we see the other aspect of Leonardo, where we might say he seeks to attain the very opposite pole from what was illustrated in the former sketches. There he tried to discover and bring out with emphasis the individual and characteristic in all details. People will often not believe that an artist who can create such a work as the Mona Lisa has any need of going in the other direction to the point of caricature. I have, however, often drawn attention to this fact. Think of the inherently natural impulse whereby our friend the Poet, Christian Morgenstern, went from his sublime, serene creations to the humorous poems with which we are familiar, where he seeks the very extremes of caricature. There is this inner connection in the artist's soul. If he desires to create a work so inwardly complete, harmonious, serene as this, he often has to seek the faculties he needs for such creation by emphasising characteristic individual features even to the point of caricature.

These pictures, which, as I said, are not in historic order, represent Leonardo in the quality of an artist seeking for inner clarity, completeness and perfection.

Here is the Dionysos figure, the God Dionysos. You will find indications on these matters in various other lectures. The painting is based on proven designs and sketches of Leonardo da Vinci. However, it is believed that it was carried out by an unknown student from the workshop of Leonardo and between 1683 and 1693 it was modified and painted to represent Bacchus.

We now come to the Last Supper—which he created, it is true, at an earlier time, and worked upon during a long period. We have often spoken of it. We know what an essential progress in the artistic power of expression is visible in this picture as against the earlier pictures of the Last Supper by Ghirlandajo and others. Observe the life in this picture; see how strongly the individual characters come out in spite of the powerful unity of composition. This is the new thing in Leonardo. The adaptation of the strong individual characters to the composition as a whole is truly wonderful. At the same time each of the four groups of disciples becomes a triad complete and self-contained; and, again, each of these triads is marvellously placed into the whole. The colour and lighting are inexpressibly beautiful. I spoke once before of the part of the colouring in this composition. Here we look deep into the mysterious creative powers of Leonardo. If we try to feel the colours of the picture as a whole, we feel they are distributed in such a way as to supplement one another,—not actually as complementary colours, but in a similar way,—so much so that when we look at the whole picture at once, we have pure light—the colours together are pure light. Such is the colouring in this picture.

We now come to the details of the picture. This is generally considered to be an earlier attempt at the Head of Christ. These reproductions are familiar.

This is Morghan's engraving, from which we gain a more accurate conception of the composition than from the present picture at Milan, which is so largely ruined. You are, of course, familiar with the fate of this picture, of which we have so often spoken.

This is a very recent engraving,—a reproduction which reveals the most minute study. It is frequently admired and yet, perhaps, for one who loves the original as a work of art, it leads too far afield into a sphere of minute and detailed drawing. Still we may recognise in this an independent artistic achievement of considerable beauty.

Here we have a fragment of the battle picture projected by Leonardo, which I mentioned a short while ago.

We will now go on to Michelangelo. Considering Leonardo once again, you will see there is something in him which comes out especially when, instead of taking the chronological order, which is in any case a little uncertain, we take his work in groups, as we have done just now. Then we see clearly what different streams are living in him. The one, which comes out especially in his Last Supper, aims at a peculiar quality of composition combined with an intense delineation of character. It stands apart and alongside of that other tendency in which he does not seek this kind of composition. This other _stream we find expressed in the pictures in the Louvre, and at St, Petersburg and London, which we showed before the Last Supper. It might have come forth at any time; one feels it is almost by chance that the pictures of this kind do not exist from every period in his life. That which comes to expression in these pictures is in no way reminiscent of the peculiar composition in the Last Supper, but aims at a serene composition while seeking to express individual character to a moderate extent.

We now come to Michelangelo. To begin with, his portrait of himself.

Here we have Michelangelo before he reached his independence, working in Florence, perhaps under the influence of Signorelli and others, still, in fact, a pupil.

And now we think of Michelangelo moving to Rome for the first time, under all the influences which I described just now.

Look at this picture and then at the following one; compare the feeling in the two.

Look at this work. Undoubtedly it is created under the feeling of his coming to Rome. A more or less tragic element, a certain sublime pessimism pervades it. Let us return once more to the former one, and you will see the two creations are very similar in their artistic character. They express the same shade of feeling in Michelangelo. We now return once more to the Pieta.

People who feel the story more than the artistic quality as such have often said that the Madonna, for the situation in which she is here portrayed, is far too young. This arose out of a belief which was still absolutely natural in that time and lived in the soul of Michelangelo himself:—the belief that owing to her virgin nature the Madonna never assumed the features of old age.

Here you have the work of which we spoke before. The figure strikes us most of all by its colossal quality, not in the external sense, but a quality mysteriously hidden in its whole artistic treatment.

We now come to the Sistine Chapel. To begin with, we have the Creation of the World,—the first stage, which we might describe as the creation of Light out of the darkness of night.

This picture bears witness to a tradition still living at that time as regards the creation of the World. It was that Jehovah created, in a sense, as the successor of an earlier Creator, whom He overcame, or transcended, and who now departed. The harmony of the net World-creation with the old which it transcended is clearly shown in this picture. Truly, we may say, such ideas as are expressed in this picture have vanished absolutely; they are no longer present.

This, then, is the creation of that which went before mankind.

Here we find the creation of man. There follows the creation of Eve.

We now move more and more away from the theme of World-creation into the theme of History—the further evolution of the human race. This is the fall into sin.

We come to the Sibyls, of whom I have spoken in a former lecture. They represent the one supersensible element in the evolution of man, which is contrasted with the other, the prophetic quality. We shall see the latter presently in the series of the Prophets. Here we have the Sibylline element. In my cycle of lectures given at Leipzig, on “Christ and the Spiritual World,” you will find the fuller description of its relation to the prophetic. That Michelangelo included these things at all, in his series of pictures, proves how closely he connected the earthly life with the supersensible—the spiritual. See now the succession of the Sibyls; observe how a real individual life is poured out into each one: in every detail, each one brings to expression a quite specific visionary character of her own.

Observe the position of the hand. It is no mere chance. Observe the look in her eyes, coming forth out of an elemental life; you will divine many things which we cannot express in words, for that would make the thing too abstract,—but they lie hidden in the artistic treatment.

And now we come to the Prophets.

These are examples of his scenes from the Old Testament.

Here we come to his later period in Florence: to the Medicis and the Chapel at which he had to work for the Medicis under conditions that I described before. I have spoken of these tombs of Juliano and Lorenzo in a lecture which I believe has also been printed.

This is the second tomb, with the figures of Morning and Evening.

Once again we accompany Michelangelo to Rome, where he creates, once more by comman of the Pope, the Last Judgment—the altar-piece for the Sistine Chapel. The greatness of this piece lies in the characterisation, the universal significance of the characters. Consider in this picture all that is destined, as it were, for Heaven, all that is destined for Hell, and Christ in the centre, as the cosmic Judge. You will see how Michelangelo sought to harmonise this cosmic scene. Majestically as it was conceived, with an individual and human feeling. Hermann Grimm drew the head of Christ from the immediate vicinity, and it proved to be very similar to the head of the Apollo of Belvedere. We will now show some of the details.

and another detail, the group above the boat:

And now, though in time it belongs to a somewhat earlier period, we give what Michelangelo created for the monument of Pope Julius; for, in fact, this was never finished, and Michelangelo was working at it in the very latest period of his life and finished portions of it.

It is significant that Pope Julius II, whose character undoubtedly contained a certain greatness, called for this monument to be erected to his efforts. It was to have included a whole series of figures, perhaps thirty in number. It was never completed, but there remained this, the greatest figure in connection with it—Michelangelo's famous figure of Moses, of which we have often spoken,—and the two figures now following:

This was completed in the very latest period of his life. It is hard to say exhaustively how it arose. One thing is certain: the group expresses an idea which Michelangelo carried with him throughout his life. Whether there was another group which has somehow been lost, in which he treated this scene at a very early stage in his career, or whether it was the same block at which he worked again, remodelling it at the end of his life, it is hard to say. But we see it here as his last work. Not only is it the one which he completed when he was a very old man; it corresponds to an artistic idea which he carried throughout his long life, and is connected far more deeply than one imagines with the fundamental feeling of his soul. True, he could not have created it thus at every phase of his life. It would always have turned out a little differently; it would always have reproduced the basic mood of his soul in a somewhat different way. But the deep and pure Christian feeling that lives in Michelangelo comes to expression especially in this particular relationship of Christ to the Mother, in this scene of the entombment. Again and again the idea of the Mystery of Golgotha arises in the soul of Michelangelo in this way:—He feels that with the Mystery of Golgotha a deed of Heavenly Love took place, of an intensity that will hover for ever before the eyes of man as a sublime ideal, but that can never be attained by man even in the remotest degree, and must therefore inspire with a tragic mood him who beholds these World-events.

And now imagine, with this idea living in his soul, Michelangelo saw Rome becoming Jesuitical. With this idea in his soul, he underwent all the feelings of which I spoke; and whatever he saw in the world, he measured in relation to this standard. Truly, he underwent much in his long life. While he was creating his earliest artistic works in Florence, the Pope in Rome was Alexander VI, the Borgia. Then he was summoned to Rome, and painted the Creation of the World for Pope Julius. We see the dominion of the Gorgias in Rome replaced by Pope Julius, and then by the Medici, Leo X. In this connection we must realise that Pope Julius II, although he worked with poison, murder, slander, etc., was none the less in earnest about Christian Art. Pope Julius, who replaced the political Borgia princes, strove for the Papal See in order to make it great through spiritual life. Although he was a man of war, nevertheless, in his inmost soul, even as a fighter, he only thought of himself as in the service of spiritual Rome. Of Julius II we must not fail to realise that he was a man of spiritual aims, thoroughly in earnest with all that lay in his impulse to re-erect the Church of St. Peter, and, indeed, with all that he achieved for Art. He was selflessly in earnest about these things. It may sot strange to say this of a man who in carrying out his plans made use of poison, murder and the like. Yet such was the custom of the time in the circles with whose help he realised his plans. His highest ideal, none the less, was that which he desired to bring into the world through the great artists. For a spirit like Michelangelo it is, indeed, profoundly tragical to feel how a perfect good can never find its realisation in the world, but must always be realised one-sidedly. Yet, this was not all, for he lived to witness the transition to the commercial Popes, if we may call them so—those of the house of Medici, who were, in truth, far more concerned with their own ambitions, and were fundamentally different in spirit from Julius II and even from the Borgias. Certainly, these were no better men. We must, however, judge all these things in relation to the time itself. It is easy nowadays to feel Pope Alexander VI, or his son Caesar Borgia, or Julius II, as human atrocities; for today it is permitted to write of them quite independently and freely, whereas many a later phenomenon cannot yet be characterised with equal freedom: But we must also realise:—The sublime works achieved at that time are not without causal relationship with the characters of all these Popes,—indeed, many things would certainly not have come to pass if Savonarola or Luther had occupied the Papal See. And now we come to Raphael.

Here is the picture of which I spoke last time. We will bring it before our souls once more. On the left we have the same subject treated by Perugino, and on the right by Raphael. It is the Sposalizio or Marriage of the Virgin. Here you can see how Raphael grew out of the School of his teacher, Perugino, and you can recognise the great advance. At the same time, we see in the picture on the left all that is characteristic of this School on the level from which Raphael began. See the characteristic faces, their healthily—as we today call it—sentimental expression. See the peculiar postures of the feet. A certain characterisation is attempted; yet it is all enclosed in a certain aura of which I spoke before,—which appears again in Raphael, transfigured, as it were, raised into a new form and power of composition. You recognise here the growth of this power of composition, too. But if you compare the details, you will find that in Raphael it is grasped more clearly and yet at the same time it is more gentle, it is not so hard.

This whole picture is to be conceived of as a world of dream. It is generally known as the “Dream of a Knight.”

We will now let work upon us a number of Raphael's pictures of the Madonna and of the sacred legend. These—especially the Madonnas—are the works of Raphael which first carried him out into the world.

In all these pictures you still have the old, characteristic postures and attitudes which Raphael took with him from his home country.

These are the Madonnas which bear witness to the further development of Raphael. Ile follow him now into the time when he went to Rome. It is not known historically exactly when that was. Probability is that he did not simply go there in a given year,—1500 is generally assumed—but that he had been to Rome more than once and gone back again to Florence, and that from 1500 onward he worked in Rome continuously. Now, therefore, we follow him to Rome and come to those pictures which he painted there for Pope Julius.

This picture is well-known to you all, and we, too, have spoken of it in former lectures. Many preparatory sketches of it exist. In the form in which you see it here, it was done to the order of the Pope,—the Pope who craved, as I said just now, to make Rome spiritually great.

We must, however, hold fast to one point, which is revealed by the fact that some elements of the motif of this picture appear at a very early stage, even in Perugia, representing this idea, this scene, or, rather, the motif of it.

Thus the idea was already living at that early stage, and was able to take shape in this remarkable corner of East-Central Italy.

We must conceive the motif of the picture as living in the very time itself. Below are the human beings—theologians, for the most part. These theologians are well aware that everything which human reason can discover is related to what St. Thomas Aquinas called the “Praeambula Fidei,” and must be permeated by what comes down from Spiritual Worlds as real inspiration, wherein are mingled the attainments of the great Christian and pre-Christian figures of history, and by means of which alone the secret of the Trinity is to be understood. This mystery, we must conceive, bursts down into the midst of the disputations of the theologians below. We may conceive that this picture is painted out of the will to unite the Christian life quite fundamentally with Rome—to make Rome once more the center of Christianity by rebuilding the derelict Church of St. Peter, according to the desires of Pope Julius. Under the influence of the Pope, wishing to achieve a new greatness of Christianity centered in Rome, such ideas are brought together with the fundamental concept; the secret of the Trinity. This fact explains what I may call, perhaps, the outer trimmings of the picture. (Even in the architectural elements which it contains, we see designs which re-occur in St. Peter's.) It is as though this picture were to proclaim: Now once again the secret of the Trinity shall be taught to the whole world by Rome. There are many preliminary sketches showing not only that Raphael only by and by achieved the final composition, but that this whole way of thinking about the inspiration, the Idea of the Trinity had been living in him for a long time. It was certainly not the case that the Pope said: “Paint me such and such a picture.” He rather said, “Tell me of the idea that has been living in you for so long,” and thus together, so to speak, they arrived at the conception which we now see on the wall of the Segnatura.

Now we come to the picture which, as you know, is commonly named the School of Athens, chiefly because the two central figures are supposed to be Plato and Aristotle. The one thing certain is that they are not. I will not dwell on other views that have been put forward. I have spoken of this picture, too, on previous occasions. But they are certainly not Plato and Aristotle. True, we may recognise in these figures many an ancient philosopher, but that is not the point of the picture. The real point is, that in contrast to what is called “Inspiration” Raphael also wished to portray what man receives through his intelligence when he directs it to the supersensible and applies it to investigate the causes of things. The various attitudes which man can then assume are expressed in the several figures. No doubt Raphael introduced the traditional figures of ancient philosophers, as, indeed, he always tried to make use of this or that tradition. But that is not his real point; the point was to contrast the supersensible Inspiration, the descent of the super-sensible as an inspiration to man, on the one hand; and on the other hand the attainment of a knowledge of the world of causes through the intelligence of man directed to the Supersensible. In this sense, the two central figures are to be understood as follows: On the one hand we have a man still in the younger years of life, a man with less experience of life, who speaks more as a man who looks around him on the Earth, there to perceive the causes of things. Beside him is the old, old. man who has assimilated very much in life, and knows how to apply what he has seen on Earth to heavenly things. And then there are the other figures who, partly by meditation, partly by arithmetical, geometrical or other exercises, or by the study and interpretation of the Gospels and the sacred writings, seek to discover the causes of things by applying their human intellect. I have already spoken of these things and I believe that Lecture, too, has been made accessible. I think if we take the contrast of the two pictures in this way, we shall not be misled into nonsensical speculations as to whether this one is Pythagoras or the other Plato or Aristotle—which speculations are at all events beside the mark and inartistic. Much ingenuity has been applied in deciphering the several figures: Nothing could be more superfluous in relation to these pictures. Rather should we study to observe the wonderful varieties expressed in the search for all that is attainable by the intelligence of man.

You may also compare the two pictures. In this present picture the whole thing is placed in an architectural setting, whereas in the other, the “Disputa,” the wide World is the setting. It is the difference between Inspiration whose house is the great universal edifice and the quest of the human intelligence which, as you see it here, goes on in an enclosed and human space.

We come to what is attainable in the human sphere, without the latter being influenced out of the supersensible.

This is like a commentary to the Disputa—the knowledge of the Divine Mysteries represented in a more allegorical figure, and leading on to the Disputa.

Here we have a picture taken from the whole complex which Raphael did for Pope Julius II in order to inspire the idea that Christianity must gain the victory and all that resists it must be overcome.

This is only another aspect of the same idea.

Also belonging to the same group.

Raphael's Sibyls. If you remember those of Michelangelo, you will observe the immense difference. In the Sibyls of Raphael—I beg you to see it for yourselves—human figures are portrayed, to represent beings standing within the cosmos,—Beings into whom the whole cosmos is working. They themselves are dreaming, as it were, within the cosmos as a very part of it and have not fully come to consciousness. The various supersensible Beings, angelic figures between them, bring them the secrets of the worlds. Thus they are dreamy Beings, living within the universal nexus. Michelangelo, on the other hand, portrays the human and individual in all that his Sibyls are dreaming, or evolving out of their dream-consciousness. Michelangelo has to create out of the individual, nay, we may even say, the personal character of each one. These Sibyls of Raphael, on the other hand, live and move and have their being over and above the individual. Even inasmuch as they are individual, they live and move in a cosmic life.

In this room we have the picture of the Transfiguration. (No picture of room available)

Here is the picture itself. It is even possible that Raphael himself did not complete it, but left it unfinished at his death. Christ is soaring heavenward.

To those who say that Raphael in his latest period painted visionary pictures, we need only reply by pointing to this figure (the figure of the boy). It is portrayed in a perfectly real, Occultly realistic sense, how the figure makes it possible for the scene to become visible to the others. Through what I would call the mediumistic nature of the unconsciousness of madness, this figure influences the others, enabling them to behold such a thing as this.

Here we have the figure of the Christ.

And now, my dear friends, think of all that Raphael had painted. All that has passed before you was contained between his twenty-first and his thirty-seventh year, in which he died. In his twenty-first year he painted the first picture which we showed—the Marriage of the Virgin—contrasting it with Perugino's painting. Hermann Grimm worked out in a beautiful way something that bears eloquent witness to Raphael's free and independent evolution, proving even outwardly to some extent what I just said before. Raphael, although he was carried on the waves of time, and learnt, of course, very much from the world, nevertheless took with him into Rome the peculiar nature of that Middle-Eastern part of Italy. In spite of his youth, he created out of his own inmost nature and progressed undisturbed, with perfect regularity in his evolution. Hermann Grimm pointed out that we come to the chief culminating points in Raphael's creative work if, starting from his twenty-first year, we go forward in successive periods of four years. From his twenty-first year we have his Sposalizio; four years later the Entombment, which we have not shown today—an exceedingly characteristic picture, which, especially when we take into account the related sketches and everything connected with it, expresses a certain climax in the work of Raphael. And then, once more, four years later, we have a climax of creative work in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican. Progressing thus by stages of four years, we see how Raphael undergoes his evolution. He stands there in the world with absolute individuality, obeying an impulse connected only with his incarnation, which impulse he steadily unfolds and places into the world something that takes its course with perfect regularity, like the evolution of mankind.

And now consider these three figures all together,—standing out as a summit in the life of Art, in the evolution of mankind. It lies in the deep tragedy of human evolution that this supreme attainment is connected with a succession of Popes—Alexander VI, Borgia, Julius II, Leo X,—men who occupy the first position as regards their artistic aims and who were called upon to play their part in human evolution as rulers in high places. And yet they were of such a character as to take with them into these high places the worst extremes which even that age could nroduce by way of murder, misrepresentation, cruelty and poison. And yet, undoubtedly—down to the Medici, who always retained their mercantile spirit,—they were sincere and in earnest where Art was concerned. Julius II was an extraordinary man, inclined to every kind of cruelty, never scrupling to use misrepresentation and even poison as though it were, in a world-historic sense, the best of homely remedies. Yet it was rightly said of this man that he never made a promise that he did not keep. And to the artists, above all, he kept his promise to a high degree; nor did he ever bind or fetter them, so long as they were able to render him the services which he desired, in the work which he intended.

Consider, alongside of this succession of Popes, the great men who created these works—the three great characters who have passed before our souls today. Think how in the one, in Leonardo, there lived much that has not yet been developed further, even today. Think how there lived in Michelangelo the whole great tragedy of his own time, and of his fatherland, both in the narrower and in the wider sense. Think how there lived in Raphael the power to transcend his Age. For while he was most intensely receptive to all the world around that carried him as on the waves of time, nevertheless, he was a self-contained nature. Consider, moreover, how neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo could carry into their time that which could work upon it fully. Michelangelo wrestled to bring forth, to express out of the human individuality itself all that was contained in his time; and yet, after all, he never created anything which the age was fully able to receive. Still less could Leonardo do so, for Leonardo bore within his soul far greater things than his Age could realise. And as to Raphael—he unfolded a human nature which remained for ever young. He was predestined, as it were, by providential guidance to evolve such youthfulness with an intensity which could never grow old. For, in effect, the time itself, into which all that came forth from his inner impulses was born, first had to grow young. Only now there comes the time when men will begin to understand less and less of Raphael. For the time has grown older than that which Raphael could give to it.

In conclusion, we will show a few of Raphael's portraits.

These, then, are the two Popes who were his patrons.

We have come to the end of our pictures.

In the near future, following on the tree great masters of the Renaissance, we shall speak of Holbein, Durer, and the other masters—the parallel phenomena of these developments in Southern Europe.

