Tiepolo at the Deutsches Eck

“Que sais-je?” Montaigne asked. “What do I know?” It’s a good question, and there are many dimensions to it. What does my knowledge amount to? Do I understand what I know? What is it to know something? Is knowledge merely an intellectual acquisition, or a moral one, too? Why is the distinction we commonly draw between knowing a person and knowing of a person so important to us?

Some months ago I was invited to a conference in Germany. It was on “Romantic Exploration”, and I had some long-neglected material that could be converted to use in that context. I was curious, too. I hadn’t visited Germany since my English childhood, when my late father—in a quixotic attempt to help make amends for the collapse of my parents’ marriage—took my sister and me on a cruise down the Rhine, on a massively elongated pleasure-barge. All I can recall from that experience, I’m afraid, is wonderment and envy watching the majority-population Dutch people aboard ship eat chocolate vermicelli for breakfast. That, and a shadowy impression of the front of Cologne cathedral. So much for Germany; and later in my life Italy exerted its appeal—as it has for quite a few Germans of note, of course.

But I had another reason to resume the acquaintance. The conference was in Koblenz, and my atlas told me the smaller southern city of Würzburg was within a day’s journey of it. Justifiably—one must get over one’s jetlag, after all—I could fulfil a desire ten years in growing: to visit the frescoed ceiling of the Treppenhaus, or staircase hall, of the Würzburg Residenz: the palace of the prince-archbishops of that stubbornly Catholic region of Germany. (With his customary blend of irreverence and insight, Napoleon called it “the nicest parsonage in Europe”.) These are no ordinary frescoes, but the climactic work of a genuine master of the medium, Giambattista Tiepolo, the last artist to specialise in that medium and to feel the Renaissance breathing down his neck, accordingly, and whose greatest work on canvas—surely the greatest canvas of the eighteenth century—hangs not in Europe at all, but in the National Gallery of Victoria.

Why Tiepolo? I couldn’t say. All those blue skies and dove-grey clouds, all that silk in oranges and lemons; so many halberds and dogs and helmets; so much wit and so many Shakespearean outfits; so much vertiginousness and drama, none of it the least bit portentous. So much perilous foreshortening, carried off with total aplomb. So many blonde, heavy-lidded glacial ladies in ruffs, with snub noses, stiff backs and rotund eyes, most of whom he tactfully modelled from his wife. So much kitsch, if we are to believe art historians, who sometimes call him a “decorator”.

So to Koblenz I duly went. Lord Byron, who’s always been everywhere before you, like his more single-minded compatriot, Turner, has a verse from Childe Harold on the fortress that looks down on the city from the left bank of the Rhine:

Here Ehrenbreitstein, with her shattered wall

Black with the miner’s blast, upon her height

Yet shows of what she was, when shell and ball

Rebounding idly on her strength did light:—

A Tower of Victory! from whence the flight

Of baffled foes was watched along the plain:

But Peace destroyed what War could never blight,

And laid those proud roofs bare to Summer’s rain—

On which the iron shower for years had poured in vain.

And so forth. The fortress is still there, still shattered but being reclaimed, and still supplying its famous view of Deutsches Eck, “Germany’s Corner”, where the Rhine and the Mosel meet. (Koblenz derives from the Latin, confluentes.) It is not only the confluence that gives the triangle of land opposite the fort this name. There is a church there where, I was given to understand, certain German states at a critical time had joined together and begun the process of unification. Deutsches Eck is a coach-stop now and not much more, stared across by a massive equestrian sculpture of Kaiser Wilhelm I, as Teutonic an image as could be imagined, gaunt, determined, visionary, with a big moustache and a hollow-eyed look into the future, all on a massive rusticated plinth. Modern, grey-haired Europeans pottered around under his dismissive gaze, mostly taking the opportunity to stretch their legs, smoke, and stare back at the starers on the opposite bank.