Today I wanted especially to bring before our souls these three masters of the Renaissance. I have tried to describe a little of what was living in them, and of their stimulus if, starting from any point of their work, you dwell on the historic factors which influenced and entered into them. You will perceive the necessary tragedy of human history, which has to live itself out in one-sidedness. We can learn much for our judgment of all historic things, if we study how the world-historic process played into that Florentine Age whose greatness is identified with Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Today especially I fancy no one will regret the time he spends in dwelling on a historic moment like the year 1505, when Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael were at the same time in Florence—Raphael still as a younger man, learning from the others; and the other two vying with one another, painting battle-pieces, glorifying the deeds that belonged to political history. Especially at the present moment, anyone who has vision for the facts of history in all its domains, and sees the significance of outward political events for the spiritual life, will profit greatly by the study of that time. Consider what was working then:—how the artistic life sought and found its place in the midst of the outer events, and how through these artistic and external events of the time, the greatest impulses of human evolution found their way. See how intimately there were interwoven human brutality and high-mindedness, human tyranny and striving towards freedom. If you let these things work upon you from whatever aspect, you will not regret the loss of time, for you will learn a great deal even for your judgment of this present moment. Above all, you will have cause to rid yourself of the belief that the greatest words necessarily signify that the greatest ideas are behind them, or that those who in our days are speaking most of freedom have any understanding at all of what freedom is. In other directions, too, much can be gained for the sharpening of our judgment in this present time, by studying the events which took place in Florence at the beginning of the 16th century, while under the immediate impression of Savonarola who had just been put to death. We see that Florence in the midst of Italy, at a time when Christianity had assumed a form whereby it slid over on the one hand into the realm of Art, while on the other hand the moral feelings of mankind made vigorous protest against it, was a form fundamentally different from that of Jesuitism which found its way into the political and religious stream immediately afterwards, and played so great a part in the politics of the succeeding centuries down to our day.

Of course, it is not proper at this moment to say any more about these things. Perhaps, however, some of you will guess for yourselves, if you dwell upon the chapter of human evolution whose artistic expression we have today let work upon our

The evolution of Art in Middle Europe up to the time when Dürer and Holbein entered this stream of evolution is one of the most complex problems in the history of Art. Especially in Dürer's case—to speak of all the elements that culminate in him, we have to deal with a whole series of interpenetrating impulses. Another difficult problem is the relation of this artistic evolution to that other one, the culmination of which we considered a short while ago: the Italian Renaissance, the great masters of Italy.

Needless to say, we can do no more than emphasise a few salient points. To understand what is really important in the evolution of this European Art, we must realise, above all, the existence of a peculiar talent, a peculiar activity of fancy, of imagination which had its mainsprings in Middle Europe. I mean that Central Europe which we may conceive extending approximately from Saxony to Thuringia, to the sea, to the Atlantic Ocean. Peculiar impulses of artistic fancy or imagination proceed from this region of Middle Europe. As impulses of fancy they go back into very olden times. In a certain way they were undoubtedly at work even at the time of the first spread of Christianity in the more Southern regions. These Northern impulses of the imagination stand in clear contrast to those of a specifically Southern nature. The difference is not easy to characterise, but we may describe it somehow thus: the Southern impulses of imagination are rooted in a certain power of perception for the quiet form, the form at rest, inasmuch as form, and color too, spring forth from deeper manifestations which lie hidden, in a certain sense, behind what is directly, physically perceptible. Accordingly, whatsoever the Southern imagination seeks to reproduce in Art, it tends rather to raise it above the level of the individual. It tends to raise the Individual into the Typical, the Universal, into a realm where the more special, earthly and human qualities will melt away. It is a striving to reveal how something that lies beneath the outer objects works into their forms and colors. This impulse of imagination also evolves a certain tendency to come to rest in the well balanced composition—placing the figures side by side in certain mutual relationships—a power of composition which, as you know, reaches its highest eminence in Raphael.

The Mid-European impulse of artistic fancy is of a very different kind. Tracing it back into the oldest time, we find that to begin with it makes no immediate effort to take hold of the form as such, or to achieve a restfulness of composition. Its interest is in the quick event which it portrays; it seeks to express what comes from the soul's impulses, to portray how the living Will of man expresses itself in gesture and in movement—not so much in the well-measured Form that is appropriate to human nature, but in the gesture in which the soul itself is living, in which it seeks to find expression itself as in its own sign or token. Such is the Northern impulse of artistic fancy. He who is sensitive to these things will always feel through it the working of ancient runes, where twigs or treetrunks or the like were thrown together, to express something through their positions as they fell. The sign or token, and the inner life which it contains underlies this kind of imagination, which is able, therefore, to unite itself far more with the individual expression of the soul's life; with all that springs directly from the Will-impulse of the soul. Little is left to us of what was there in olden times,—I do not mean so much as finished works of Art but as ideas of human life and cosmic processes. All this was exterminated root and branch with the spread of Christianity. Little is left of what wls contained in the old Paganism. Once more, I do not mean perfect works of plastic Art—nor will I say symbolical—but rather sign-like representations of their ideas about the world and life. If more of these things had been preserved, even the outer world would feel how the essential thing in the Northern Art is this imagination working more from within outward—from the impulses of Will and not contemplative vision. This imagination, working forth from the impulse of the Will, must be regs.rded as the fundamental note in all the cultural life that spread from the North towards the South. And, I may say, more than is generally realised, spread out in this direction. The time will come when men will see and unravel how much of these Northern impulses lies hidden, above all, in the art of the Renaissance. It is hard to recognise in the finished and extant works of Art, whether of the North, or of the South, or Spain, the true nature of the impulses that they contain. For these impulses flowed together from many quarters. Consider, for instance, all that is living in the famous “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. Compare it with the earlier pictures of the Last Supper which were derived more purely from the Southern spirit. See what dramatic life and movement he has expressed in the relations of the several figures, see the individual characters of soul which shine out of these faces. Then you will realise, working in all this, a Northern impulse that spread mysteriously towards the South. Something is here poured out, needless to say, poured out into the purely Southern imagination—albeit correspondingly toned down—which we observe again in quite another sphere in Shakespeare. For Shakespeare's figures are certainly born out of the Northern Spirit. They always express the individual human being himself, they no longer contain what comes, as it were, out of the Supersensible, using the human figure and human action like a mere instrument for its expression.

But we may go still further, my dear friends. Strange though it may sould today, if we observe Michelangelo's wonderful foreshortenings in the Sistine Chapel we cannot but realise, even in this element of movement, an impulse coming from the North. These impulses were but submerged and overlaid by Southern ones. We can see a special instance of this process in Raphael, whose imagination, growing up amid the loneliness of the Umbrian Hills, had remained, after all, more or less purely Southern. All that Raphael observed in Leonardo, in Michelangelo—influenced as they were by Northern impulses—all this he took and rounded off and ‘classicised’ if I may put it so, into his marvellous composition.

These are a few bare indications of profound problems, which if we cannot master we do not understand the medieval Art at all. For the same reason, more than elsewhere we find in the oldest extant medieval Art the expression of the word itself in signs quite naturally wedded with the plastic arts. The artistic elaboration of letters into exquisitely printed miniatures, in the biblical works created in Europe at that time, give us a feeling of something absolutely natural. In the oldest period of Christian culture we find the monks—all of whom undoubtedly absorbed Mid-European impulses—decorating their litanies and other books in this way, causing the letters, as it were, to blossom forth into miniature paintings. This was no mere external habit. It sprang straight from the feeling of an inner connection between sign and picture. The sign or token wedged its way into pictorial description, as it were. Now the ‘sign’, once again, is a direct expression of the human Will, the human life of soul. Here, therefore, we have the natural transition from that which seeks expression in sentences and words to that which flows into the painted miniature or into the sculptured ivories with which they decorate the covers of their books. Truly, in all these things there blossomed forth something that was afterwards no longer there for Mid-European Art. In every case these miniatures reveal a creation with inner life and impulse of the soul, combined with a certain naivete, a certain uncouth simplicity in respect to what the South could reproduce with such abundant skill; I mean, what lives in the Form itself, in the Form that belongs to the pure human nature before the movement and mobility expressing the individual life of the soul, works from within and pours itself into the nature of these forms. Take any of these miniatures in the old Bibles. Again and again you will see it is the artist's impulse to express, albeit through the traditional biblical figures, what he himself may have experienced in soul. A guilty conscience, for example—all such experiences of the soul are expressed magnificently in the older Mid-European miniature painting. This, as I said, is combined with great uncouthness in point of Form; I mean that human form to which man himself, through his own individuality, does not contribute, but in which the Divine and spiritual being that underlies all Nature is revealed.

Now the impulse which I have just characterised rayed out again and again from Middle Europe, and as it did so it lost itself in what was raying outward meantime from the South. It lost itself, for instance, in the spread of Christianity and Romanism. Moreover, that which rayed out from Middle Europe was fertilised in turn from the South. All that was gained from the South by way of mastery of Form and of Color, too, inasmuch as it manifests the underlying spirituality of nature, all this entered into the flower of the Northern impulse. Thus did the several impulses grow into one another, layer upon layer, interweaving.

Evolution, therefore, did not take place continuously but more or less by sudden starts. Again and again we feel impelled to ask: What would have evolved if, instead of these sudden impacts, there had been a continuous process of evolution? We have the following feeling, for example (though, needless to say, these are mere hypotheses); What would have been the outcome if that which was contained, during the early Carolingean and Ottonian periods, in the miniatures and sculptured ivories above described, had been enabled to evolve straightforwardly to a great Art? What actually took place was very different; the Romanesque and Classical carried forward on the advancing wave of Christianity, poured itself out into all this, bringing with it in architecture and in sculpture, the impulse of Form which we described just now—the Southern impulse. Then were the Northern impulse of movement and expression, and the Southern of form and color wedded to one another (though when I speak of color in the Southern impulse I must qualify once more:—Color as the manifestation of the underlying Spiritual that is expressed in Nature, not of the individual).

But there was yet another thing. We may say that with the decline of the Ottonian period the first Northern impulse came to an end. The classical and Romanesque grew into it, spreading into the tributary valleys of the Rhone and Rhine. Into these regions especially, but further afield as well, a Classical impulse found its way. The two impulses coalesced and attained their height towards the 12th and 13th centuries. Then from the West emerged another impulse, which had been preparing in the meantime. Once more, then, the impulse of contemplative Vision—the Southern impulse, properly speaking,—was wedded in mid-European Art with that impulse of movement which, as I described just now, sprang essentially from the element of Will. But meanwhile in the West a different impulse was preparing, and grew into the union of the other two, till from the 12th and 13th centuries it was completely interwoven with the united impulse which I characterised just now, raying outward from the basins of the Rhone and the Rhine. This other impulse, prepared in the West, also resulted from the flowing together of two distinct impulses. It appears in the sublime forms of the Gothic. Truly, in Gothic Art once more two impulses have come together. The one is carried thither from the North. It contains, if I may describe it so, a practicality of life, a cleverness in skill and understanding, a certain realism. It comes to Europe on the Norman waves of culture. The other impulse comes from Spain, and more especially from Southern France. Thus we have coming from the North an element of intelligence, utility and realism (but we must not confuse this with the later realism; this early realism sought to understand the Universe, the Cosmos, and wanted to see all earthly things in their connection with the heavenly). From the South, on the other hand, and concentrated most of all in Southern France, there came what we may describe as the mystical element, striving upward from the earthly realm and reaching up to Heaven. Hence the peculiar nature of the Gothic, for these two elements have grown together in it, a mystical element and an intellectual. No one will understand the Gothic who cannot see in it on the one hand this mystical element which, concentrated in the South of France, grew especially in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. It brings into the Gothic Art that mysterious quality of striving upward from below, while united with it, on the other hand, there is an element of cool intelligence and craftsmanship, which is never absent from the Gothic. The sublime upward striving of the Gothic forms is mystical; their interlacings, and ingenious relationships come from another quarter, adding to the mystical element the height of craftsmanship.

Thus in the Gothic the one side and the other are peculiarly united. These impulses which poured themselves into the Gothic flowed over again from the West, notably in the 12th and 13th centuries, to permeate once more the artistic creation of Mid-Europe.

But we must bear in mind another thing in this connection. It is true that in the natural course of civilisation there was always a tendency for things to interweave with one another, layer upon layer; for every impulse always tends to spread. The Classical element of Form is interwoven, for example, in the works proceeding from the Gothic. But this is only the one tendency. In Middle Europe there always remained a certain impulse of revolt which is especially to be observed in Art. Again and again, this impulse tends to bring out a strong element of Will and Movement and expression. Thus, after all, that which flows inward, both from the South and West, is ever and again more or less repelled, pushed back again. In Middle Europe they felt the Classical and in later times even the Gothic as a foreign element.

What is it, essentially, that they feel as a foreign element? It is that which in any way tends to blot out the individuality. They feel in the Roman and Classical something that is hostile to the individual. Nay, in later times they even feel in the Gothic an element beneath which the individual must groan and soffocate. In the artistic life especially, there is in Middle Europe the mood which afterwards finds expression in another sphere, in the Reformation,—a mood already voiced by spirits such as Tauler or Valentin Weigel. Perceiving how the Gothic and the Classical wedged their way into the Mid-European principle and completely overwhelmed it, we must say that in the centuries before Dürer, the Mid-European principle as such, in its own impulses, failed and fell and was unable to come forth, being overwhelmed by the other. Yet it lived on; in thoughts and feelings it was always present. It is the same element which speaks so eloquently out of the subsequent conceptions of Nature, seeking to unite with bold intelligence Heaven and Earth—seeking to comprehend all other things by laws discovered also on the Earth.

But in the heart of it all something quite different is holding sway; it comes to expression very beautifully in the words of Goethe's Faust. Imagine Faust in his study, which we may naturally conceive in Gothic forms. He has studied all that we might describe as Romanism and Classicism, Over against it all he sets the human individuality—the self-supporting individuality of man. Yet how does he contrast it? To understand how Faust opposes the human individuality to all these things in the midst of which he finds himself, we must realise that to this day there thrives almost unnoticed, in Middle Europe, something that unites this country most wonderfully with the East. When today we read or hear of the part that was played in the primeval Persian culture by light and darkness—Ormuzd and Ahriman—we take these things too abstractly. We fail to realise how the men of earlier ages stood in the midst of real and concrete forces. Real light, real darkness, in their mutual interplay, were a direct real experience to the men of former days; and this experience stood nearer to the impulse of Movement and enpression than to the Southern one of Form and composition, where things are placed in quiet balance side by side.

In the creative weaving of the World, light and darkness weave together. Influences of light and dark ray out upon all that lives and moves on Earth, as man and animal. Through light and shade, and through their mutual enhancement to the world of color, we feel the connection between the inner expression of the soul of man that flows into his movements, and something Heavenly and Spiritual which lies far nearer to this human impulse of movement than anything the Southern Art is able to express. Man walks along, man turns his head. With every step, with every turning of the head, new impulses of light and shade appear. When we study this connection between light and movement we enter into something which, as it were, links earthly Nature with the elemental. In this interplay of elemental with earthly Nature the man of Middle Europe lived with a special intensity whenever he could rise to creative fancy. Hence, though the fact has scarcely been observed as yet, color arises very differently in Middle Europe than it does in the South. Color, in the Southern Art, is color driven outward from the inner nature of the being to the surface. That which arises from the artistic imagination of Mid-Europe is cast on to the surface by the interplay of light and darkness; it is color playing over the surface of things. Many things as yet imperfectly realised will only be understood when we perceive this difference in coloring; when we perceive how on the one hand the color is cast on the object and plays over its surface, while on the other hand it surges from within the object to the surface. The latter is the Southern Art of color. Color in Mid-European art is color cast on to the surface, springing from the interplay of light and shade, glistening forth out of the weaving and willing of the light and darkness. As all these things interpenetrate, layer upon layer, the several impulses are not so easily perceived; yet they decidedly exist.

This impulse in Mid-Europe is connected in its turn with what I would call the magical element which we find in the old Persian civilisation. For the interplay of light and shade—light and darkness—is deeply connected with the ancient Persian wisdom of the Magi. Here we have the mysterious manifestations of the life of soul and spirit, as it works at the same time in man himself and in the elemental weaving of the light and shade that play around the human being. It is as though his inner being entered into a hidden relationship with the light and shade that play around him, and with the glistening life of color that springs from light and darkness. This is a thing that lies forever in the element of Will; it brings the quality of magic into connection with the feelings of the soul. And man himself, through this, comes into relation with the elemental beings—those beings who, to begin with, manifest themselves within the elements. Therefore Faust, having turned away from all the philosophic, medical, legal and theosophical studies coming to him from the South, gives himself up to magic. But in doing so he must stand firm and secure within himself. He must not be afraid of all the influences in the midst of which a man is placed when he would stand firm on his own personality alone. He must have no fear of Hell or of the Devil, he must march firmly on through light and darkness. Think how beautiful this feature is: Faust himself working and weaving in the wondrous twilight of the morning! Think how the play of light and darkness enters the famous monologue of Goethe's Faust. It is a wonderful artistic inspiration, intimately connected with the Mid-European impulse. It is equally a poem or a painting, out of the very depths of the Mid-European principle.

Here, again, we have a connection between Man and the naturalistic life and being of the Elements. This is a trait that also played its part in Mid-European conception of the Christian tradition coming upwards from the South. Like a perpetual rebellion, this element wedges itself in; this element by which Mid-Europe is akin to Asia, to an ancient Asiatic civilisation.

All these different influences play into one another; and now into the midst of all this evolution, Albrecht Dürer, an absolutely unique figure in the history of Art, comes upon the scene. Born in 1471, he died in 1526.

I have studied Dürer again and again, as an individual figure, it is true, but placed as he is in the whole context of Mid-European culture, I could never understand him in any other way. Through the infinite and countless channels whereby the unconscious life of the human soul is connected with the life and civilisation around him, Dürer is related to his environment.

We see him at an early age in his portrait of the Jungfer Furlegerie (above) bringing out the light and shade of the figure, modelling this most wonderfully. Here we already recognise the working of the impulse I described just nau. Here and throughout his life, Dürer is particularly great in expressing what arises from the above-described experience and sympathy of man with elemental Nature. He brings this element into all that he absorbs from biblical tradition. At the same time, he has great difficulty in adapting himself to the Southern element. We might say, it is a right sour task for him. How different in Leonardo's case: It seems perfectly natural to Leonardo to take up the study of anatomy and physiology, and so receive into his faculty of outward vision uhat was formerly given to a more occult sensitiveness, as I explained in the last lecture. For Dürer it is a sour task—this study of anatomy, this studious mastery of the forms in which the Divine and spiritual, transcending the individual human being, comes to expression in the human figure. It does not come natural to him to make these studied forms his min, so as to re-create the human figure, as it were, after the pattern first created by God. That is not Dürer's way. His way is rather this: to trace in all existing things the inner movement, the impulse of Will; to follow up uhat brings the human nature into direct connection with all things moving in the outer world,—with light and shade and all that lives therein. This is Dürer's kingdom. Hence he always creates out of the element of movement, whereto his oun original artistic fancy is directed.

Is it not perfectly natural for the everyday, workaday things of human life to have found their vay into the evolution of these impulses? An Art which mainly seeks to express the Divine that works in man, the Universal type that transcends the human individual,—such an Art will of its own inherent impulses be less inclined to portray uhat in the everyday life of man stamps itself upon his form and figure,—from his everyday calling, from the familiar experiences of his life. In the Mid-European Art, on the other hand, this element plays a great part, and in this respect a special impulse proceeded from the districts which we now call the Netherlands. Thence came the practical impulse, if I may call it so, permeating the artistic imagination with all that is stamped upon the human being by the familiar reality of earthly things, so that in his gestures, nay, his form and mien and physiognomy, he grow, together pith this earthly kingdom.

Such impulses flowed together in Mid-Europe, in ways most manifold; and only as we disentangle them (Which would require, of course, far more than these few abstract sketches), do we come to true understanding of what is characteristic in Mid-European Art. We shall still have to bring out many a single point; for these things cannot all be said, we can but hint at them.

We will now begin with the period when the Classical impulse grew together with the Mid-European. We shall see some of the sculptured figures in the Cathedral at Naumburg in Germany, representing individual human beings of that time.

Especially in these sculptured works, you see most beautifully combined on the one hand, the perfect striving for expressiveness of soul, and on the other hand the relatively perfect mastery of form which they had absorbed by this time from the South. You will see this especially in these sculptures of the Cathedral at Naumburg, belonging to the thirteenth century. At that time the Mid-European feeling had grown together in Mid-Europe with the power of form which they received from the Classical. While on the other hand, the same Mid-European feeling blossomed forth in the creations of Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eichenbach. Remembering that this was the time which brought to the surface these great poets, we shall have before us a clearer picture of the stream of civilisation which was then flowing over Central Europe.

Wonderfully, in this work, you see the life of the soul poured out into the facial expression.

Intensely individual expressiveness of soul, not in the least immersed in any Universal type, is here united with a high technique of Form—a faculty which, as I said, they had received from the South.

We will now turn to works derived more out of the Gothic thinking. We will show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Strassburg.

These figures are far more adapted to the surrounding architecture than the ones we saw just now. The expression is still most decidedly determined from within, but the forming of the figures is also called forth by the surrounding architecture. We observe this feature even more if we go further West.

It is characteristic of that time to represent the Church as the power that overcometh. Again and again you will find these motifs of conquered demons or the like.

The Church is represented in the figure of this woman.

Please impress upon your minds not only the head with its peculiar expression, but the whole gesture of the figure. We will show the Church once more so that you may compare and see the wonderful contrast of the soul's life expressed in the two figures, Synagogue and Church.

As a further instance of the working-together of Southern and Mid-European impulses, we will now give some examples of the School of Cologne. The Cologne Master of uncertain identity, often known as the Master Wilhelm, combines great delicacy of form and line with tender intimacy of expression, as you will see in the following:

Observe, too, the lower figures, see how the forms are created out of movement and gesture. The following well-known picture of the Virgin in the Cologne Museum is by the same Master.

I beg you to observe, in all the following pictures, how these Masters love to express the life of the soul, not only in facial expression and in gesture, but especially in the whole forming of the hands. That epoch, more than any other, was working at the perfection of the hands, in relation to the inner life. I mention this especially because it is brought to a great height in Dürer who with the greatest joy portrays all that the soul can bring to expression in the hands.

In this Cologne Master, we truly see a pure permeation of the Southern element of Form with Mid-European expressiveness of the soul. We will now go on to the Master who came from Constance to Cologne, in whom the element of expression rebels once more against the element of Form, albeit this later Master learnt very much from his predecessor—from the creator of the last two pictures.

I refer, of course, to Stephen Lochner, who, deeply rooted as he is in the Art of expression, if I may say so, adapts himself with a certain revolutionary opposition to what he learns in Cologne from the former Master and his pupils.

Here, then, ye have the works of Stephen Lochner following on those we showed just now. However closely he adapts himself to them, we see in him a new beginning—once more, a fresh creation from within. He came to Cologne in 1420. He who became more or less his teacher there—the Master of the “Veronica” and of the “Madonna of the Sweet Pea”—had died about 1410. In 1420 Stephen Lochner came to Cologne.

A wonderful picture by Stephen Lochner: Mary in a bower of roses. Observe the immense mobility of the figures and the attempt to bring movement into the picture as a whole. We can only reproduce it in light and shade; far more is expressed in the coloring. See the mobility that comes into the picture by the spread veil, out of which God the Father looks down on the Madonna and the Child. See how every angel does his task,—what movement this brings into the whole picture. The picture grows into a composition born out of the very movement. In the Southern impulse you have composition born of restfulness; movement comes into it only when the Northern impulse is added. Here, in this work of Stephen Lochner's, everything is inner movement from the outset.

We will now show some examples of the work of another Master—one who received strong impulses from Flanders, from the West. The Western impulses are clearly visible in him. I refer to Martin Schongauer, who lived from 1420 to 1490. Here you will see the same artistic tendency, combined, however, with the Western impulse from Flanders.

You see how this brings in a far more realistic element.

This essentially visionary picture is conceived most realistically and with great individuality. It is, indeed, an extraordinarily true Imagination which enables the artist to embody in such realistic figures the human passions, the content of a temptation. Side by side with the human figure he places that which lives as a reality in the astral body when temptation comes upon us.

Here, again, you have a temptation of Saint Anthony. This one, however, is by Grünewald, who lived from 1470 to 1529. In Grünewald you will admire more or less the culminating point of all that flowed together in the preceding efforts. Real individual expression is combined with great technical power. Grünewald, in many respects, is far more influenced by the Southern imagination than Schongauer. It is most interesting to compare the two “Temptations,” Their subject is the sable. We might even conceiyg,them as the Temptation which came to him on the one day in the former picture, and that which comes on the following day in this one The point is not the detailed subject but the artistic treatment as such which shows, undoubtedly, a higher perfection in this artist than in the forMer.

This is the central picture in the famous Isenhaimer Altar, now at Colmar. Observe, to the very smallest detail, how the characterisation always flows from the expression. Even the little animal down here partakes in the whole action. Study the flowing of the soul into the hands.

One wing of the Isenheimer Altar. Another temptation of St. Anthony, also by Matthias Grünewald.

This is the other wing of the same Altar:

Next is the Predella of the Isenheimer Altar. The representation of character in these works of Art is perfect in its kind.

Also a part of the same Altar-piece.

This, then, is Master Grünewald who represents in a certain respect the very summit of what we have seen coming over, evolving more and more, from the thirteenth century into the fifteenth, and on into the sixteenth.

We will now pass on to a different element, where with comparatively less technical ability (for in these last pictures the technical ability is very great) we find a nee effort to express what I called just now the “rebellion” in individual characterisation. We will pass on to Lucas Cranach, who, though with far less ability, brings out the expressiveness and inner life of the soul with revolutionary impulse. He shows how the soul finds outward expression even in the everyday, workaday life of man. In Lucas Cranach this impulse is especially active.

Here you have the purest Reformation mood, although it is a Madonna,—it is the mood of the Reformation through and through. To a high degree, the human element outweighs all other considerations. Look at the figures, both of Mother and Child, and you will see that this is so.

An individual human being is painted here to show how he reveres the Christ. A personality with both feet on the ground, he expresses as a deliberate Will-impulse of the soul the reverence he feels for the Christ. The whole conception shows how this very soul comes to expression in the human feeling. The man's identity is known, it is Albrecht von Brandenburg.

We now come to the most eminently mediaeval artist, Albrecht Dürer.

More in the period of his youth.

Study once more the hand; observe how the very hair is arranged to bring out the effects of light and darkness.

Here you have Dürer's Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit. The conception is truly born out of the whole spirit of the age—a conception reaching far beyond all thought, and yet in some way it was mastered by that time. The conception is here worked out in Dürer's way, with his wonderful drawing. Study it carefully, and you will see how everywhere, even in his drawing, he is aiming at the light and shade, and arranges the composition accordingly.

For a definite reason we will now once more show Raphael's famous picture known as ‘Disputa,’ which is familiar to you all.

You know what is characterised in this picture: Below, the College of Theologians engaged in the study of the truths of Theology; and there bursts into this gathering the Revelation of the Trinity; Father, Son and Spirit. !le see three stages, as it were: the Spiritual Beings rising ever higher,—those who have passed through the Gate of Death, those who are never incarnated. We see the composition of the figures down below arranged quite in the Southern way; the fundamental conception of the picture is expressed in a restful composition, the various figures balanced side by side; the very movement flows into this state of rest. Now let us return again to Dürer's ‘Holy Trinity,’ painted almost at the same time as this.

Compare this composition with the other. Once more you have three stages, but the composition here arises out of movement. It is wonderfully contrasted with the other, the Southern composition created almost simultaneously with this. The picture is in Vienna, the coloring is very beautiful. It is quite untrue to suggest that in creating this composition Dürer was influenced in any way by anything he had received from the South. On the contrary, the Southern painters can frequently be shown to have been influenced by Northern compositions—if not by Dürer's own. Indeed, in one instance it can be historically proved:—

For his Crucifixion (undoubtedly a later picture), Raphael had Dürer's drawings before him. Needless to say, we make no such assertion in this case; but the idea that Dürer himself was influenced must be rejected. The motif lay in the whole spirit of the time; it existed in the widest circles, and this work of Dürer's is thoroughly a product of the Mid-European impulse.

Here we see Dürer, too, as a master in characterisation. The picture represents Jesus among the Doctors of the Law, but needless to say, the heads of the characters are surch as the artist saw around him in his own environment.

This is the famous picture of the four Apostles. The excellence of the picture lies in the sharp characterisation of the difference of the four Apostles, in temperament and character.

This is the center-piece of the ‘Paumgartner altar.’

I have inserted this picture because it shows Dürer's conception of movement,—movement proceeding directly out of the human being.

This is the famous picture of the Christian knight, or, as it is often called: ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel,’—the Knight, Death and the Devil. Observe how entirely this picture is a product out of the age. Compare it with the passage from ‘Faust’ to which I just now referred.

“Tis true, I am shrewder than all your dull tribe, Magister, doctor, priest, parson and scribe; Scruple or doubt comes not to enthral me, Neither can devil nor hell now appal me.”

There you have the character who will fear neither Death nor the Devil, but go his way straight forward through the world. So, indeed, he must be represented—the Christian knight who has revolted thoroghly against all the doctors, masters, scribes and priests that have encumbered him. He has to go his way through the world alone, fearing neither Death nor the Devil that stand across his path. He leaves them on one side, and perseveres on his way. ‘The Christian Knight’ this picture should be called. Death and the Devil stand in the way; he marches over them, passes them by unfalteringly. The same mood of the time, out of which the monologue in Goethe's "Faust" is consciously created, comes to expression in this picture by Dürer.

Look at this thoroughly medieval room. The composition is born purely out of the light and darkness, and it is consciously intended so. Look at the light that floods the room. Placed into the light, there is the dog asleep, getting least light of all, more or less in the shade. Then the lion, as it were, a creature of more [?ill; he seems to be dreaming, and there is much light on his face. The contrast of the two animals is intentionally thus expressed in their relation to the light that falls upon them. And now contrast with these St. Jerome himself. On him the light is also falling, but at the same time he seems to ray it back again out of himself. Man and animal—saint and animal—are contrasted simply by being placed in the light. So, too, the skull. Dog and lion, saint and skull; the whole composition is ordered with respect to the light and shade.

It is like a very history of evolution, magnificently expressed by placing the different figures thus into the light. It is one of the greatest qualities in Dürer to bring out with such creative power mthe inherent force of composition that lies in the interplay of light with different objects and living creatures. Of course, the main figures do not alone make up the composition. But we must especially adraire in this picture the bringing out of the force of composition which lies inherent in the light and shade.

Of course, you must not take such a statement as beyond cavil, but this picture seems placed into the world for the express purpose of showing what Dürer intended in his treatment of light and shade, his power of composition out of light and darkness. As if to show what he intends, he puts together the angular body of the polyhedron and the round sphere. In the sphere he shows how light and darkness work together; he lets the light fall on the sphere in a quite peculiar way. Having studied the distribution of the light on the sphere, you may proceed to observe how the effects of light expressed in the folds of the garment correspond to those of the spherical surface. Dürer lets them fall in such a way as to express in the arrangement of the folds all that comes to expression by way of light and shade on the simple surface of the sphere. Now let us go on to the polyhedron, and compare this in turn. According to the angle of the surface, it is light, half-dark, quite dark, and brilliantly illumined. Then he sets down a being of more fleeting form, once more in order to portray the falling of the light upon the surfaces, even as he showed it in the polyhedron. So that in every place you have the question: What says the light to this object? What says the light to this being? You may compare the effect of light and shade in every case as in the Polyhedron and in the sphere. In this picture Dürer has created a work of immense educational value. You cannot do better than use this picture if you want to teach the art of shading. Up here, to the right of the bat that carries the word, ‘melancholia,’ he lets a source of light appear—something that is self-luminous, in contrast to the reflected light expressed on all the other surfaces.

(At this point some one interposed the question: Has the picture any deeper meaning?)

Why should this not be deep enough? Why look for any deeper meaning? If you only study the magical and mysterious qualities of light in space, you will find in this a far deeper meaning than if you set to work with symbolic and mysterious interpretations. Such interpretations lead us away from the true domain of Art. Even if deeper meanings can be seen in it—as, for instance, in the table of planetary figures on the right, and other things of that kind,—it is far better simply to associate these things with the character and setting of the time. It was natural in that age to put such things as these together. But we do better to remain within the sphere of Art than to look for symbols. I even think there is considerable humour in this picture, inasmuch as the title (somewhat amateurishly translated, I admit) may be intended to convey, as a more humorous suggestion, the words, ‘black colouring.’ What he really meant with the word ‘Melancholia’ was something like ‘black coloring.’ In a rather hidden way (though, as I said, this is a little amateurish) the word may well be held to designate ‘black coloring’ or ‘blackness.’ That, at any rate, is far more likely than that it was intended to express some profound symbol. Dürer was concerned with the artistic treatment—the plastic quality, the forming of the light. Please do not think there is no depth in this plastic treatment of the light; do not look out for artificial symbolical interpretations. Is not the world deep enough if it contains such light-effects as these? They, indeed, are far deeper than any mystical contents we might hunt for in this picture because it happens to be entitled ‘Melancholia.’

We now pass on to Holbein, an artist essentially different from Dürer. Born in Augsburg, he then lives in Basle, and afterwards loses himself—disappears, as it were,—in England. He is a realist in an especial sense. Even where he creates a composition, he carries his strong realism into the clement of portraiture. At the same time he strives to express what I referred to just now; the things of everyday in the life of the soul. I beg you to observe how the milieu, the calling, the whole environment in the midst of which a man is living, is stamped upon his soul and character. Holbein expresses this in a wellnigh extreme way; he seeks to draw it forth out of the soul, creating the whole human being out of the very time in which he lives.

Here, again, you have the same motive. An actual human being of the time (it is the Burgomaster of Basel, Herr Mayer, with his family) is shown worshipping the Madonna. This picture is in Darmstadt. There is a very good copy in Dresden, so good that for a long time it passed as a second version by Holbein himself. Here you will see the extreme realism of Holbein, whereas in Dürer there are those elements which we tried to characterise before—quite universal elements. I'm sorry we have no slides of Holbein's ‘Dance of Death.’ Perhaps we may show these another time, for Holbein is especially great in his treatment of the motif of Death:

In conclusion, I will show you something which, while not in direct connection with the other, belongs, nevertheless, to the same artistic context.

This sculpture of the Madonna, which is in Nuremburg, reveals to perfection what the Mid-European art could achieve in gesture and tenderness of feeling. It is by an unknown artist. You must imagine this Madonna, opposite her, perhaps, St. John, a great Cross with the Christ in the center; for this Madonna of Nuremberg belongs undoubtedly to a Crucifixion group. Here you have the very flower of German Art in the 16th century or perhaps a little later. Much of the tenderness in the Madonnas which we showed today will be found again in this one, especially in the unique posture.

We have tried to show you, my dear friends, all those things which, seen in the connection I have tried to indicate, bring out in clear relief the individuality of Dürer. One only learns fully to recognise Dürer when one considers him in connection with the time—his own time and the time before him. More than is generally imagined, there lives in Dürer the greatness of that impulse which led, in another sphere, to the assertion and rebellion that we associate with Faust. In Dürer, indeed, there lived, artistically speaking, a goodly piece of Faust.

You will get a real feeling of the time in which Dürer lived and out of which he was born, if you take such pictures as his ‘St. Jerome,’ his ‘Melancholia,’ and his ‘Christian Knight,’ and many another, and compare them with the mood that goes out from the first monologues of Goethe's Faust—which must, of course, be placed in the whole setting of the time, even as Goethe himself intended it. Nay, more, you could compare Dürer's ‘St. Jerome’ with certain actual pictures of Faust and you would find a real connecting link. When I spoke of Dürer's creating out of light and shade, I certainly did not mean it in a banal sense. Needless to say, anyone who wishes to imitate some fragment of reality can work out of the light and shade. This is one of the most characteristic features in Dürer, while on the other hand he also has in him the longing for individual characterisation which is so remarkably expressed in his ‘Heads of Apostles.’

We have thus tried to bring before you a few of the important points in the old Christian Art. On the next occasion we shall refer to some others which entered the main stream here or there. Then we shall see the whole in its totality.

Continuing our studies on the great works of Art, we will show some further slides today, supplementing those that were shown last week. Today I propose in the main to supplement what I endeavoured to explain last week, of the connections and contrasts between the Mid-European, or Northern, and the Southern Art. I tried to show how the specifically artistic quality is always influenced by the character of the South or of the North, while, on the other hand, there were continual interpenetrations of the Southern and Mid-European impulses, layer upon layer, as it were, so that it is by no means easy now to see how these things really worked together. Spiritual scientific investigations will in course of time have to bring more and more light into these matters.

Today I wish to draw attention to the contrasts from certain other points of view. You will remember what I emphasised last time. From underlying impulses of the Mid-European spiritual life, there arose what we may call the art of expression—expression of Will and Intelligence—the power to express the ever-mobile life of the soul. The soul in movement—that is the goal of the Mid-European impulse; while the Southern (which was, however, influenced at a very early stage by the Mid-European) looks more to all that enters our perceptions from the Divine-spiritual in the Cosmos, which finds expression in the power of composition, and in features which transcend the human.

It is a characteristic abuse of our time to consider Art—even the plastic Arts—far too much from the mere point of view of the narrative and subject matter, while appreciating far too little the specifically artistic qualities. At the same time there is another equally pernicious error. Art is very frequently severed nowadays from the general life of culture and civilisation, and treated as though it were something that lives a life apart. This, too, is wrong. For we need only have a feeling for the specifically artistic qualities, for all that works in form and colouring, in composition and the like—we need only wean ourselves of the tendency to explain everything symbolically, or in other artificial ways; we need but feel—before such pictures as Dürer's ‘St. Jerome,’ or ‘Melancholia,’ for example,—how infinitely deeper is the mysterious ebb and flow of the masses of light themselves, than any artificial symbolism we may choose to read into these pictures. Then we shall recognise that the specifically artistic qualities that come to expression in the great works of Art, are also living in the whole general life of civilisation. Out of the common feeling of his time the artist works into the spheres of form and color and expression. The time itself works through the soul of the artist. The whole culture of the age finds expression in the characteristic works of Art.

We saw last time how the Mid-European, or Northern element, works its way upwards more or less independently, while at the same time it grows together with all that is brought to it through the Church—through Christianity from the side of Rome. Until the 12th and 13th centuries we witness the development of a unique artistic life in Middle Europe, uniting the more Roman or Latin elements with a strongly individual characterisation of all that is life and movement in the human soul. We cannot understand what took place until the 12th and 13th centuries if we merely consider what we know of the spread of Christianity in the succeeding time. For the whole spread of Christianity was a very different thing in those earlier centuries from what it afterwards became. It was only in later times that the rigidly dogmatic qualities which so repel us, came into prominence, though, needless to say, there were all manner of excesses even before the twelfth century. And while in Middle Europe the systemmatising, formal tendency of Rome was always felt like a foreign body, still the Christian impulses found their way most wonderfully into the soul-life of the people—especially into the more subconscious, feeling elements of the soul.

This entry of Christianity into the soul found expression especially in the sphere of Art, where there was a wrestling for plastic power of expression.

Here we may point to a truth which can be characterised in two very simple statements which are, none the less, very far-reaching. We may ask this question: To what does Art appeal among the Southern peoples? To what did it appeal already in antiquity? And elsewhere in the South, in the period of its decline and in its resurrection from the early to the late Renaissance? To what does Art appeal in the more southern regions? It appeals to the fancy and imagination. This statement is of infinite importance. The appeal is to the life of the fancy and the imagination, which is present in the souls of the southern people with a slight, suggestion of a sanguine temperament in these respects. Thus in the southern regions we see the Christian ideas entering, above all, into the imaginative life, and borne by fancy into the realm of Art.

Needless to say, such a statement must not be pressed too far. I would say, the statement itself should be artistically understood.

Only so, my dear friends, could it come about that in the time of the Renaissance artistic fancy rose to such great heights of creation, while the moral life, as we showed in a recent lecture, fell to the state revealed in the attacks of Francis of Assisi, and later of Savonarola. The situation stands before us when we contrast the fiery attacks of Savonarola which were all in vain, with the infinitely rich life of Christian vision and imagination in the plastic works of Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and many others.

Art in the North speaks differently and appeals to a different element of soul, namely, to mind and feeling. Once more, these things must not be pressed; nevertheless, in such a statement guiding lines are given for the understanding of whole epochs of History. However we may believe that Christianity contains a peculiar, morally religious impulse of the soul, this impulse did not find its way into the element of fancy and imagination in the Southern culture which reached such giddy heights in the Renaissance. But in the North, the centuries until the 12th—nay, the beginning of the 13th—reveal in Art the progressive appeal of Christianity, and especially the tragic elements of Christianity, to human heart and feeling. The Art of the Italian Renaissance strives to make the countenance of Christianity itself as fair as possible—that, after all, is the essential element in the Renaissance Art: But the centuries to which I now refer, in Middle Europe, are all devoted to the striving to realise the Story of the Passion—with all its tragedy and drama, until the tragic story becomes their very own in heart and soul.

Down to the Carolingian period in Middle Europe, Mid-European paganism continually breaks through into the life of feeling. But in the centuries from that time onward until the 12th and 13th there arises out of the very soul of Middle Europe an inherently Christian Feeling for all human life. And the strange thing is that from the 13th century onward a certain decline can be observed. Yet, as I explained last time, even now when another element once more overwhelms it, there is still the constant striving for the Mid-European soul to assimilate into its deepest inner life all things that come to it, so that, after all, there is a continuity of work and progress in the best souls, from the 11th century on into the 15th and 16th.

The gradual entry of Christianity into the life of the people is also recognisable, or, rather, would be recognisable, if the dramatic representations which did, indeed, grow more and more significant toward the 13th century, had been preserved. All that we now bring to light again—the Christmas and Easter Plays, and Plays of the Three Wise Men—are of a later date, and are but a faint reflection of those earlier ones which tended to a more universal presentation of the Christian world-conception. The Play concerning Anti-Christ, of the 12th century, which has been found at Tegernsee in Bavaria, and a later Play on the Ten Virgins, these, too, are but echoes of Plays that were presented everywhere, dramatising the Biblical stories and the sacred legends. Out of this life with the Christian world-conception as a whole, there arose the works of Art which we shall see again today and which we say last time. There followed what I might call a slow and silent working towards the deepening of the soul's life and its artistic power of expression. It finds expression wonderfully in Dürer's representations of the Passion, and notably in the head of Christ Himself as conceived by Dürer and others. It will be a satisfaction to me if we can show these pictures, too, on some future occasion; we do not possess them at present.

If we study the progress of artistic penetration in pictures of the countenance of Christ till Dürer's time, and in other things as well, we find there was really attained in Mid-Europe at that time an astonishing degree of maturity. It lies inherent in the subtle difference between the Mid-European and Northern, and the Southern life, which developed, as it were, the last phases of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—(albeit the Fifth epoch already shone into the Renaissance);—the South in its deepest tendencies of feeling was still expressing the last phases of the Fourth; while in Mid-Europe and the North the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch was preparing. What afterwards became the expression of the individual, and of all that is mobile in the human soul—the soul in movement and emotion—all this was working its way up from unconscious depths.