The church is still standing, though in front of it there is precious little apart from a tall truncated block of old dwellings, and up from the Eck is Koblenz’s old town, about eight blocks square, and as easy to lose yourself in as one of the Grimm brothers’ fairytale woods. Regularly enough, one of those European pleasure-barges my father had put me on would pull in and flood the zone with tourists and, of course, the trade was there to meet it and sell and exhibit itself. The pubs were fairly immune from these invasions, but they served lunches fit for heroes, and often enough when I thought I’d ordered something light and sensible, I got enough sausage for a platoon. Smallgoods aren’t small in Germany.

Thence, with a day to spare before conference proceedings began, to Würzburg, beyond Frankfurt to the south, and on yet another river, the Main. The train is the greatest way to travel, and this was a memorable three hours or so in October sunshine, passing the Lorelei and other scenic spots. Würzburg is far smaller than Koblenz; “fairer”, you might say, and less touched by modernity. Somewhat like Bath, in that you can see the surrounding hill-slopes from the centre, only covered in grapevines in this case. The Residenz is unexpectedly huge, therefore, with a front like Buckingham Palace or Blenheim. (After my visit to the building I sat in the Hofgarten behind it, which goes uphill from formal to natural in a series of terraces, and had that familiar response of visitors to buildings of this size: “I hardly saw any of that.”) No time is wasted once you enter: the great staircase the roof of which Tiepolo was employed to “decorate” is the first thing you see, as was no doubt the intention. As you ascend, the stairs double back on themselves and split into two halfway up, leading to a landing, rectangular in shape, I couldn’t say how long.

Above your head are the heavens, all peach and azure, at dawn, and the god Apollo bounds across the sky to meet the chariot of the sun he must steer towards dusk. He is accompanied by all sorts of supporting, upward-gazing deities and semi-deities, the perspective passing off into infinity. The goddesses are all like Mrs Tiepolo, whereas each of the gods demonstrates a different kind of middle-aged masculine authority, or complacency. I injured my neck in university service three years ago, and can only tilt my head for a few minutes, so it occurred to me the Residenz might offer a service of wheeling visitors around on hospital beds or mechanics’ trolleys to inspect the vault. I certainly couldn’t just lie down and look up. Little troops of high-school students, like goslings, were passing through continually, ignoring the art works completely, and I’d have looked a proper fool.

Apollo is good, but what everyone comes to see is the depiction of Earth beneath him. Each of the four sides of the ceiling is given over to one of the four continents known when Tiepolo set to work in the early 1750s, and each continent is presided over by a female tutelary empress at the centre of each representation, seated on an animal appropriate to her sphere: America on an alligator, Africa on a camel, India on an elephant, Europe on a bull. As you go up the stairs, it is America you see, on a short side of the rectangle. Asia and Africa are on your right and left, and as you turn up the second flight to complete your ascension you confront Europe, above whose head the artist has placed a portrait of the man who paid for all this: Prince-Bishop Carl-Philipp von Greiffenklau—shades of Harry Potter!—who died two years after it came to pass.

Around each queen is an immense bustle of figures and animals, objects and artefacts, extending right along in a frieze where the ceiling meets the wall, and the program is demonstrably in the kind of historical sequence beloved by the Enlightenment. In America there are no buildings, and there are telltale signs of cannibalism along the ground. Magnificent though she is, America is clad in feathers, and the only sign of civilisation in her realm is a lighted fire. In Africa the side of a colossal tent forms the background, and trade is going on apace: everywhere there are barrels and bales, being processed by merchants and porters. In the exact centre, a dealer displays a string of pearls across his forearm; more peep out from an emerald-green box.