Here we see the whole life of the two regions in their essential difference. We need only bear in mind how much in the Southern Art is due to the fact that there still existed a living atavistic perception of what plays from spiritual regions into the realms of sense. For this was, indeed, preserved in what are known to us of the Byzantine forms of Art—in all the suggestive forms and figures that have come down to us. Take, for instance, what works upon us with such suggestive power in the Art of the Mosaics, and in all that is connected with the name of Cimabue. Here it is more the Christ Figure that works upon us. In Middle Europe it is, rather, the life of Jesus that is presented to us, for the artistic forms are created directly out of the inner life of the soul.

Superhuman as is the Byzantine type of Christ, inwardly human is the Christ type which was afterwards worked out by Dürer.

The Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, including the latest flower (in the Italian Renaissance) has essentially the quality of looking upward to the superhuman and typical; the superhuman and generic nature of the soul, setting aside the individually human. The Southern peoples brought to their Art, in a far higher degree, the ancient, the generic nature of the soul in its superhuman and divine quality.

In the Northern Art, on the other hand, we see the strong decided striving of the individual, as it works its way upwards out of every single human soul. The more these things are understood, the more this will be confirmed.

The southern life still contains mankind as a whole. Think how intensely an Athenian was an Athenian, or a Spartan a Spartan, so that Aristotle rightly called man a “Zoon politicos”—a political animal. The “political animal” was developed to its greatest height in Rome, where, we might say, man lived more in the streets than in his own house; and with his soul-life, also, he lived more in the life that surrounded him than in the house of his own soul. Such, truly, was the Southern imagination as it worked in the world of space. From the very outset men live together, live together as a whole, and the life of Art itself arises out of this principle. This is a feature common to all the Southern Art. They decorate the churches and the public squares; everywhere we see how they reckon with the fact that the people run gladly together, crowd gladly into the churches, or in the public squares, drawn thither by their very temperament and expecting what will there be set before them. To possess themselves fully, they need this life in the outer world, this living with the group-soul nature—with all that is most eminently political—in the right sense of the word.

All this is different in Middle Europe. In Middle Europe man lives within himself; seeks his experiences in his own house and home, even the house of his soul. And if he is to dedicate himself to the group-nature, his heart must first be conquered for it, he must in some way be summoned to it. Many of the underlying impulses of Gothic architecture will be found to lie in this direction. The buildings erected by Gothic architecture stand there not because the people are already running together of their own accord, but, on the contrary, because they must first call the people, bring them together, as it were, through mysterious and suggestive influences. This is expressed in the very forms of the Gothic. The individuals must first be called to the group-life. And the same thing lies inherent in the whole treatment of light and darkness which I described to you the other day. In the elemental surging and interweaving of the light into the darkness, man finds an element into which he can enter to free himself from his own separate existence; albeit he can carry his individual existence, his individuality with him into this very element, because it is so akin to the nature of the soul.

In all these things we find the distinguishing feature of the Northern as against the Southern Art. Hence the striving—the successful striving—of the Northern Art to express inwardness of life and soul. We need only call to mind the portraits, the Madonnas, for instance, of Van Eyck. These Madonnas—their facial expression altogether determined by a turning inward of the life of the human soul—this speaking from an inwardness of soul in the countenance and gesture—all this, Raphael would never have painted. Raphael raises what he paints beyond the human; Van Eyck lifts it into the still more deeply human, so as to seize the human emotions with his paintings, the human hearts of those who see them. Once more it is a question of grasping the human soul.

The priesthood until the 12th and 13th centuries were well aware of these possibilities of the human soul in Europe. They reckoned with these things. They worked with the heart and mind of the people. And without a doubt, much that arose out of this wrestling for artistic powers of expression, came about through the co-operation of the religious orders with that inner life and character of the people which we have here described. We must by all means understand how these more Northerly qualities of artistic creation are connected with the protesting folk-soul of the North, rising up in opposition against the Roman element.

Luther went to Rome. But he saw nothing of the sublime heights of artistic creation; he saw only the moral degradation there. And this implies very much. No doubt he met one or another of the great painters of Rome on the Square of St. Peter's, but what concern had they for him, these men who created out of al altogether different mood of soul, something to which he had no inner relationship. And yet, Luther's very radical one-sidedness was in another way the product of the same Mid-European characteristics which, if I may say so, wrestled most sublimely in the realm of plastic, pictorial expression, and attained an artistic height that stands, in a certain way, so magnificently and independently side by side with the Art of the Italian Renaissance. (We need make no comparisons, for they are always trivial.)

We will therefore now show a few more pictures, supplementing those we showed last week. First we will show some wood-sculptures from the very beginning of the 13th century. They are at Halberstadt.

Look at this Crucifixion Group. I will only say one thing to characterise what is most important. In this group you can see how deeply the story of the Passion had found its way into their lives by that time. There is Mary, there is St. John, and in the center the Christ, looking down towards her. If you could see the face you would see an infinite deepening of soul in the expression, an overwhelming depth. In Mary, if you have a feeling for these things, you will recognise at once the flowing together of the more Roman, priestly conception with the Mid-European depth and tenderness of feeling. Here it is recognisable in a most wonderful way. We shall presently show the face of Mary in detail.

This group reveals how they contrived, out of the specifically Mid-European creative impulse of the soul, to mould the Christianity which had conquered the Mid-European country. We will now show the detail.

Wonderfully characteristic is the expression of the face. The expression in the Southern Art is such that the eyes look far out into the world; in the Northern Art the soul, as it were, presses forward into the look of the eyes from within. Here the two are altogether interwoven—united with one another. A tenderness of soul in the expressions hovers gently, wonderfully, over a more Latin, Roman rounding and perfection of the features.

These things must not be pressed. But I beg of you to observe in all the following pictures how very differently the clothing and drapery is treated in the Mid-European Art and in the Southern. Undoubtedly, such things must not be pressed too far; yet it is true to say that in all the Southern Art the drapery rather surrounds and veils the human form, follows the lines of the form closely, continuing, as it were, the bodily forms. In the Mid-European Art the treatment of the drapery is different. It proceeds from the emotion and movement of the soul. According to the gesture of the hand and the whole attitude of the figure, the quick, mobile life of soul is continued into the raiment. The latter adheres less closely to the body. It does not seek, as in the Southern Art, to veil or to express the forms of the body. It is, rather, like a continuation of the living experience of the soul. You will see this more and more distinctly as we go on into the following centuries.

We have now come to the famous:

This, too, is in the wood, and dates from the first third of the 13th century. None the less, you will see in it a wonderful progression from the former group whose subject is so similar. Observe the communion of soul between the Mary and the Christ-Figure. See how the faith in the Christian world-conception, deeply united with the human soul, appears in the St. John and in the Mary-Figure, as the power that overcomes all things. The Christian world-conception had entered into the souls of these people so as to become an universal historic conception of all earthly evolution. See how Adam, down here, receives the Blood of the Redeemer dropping downward from the Cross. Study the face of Adam, how he is touched by the influence of Grace which he can now receive inasmuch as he may catch the Blood of the Redeemer flowing from the Cross. You will realise with what infinite depths Christianity had found its may into the lives of these people. It had risen to a universal and truly Cosmic conception.

Angels carry the Cross. God the Father descends with the Dove, setting His seal upon the fact that what He had given to the Earth in His Son gives, at this moment, the whole Earth its meaning. In this group with all its artistic perfection we see how deeply Christianity had found its way into Middle Europe,because they tried again and again to permeate it with the human heart and feeling,—to permeate it from within the human soul.

On the other hand, in the South, it was permeated by fancy and imagination, thus producing that peculiar permeation, so free from the moral element—(or shall we say, in order not to give offence, so free from moral cant)—which comes to expression in the Renaissance in the South.

If you were to make a study of the progress in the representation of the Christ-Figure, this Head of Christ would be an important station. Also the Head of Christ in the Cathedral of Amiens, and afterwards, the Head of Christ by Albrecht Dürer.

We now pass to some sculptures which are found at Freiburg in Saxony, also dating from the first third of the 13th century. They show an altogether different aspect, though here, too, it is the sacred history, and a deep striving for inwardness. It is not too much to say that one loves to dwell on every single face. The next picture:

shows us two figures. The one, the figure of a woman, is hard to interpret. Perhaps she is an “Ecclesia.” The other is said to be Aaron. These things are not essential. The figures are undoubtedly connected, allegorically or in some other way, with the Christian world-conception. Once more, observe the deepening of the soul's life. The contrast of expression between the face on the left, and that on the right is particularly fascinating from this point of view.

Supplementing what we showed last time of the Cathedrals at Naumburg and Strasburg, we will now show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Bamberg. Here, to begin with, we have two.

See how directly the dramatic element, the living movement of soul, is expressed in the attitudes, representing the interchange between one soul and another. C. single moment is presented to us, while at the same time the two contrasting characters are well expressed.

The composition is by no means great, but the expressiveness of soul is marvellous. He must remember that this dates from about 1240. Spiritual scientific research will in course of time be confirmed, in that it does not suggest—as many people still do today—that the Mid-European element, in its presentation of the Christian world-conception, was in any high degree influenced by the Southern. That, indeed, is not the case. On the contrary, the very opposite is true.

The different streams are not as yet clearly seen by external history. It is not seen, for instance, what I pointed out the other day—how the Northern impulses worked down even into the creations of Raphael and Michelangelo. Artistically, this conception is altogether a product of the Northern spirit.

This example shows how the worldly and the religious elements played into one another. This was, indeed, the case, especially at the time with which we are now dealing. The worldly and the religious were brought together in the effort which I characterised just now. The souls of men had to be won over; the individual souls must first be called—must by some means be gathered together, if they are to look up in community, in congregation, to the spiritual world. Likewise, they must first be called if they are to express reverence in one way or another, for something in the outer worldly sphere.

Hence the worldly is brought together with the ecclesiastical element. Here, then, we see the Emperor Heinrich, the Empress Kunigunde, and, on the left, St. Stephen.

Needless to say, these things presuppose, as a rule, the naivete of the common people, their blind devotion and dependence. Today, in the fond belief of our contemporaries, these things are overcome. Inwardly, they are present all the more. On the part of the great lords themselves there is very frequently the underlying idea (not unconnected with very human qualities, which shall be nameless), that they themselves stand just a little nearer to the various Saints and supersensible powers than ordinary mortals do.
We will now show a detail, the middle figure of this picture.

The Old and the New Testament were always conceived in unison, as the promise and the fulfilment. Follow the detail of these figures.

And now another figure from the same Cathedral.

A figure of Mary, showing—from whatever point of view you may consider it—how richly the qualities which I described before, come to expression in this stream of Art. You must remember that this was done about the year 1245. What would you look for in the South at that time? The next Picture, from the Cathedral at Bamberg again, represents the figure of:

A favorite representation at that time. Last time we saw the corresponding figure from the Cathedral at Strasburg. The figure of the Church is conceived with a certain inner freedom. Her soul is free, she gazes freely far into the world, with wisdom.

This figure is in contrast, as we saw last time, with the Synagogue, who is represented once more with bound and downcast eyes. The whole posture is intended to represent this contrast in every detail, even to the sweep of the drapery.

Look at the lower portion of the dress, how well it is adapted to the movement of the soul. We will insert the 'Church' once more, in order that you may compare the draperies:

And now a worldly, or secular figure from the same Cathedral.

Study the expression well. The head, which we will now show in detail, is most wonderful:

We now pass on to the 14th century, and see what had occurred by that time. We have a few figures from the Cathedral at Cologne, first half of the 14th century.

It is easy to see that a certain decline had taken place. The next picture is also from Cologne:

Going further in the 14th century we now come to a figure of St. Paul by a master known as the “Master of the Clay Figures.” These figures were executed in burnt earthenware.

Having now shown the rise, and to some extent the decline of a stream of evolution complete in itself, we will give a series of pictures from the Chartreuse de Champmol at Dijon, which are really great of their kind. Most, if not all of them are the independent work of the Dutch sculptor, Sluter, or else done under his direction. He brought to the Chartreuse at Dijon, from the Netherlands, an almost unique power of individual characterisation. From many points of view we see this individualising tendency in his work.

Here especially you see the Art of individual characterisation. Compare this Madonna and Child of Sluter's with the next picture (Moses) and realise the power of one and the same man to characterise these two.

Remember that this Chartreuse at Dijon was built in 1306 to 1334; it was therefore the beginning of the 14th century. Compare this with Michelangelo's Moses—for why should these things not be placed together—they are, indeed, comparable.

And now by the same artist as before—Sluter.

To live with the prophetic figures so as to achieve this degree of individualisation, was, indeed, most wonderful. We will now show one of the figures in detail:

These are by the same artist. The age was especially great in the creation of tomb monuments. We will show the detail of the upper part:

The figures round the base of the tomb which were formerly so small, are wonderfully executed when you come to see them in detail.

Such is the individual characterisation of all the single figures round the base of the tomb. Here is another group.

We now go on to an artist of the 15th century. (We must go according to the pictures we possess at the moment.) The last pictures, you remember, were by an artist of the early 14th century. With the Cologne Master, and the Master of the Clay Figures who made the group we saw before, we came to the 14th century. We now pass on into the 15th. Here, then, we have two figures by Hans Multscher:

This is about the middle of the 15th century. The next is a Madonna, by the same artist (Multscher).

And now we go further and further in what I described just now as the elaboration of the Christian subjects with deep inwardness of soul. The following are figures carved in wood, at Blutenburg (end of the 15th century). The art of characterisation has, indeed, attained its ideal to a marvellous extent.

The figure of Mary, carved in wood—end of the 13th century:

This, then, is the time when Michelangelo and Raphael were born. The next picture, too, is from Blutenburg.

The time when these highly individual figures were created was also especially great in wood-carving, with which they decorated the Choristers' seats in their churches. We will give two examples from the Frauenkirche in Munich, end of the 15th century.

We now come to the sculptor who worked at the end of the 15th century.

And this was the time when the High Renaissance in Italy had not as yet begun. These works were created about 1490–1495.

This St. Elizabeth—created in the early 16th century—is now in the (Germanisches Museum, at Nuremberg.)

This, too, dates from the beginning of the 16th century.

There are wonderful types among these twelve Apostles; one would like to study every single head alone:

Finally, we give two examples of the sculptor—Veit Stoss—early 16th century, who worked in Cracow and also in Southern Germany, creating his plastic works in many different materials.

The next picture is in Nuremberg,. “The Angel's Greeting,” it is called.

I will also show three paintings by Hans Baldung, also known as Hans Grun, who worked in Dürer's workshop at the beginning of the 16th century—about 1507–1509.

His pictures reveal once more, in the sphere of painting, how everything is turned towards the life of the soul.

Hans Baldung was also a portrait painter of no mean order. Here you have an example.

Here you see how the same master cultivated the art of portraiture. He was a pupil of Dürer's, who subsequently lived at Strasburg, and at Freiburg in Breisgau. He did some wonderful paintings of the Life of Christ, and of the Mother of Christ. You will find a picture by him at Basel—“Christ on the Cross.”

This picture, then, is of the early 16th century—the time of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome.

My dear Friends, the more we multiply these pictures, the more should we see, from this juxtaposition of the Northern and Southern Art, what an immense revolution took place at the turn of the fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean Epochs. And the more should we realise how infinitely rich in content is the simple statement that at that historic moment Civilisation passed from the development of the Intellectual, or Feeling Soul into that of the Spiritual Soul. Infinitely much is contained in such a simple statement. But we only learn to understand these things of Spiritual Science rightly when we follow them into the several and detailed domains of human life.

In conclusion, my dear Friends, I still wish to speak a word of solemn remembrance to you on this day. The day after tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of our dear friend, Fraulein Stinde, and in our hearts we will not forget to think on that day of all that came into our Movement through the work of this dear and valued member.

And we will also turn our thoughts to her soul as she works on in the Spiritual Worlds—deeply and lovingly connected as she is with our Movement. On this day especially we will deepen the thoughts and feelings of our hearts which are directed to her.

I only wished to add this word of remembrance to remind you of the day after tomorrow.

In memory of all that unites us with our dear friend—with the soul of our dear Sophie Stinde—let us now rise from our seats.

Continuing our series of lantern lectures, we will today pick out a single artist—albeit one of the very greatest in the artistic evolution of humanity. I refer to Rembrandt.

In this case the former kind of introduction, indicating the historic background of the artist's life and times, would be a little out of place. With an individual artist such as Rembrandt, it is more important to give ourselves up to the immediate impression of his works—so far as is possible through some few reproductions. For only when we bring before our souls in sequence at least a few of his main works,—only then do we realise how unique a figure is Rembrandt in the history of mankind. We should, indeed, be adopting a false method if we tried—as in the case of Michelangelo, Raphael and others—to reveal the background of his creations more from the point of view of the history of his times. For Rembrandt, as a human phenomenon, stands, to a great extent, isolated. He grows out of the broad foundations of the race. In his case it is far more important to see how he himself stands in the stream of evolution—to see what radiates from him into the stream of evolution—than to attempt to describe him as a product of it.

This is the essential point—to recognise the immense originality which is peculiar to Rembrandt. As an isolated phenomenon of history, he grows out of the broad mass of the European people, once more bearing witness to the truth that when we contemplate the creative work of human individualities, we cannot simply construct a succession of historic causes and effects. Sooner or later we must realise the fact that just as one plant in the garden, standing beside another in a row, has not its cause in the neighbouring plant, so the successive phenomena of history have not always their causes in the preceding ones.

As the plants grow forth from the common soil under the influence of the common sunlight, so do the phenomena of history grow from cut a common soil, conjured forth by the activity of the Spiritual that ensouls humanity.

In Rembrandt we must look for something elemental and original. Many people in Mid-Europe began to feel this very strongly about the end of the eighties and the beginnings of the nineties of last century. It was curious to see what a far-reaching influence a certain book had which was published about that time. The book was not exactly about Rembrandt, but took its start from Rembrandt.

When I left Vienna at the end of the 1880s, I went out of an atmosphere in which everyone was reading and discussing this book Rembrandt as an Educator, by a German. Such was its title. I found the same atmosphere when I came to Weimar, and it went on for two or three years longer. Everyone was reading Rembrandt as an Educator. I myself—if I may interpolate this remark—found the book to some extent antipathetic. To me it was as though the author—undoubtedly a man of keen perceptions—had written down on scraps of paper in the course of time, all manner of ideas that had occurred to him. He might then have thrown them all together into a little box, shaken them up, and taken them out at random and so compiled his book. So confused were all the thoughts—so little logical sequence—so little system was there in the book.

However unpleasing from this point of view, the book nonetheless expressed something of great significance, especially so for the close of the 19th century. People investigated in all directions to discover who the unknown author might be. He had at any rate succeeded in writing out of the hearts of very many people. He felt that the spiritual and intellectual life of men had lost connection, as it were, with the mother-soil of spiritual life. Human souls no longer had the force to penetrate to the heart and center of the Cosmic Order, to draw from thence something which could give them inner fullness and satisfaction. The anonymous writer was everywhere referred to as der Rembrandt Deutsche,—the Rembrandt—German. His desire was to bring the life of the human soul back again to an elemental and original feeling of what pulsates as the underlying heart of things—even in the phenomena of the great world. He wanted to bring them thoughts of an awakening—calling out aloud to mankind: “Remember once more what lives in the elemental depths of the soul! You have lost touch; you are trifling everywhere on the surface of things—in science and scholarship, and even in your cultivation of artistic taste. You have lost the Mother-Earth of spiritual life. Remember it once more!”

To this end he would take his start from the phenomenon of Rembrandt and he therefore called his book Rembrandt as an Educator. He found the conceptions and ideas of men floating about on the surface; but in Rembrandt he saw an individuality who had drawn from the very depths of elemental human forces.

If you look back on our lectures here at Dornach during the last few weeks, you will realise—what we cannot but realise—that the inner intensity of spiritual life had declined considerably in Europe in the last decades of the 19th century. In all directions it had become essentially a culture on the surface. Even the great figures of the immediate past were appreciated only in a superficial way. What, after all, did the late 19th century (I refer to wider circles, a few individuals always excepted) understand of such writers as Goethe or Lessing? They understood practically nothing of their greatest works.

The “Rembrandt-Deutsche” felt, as I have said, that the soul's power of perception must be brought to feel and realise once more all that is elemental, all that is truly great in human evolution. True, if we feel, perhaps, in a still deeper way than he, what was and still is needful for our age, we cannot go all the way with him. Indeed, his limitations—bowed themselves in the subsequent course of his life. There was a deep sincerity of feeling in the “Rembrandt-Deutsche;” yet, after all, he was too much a child of his age to realise that a renewal of all spiritual life was necessary by a discovery of those fundamental sources which we, in our movement of Spiritual Science, are trying now to bring before our souls. All people of that time passed by unheeding—passed by what was “in the air,” if I may use the trivial expression: the need for a spiritual-scientific movement. Most of them, after all, continue to do so to this day.

The “Rembrandt-Deutsche” made a brave beginning. “Look,” he said, “look what it means to wrest one's way through to such resources of humanity as Rembrandt reached!” Yet when all this had been living in his soul, he probably fell more and more into a kind of despair—despair of the presence of any such living sources in the evolution of mankind. Eventually he went over to Catholicism. Thus, after all, he tried to find in something from the past—in old tradition—a consolation for the vain quest on which he had so bravely started in his book. His impulse did not carry him far enough to reach that spiritual life which is needed to sustain the future. None the less, we cannot but feel with him what he felt about Rembrandt.

(I may add that the name of the “Rembrandt-Deutsche” afterwards became known; his name was Langbehn.)

Rembrandt is not at all dependent on that artistic movement which I have characterised in recent lectures as the Southern European stream. He is even less dependent than Dürer was. Truly, one might say that not in a single fiber of his soul was he in any way dependent as an artist on the Latin, Southern element. He stands on his own ground entirely, creating out of the Mid-European life—out of a source of life which he draws from the deep well-springs of the people. What was the time when Rembrandt lived and worked? It was when the Thirty-Years' War was ravaging Mid-Europe.

Rembrandt was born in 1606; in 1613 the Thirty-Years' War began. Thus we may say that while the more southern nations of Middle Europe were being massacred in this War, Rembrandt, in his North-Western corner of the land, was bringing forth the unique creations of his genius out of the very essence of Mid-European humanity. He never even saw Italy. He had no relation to any nature like the Italian. He fertilised his imagination simply and solely out of the Netherlands nature that surrounded him. He made no studies as other painters of his country did—studies of Italian pictures or anything of that kind. Rembrandt stands out as the arch-representative of those who felt themselves in the 17th century so completely—albeit unconsciously—as citizens of the new Fifth post-Atlantean age.

Let us pass in review before our souls what had happened from a certain moment onward until Rembrandt's time. Hermann Grimm, who undoubtedly had a feeling for such things, considered the creations of Art as the purest flowers that mark the historic evolution of mankind. From the aspect of artistic history, artistic evolution, he threw many a beautiful and brilliant search-light on the history of Europe—notably in that time when the Fourth post-Atlantean age was playing over into the Fifth. We ourselves, in recent lantern lectures, have brought before our souls the flowering of artistic life in that age. Hermann Grimm rightly says that to understand what took its start in that period we must go back to the Carolingian era. Nothing can teach us to understand so well what was living in the age of Charlemagne as the Song of Valthari, written by a monk of St. Gall in the 10th century, and relating how Mid-Europe was overwhelmed from Italy, telling of all the destinies that overcame Mid- Europe. (In style and form, however, the Song of Walthari—like many other works of Art which we have shown—betrays strong Latin, Roman influences.)

Then we come to the gradual emerging of a new age. We find, developing in Mid-Europe, the Latin element in architecture and sculpture. We find the gradual penetration of the Gothic. We witness the life of this Gothic and Latin Art in the time of the poets in Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. And we see how the Mid-European freedom of the cities—the culture of the free cities—comes to expression in the works—especially in the domain of sculpture—which we showed last time. At length we come to the Mid-European Reformation, expressing itself in the great figures of Albrecht Dürer, Holbein and others. Then, as we indicated when speaking of Michelangelo, there came the Counter-Reformation, spreading out over all Europe.

Once more, this is visible in the realm of Art. Hermann Grimm rightly remarks that throughout this period, when the powers of mighty States were overwhelming Europe, sweeping away the political individualities, in this period of the great Principalities, there arose what is made visible in the Art of Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez. With all their greatness, when we call to mind these names we cannot but find expressed in them something connected with the Counter-Reformation—with the will to break up the Mid-European people.

Rembrandt, on the other hand, is an artist who makes felt—as an artist—something that contains the highest and strongest assertion of human individuality and human freedom, and his creations spring from the deep originality of this same people.

It is wonderful to see how in Rembrandt has continued what I have already explained in the case of Dürer—the weaving in the elemental play of light and darkness. What Goethe afterwards achieved for Science (although Science to this day does not accept it, not having yet advanced so far—but it will become so in good time)—the discovery in light and darkness of an elemental weaving on the waves of which the true origin of color itself is to be sought—this, I would say, lights up in the realm of Art for the first time in Dürer and finds its highest expression in Rembrandt.

The greatness of the Italian Masters of painting lay in the fact that they raised the individual appearance to the sublime—to the typical. Rembrandt is the faithful observer of the immediate reality. But he observes it not in the spirit of Classical antiquity, for he belongs to the Fifth and not to the Fourth post-Atlantean age.

How does Rembrandt observe the reality? He confronts the object as an outsider—really and truly as an outsider. Fundamentally speaking, even Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, living as they did in the Fifth post-Atlantean age, could do no other than confront the object as men stand outside it. But they still let themselves be fertilised by what came over to them from antiquity. And thus, if I may say so, it was only half-outwardly that they confronted the object. Rembrandt confronted it altogether outwardly, and yet in such a way as to bring it—albeit from without—all his own full inwardness of soul. But to bring inwardness to the outer object in this way is not to carry all manner of things into it out of the egoism of one's human personality. It is, rather, to be able to live with that which works and weaves in space.

Rembrandt was a man who wrestled on and on for decades,—we might almost say, from period to period of five years, and his pictures bear witness to his continual wrestling and his constant progress. This wrestling essentially consists in the ever more perfect working out of light and darkness. Color to him is only that which is born, as it were, out of the light and the darkness.

What I said of Dürer—that he looked not for the color which wells forth from within the object, but for that color which is cast on it from outside—applies in a still higher degree to Rembrandt. Rembrandt lives in the surging and weaving of the light and dark. Hence he delights to observe how the play of light and dark brings forth its remarkable plastic painting effects in a crowd of figures. The Southern painters took their start from composition. Rembrandt does not do this, though in the course of his life, because of the elemental forces working in him so strongly, he rises to the possibility of a certain composition. Rembrandt simply sets down his figures; he lets them stand there and then he lives and weaves in the element of light and shadow, tracing it with inner joy as it pours itself out over the figures. And as he does so, in the very life and movement of the light and darkness, a Cosmic, universal principle of composition comes into his pictures.

So we see Rembrandt (if I may so describe it) painting plastically but painting with light and darkness. And by this means, although he only directs his gaze to the outer reality—not to be the sublimer truth like the South-European painters, but to the actual reality—he still lifts his characters to a spiritual height. For that which floods through the realms of space as light and weaves in them is the element we must always seek in Rembrandt; by virtue of it he is the great and original spirit that he is.

You will recognise this if you let pass before your mind's eye the whole succession of these pictures. Rembrandt is first of all an observer, trying faithfully to reproduce what Nature puts before him.

Then he gets nearer and nearer to the secret of creating out of the light and the darkness, until at length his figures only provide him with the occasion, as it were, to reveal the working of the pure distribution of light and darkness in the realm of space. Then he is able to reveal the mysterious fashioning of sublimer forms out of the light and darkness. The plastic forms of outer reality only provide him with the opportunity. We see emerging more and more in Rembrandt's work as time goes on, the boldest imaginable distributions of light and dark. When we stand face to face with his creations we have the feeling: all these are no mere figures that stood before him in space, as models or the like. The essential thing is altogether different; it is something that hovers over the figures. The figures only provide the occasion for what Rembrandt was essentially creating. He created his great works by using his figures, as it were, to catch the light. The figures give him the opportunity to seize the light. The essential is the play of light and darkness which the figures enable him to grasp. The figures merely stand there as a background; the real work of Art springs from this intangible element which he attains by means of the figures.

To look in Rembrandt's works for the particular subjects which the pictures represent, is to look past the essential work of Art. It is only when we contemplate what is poured out over the figures that we see what is essential in Rembrandt. The figures are no more than the medium for what is poured out over them.

Of such a nature is the delicate, intimate quality of the creations especially of his middle period. Unfortunately we cannot show this, because the reproductions are in black and white; but it is most interesting to see in the middle period of his work how really the colors in his pictures are created out of light and shade. The colors are everywhere born out of the light and the darkness. This artistic conception becomes so strong in Rembrandt that towards the end of his life's work, color recedes, as it were, into the background, and all painting becomes for him a problem of light and darkness.

It is deeply touching from a human point of view, to witness what wrestles its way through to outward existence from decade to decade in Rembrandt's work. For it is undeniable—great as was his talent, his artistic genius from the very first—he was not yet profound; he could not yet reach into the depths of things. What he created to begin with is great in its way, yet it somehow is lacking in depth.

Then about 1642, he suffered a grievous loss—a loss for his whole life. He lost the wife whom he loved so tenderly, and with whom he was so united that she was really like a second life to him. But this loss became for Rembrandt the source of a great, an infinite deepening of soul. Thus we see how his creations gain in depth from this time onward—grow infinitely richer in soul-content than before. Henceforth it is no longer merely Rembrandt, the man of genius—henceforth it is no longer merely Rembrandt, the man of genius—henceforth it is Rembrandt deepened in his own inner life and being.

Considering Rembrandt comprehensively, we must say that here at last we have the painter of the beginning of the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch in the fullest sense of the word. For as you know, we describe the basic character of this epoch when we say that the Spiritual Soul, above all, is now wrestling its way into existence. What does this signify for Art? It signifies that the artist must stand over against his object from without. He lets the world work upon him objectively, yet in such a way that there is still a universal spirit in his contemplation, for otherwise he would be creating merely out of human egoism. The very fact that he confronts the world, and even man himself, as an outer object, gives him the possibility of seeing infinitely much that could not be seen in former ages.

What, after all, would be the meaning of Art if it were only to produce the reality as human beings see it in ordinary life? It is the very purpose of Art to reproduce what is not seen in the everyday life.

Now it is natural in the epoch of development of the conscious Spiritual Soul that man should turn his attention, above all, to man himself and to all that is expressible through man. The artist of the Fourth post-Atlantean age, as I have so often told you, created more out of an inner feeling of himself—out of an inward experience of his own being. The artist of the Fifth post-Atlantean age—and this is true in the highest degree of Rembrandt—creates from outward, contemplative vision. But this signifies for man an artistic process of self-knowledge. And I think we are pointing to no matter of chance when we recall the fact that Rembrandt painted so many portraits of himself. I think there is a deep and significant meaning in the fact that he had to seek again and again for self-knowledge as an artist. His own form was not merely the most convenient model at his disposal—certainly it was not the most beautiful, for Rembrandt was not a handsome man. No, for him the important thing was to become progressively aware of the harmony between what lives within and what can be observed from without—to become aware of this harmony at that very place where it can best be studied—in the self-portrait.

Undoubtedly there is a deeper meaning in the fact that the first great painter of the Fifth post-Atlantean age painted so many portraits of himself.

We might continue for a long time, my dear friends, making one observation or another about Rembrandt. The result would only be to make us realise more and more how he stands out as an isolated phenomenon through his age, though in this isolation he creates out of the very fountain-head, out of the well-spring of Mid-European spiritual life. For Rembrandt creates out of the spirit which is characteristic of Mid-Europe. To create, to look at the outward reality, not merely seeking to observe it realistically, but with a gaze that fertilizes itself with that by which man's gaze can, indeed, be fertilized—with the surging, weaving, elemental world. And for the painter, this signifies the light and dark, surging upon the waves of color, till the outward reality is merely the occasion to unfold this living and weaving in the light and dark and in the world of color.

We will now consider a few of Rembrandt's characteristic pictures, and see how these things can be traced in his works:

Here you see at once how what I indicated just now shows itself in actuality. In Rembrandt's work, even when we stand before the colored paintings, we have the feeling that what lives in color is already there potentially in the light and shade. This must always be borne in mind.

When we let this or any other pictures of Biblical history by Rembrandt work upon our souls, we are struck by a peculiar difference between him and Rubens, for instance, or the Italian Masters. Their presentations of the Biblical figures are always somehow connected with the sacred Legends. Rembrandt's are quite obviously the work of a man who reads the Bible for himself.

We can remember that the time of his creative work was near the climax of that period when Roman Catholicism, and, above all, Jesuitism, was waging an inexorable war on all Bible-reading. Bible-reading was anathema; it was forbidden. Meanwhile, on this Dutch soil which had just freed itself from Southern influence and Southern rulership, there arose the strong impulse to go to the Bible itself. They drew their inner experience from the Bible itself—not merely from Catholic legend and tradition. Such was the inspiration of the scenes which Rembrandt treats so wonderfully with his rays of light and dark.

Even the dress is arranged in such a way as to express his favorite element of light and shadow. He even liked to use a metal collar on which the light could glisten.

This portrait will certainly confirm what I said just now, and it will show you another thing at the same time. Under the influence of his artistic way of feeling—although the reality is by no means lifted into realms of fancy—the life of the soul comes to expression with great depth.

The purest study in light and darkness. Here you will feel what I tried to characterise briefly in the introduction. All that you see here—the architectural and all the other features—merely provided the occasion for the real work of Art, which lies in the distribution of the light itself.

Here we have a picture of Rembrandt and his wife; they are both looking into a mirror:

It is interesting to hear of an experience which Hermann Grimm relates. He introduced the use of Lantern-slides in University lecturing. It is evident on other occasions, also, how much can be gained from the use of lantern slides and projectors in familiarising ourselves with the world of Art. But once when Hermann Grimm was lecturing on Rembrandt, the slides arrived a little late. He had not time to go through them beforehand, and saw them for the first time during the lecture, which thus became a kind of running conversation with his hearers, among whom there were always older people as well as students.

Now I need scarcely remind you that in lecture halls, which are generally well lighted, a more or less wide-awake attention prevails—occasionally more, generally less: But the customary condition was changed in as much as the hall was darkened. And through the darkness and the effect of the Rembrandt pictures thrown upon the screen, people in the audience again and again had a peculiar impression, as Hermann Grimm himself relates. In effect, through the extraordinary vividness which Rembrandt can achieve, one really has the feeling that such a character is present here, among the people in the room. He is there—and if you imagined all the paraphernalia removed—if there were only the light-picture by itself—it would be all the more vivid. The number of people in the room is simply increased by one, so vividly does this figure live among us.

Rembrandt attains this effect because he places his figures into that element in which man always lives—though he is unconscious of it—the element of light and dark. This light and dark which is common to us all, Rembrandt pours out over his figures, and so places them into this living interplay of light and darkness, thus endowing them with a common element—in which the onlooker himself is living. That is the wonderful thing in Rembrandt.

Here you see there is a decided attempt at a composition. Yet the composition, as such, it must be admitted, is not a great success; at any rate it is by no means equal to what is called so in the Southern Art. But look at the characteristic Rembrandt quality once more. Infinite mysteries speak to us out of this picture, simply through the distribution of the masses of light. The composition is truly not very great, and yet I think the picture makes an extraordinary deep impression upon us.

I should really have shown the next two pictures before this one, but I have purposely chosen the reverse order. I beg you to compare this picture with the two next, which most probably preceded this one in time. There is probably an interval of about two between this picture and the next but one. Showing the pictures in the reverse order, I wish to illustrate how Rembrandt perfected himself. He was constantly wrestling and striving. Compare this picture with the next but one—that of the Ascension—and you will see how he advanced. Compare them with respect to depth and inwardness. The next is the Resurrection.

And now we come to:

With the “Entombment,” which undoubtedly represents a considerable advance on this, we come near the year 1640—or, at any rate, the close of the 1630s.

Now for an example of a landscape by Rembrandt:

And now we come to some of the most famous of his pictures:

The Amsterdam Citizen's Guard gathered round the drummers in the night—a whole host of individual figures. Rembrandt was not the only artist of his time to paint such pictures as this. Only he did so with an unique perfection. Such a picture shows us especially how this artist is rooted in the people. Look at this whole collection of men. Some Guild or other—people of one and the same class or calling, men who belonged together—ordered the picture jointly; each one paying his share. This man here, of whom only half the head is visible, made a great fuss. He was very angry and Rembrandt got into trouble because he did not find himself portrayed in his full glory.

“The Night Watch” shows us in the most beautiful way how Rembrandt had progressed. Look at the wonderful distribution in this picture of the light and darkness. This is, indeed, the very time of the great deepening of Rembrandt's life. The picture dates from 1642, the same year that he lost the wife whom we saw in the portrait just now, and in the portrait of the two together.

I think you will feel in these pictures a greater clarity, a more sublime quality than in the former ones.

Now we would like to show a series of “self-portraits”:

Then we have an “Adoration”:

With all its simplicity, this is surely one of his most characteristic pictures. To show the reader in the light, the light itself is made of the subject-matter, as it were—the subject of the story the picture tells.

A picture of great tenderness. We have now come to the year 1648.

I may remark that in the vast majority of Rembrandt's pictures, the Christ is by no means beautiful.

And now we come to that most beautiful picture:

You would realise what Rembrandt is if you could see side by side with this picture the picture of a horse by Rubens, for example. Then you would see the whole difference in the conception of these two pictures.

This horse is really moving; it is really a living horse. No horse by Rubens, ever really moves. Please do not think that this is unconnected with the artist's peculiar conception out of the element of light. He who aims at what is merely seen, he who merely tries to reproduce the “reality,” will, after all, never be able to produce more than the frozen form. However great his work may be, it will always contain just a little of what we might describe as a kind of cramp, or paralysis, poured out over the whole picture.

But the artist who holds fast the single moment in the weaving, ever-moving element that plays round the figures—the artist who does not work merely “realistically,” but places his figures into the true reality which is the elemental world—he will achieve a real impression of movement.

Look at this old woman. Is she not really cutting her nails?

Here, again, we have a picture painted by special command of these great gentlemen. Yet it is one of his greatest masterpieces. See the wonderful simplicity with which they are presented here—the dignitaries of the Guild whose task it was to test the finished cloth and set their seal upon it as a sign that it was good. They are the Presidents of a Clothmakers' Guild—the Stall-Meisters. Of course, they club together to pay for the picture, but as these were especially high lords and masters, Rembrandt must see to it that this time no single face is eclipsed. Every face must come out properly in full relief. And with the high artistic perfection of this picture this is attained. These gentlemen did not go quite so far as the Professors of Anatomy with their half-dissected corpse; one of them holds in his hand a piece of paper on which their names are recorded.

And now the work of a very old Rembrandt:

And now I wish to show you the well-known picture of Faust.

When we see this picture, we are reminded of what I said in one of our last lectures—how Goethe himself in his “Faust” portrays the figure of the 16th century in this weaving of the light.—But Rembrandt had revealed it before Goethe.

I must not leave it unsaid that to know Rembrandt fully it is most necessary to be acquainted with his art as an etcher. The especial love for this Art is, indeed, characteristic of that stream to which Rembrandt wished, above all, to devote himself. He is no less great as an etcher co, than as a painter.

Etchings by Rembrandt:

This is the so-called Hundred Guilder Print: “Come unto me all you who labor and are burdened you ...”

We see in it the real beauty of Rembrandt's art, especially in how these characteristic figures around the Christ figure are expressed.

And now we want to add to the self-portraits we have shown you as a final scene, another etching:

How different is Rembrandt from the other artists whose works we have seen during these lectures: It was only in Dürer that we saw the first lighting-up of what appears so wonderfully in Rembrandt. Rembrandt is a unique figure; he stands alone and isolated. In the continuous study of the history of Art, it is especially fascinating to dwell upon what is really characteristic in the creations of single individualities. Rembrandt, above all, makes us aware of the immediate individual presence of a strong and forceful, mighty personality, lighting forth in the seventeenth century.

At a time like the present it is not without importance that we should turn our gaze to an epoch in which, beside all the devastation that was taking place in Europe, there was this immediate and original creation out of a human soul—a human soul of whom we may, indeed, believe that he was connected directly with the prime sources and elements of world-existence.

I hope it will be given to us while we can still be here together to show some other aspects also of the continued development of Art.

This performance took place in the Goetheanum building – including the last, cheerful part. This was the first complete eurythmy performance there; previously, only individual eurythmic performances had been shown there as part of larger celebrations. From the next performance on April 24, 1921, the first parts of the performance took place in the Goetheanum building, but during the break for the last, cheerful part, the audience moved to the carpentry workshop.

“Charming Region (Ariel Scene)” from “Faust II” by]. W. v. Goethe
“Proemion“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (2.) by Rudolf Steiner
“With a Painted Ribbon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (3rd) by Rudolf Steiner Music (with the curtain closed)
Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Among Times”; “Twelve-Eleven”; “The Guineafowl”
Two presentations by the children's

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

I do not wish to use these introductory words to explain the presentation, for artistic matters must speak for themselves. But the art of eurythmy, as we practise it here, and of which we would like to give you a presentation today, draws on special artistic sources and expresses itself in a special artistic language of forms that is less familiar to the present day. What is being striven for here should not be confused with any kind of pantomime or facial expression or even dance-like performances. It may appear to you to be a representation of the moving human being, of the human being moving in his limbs, especially his arms and hands, and also the movements between groups of people in space and so on – an art of movement. But the movements are not meant to convey an immediate facial expression or other expression taken from the moment from something in the spiritual or psychological, but rather they are meant to convey something that is based in reality on a, I would like to say, visible language.

This visible language came about through the observation of human speech. The inner formation of movement that occurs when a person sings was also observed. It does not fully emerge, but it is present in the larynx and other speech organs, in everything that can be observed in speaking and singing in humans. And that which can be overheard through sensual and supersensual observation and research in the human organism in relation to one of its organ systems when speaking [for example], is then transferred and transformed into mere movement in the whole person. So that one has before one, so to speak, in a certain sense a kind of visible larynx, visible speech. Just as the soul-spiritual expresses itself through speech, so it can also do so through this visible speech. Of course, we have to bear in mind that what is initially the eurythmic language is just a form of expression, that it has to be transformed into something artistic, just as, depending on the treatment of language, on the shaping of language, on the forming of language, it depends on whether something that is pronounced succinctly becomes a real work of art, something artistic. So the artistic element must first be drawn out of what underlies this eurythmic language.

But now we can see that the artistic element can indeed be expanded if we try to translate the human form itself into movement; and we arrive at the sources of movements that are naturally and elementarily present in the human organism. One can see, as it were, how the human form moves out of its own forms into certain forms of movement. And one can perceive these forms of movement as a natural revelation of the human being, just as one perceives it as a natural revelation of the human being when he expresses what lies in the soul through the language of sounds or tones. On the other hand, however, one can also see how the artistic element in eurythmy lies not in the individual movement, but in the lawful sequence of movements, in the way one movement emerges from another, in the way the individual movement makes each of the others visible. individual movement. And so, as it were, what is essential and artistic in poems must be substantiated by the prose content of language, so it must also be the case with this eurythmy.

And it must be said in advance that what is expressed, in terms of its impression, in terms of its aesthetic impression, can be completely independent of the interpretation of the individual movement. In the artistic shaping of this visible language, there is a definite transformation into such movements that are immediately comprehensible for the sensory impression. In ordinary spoken language, the following actually work together as a human speech sound: the mental element, which, as it were, flows through the sound, and it works into the sound, which is particularly evident in artistic, poetic language; it works into the sound and into the sequence of sounds, into the inner sound formation, the feeling and the will element. And one can say: the more the intellectual element lives in the poetry, the less artistic the poetry becomes. The more formative-volitional element there is in the poetry, but which is expressed in the evenness of the form, the more artistic it is.

Now, when the whole human being is expressed through this eurythmically visible language, one appeals to the whole human being, to the full human being. In this way, the abstract element of the mere thought is overcome and what is revealed is more that is the will-feeling element. One also sees how in the eurythmic embodiment of a poem, those things come to light that express the actual formal artistic element in the poem. That which is first secreted into language by the real poet, but that is seen to be expressed in a eurythmic form.

Therefore, even if you have accompaniment, as is to be done here, you cannot recite in the way that is popular and considered good today, since one particularly emphasizes, so to speak, the prose side of poetry in recitation or declamation. This leads to a prosaic effect, and an unartistic age like the present will have much to object to in the way recitation and declamation are done in the way that is being challenged by eurythmy – that is, to bring out the rhythmic, the melodious, the sense of meter in the treatment of speech – and to bring this out in recitation as well, so that the recitation in the recitation eurythmic element contained in every true poem. So on the one hand you can see here how what can be recited and declaimed comes to light in this visible language. On the other hand, the musical element will accompany what then becomes visible language. Just as one can sing with the larynx and the other vocal organs, one can also sing visibly. This is what can be visibly presented as a singing revelation through the art of eurythmy.

It is important that this eurythmic art can also be used to present dramatic material, such as we are about to show you today. This dramatic element is initially revealed in such a way that eurythmy is particularly suited to depicting those parts and dramas where certain poets rise from the representation of the external physical-sensual into the supersensible, where the inner life of the human being is also depicted in an external visualization. And you will see in the one [representation] of a Goethe scene that is being presented today how that which, so to speak, plays into the sensual world from the supersensible, how it is brought out through the eurythmic element. Of course, today we still have the necessity that everything that is, so to speak, a realistic representation of human beings, that is, the actual realistic drama, must also be given in the ordinary theatrical form. But there is hope, and I give myself up to this hope in the expectation that, after we have already succeeded in eurythmically presenting the non-sensuous, we will also succeed in progressing to a dramatic stage style, again starting from the element of movement, for realistic scenes as well. However, further work needs to be done on this. Today we are not yet able to shape the eurythmic-dramatic in a eurythmic way. What it [gap in the shorthand]

made possible was to find a way, through eurythmy, to create a kind of [a] representation that truly corresponds to the subject. In the scene from my Mystery Dramas that is to be presented today, you will see the supersensible human element, that which works in people in such a way that it cannot be portrayed in such realism. This is where we are dealing with what a person from a soul-spiritual world does in actions, what lives in him from a soul-spiritual world. Then one must use eurythmy to reveal this soul and spiritual reality. That which is already working eurythmically, such as a scene from my “Mysteries Dramas”, can most easily be presented in a theatrical form, although what is realism in the presentation must also be taken into account. What is in people and what is the main thing that we form today.

In a scene like this, you will see in the eurythmic presentation, how it is from my “mystery dramas”, that it is indeed possible to present in full individual form that which, as it were, sees through the world of the senses as something supersensible, and that in this way one can enter into a certain working and essential nature of [nature], whereas today one does not really can see anything of the kind. Today, one only wants to have an abstract creation of natural events in natural laws. So we must say to ourselves: if nature does not want to give up her secrets to mere, abstract thought, if nature herself is a great artist whose secrets can only be surmised, if, when we shape, we must indeed resort to what we call knowledge of nature, then we must resort to what poets present dramatically. And it was from such a feeling that Goethe spoke the words: “To whom nature begins to reveal her open secret, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter: art.”

That is essentially what needs to be said about eurythmy as such, as art. You will see that even [introductions can be given before, without] accompanying words, which thus create the mood, can be formed eurythmically. [Incomprehensible sentence, see notes] Endings can be given where the mood is [represented] in a purely [eurythmic night act].

Another side of this eurythmy is – which I will only mention here – therapy and hygiene. Since the movements involved here are taken from the full human being and his creative powers, they can also be developed in such a way that they actually become a kind of eurythmy therapy, because they are healing movements. They are taken from the organization of the whole human being, which is fully formed. This is something I only want to mention.

I would like to point out a third element in this eurythmic endeavor. This is the pedagogical-didactic element: at the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run, eurythmy has been introduced as a kind of soulful gymnastics, as a kind of compulsory teaching subject, and one can clearly see how the children find it, the self-evident fact that the full human being is not only based on the external physical nature, this point of view but on body, soul and spirit [is based] on this expression as a full human being. I would say that even the child feels this as something quite natural. It grows into those healing forces that are particularly also healing forces during growth, namely in the transition from the human, resting form to the moving human form, which [demands] nature of the human form. The child demands such movements and such movement exercises in such a way that it has an inner, implicit idea of them. [Sentence difficult to read, see notes.] Initiatives of the will are thus trained in the right way through what the child can live out in these eurythmic movements, in this soul-filled gymnastics.

What needs to be said about artistic eurythmy to characterize it can be summed up by recalling what Goethe said about the artistic human being and their relationship to the world: “When man is placed at the summit [of nature, he perceives himself as a whole of nature again], takes measure of nature, harmony, meaning and sense together and finally rises to the production of the work of art work].” - There is now another: When man uses external instruments, he has to express what he experiences artistically within himself differently than when he has the tool in his own organism, the tool that is, firstly, an imprint of the whole world, really a kind of microcosm [gap in the shorthand, see notes], but that, on the other hand, is also something that man lives entirely within himself, so that in what he expresses he expresses his own innate tool, so that man, not only when he is placed at the summit of nature to produce a work of art, but that he tries to let the artistic experience within him be revealed through himself. In this respect, those who have a true artistic feeling can see the eurythmy experiment and the artistic endeavor. The artistic goal is certainly not to depict abstractions.

On the other hand, let me repeat once again, dear audience, that the new eurythmy art is still in its infancy, and that we must therefore always ask for the indulgence of our esteemed audience. It is the case that we are our own harshest critics, but we are also convinced that we will find opportunities for development in our artistic endeavors, and that we will be able to fully develop some of these opportunities, probably through others and no longer through ourselves. Then the time will come when this art of eurythmy, even if it is the youngest, will be able to stand alongside the older sister arts as a fully justified sister art.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanum auditorium, the second, more cheerful part in the Carpentry.

Part I (Goetheanum)
Mercury prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Seventh picture from the Pforte der Einweihung by Rudolf Steiner
“Prooemion” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (3.) by Rudolf Steiner
“With a painted ribbon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (4.) by Rudolf Steiner
From the ‘Chymischen Hochzeit’ by Valentin Andreae with music by Max Schuurman

Part II (Joinery)
“The Three Gypsies“ by Nikolaus Lenau
“The Castle by the Sea” by Ludwig Uhland “Erlking” by J. W. v. Goethe with “Elven Prelude” “Good Night” (children's group)
“Guests at the Beech” (children's group)
Humorous poems by Christian Morgenstern: ‘The Sniffles’; ‘Under Times’; ‘The Priestess’; ‘The Dog's Grave’; ‘Moon Things’

Distinguished attendees!

When a person speaks, they leave to the air what is happening in their throat, which they evoke through their speech organs. Certain tendencies of movement lie in these speech organs. These tendencies can be studied by means of sensory and supersensible observation, and in this way we can, as it were, discover the foundations of the human organism when it reveals its soul and spiritual nature through one of its organ systems.

We can now say that the human being is actually concentrated in such an organ system at the moment when the person speaks through it. Perhaps the best way to express what is involved in terms of the human being is to recall Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, that work of Goethe's that is still far too little considered today, but that will one day, when we see these things more impartially, play a great role in our understanding of the living. In the individual plant leaf Goethe sees an entire plant, only simply formed. And in the whole plant he sees a more complicated leaf. What Goethe so fruitfully applied within his view of the living in the plant world can be extended to all living and also to all soulful, spiritualized things, and one gets the following as knowledge for that which can then be of interest here for the human being.

In a language organism, the whole human being is, as it were, concentrated during the activity of speaking – just as the whole plant is in the individual leaf. This can certainly be noticed in the experience of speaking. When we speak, we are, so to speak, immersed in what we are saying with our whole consciousness, with our whole soul life. But just as Goethe sees in the whole plant only a more intricately formed leaf, so too can what we see through sensory-supersensible observation as the actual, essential inner activity of the human speech organs be transferred to the whole human being. One can bring the whole human being into movement in his limbs and his movements, and also in space, so that he becomes, as it were, a speech organ that expresses itself visibly – not audibly, as with the ordinary speech organ.

That, dear attendees, is what has actually happened to shape our eurythmic art. It is not based on some kind of random gestures, or on arbitrary pantomime or facial expressions — or even dance movements — in connection with an experience of the soul. Rather, it is based on the fact that a visible language has been gained through research into what goes on invisibly in the human speech organs when we speak audibly. This has been applied to the human being as a whole. And now you will see, so to speak, a whole human being here on the stage in eurythmy – larynx, other speech organs – and you will hear a real visible language, shaped just as much by inner laws as spoken language.

What appears in recitation, in declamation, and in poetry in general – and our presentation will be accompanied by recitation and poetry – can be portrayed by the visible language of eurythmy, without there being anything arbitrary in the individual movement. as one can arbitrarily utter speech sounds in order to reveal something that is formed by the soul through language. In eurythmy, as in other arts, the main thing is not the individual movement but what emerges when the individual movement accompanies the formed word or sentence, when these movements unfold. Just as one can accompany the spoken word, one can accompany music. Just as one can sing through the speech organs, one can sing with this visible language of eurythmy. It can accompany the musical work just as well as the audible tone itself. So here we have what makes the whole human being an expression of what is experienced spiritually and mentally, like tone and speech or like singing itself.

When we direct our gaze to another person in life – perhaps we do not always notice it in our busy lives, but it is there – when we direct our gaze to another person, when we become aware of this human form: we feel our own inner being in the sight of the other person, and that is, after all, what makes us feel connected to other people. It is something like a glimpse of the self when you see another person. And if the other person expresses what moves his soul through speech, then there is an intimate absorption in the being of the other person.

The same can now be achieved by looking at, perceiving this visible language of eurythmy. It is, so to speak, absolutely that which we can feel in the shaping of the poet, the real artistic poet, in his poetry; there is really something in these lawful movements of eurythmy which, in a different way from our speech sounds, enriches our whole observation and can express poetry and the musical. And anyone who can feel joy at an expansion of the field of art will certainly not oppose the attempt to seek precisely such an expansion of the field of art through a particular artistic medium, which consists in setting the human form itself in motion, and in a particular artistic formal language.

You will then also see, dear attendees, groups of people in motion in their mutual relationships in space. What is expressed is also the inner emotional experience in groups of people in relation to one another, not only in the individual. In a sense, we see ourselves and our own emotional life. This emotional life is actually such that it is also a reflection of the whole external world: what people experience with each other, how people can be in harmony or disharmony with each other, all this is reflected, if I may put it this way, at the bottom of our emotional life. All this can in turn be expressed through poetry and music. And then it is better if we express this inwardly moved soul life, which lives in its relationship to a majority of people, if we want to express that, that we use the human groups. The human group has something more natural in itself for eurythmy. You will see that, without the accompanying speech or music, it is possible to speak or sing, as it were, in introductory and concluding forms, through what has been found as the eurythmic form itself. In the introductory form, we will have to strike the mood of a poem or a piece of music, or we will breathe out the mood in a silent form. This means that there are certain possibilities for developing our eurythmic art that we have so far only exploited to a very limited extent.

Today, you will perhaps be able to see from the first part of our presentation how the eurythmic art can be used for drama, not just for lyric and epic poetry. Admittedly, so far we have only succeeded in expressing in eurythmy the right way that which, so to speak, presents itself in the drama as supersensible, as a revelation of the inner human soul. For example, it is really possible to express those scenes in Goethe's “Faust” where the supersensible is drawn upon by Goethe, where the representation rises from the earthly-sensual to the spiritual-supersensible, to express this intrusion of the supersensible into the sensual in such a way through eurythmic forms that the dramatic progression is particularly enlivened. I do hope, however, that we can also find special forms for the realistic-dramatic, which we still have to present today as if it were ordinary realistic stagecraft, with mere gestures to accompany the words, these things must be presented.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is one aspect of eurythmy. That is one side. There are two others. The first is the therapeutic and hygienic aspect, which I will mention only briefly. The movements that are drawn from the human form are entirely in keeping with the same currents that lie in the human powers of growth and creativity, in which lies everything that is contained in human circulation and human breathing as normal movements, as health-promoting, health-preserving movements. Therefore, by expanding the paths that are artistically expressed here, by further developing the movements, one can also develop a therapeutic-hygienic eurythmy. And it will be developed. There is no doubt that it will be able to enter our lives as a healing factor.

The third aspect is the educational-didactic side. At the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is led by me, we have introduced the art of eurythmy as a compulsory subject. There it is a factor within pedagogy and didactics that can be called an inspired, spiritualized form of gymnastics. One day people will think about these things more impartially than they do today. Gymnastics is purely shaped by physiological rules. It is that which relates to the laws of the human body. In contrast, what is represented in this soulful gymnastics - eurythmy - is a meaningful and natural movement of the whole person, body, soul and spirit. This is why we see – and this is clearly demonstrated by Waldorf school eurythmy lessons – that we see that the child perceives it as something completely natural to live out their entire humanity in these eurythmic movements. Every movement is imbued with meaning, carried by the soul. The child feels this, it knows that it does not need to hold back the soul and spirit as it would in gymnastics.

Above all, one sees that one element in particular is developed in an educational way: this is the initiative of the will, which will be so necessary for our generation and the next. And many other things can be achieved if eurythmy is introduced at the earliest stages of education and teaching. No other educational method can achieve the same degree of inner mobility in the living out of the spiritual, the same skill in the organism, and so on.

The main thing here is, of course, the artistic expression of eurythmy. And in this respect, I would like to say that the fact that the human organism, with its range of movement and its inner laws, is the tool of this eurythmic art justifies it in itself. Goethe says so beautifully: “To whom nature reveals her manifest secret, longs for her deepest interpreter, art.” The deepest secrets of the existence of the world are contained in the human being, this microcosm. But the human form, which expresses so much, so infinitely, does not express the whole, the full human being. When we see a human hand in its resting form, we do not have it in its fullness. We have it only in its fullness when we consider every shape of the individual finger of the arm and so on, and see how the shape is tinged to merge into the movements, how the shape is, so to speak, the main movement that has come to rest, how the movements that are carried out by the hand or arm are driven out again from the particular shape. And so in the whole person. Truly, it is so that in the truly artistic one sees the deepest secrets of nature, which is why, according to Goethe, it is the deepest yearning of man to look at these secrets in the artistic sense.

Then, at another time, Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn regards himself as a whole nature, takes in order, harmony, measure and meaning through appearances and rises to the production of the work of art. This work of art will be a truer one if the human being does not use external instrumentation, but uses himself in his inner lawfulness, his inner essence, in such a way that he seeks order, harmony, measure and meaning from his own form and movement and thereby rises to the production of the work of art.

In all this, I must also today, as always, ask my dear audience to consider what we call the eurythmic art in such a way that there is always a beginning. It will be further developed, and we are only just beginning today, but our strictest critics know what possibilities for development lie in it and what can be expressed further and further. What has already been thought in eurythmy in a certain respect – the individual scenes from my mystery drama – will show you that eurythmy arises as if by itself. In all that is really artistically shaped in the poetry itself, it flows as if by itself, as it were, over what is poetry, into the eurythmic movement. Therefore, one cannot recite or declaim in the way that is popular today for this eurythmic performance, but it must be emphasized not only the literal prose - as it is today as audible when reciting - but it must be the voice, the tone when reciting the eurythmic, the pictorial, which is already in the poetry, the rhythmic, the beat-like, the rhythmic, that which is actually artistic and subtle in a real, true poem - not that which is literally prosaic - must be emphasized.

All this must be taken into account, because it is actually a new field that we are entering with this eurythmic art. If we take all this together with what I have said, that we are only at the beginning, but that we will continue to develop the eurythmic art further and further, then we can perhaps also sense what possibilities for development are available and that it is to be hoped that this eurythmic art will be further developed - not so much by us, but by others - so that one day it can establish itself as a fully valid younger art alongside the older sister arts.

Today we will present the first part here – up to what will take place as a “Chymical Wedding” – in this room. Then there will be an intermission, and the second part after the intermission will take place over there in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop, where the eurythmy performances have usually been held up to now.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanumban, the second, more cheerful part in the carpentry.

Part I (Goetheanum)

Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
“The Nile Delta” by Wladimir Solowjow (Russian) ‘Mighty Surprise’ by J. W. v. Goethe
Quote from the soul calendar (4.) by Rudolf Steiner “The little bird” by Edward Grieg
Quote from the soul calendar (5.) by Rudolf Steiner “Forest Concerts” by Christian Morgenstern with music by Max Schuurman

Part II (joinery)
Music played by Louise van Blommestein
“The Castle by the Sea“ by Ludwig Uhland
“Erlking” by J. W. v. Goethe with “Elven Prelude”
“Poems are painted window panes” by J. W. v. Goethe
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘Among times’; ‘The priestess’; ‘The dog's grave’; ‘Moon things’

Dear attendees!

The eurythmic art, of which we would like to give you a sample, is based on a kind of visible language. You will see the movement of the individual human being in his limbs, namely in those limbs that can most actively and expressively reveal the soul, movements of the arms and hands. Or also: you will see movements of the whole human being in space or of groups of people and so on.

All that which presents itself as a kind of visible language could be understood as pantomime, mime art or even as dance art and the like, but should not actually be confused with these neighboring arts. For what underlies this eurythmic language is observed – to use this Goethean expression – through sensual-supersensory observation of everything that, as movement tendencies, as movement intentions, underlies, so to speak, the emergence of phonetic language and song. Song and phonetic language emerge from the human speech organ. It is not so much about what comes out with the movements of the air, but rather about what it is about, to observe what movement patterns prevail in the larynx and the other speech organs. These movement patterns are not directly expressed as such, but are transformed and converted into what can then reveal itself as speech sounds. But if one observes this system, one comes to the conclusion that, in relation to what a person reveals when speaking, one can recognize and artistically apply the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis.

Goethe sees in the individual plant leaf a simpler whole plant that simply grows on the rest of the plant, and in turn he sees in the whole plant a more complicated plant leaf. What Goethe applied to the formation of plant life, he later wanted to extend to all living things. This is an extraordinarily fruitful direction and maxim for observation, and it can also be applied to the method of observing living beings. In this way, we come to the conclusion that, when a person speaks, when he causes his speech organs to reveal something by speaking or singing, then what is being expressed in a partial part of the human organization is actually the whole. And just as one can see a more complicated leaf in the shape of the whole plant, so one can now extend to the whole human being that which lives there as a tendency to move in a partial part of the human organization, so that one can thus allow the whole human being to express himself - now for visible observation - as for the soul observation invisibly the possibilities of movement underlie the sound language and the singing .

In this way, one has a means of expression that is based on an inner lawfulness of the human organism - just as speech itself is not made by arbitrarily inventing some gesture or facial movement and making it an expression of something of the soul. Rather, what the human organism is in its essence is actually brought out of it.

And we can say something like the following: That which the human being is as a gestalt reveals itself to the senses and the supersenses in such a way that it always seeks to become movement, to become a gesture. We need only observe a human hand. Of course, we can consider the gestalt. But the shape of the human hand has no meaning if it is not thought of as the motion of the fingers and the rest of the hand coming to rest. How one grasps with the hand, how one can touch with the hand, and how, in other words, one can move the hand, is expressed in the hand that has come to rest. And so one can observe the whole human organism, the whole human form. One can find the lawful starting point for setting the organism in motion in this form, and one then makes the discovery, which can indeed be extraordinarily striking: that by revealing something of the soul and spiritual life through movements derived from this form, one has something like a self-evident, visible language that can be transformed, artistically shaped, giving rise to the art of eurythmy. This visible language can be used to express poetry or music in the same way as spoken or sung language. Therefore, here too you will find what appears as the eurythmic art for the eye, from recitation and from the musical.

Both are just another revelation of the same thing, which comes through the visible language of eurythmy to revelation. When poems, which are the expression of the soul, are recited or declaimed, we see that the declamation or recitation must be guided by the artistic element in the poem. In our unartistic times, there is a tendency to prefer the prosaic, to focus on the literal content of the poetic. And today, when reciting, people particularly appreciate the pointization, the highlighting of the word, the literal, and thus actually the prosaic in poetry. But such an art of recitation actually leaves the special artistic field. The essence lies in the shaping that the poet does with the language. The true poet already has a eurythmy, sometimes a vividly designed one in pictures, as is the case with Goethe, or an expression through the language of a musical element, as is the case with Schiller, so that in Schiller there is already a eurythmic element in the language itself and so on, in Goethe in the creation of images, which must then also be brought out in the recitation that eurythmic art.

So you will see that what is performed on the one hand musically is expressed, I would say, through the moving human being. Just as one can sing audibly with the speech and singing organs, one can also sing with the eurythmic movement. And just as you can find a revelation in what is revealed in a poem, you can find a revelation in what is expressed by a person or group of people in motion.

One can present lyric, epic, dramatic works in this way; in doing so, the style must be particularly adapted to the poetic art. And you will see, especially those of the honored spectators who have been here more often, that we are indeed trying to make progress in the development of the forms, that we have been working on the development of such forms in recent months. For example, we are trying – which has not been done before – to introduce certain moods of a poem or a piece of music through silent forms, that is, forms that are not accompanied by music or poetry, so that the moods are prepared in the pure spatial formation of the movements, which are then expressed in the poem. Or we try to allow this mood to fade away by following a poem with such silent forms.

This makes it particularly clear how, in fact, this is a language with an inner, inherent movement, the peculiarities of which cannot be grasped by thinking, for example, about what this gesture means or that gesture. Such thinking does not lead to the essence of the eurythmic art. Just as one does not have to relate the individual note to something in music, but only to the lawful sequence or harmony of the notes, so too in the eurythmic art one has to consider the lawful sequence of movements or the harmony of the movements as they are performed by the individual people in a group and the like.

What actually constitutes the eurythmic art lies in this lawful sequence of movements, not in the individual arbitrary facial expressions. In particular, when the eurhythmic is already present in the conception of the poetry, one can see how this eurhythmic art can become, I would say, a natural expression of what is experienced when a piece of poetry comes into being. Thus it turns out, for example, that those parts of a dramatic poem that lead from the sensual-physical life into the supersensible realm become particularly theatrical through the application of the eurythmic art. We have tried this in the case of those scenes from Goethe's 'Faust' in other performances that go beyond ordinary realistic experience, that embody soul states through forms and so on. Wherever the dramatic is led out into the supersensible, the application of the art of eurythmy makes the stage-like element an artistic revelation. It is to be hoped — although I have not yet succeeded — that the underlying principles of other dramatic poetry, that is, of realism in drama, will also be able to find their eurythmic expression.

Today you will be shown a rehearsal, a scene from my mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul”. The aim is to bring to dramatic expression that which plays into the human soul from the life of the world. It is necessary to see how abstractly that which we usually call the laws of the world actually affects the real observer.

You see, dear attendees, the thing is that today we say: natural laws, that is, that which should also play a role in human life, must be grasped according to the rules of abstract logic. Yes, but if the matter were such that the law of the world simply does not reveal itself when one applies only abstract logic to it, namely human life. It is impossible to understand it if one wants to stick to abstract laws, for example abstract historical laws, if one does not move on to a pictorial understanding of what plays a role in human life. All manner of arts are being applied today that actually arise from a dilettantism of the time; psychoanalytic arts and the like are used to get to the soul life. These arts are dilettantish for the reason that they basically have no insight into the fact that only in images can the full extent, the whole saturation of life, reveal itself to one.

And so, in one of the scenes of my drama “The Awakening of the Soul”, an attempt is made to reveal, on the one hand, certain forces that emerge from the whole of the world and are presented as figures that are not intended as symbols but as realities that emerge from the whole of the world, so that they express certain aspects of the world that approach the human being and then play into his soul , so that they make it present in the soul.

Likewise, an attempt is made to illustrate human life, soul and spiritual life in its course through the human life cycle by choosing, for example, that which always stands before the reasonably discerning human being: childhood that has become objective, youth that has become objective. We look back on our youth when we have reached a certain age. And it is often the case with sensitive self-reflection that one says to oneself: this youth, it actually stands before the soul like a foreign human life; but it is in the soul again. This cannot be portrayed with abstractions, nor with the means of ordinary drama; one must try to move on to sensual-supersensory images, as I have tried to portray the 'spirit of Johannes' youth'. Johannes is the hero of these 'mystery dramas', including this one, from which today's scene is taken from 'The Awakening of the Soul'. So I have tried to imagine this Johannes, how he has already objectified his youth to a certain extent, how this youth, this childhood stands before this dramatic hero Johannes. When we look back on our youth in this way, it is something that now, in turn, works within us, that belongs to us, but has been alienated to a certain extent. What plays into our entire soul life, this strange feeling of being both a stranger and ourselves, is what makes us feel as if what we have lived ourselves has been given over to foreign powers.

Thus one sees in this juxtaposition the old Johannes, the spirit of Johannes' childhood, to whom is even spoken by another personality, by the real personality of Theodora. But one also sees the influence of the spirit, how spirits play an objective role in the laws of the world – I have summarized them here and called them Lucifer – how they work and how these forces can come into a concrete spiritual-soul vision, artistically shaped, of the human being and his relationship to the world.

Such things can best be grasped if, I would like to say, one can transfer ordinary language into the theatrical language of drama, which appears in eurythmy, which, more than is usually the case with ordinary language, where thought predominates in speaking, brings more of the will, the whole, the full human being to revelation. In this language, one can adequately present that which looks more deeply into the whole surging and undulating concrete soul life of the human being. It is therefore almost natural to turn to eurythmy in such a dramatic undertaking. The will, the spiritual will in the human being, can be expressed much more fully and intensely in eurythmy than in ordinary spoken language.

That is the one, the artistic side of our eurythmy. But this eurythmy, which derives these natural, self-evident movements from the human form, from the whole inner laws of the human organism, also has a therapeutic-hygienic side. This hygienic-therapeutic side should also be developed within our anthroposophical spiritual science by bringing out those movements from the human organization that can have a particularly healthy effect in this or that direction.

A third aspect is what I must call the pedagogical-didactic aspect. In the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is run by me, eurythmy has been introduced as a compulsory subject since its foundation. We begin teaching the children as soon as they enter the school at the age of seven, and continue throughout their school years.

And it really does show how this soulful gymnastics - one could say - this spiritualized gymnastics affects children. Firstly, a certain spirit of truthfulness is cultivated in them. Of course, in spoken language – since convention has already taken hold today – one can say phrases and lies, but one cannot lie in eurythmic movements. Thus, when used as a pedagogical-didactic teaching tool, this eurythmic art is truly an education for children in truthfulness, but then also in will initiative. Gymnastics, ordinary gymnastics, is basically only based on physical laws. Eurythmy gymnastics, on the other hand, is something that works with the whole, full human being, with body, soul and spirit. And the child feels this as something thoroughly natural. That is why children accept this teaching, because they feel that here they are being led into a living element that allows them to live their whole being. It is a teaching method of an extraordinary and significant kind and will certainly be judged differently in the future, when people will be able to judge these things more impartially, than it is by many sides today.

With regard to the artistic aspect, which is what really matters, I would just like to say how Goethe was thoroughly imbued with the view – he, who always worked according to the relationship, according to the organic relationship between knowledge and artistic design – how he was imbued with the view that art must penetrate into the true, real basis of existence and that it is from there that it must be created. When nature begins to reveal her secrets, one feels the deepest yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art – thus speaks Goethe. And in another place, he speaks of how it is actually man who shapes nature into art, saying: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he feels himself again as a whole nature, he repeats nature in a spiritual-secluded way, as it were, taking order, harmony, measure and meaning together and rising to create the work of art.

Eurythmy has certainly not yet reached the point of fully realizing its ideal, but ideally it can be envisaged that the human being not only places himself at the pinnacle of nature in his art, but also regards his own organism as a tool for this art, as the tool that contains all the details of natural secrets as a microcosm, which are otherwise spread throughout the wide cosmos . It is to be hoped that this eurythmy will develop into an art that, precisely because the human being uses himself as a tool and does not use external tools or instruments, will be able to develop into a means of expressing the deepest secrets of the world.

We are certainly our own harshest critics and know that we are only at the beginning with this eurythmic art and that it must be further developed. Therefore, I would like to ask you, as I usually do at the end of these introductions, to take this presentation with a grain of salt. For we are indeed at the beginning, but we are also convinced that this eurythmic art holds possibilities for development which, once fully realized in the distant future, will establish eurythmy as a more recent art form that can stand alongside the older art forms with dignity.

We will perform the first part here in this domed building today, then there will be a break, and the second part will be performed in the temporary hall where the performances usually take place.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanum, the second, more cheerful part in the carpentry workshop. There is no program for this performance. Among other things, the seventh scene from the first mystery drama “The Portal of Initiation” was performed.

Dear attendees!

The eurythmic art, of which we would like to show you a sample, is based on a visible language that expresses itself in the movements of the human limbs, especially the arms and hands, which make it possible to reveal the greatest amount of soul expression through them. Thus it is a visible language, but one that is not based on arbitrariness. It does not come about in the same way as mimicry, pantomime or dance. Rather, these eurythmic forms, this visible language, come about through observing, through sensuous and supersensuous vision, what lies at the basis of human speech and song as inner movement tendencies of the speech and everything that belongs to the speech organs. Just as phonetic language and song express nothing arbitrary, so this eurythmic, visible language represents nothing arbitrary either, but something that arises entirely lawfully from the nature of the human organism.

If we study speech, which then finds its other expression in song, I would say, we see that the laws of the world of thought, which in turn arise out of the life of the senses, flow into speech. Everything that flows into human speech from the world of ideas and thoughts is actually the inartistic element of speech. For art is actually killed by the conceptual, by the imaginative. But in addition, the will and the feeling flow into language from the whole human being. This will and feeling is now just as much an expression of the inner human being as the conceptual is a result of the human being observing his surroundings.

If you observe language as it develops into the whole of educated civilization, you will find that, as the conceptual predominates more and more in the actual language, that there are original sensations of the sound, of the tone, and that these original sensations are killed by what is poured into the language by the conceptual element. The mental element pours into language the grammatical and prosaic. The poet, in turn, seeks to overcome this when he shapes language artistically, and then, the true poetic artist seeks to approximate language to what it is as an expression of the whole human being, as an expression of sympathy and antipathy, as feelings, as an expression of joy, pain and suffering, of the intensification of feelings and so on. In this way, the poet works his way out of the abstractly prosaic-dramatic and works his way into that which is actually artistic in language, but which is basically a volitional act. The poet works his way into the euphony of the tone, of the sound; he works his way into that which is a kind of religious-grammatical /] summarizing of sounds; he works his way into the rhythm, meter and so on, alliteration and so on. These are all formations, revelations of language. And only with the fact that this element, this ungrammatical, one might say anti-grammatical and anti-conceptual element, comes into the formation of language, is language in turn led back to its actual artistic element.

In singing, we have the attempt of man to shape the tones in the same way: that one actually leaves the sound unconsidered, that that which makes language into language is completely taken out of language itself and that only the tone figures in it. So here we are dealing with a withdrawal of the human being from the actual sound. This is what makes singing a possible companion to music, which is precisely an outwardly unformed, an outwardly ideal-spiritual, spiritual formation, as is also the basis of singing.

Now one can say: Nevertheless, it can be clearly perceived, especially in the original languages, that a certain ability is present in man to inwardly experience the sound itself. By practicing in a musical and vocal way, one withdraws from the sound to the mere tone. And the question arises: how can we bring to external manifestation that which does not flow from the external world into language and kills the tone, the sound, pushing it into the grammatical?

There is no doubt that what the poet can only find halfway, namely this return to the artistic element with language, can also be made visible. And this is indeed achieved through what is attempted with eurythmy. What the musical element alone cannot achieve is indeed made possible: the revelation of the emotional and volitional experience of the human being in the tone itself, in the sound itself, the experience of that which has already been completely effaced and lost in the grammatically prosaic treatment of language; so that the truly poetic element of a poem can indeed visible language, as eurythmy is, can particularly express the actual poetry of a poem.

And so, by observing what lives in language as a volitional element, by being able to extract this from the human form in a completely lawful way, one can create a visible language that is as directly based on the outer human form as, I would like to say, the tongue, palate and lip movements are based on what flows from the head and heart in ordinary language. And this is precisely what happens in eurythmy. In eurythmy, we are dealing with a visible language that, by its very nature, can express what flows from the whole being of the human being in the poet.

I would like to say: in this eurythmy, the human form is transformed into soul-inspired movement, just as the harmonious proportions of the whole human being live in the resting human form. The human being thus makes himself the tool of what he experiences soulfully through the artfully eurythmically shaped movement. And just as he himself is an expression of his whole being in his resting form, so in eurythmy one has a means of presenting to the eye what is in the poem.

But one can just as easily sing with this visible language as one can sing with the larynx, with the chest. Therefore, on the one hand, you will see our eurythmic performances of the recitation or declamation of corresponding poems, which are to be brought to revelation through this visible language, and on the other hand, you will see the musical element, which is accompanied, so to speak, by a visible song, by a eurythmically visible song.

Only someone who has no interest in expanding the means of our artistic expression can actually rebel against such an attempt at a new language, a new artistic means of expression. Those who have an 'open heart and an appreciation for the expansion of the field of art can only greet it with joy if we can succeed in expanding the field of artistic means to include a wider area.

You will see, my dear audience, that it is also possible – we have tried this more and more in recent months, as our esteemed viewers will remember from our earlier, more primitive performances – to present it alone in eurythmy. And you will see this in the introductory formations and in the final sounds at the end of a poem or a piece of music, which are presented to you in eurythmy, how they introduce the mood of a poem – or you can also let this mood fade away, so that eurythmy can speak for itself in a certain sense. It then speaks in an outwardly visible form, in a moving sculpture, what is felt through the poem or through the piece of music.

In earlier times, in earlier weeks, we tried to bring those scenes from Goethe's “Faust” to dramatic stage representation that lead away from the ordinary life of the senses, into supersensible regions, where that which plays out of the spiritual world into the human soul is to be represented. I hope that we will also succeed in finding a real stage style for realistic scenes from eurythmy. So far, we have not yet succeeded in doing this. But everything in Goethe's “Faust” – and one often has the opportunity to observe such things – that stands out from the usual realism of the physical world, can be brought to the stage particularly through this silent language of eurythmy.

You will see that in the scene from one of my “Mysterienspiele” (mystery plays) that is being performed today, where a person's spiritual processes are described, that eurythmy can be used as a particularly dramatic means of expression on stage. This scene is one of those in my Mysteries where it is intended to show how, in the ordinary fullness of life and in ordinary cognition, not only abstract soul processes take place in the human being, but how soul processes take place in the human being that change his entire relationship to the outer world, change it in the way that growing conditions, that is, real processes of becoming, change it. The fact that one is compelled to present such things, which thus present something quite real spiritually in the human being, means that one must present the human being's relationship to the world in a more intimate way than is otherwise the case in realistic drama. After all, you can't explain a compass needle, for example, just by looking at it; you have to explain it by relating it to the whole of the earth's magnetism. In the same way, we have to relate the human being to the whole spiritual world. We cannot do this by means of abstract laws; we have to enter into the concrete and pictorial. We have to present natural processes in such a way that they also represent a moral development.

This is the case in the scene that is to be presented today and in which the eurythmic means of expression is used in particular. It shows how John undergoes such inner psychological processes. But it would only give a pale picture if, for example, John were to express them or if they were to be depicted symbolically. That is not real art, but one must see things in a concrete, pictorial way, one must go into the concrete and pictorial, so that what takes place between Mary and the soul forces - which appear as real spiritual powers, not merely as natural forces, but as real spiritual powers - is a revelation of that which is really present spiritually. Thus the presentation becomes something that really concerns people, something that plays into people from the spiritual world, just as earth magnetism plays into the magnetic needle.

It is then necessary to rise with this theatrical, dramatic aspect of art and gesture to what is given through eurythmy, where one can actually express the whole human interior more adequately through the shaping of human movements than is otherwise possible through ordinary everyday gestures. The stylized gesture, which is no longer a gesture but a continuation of what is present in the static form, moves into movement; one forms, one represents that which plays into the supersensible world.

One consequence of the fact that the truly poetic and artistic is challenged by eurythmy is that recitation or declamation must also depart from what is particularly valued in our inartistic age as the art of recitation. Today, in fact, everything recited or declaimed tends to emphasize the prosaic element, that is, the inartistic element in the poem. You find that on the outside [artistic?]. But here we must go back to the actual form that the poet gives according to rhythm, meter, rhyme, imagery, and so on.

It is strange: one could recently read in a particularly laudatory review about contemporary stage and recitation speaking that someone has recently succeeded, has succeeded with language, in presenting something in such a way that one no longer noticed the rhythm and rhyme and so on. So they particularly praised the fact that the person in question was especially successful at killing the poetry in the prose. Today, this is considered particularly outstanding. But this is something that is quite characteristic of an unartistic age. Something that is really looking for artistic means must be introduced. We have to go back to recitation and declamation in rhythm, we have to achieve more and more eurythmy even in speaking. And in many other ways, eurythmy will be able to lead us back to a truly artistic experience, which is often very far removed from our present time, more than most people actually realize. This is about the artistic element of eurythmy.

Eurythmy also has another side, which is already being cultivated here. Above all, it has a therapeutic-hygienic side, which can also be carried out through eurythmy, because through the eurythmy movements that follow from the healthy human organism, polar opposites are juxtaposed to healing processes in contrast to everything that enters the human organism through illness. In certain cases, therefore, what we may call eurythmy therapy can serve therapeutic and hygienic purposes. I only mention this because I believe it has a certain significance.

The third element of this eurythmy is what must be called the pedagogical-didactic element, which has already been introduced and tried out at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and directed by me. We have introduced eurythmy into the Waldorf School in Stuttgart as a compulsory subject, like a form of gymnastics that is imbued with soul and spirit. It has been shown that from the earliest childhood, the pupils experience this soul-inspired gymnastics as something in which their organic laws can truly be lived out as a matter of course. This is what eurythmy can do in terms of educational didactics. And one can say: it is also an extraordinary pedagogical tool. While ordinary gymnastics, which is based entirely on physiology, only trains the body, the soul-inspired gymnastics that comes to light in eurythmy involves training the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. And the child feels that very deeply.

But it also has a particularly strong effect on the will initiative, which is so urgently needed in our time, because it works deep within the human being. I would like to say that it is precisely in the child - it is less evident in the adult - that truthfulness is brought to bear. For one can lie in a language that has become conventional, especially at a civilized stage of human development, one can say empty phrases. But with what wells up out of the whole human being from a visible language of eurythmy, one cannot fall into phrase. The child therefore learns truthfulness, a sense of truth through this eurythmy.

All these things will one day be able to be viewed more impartially than today, when ingrained prejudices stand in the way on the one hand. In terms of art, this eurythmy really does something that can be characterized by a Goethean word that Goethe himself said about the visual arts: When man stands at the summit of nature, he sees himself as a whole nature that has to produce another summit within itself. To do this, he rises by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.

He can rise all the more to the production of the work of art, the more he uses his own organism with the wonderful laws within it as a tool, if he does not use external instruments, but uses his own organism as a tool for artistic expression. Then it becomes apparent how, basically, a kind of small world, a microcosm, is also contained in the possibilities of movement of the human organism. There are tremendous secrets to be drawn from this human organism. And so, in such a development of eurythmy, one senses the truth of Goethe's words: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him who is open to them, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.”

And art must come into being when the human being takes themselves as a means of expression for what they experience spiritually and intellectually. That, dear assembled guests, is what I wanted to say by way of introduction. I would just like to ask the honored audience for their forbearance, as I always do before these performances; for we know that what can be called eurythmy is still only a kind of ideal, that we are only at the beginning of what eurythmy should become. But we also know what possibilities for the development of eurythmy lie in this striving for a eurythmic art that can be further and further developed, to the extent that this presentation in visible language will one day be able to present itself as a worthy, younger art alongside the older, recognized and established art forms.

So that is what I have to say, as I said. I would now just like to add that we can only present the first part in this room. There will then be an intermission after the first part, and during this intermission, the honored audience is requested to go to the provisional hall of the Goetheanum.

The first part of the performance took place in the domed room of the Goetheanum, the second, more light-hearted part in the “provisional hall” of the carpentry workshop.

Part I (Goetheanum building):
Mercury prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Seventh image from the Portal of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner
“Evening Feeling” by Friedrich Hebbel
“L'aurore s'allume“ by Victor Hugo
“Prooemion” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (6.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Spring“ by Rudolf Steiner
“Forest Concerts” by Christian Morgenstern

Part II (Joinery)

Evoe
“Kennst du das Land“ (Mignon I) by J. W. v. Goethe
“Erlkönig” by J. W. v. Goethe with “Elven prelude”
Prelude “Look around you”
“The posy” by J. W. v. Goethe
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘The prayer: The little deer’; ‘The leopard’; ‘From the suburbs’
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten

Dear attendees!

The eurythmy art, of which we want to present a sample to you here today, is not to be confused with related art forms that make use of the human being itself and [work with all kinds of artistic means of expression –] such as sign languages, mimic arts and the like. It is least confused with any form of dance art, although it is a kind of spatial movement art, whereby movements are performed by the human being themselves, by their limbs, especially the hands and arms, which allow the soul to be revealed best; but also through movements of groups of people in space, in the positional relationship of groups of people in space and the like

This eurythmic art attempts to arrive at a completely different way of shaping human movement than a mere art of gesture or mimic art. And it is precisely through this that it will be able to move away from all that is inauthentic in these related artistic attempts and arrive at an artistic form of expression. For it may be said that what is usually attempted through the human being and his movement forms is, when considered in relation to the original culture, something that is actually, fundamentally, originally and essentially human. In older epochs, one always had an accompanying gesture for that which was to work as a kind of song or, better said, as a kind of recitative in the human being as an artistic form. The older languages even had a single word for this accompanying gesture and for that which came about through the sound, through the tone, a single word that indiscriminately designated both. In the course of human development, what was expressed as belonging together was then split, as it were, by the sound gesture, gesture-sounds: into speech without gestures or singing without gestures and into everything that has passed over into mime, into pantomime, into gestures.

Eurythmy wants nothing to do with the latter, in that it really wants to be a kind of visible speech, drawn out of the human organization according to the same laws as speech and song are drawn out of this human organization.

Perhaps the nature of this eurythmic art is best understood by looking at what this eurythmic art seeks to achieve as a form of movement, in contrast to what our spoken language has gradually become. Of course, we accompany our speech with gestures and facial expressions, especially when we are full of enthusiasm or liveliness. But basically our speech is actually nothing more than a kind of invisible gesture, in that the outwardly visible gesture has gradually receded and what the person has experienced in this visible gesture has receded into the particular nuance, into the interpenetration with feeling and so on, which he gives to speech. In earlier times, the fact that the older, more monotonous, more consonantal language was based on and supported by the gesture, gave the gesture its special nuance. We have, as it were, taken this back into the sound in the course of human development. Those who have a sense for such things can certainly feel and sense the gestural quality that underlies language, even if that language is not accompanied by gestures.

We can say that our language has become an audible gesture, and we can clearly feel the remnants of the old gestures in what we hear. If we now move [back to the gesture] today - without turning the art of eurythmy into a mimic, a gestural expression, as sometimes happens - then we have the gesture, which is a further development of the natural gesture that a person uses when they speak particularly vividly or when they want to put something special into their language. But what kind of gesture is that? But what kind of gesture is this? We will not be able to use a gesture [in the usual sense] in eurythmy, because this is added retrospectively to what has gradually split off in our language.

The human being of prehistoric times had a living sense of the interior of the sound itself. He developed a feeling, a sense, in the a, in the i, in the f, in the r, in the s; he had thus brought his humanity into connection with the sounds. That was also what was expressed in the primal gestures, what the human being experienced in the sound. But the sound is developed through language – and that is the case, insofar as language belongs more and more to civilized cultures. But the gesture has gradually lost its connection with the development of sound through the development of language. Language itself has developed from a revelation of the sound, of the tone, in which one has one's inner joy, one's inner experience, into that which now lives more abstractly, more logically in the context of sounds, in the context of words, of sentences. In this way, language has discarded the original sound that it had, in which its true artistic quality lay, and has become meaningful.

And so if we were to try today to accompany language in eurythmic art with gestures and facial expressions, we would have gestures of meaning that are actually connected to what a person experiences inwardly in thought, in feeling, in will, but that are no longer connected to what a person can experience in sound. Eurythmy, on the other hand, goes back to the inner essence of the sound and the tone itself. And it seeks the gesture that comes naturally when one feels and experiences the inner essence of the sound and the tone, so that eurythmy, in contrast to meaningful gestures, consists of gestures of sound. A visible language, a visible singing, is thus created.

Therefore, what is attained in this way through sensual and supersensory observation can certainly be regarded as an independent artistic accompaniment and revelation of what, for example, a poem presents to us. In shaping language in today's civilization, the poet goes back to the actual artistic element of language in phonetic speech itself and its formation through rhythm, meter, rhyme, and so on. Schiller, for example, always had a kind of rhythmic melody alive in his soul before he grasped the literal meaning of the poem in its fullness. And so the poet must either go back to the musicality of language or to the plastic and pictorial, as was more the case with Goethe. But he must, I would say, go back one layer further in the shaping of language, so that the artistic may enter into language beyond the merely meaningful.

But in poetry it still remains hidden. I would like to say that in people there is the temptation to place too much value on the meaningful, the thought-like. And the analogous, the conceptual, is actually death, the paralysis of every truly artistic activity. What is artistic is basically language – which is composed of the conceptual element and the will element in the human being. What is artistic in language is only to the extent that it comes not from the human head, but from the full human being, from the will nature of the human being. In [eurythmy], the possibility is created of making this visible eurythmic language an expression of the fully human, of the will, by going back to the experience of the sound, to the gestural experience of the sound and the tone. In this way, the whole human being reveals himself, so to speak, not just a single organ or organ system in language, but the whole human being reveals himself as a whole human being.

If we accompany our eurythmic performance with recitation or declamation, these performances of appropriate poetry, which are to be revealed through eurythmy, then the declamation and recitation must also be different from the way we are accustomed to today. We need only remember that people who have really lived in art, like Goethe, placed such great value on form and on the shaping of language that Goethe himself rehearsed his iambs with his actors very dramatically, like a conductor, using a baton. So he placed the greatest value on the treatment of language. Today, it is considered particularly praiseworthy when, when reading, when there is a recitative form, the sense of verse, rhyme and meter is completely suppressed. This is inartistic. And in an age that will be more artistic than ours, it will be recognized as unartistic to place the greatest value on the prosaic and the literal.

This could not be done if one accompanies the [poems] with eurythmy. One has to go back to the actual artistry, to the artistic design of the poem, to the rhyme, rhythm, and beat, to the inner, melodious and pictorial element. Just as one can now accompany the poem with eurythmy, one can also do so with music. Since eurythmy is a truly visible language, it can be sung through in the same way as through the human speech organs. And you will also be able to see rehearsals where the eurythmy accompanies the music, as this eurythmy is a possible art in itself.

Apart from the other thing, which I do not want to mention today, it can be seen from this that in certain cases one must resort to this eurythmy, I would like to say as a matter of course, if one wants to do full justice to the dramatic. For example, in Goethe's “Faust” there are scenes where the drama arises from the mere realistic representation of the phenomena. One need only recall the moment in Faust when the drama rises to depict something of the supersensible world that plays into the human soul. For example, if one considers the Arielle scene at the beginning of the second part of Faust, which represents something that does not take place in the real, outer, sensory world, but plays into the human soul from a spiritual reality human soul. If you want to depict that, you cannot get by with the usual realistic stage settings. But the moment you move on to what the eurythmic art gives not in terms of meaning but in terms of sound, when you introduce a special language that is not the language of ordinary contemporary life, you move beyond the very ordinary drama into the drama that can also be presented supersensibly.

And so you will be able to see in a scene from one of my “mystery dramas” that is being performed today that what is intended is thoroughly supersensible, but intended dramatically and not symbolically, as can be represented by the art of eurythmy alone. In this case, it is about the development of a human being, about the kind of development that does not, I would say, proceed in the usual way in which human life develops in everyday life, but rather one that brings about real transformations in the human being, where he really becomes a different person inwardly, in his soul, where he experiences something in his soul that can be compared to the great transitional points in outer growth. If you want to depict something like this, which is absolutely real but does not take place before the outer senses – as here, where John is standing before us, undergoing an inner soul development – then you have to do so pictorially, not symbolically, but pictorially, to make accessible to the sensual and supersensible gaze what is passing through the human soul.

And this is precisely what is to be shown in this scene, as we present it: that what takes place in the human being, but takes place in him in such a way that he has a purely spiritual world around him – as otherwise through the eye and ear a sensual world – that this is represented through the outer form by the three soul forces, as it is expressed through Mary, the ruler of these three soul forces . However, this cannot be realistically portrayed on stage if one wants to reveal it in a meaningful way. Instead, one must resort to eurythmy.

You will also see how eurythmy can work on its own. For in recent times we have moved towards creating forms that, so to speak, indicate the mood from the mere visible language of eurythmy, which is then continued and developed in a corresponding musical [performance] or in an artistic poem. Even the fading away of a mood can be captured in such a silent form.

In addition, eurythmy also has a hygienic-therapeutic side, which, however, basically draws what is expressed in this eurythmy from the inner laws of the human organism itself. Thus, the movements, which on the one hand are an artistic revelation, can also be shaped in such a way that they have a healing effect on certain pathological formations in the human organism. I just wanted to mention that.

The third thing that eurythmy offers is the didactic-pedagogical side. At the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is now under my direction, we have introduced eurythmy as a kind of soul-filled gymnastics, one after another, as a compulsory subject alongside other gymnastics. And it has already been shown how children, from as early as compulsory school age, find their way into these movements with great ease, movements that are thoroughly rooted in the human organism. Ordinary gymnastics – in the future, people will judge these things more impartially – are based solely on the physiological laws of the human organism. But what appears here as inspired gymnastics is based on the whole human being, on the human being as body, soul and spirit. Every movement is inspired. The child takes this for granted as it performs these movements. This is why these movements have such a life-giving and developmental effect on the child. It is an important educational tool in many other respects as well, for it contains a special power of the will. Above all, this eurythmy exercise fosters the initiative of the will and, in children, even a sense of truthfulness. In ordinary speech we can say things that become hardened into lies. But we cannot lie in these speech sounds, for when the whole human being is expressing himself, he cannot lie or indulge in empty phrases. What is given in this way means a development towards truthfulness for the child.

These are only isolated aspects. Much could be said about this theme. If we consider that the human being uses himself as an instrument, but in such a way that the forces at work within him are brought out, and the form itself is transformed into movement, then we can say that this eurythmy really does embody an ideal.

Then, before each performance, I must again ask for your forbearance. We are our own harshest critics, we know that we are at the beginning of our art form; it must develop further, but it has the potential to develop. These possibilities for development can be convincing when one considers what is gained by man using himself as a tool, as an instrument for his artistic formation, not just any external instrument, but himself. When Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To this end, he improves himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. One must add that he rises most significantly to the production of the work of art when he seeks choice, order, harmony and meaning from this own organization and transforms it into movement, into living sculpture. So that one can indeed entertain the hope that eurythmy, which is now at the beginning of its development, will continue to perfect itself more and more, so that one day it will be able to stand alongside the other fully-fledged art forms as a fully-fledged art form in its own right.

The first part of the performance will take place here in the building; the second part in the carpentry workshop.

The performance on 15 May 1921 (Whitsunday) took place entirely in the domed auditorium of the Goetheanum. Only the first part of the performance on 16 May was shown there; for the second part after the break, the performance was moved to the carpentry hall.

Program for the performance in Dornach, May 15, 1921

Recitation by Dr. Steiner
Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
“Evening Feelings” by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (6.) by Rudolf Steiner “Spring” by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (7) by Rudolf Steiner ‘Daffodils’. Music by Henry Zagwijn

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

The presentation that is about to take place will consist of recitation, eurythmy and music. It has been organized in such a way that the second scene from my fourth mystery drama, from 'The Awakening of the Soul', can be presented today in the following way: Firstly, Dr. Steiner will recite the first part of this second scene. Perhaps I may therefore be permitted to say a few words about these “mystery dramas” for the reason that only one scene is to be presented here and perhaps a few words are necessary to place this scene in the context in which it is presented. For these “mystery dramas” are in fact a presentation of the soul processes within, not in a symbolic or allegorical way, but in such a way that the soul — insofar as it is as real for the human being and his development as the sense world around him — is presented in a thoroughly idealistic way, if I may use the paradoxical expression: idealistic-realistic.

The four “mystery plays” depict the inner psychological development of a series of people who are socially and psychologically connected to one another. In a sense, the fate, the psychological and spiritual fate of the personality named Johannes, is the central focus that runs through all four “mystery plays”. Johannes is a painter, but one who, in his artistic striving, aims for a spiritualization of the artistic, for such a spiritualization that can then bring a supersensible reality to manifestation in a thoroughly realistic way, even in the painterly.

Through the vicissitudes of his life, John comes into contact with various personalities who, while he is undergoing his own spiritual development, are also undergoing theirs. And then it can be shown in dramatic images how the various supersensible powers intervene in the development of those people who are truly undergoing an inner, spiritual development. We see how, in particular, Maria is placed alongside Johannes Thomasius as a personality who, while Johannes himself is still at the starting point, one might say at the beginning of his development, has already attained a certain maturity of development; so that a kind of spiritual confrontation takes place between the still undeveloped Johannes Thomasius and the more mature personality of Maria.

Then other personalities join the circle. Above all, the antagonism of fate that arises between the two personalities - Professor Capesius and Dr. Strader - is portrayed.

Strader is a personality who, by nature, is actually quite suited to direct practical life, who has only been brought up by parents and educational prejudices into a different life path, but at the same time a personality who cannot be within practical action without this practical action being illuminated by a spiritualized worldview. And at the same time, he is a personality who does not want, on the one hand, to have practical work, like the sober, realistic life to which one pays tribute, and, on the other hand, devotion to the spiritual world in an abstract, mystical form, but rather, in Strader, a personality should be portrayed who, from the point of view of humanity, from reality, wants to weave the spiritual and the practical into one another .

In Capesius, we see a personality who is more immersed in the scientific life and who also finds some satisfaction in this scientific life, but only in the general scientific life as such, not in the particular scientific field of the present in which he is immersed. Therefore, Capesius feels particularly drawn to the revelations that can come to him from fairy tales, from the presentation of myths, in fact from all that which, in an imaginative, folk-like way, finds its way into the secrets of existence. What such people can experience in terms of mutual spiritual interaction is now presented in the first three “mystery dramas” to the point where personalities can connect a specific idea with what it means to be part of the spiritual life.

Because, dear attendees, this must be a spiritual experience, a spiritual event. Something that can only be expressed approximately in abstract formulas, something that is called “standing within the spiritual world”, which can be characterized in such a way that for the one who stands within the spiritual world, this spiritual world is really like the outer sensory world, so real that he must speak not only of some abstract spiritual beings, but of concrete spiritual entities that are not symbols and allegories, but that interact with human nature — which itself is spiritual and soul-like on one side — just like the beings of the external sense world. And it is intentional, according to the scenic images that already characterize this standing within the spiritual world with the decisive personalities of the “mystery dramas”, it is intentional the transition into practical life afterwards, after the drama that I have named the “Threshold of the Spiritual World” [The Guardian of the Threshold], after that the drama is set, [whose events] present themselves as a further development, [ the drama] which the personalities on whom it depends are now to place in practical life.

We should be able to use the course of these dramatic events to draw attention to how a spiritual world should not be approached as a Sunday pleasure, as something that runs alongside life, but how it should be approached as a spiritual reality that is directly connected to the outer, very real everyday life. The spiritual world should not be sought as a cloud-cuckoo-land, but as something that can be approached through each of the individual powers of the material life, to have a spiritual effect.

The first scene of this mystery drama, “The Awakening of the Soul”, therefore shows how one of the personalities of the four dramas, Hilarius Gottgetreu, comes to organize his very practical, namely industrial, enterprises in such a way that he includes Johannes Thomasius and Dr. Strader in this practical enterprise, so that they can actually bring about the realization of what that is, what connects abstract technology, in which it has been brought to a certain perfection in recent times, with that which, at the same time as the actions of technology, promotes everything that places man in this community in such a way that everyone can find their human existence in this community.

If this is to be realized, then the machine must begin to think differently than it has been thought in the past, especially in modern life; then the spirit must indeed be invoked and called upon to explain in a fully human way that which has so far only been explained in abstract mechanics, so that it can be carried directly into practical life - for the good and further development of humanity - that which is looked down from the spiritual world. Thus, spiritual personalities with a certain development are to be placed in practical life, and practical life is to be placed in the service of spiritual activity.

This gives rise to prejudices in those who have hitherto been involved in such an undertaking merely out of, I might say, abstract practice – like the office manager in the first picture of Hilarius Gottgetreu's practical enterprise. And we see the whole opposition with which so-called practice is confronted with that which alone can bring salvation to humanity: in a spiritual conception of life that is convincing to humanity.

What we are now attempting to a certain extent in practice, albeit in the very first, elementary stages, is fully contained in these “mystery dramas”. And when in 1913 the fourth drama, 'The Awakening of the Soul', was performed, initially it could only be brought to the world - which actually only means the world, namely the world of the stage - but which is thoroughly conceived in a thoroughly real sense, albeit in the sense of a spiritual-physical reality. However, when you see something like this, you soon realize how not only the so-called practical, physical world presents its prejudices against that which wants to exert its influence from the spiritual, which it wants to penetrate spiritually, but also how sometimes those who now strive for the spiritual heights, who want to undergo a certain spiritual development and also undergo it, how these can also absolutely can also completely fail at the right moment. And this failure from the other side is artistically attempted to be demonstrated in the second picture, which we now want to present.

In the first picture, which is not to be presented here, the resistance of external practice against the spiritual is shown, so to speak. In this second picture, the resistance of spiritual people is to be shown, so to speak. First of all, there is John himself, who, in the course of many events in his life, has gone through a lot, and who has risen to a certain view of the spiritual world, so that he could already be guided through the event of crossing over into the spiritual world. But then he suddenly feels uncanny] about this whole spiritual world into which he has come: He is confronted with the spiritual world, he feels like he has no footing in this spiritual world. But he wants to resort to direct nature and, above all, to what emerges in him as his own childhood memories. This inner tragedy, which actually grows ever greater the more a person advances in the spiritual world, this inner tragedy of a person developing in this way, is to be depicted in this picture. One would like to say: Through such a spiritual development, a person, when he has reached a certain age, becomes more alien to his earlier epochs of life than otherwise. He looks at his earlier epochs of life as if, one might say, childhood, the first childhood, were standing there as an independent person, as another person, and then youth, one might say, as another person. One becomes stranger through such a spiritual development. And one must again find one's way back in a more intense way than otherwise occurs.

We see Johannes Thomasius depicted as his childhood appears before him, as he wants to go back to that childhood because he cannot yet grasp what he is looking at, because he has not yet learned [to shine a light into] the spiritual world. Just at the moment when he had been called to be useful in the world, one might say, he becomes a burden to himself. You see him standing there in all his tragedy, first facing Maria, as he is to be led back to what he once was. But we also see how another personality connected with him, Capesius, has taken a certain step forward in his development, has gone through it, and cannot find his way back into reality, how he wants to remain in abstract spiritual worlds, in those that cannot penetrate reality. He, who has only been educated by science, I would say - not by practice like Strader - can more easily be tempted to stay inside the abstract spiritual world. We therefore see him, so to speak, temporarily falling away in the course of this picture.

And all this is meant to represent nothing other than the way in which the power appears – I need only remind you of Johannes Thomasius – not in a mystical and mysterious way, when I use the term 'Ahrimanic' for this power, when one sees how the Ahrimanic reaches into this life, wanting only to chain him to the outer, spiritless practice, to all that that only ties people to the physical and mechanical. This Ahriman does not appear in this [picture]. But on the other hand, one sees that which now wants to lead the human being beyond himself, so to speak, which works in the human being so that he wants to mystically or, in the bad sense, theosophically rise above himself by half a human length. You are well aware, ladies and gentlemen, of this kind of theosophy, which consists in those concerned always saying: I have the higher human being in me, I have the higher self in me. And then they feel as if they had grown beyond themselves by half a person and could grow beyond all other people. This is bad mysticism, this is bad theosophy, this is what wants to dissuade man from standing firmly on a secure ground of practical-physical reality, but which must be permeated by the spirit.

These forces, which want to alienate man from himself into an abstract spiritual world – I refer again to Thomasius – should be called Luciferic forces. They appear here; but the whole thing is not meant symbolically, but quite dynamically as forces present in the world, such as electricity and magnetism, which cannot be seen, but which are nevertheless present forces. We see how, through everything that is at work, Johannes Thomasius is led not to see his youth in delusion and dream and to long for it, but to see it in front of him, real. The struggle of his Scelenkräfte - Philia, Astrid, Luna and the other Philia - is presented to you. The spirit of Johannes' youth is presented to you. It is Johannes himself, but something that has become alien to him, which is juxtaposed with the older Johannes Thomasius as a perceivable personality – so to speak, the young Johannes Thomasius with the older Johannes Thomasius. The soul forces work together so that Johannes Thomasius, at the age at which he can recognize himself, no longer dreams himself back to his youth in delusion, but can prepare himself in this way to really intervene in practical life, as it should be in the real, right relationship between the spiritual world and the physical world.

The first part will be recited. The second part – where the gnomes and sylphs appear and the soul forces and where the drama itself demands a kind of eurythmy, as noted in the drama – the recitation will then transition into a stage presentation through eurythmy, through that eurythmic art that is based on a visible language that is brought forth from the human organization just as lawfully as human phonetic language or singing.

But precisely that which is to be presented supernaturally, which plays into the supernatural, cannot actually be presented with ordinary stage realism. We have made the attempt with the scenes in which Goethe, for example, transfers his “Faust” drama into the supernatural: we have used our eurythmy, this visible language, to help us. And you can see how everything that Goethe weaves into a higher world of reality can, precisely because of that, find its way into the language of the stage.

What appears here as visible speech is intended to enable the inner movement tendencies of the human larynx and speech organs to be studied as they are employed in speech or song. Then what is observed there as the inner lawfulness of speech is transferred to the whole human being or to groups of people, so that, as it were, the human being or groups of people appear on the stage like a visible larynx, like a speech organ. Eurythmy is not mere gesturing or mimicry, nor is it ordinary dance, but eurythmy seeks to represent something quite different at its root.

When we accompany our speech with gestures today, these are arbitrary gestures. It is interesting that in the early days of human development there was a single word for the gesture that was still connected to the sound. Our gestures today are gestures of meaning that arise from what we actually want to express and have already gone through in our thoughts. What occurs in our eurythmy is what is experienced in the tone and sound. What is experienced when a person experiences the individual sound in their soul is already abstract in outer speech. But in eurythmy we must lead back more and more from the gesture of meaning to the gesture of the sound. And that is the point: how speech in sound and song itself can evoke something that is again a real language, not just an accompaniment. In this way we can go back to the elementary form, to the artistic feeling of expression.

This, however, also leads to a different relationship to the other arts, namely declamation and recitation. This is an experiment. And one could, by accompanying the eurythmy - not in the sense of wanting to particularly emphasize the content of the prose and let everything that is rhythm, meter, rhyme and so on, verse foot and so on, recede in the declamation, thus suppressing the actual artistic element, [one could] not accompany the eurythmy with this art of recitation at all. Therefore, we fall back on what, for example, Goethe, the true artist, still felt very much when he himself rehearsed the drama with his actors, what he had to rehearse with the baton, thus seeing the main thing in the treatment of language, in the formation of the linguistic-phonetic-tonal basis of the actual literal content. For that is the truly artistic, whereas it is an unartistic approach to focus particularly on the content and to want to emphasize only what is often considered the greatest in the art of recitation and declamation today. We then apply this art of recitation and declamation, if recitation and declamation is used at all, by always going back to the artistically shaped, which actually only makes use of the literal content in order to express something much deeper than can be expressed by the abstract literal content, thought-filled content.

In this sense, the first part of the picture should be recited; then the transition will be made immediately to the eurythmic presentation of the second part of the second picture of my mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul”. There will be no break. The entire performance will take place in this space without a break. The presentation of this mystery play will then be followed by other types of eurythmy performances, and there will also be a musical interlude.