Africa remains scantily dressed; Asia is clothed from head to foot. She stares imperiously from a moving elephant, at whose feet we see a slave in manacles, and two men who have almost disappeared, so humble is their obeisance. But here, too, are further signs of culture: a grotesquely stylised pyramid, and a stone incised with the Armenian alphabet. In the background is a hill with two crucifixes. Here, then, are religions and languages. In this way and in due course we are made ready for Europe, on the narrow wall opposite America, where civilisation has arrived in full force. Here is a neo-classical building and an orchestra, a fortification in the process of being built, cannons and crosiers, an idealised female painting a globe from a palette, and a massive warhorse. There is even an absurd scholar, lost in a book. Looking on from the left are Tiepolo himself and his son (who helped paint); sitting on a cannon in the front is the architect, Balthasar Neumann, tentatively sniffed at by a huge liver-coloured hound; and above it all the laurel-wreathed portrait of Carl-Philipp escalates into the air, apparently on the back of an immense ermine-lined cloak, a trumpet of fame blown lustily alongside by one of many bare-breasted maidens in which the fresco specialises.

No doubt it all sounds ridiculously Eurocentric; a kind of last word in cultural arrogance. But arrogance is the last word one would use of Tiepolo. Europe may be top of the heap, but the artist’s curiosity about places and peoples elsewhere is rampant, and so is that ever-present, deflatory wit that he inherited from the Renaissance. The other continents are far too pregnant with splendour, interest and humanity to submit to European rule. They are chaotic, but it is the chaos of life, profusion and romance. There is absolutely no sense of clenched ideological intention in Tiepolo’s effort; he’s not capable of it. Indeed, twice, in similar postures, Tiepolo has placed a ridiculous stumbling European on the fringe of his exotic queens’ domains, bottom in the air, legs in a mess, prostrated by the glory heaped up before and above him, recognisable only by his breeches and the skirts of his coat.

What I couldn’t understand was where the little gaggles of schoolchildren had gone. There were a few other rooms to visit before I fell upon the gift shop like a Napoleonic grenadier, but they were all quite empty. One has more frescoes by Tiepolo, but after the Treppenhaus they are small beer. Another is comprised of so much baroque plasterwork that you feel you are imprisoned inside a wedding cake. Another has a set of dark green walls, painted on copper. No children in any of them. Puzzled, I set off down a nondescript corridor in search of further sights.

At which point I had my “Que sais-je?” moment, or one of them. Quite without fuss the corridor displayed black and white photos of the Residenz from 1945 onwards: the rooms I’d seen, blackened with smoke, plasterwork hacked away, floorboards ripped up, with burned beams and rafters, smashed panes, splintered doors and panelling: all a shattered and blackened wreck. Alongside were further pictures from the 1960s and 1970s, of craftsmen at work, rebuilding the frame, replacing the woodwork, restoring the parquet floors. On the night of March 16, 1945, two hundred Lancaster bombers reduced Würzburg to rubble in a quarter of an hour. By some miracle, no bomb landed on Tiepolo’s ceiling, which would truly have been irreplaceable. To the best of my knowledge, the city had no particular military or industrial significance. This was “area bombing”, intended to demoralise, no more, no less. Even Koblenz, which suffered the same fate—which is why the square in front of the church at Deutsches Eck contains only one truncated building, and why the old town is so small—served as a base for the Wehrmacht. The bombers can’t take credit for the fact that the admittedly somewhat ludicrous equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm staring over the confluence is a replica. It was American artillery that destroyed the original of that.

Nor were the Lancasters crewed only by Britons. I believe I’m right in saying that in personnel terms Air Crew Europe was Australia’s single largest military deployment during the Second World War, and 20 per cent of Australian military losses overall were from that theatre. Nor, of course, are the sufferings of Koblenz and tiny Würzburg to be compared to those of Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf or Dresden. The point is that I “knew” about those events, but they had the status only of historic facts until I saw the pictures of Europe’s nicest parsonage turned to rubble and then put together again. Byron said, “Peace destroyed what War could never blight” at Ehrenbreitstein. Not so here. He said Ehrenbreitstein had shrugged off war’s “iron shower”. Not so here.

History has many cunning passages, said Hegel, and this particular corridor led, of all places, right back to the top of the stairs and Tiepolo’s Europe, just as I left it, radiant and orderly, a neat and unobtrusive crown on the head of its queen, Saturn, Mercury and Diana in attendance, buildings erect or going up, military hardware present for decoration only, an artist well-pleased with his efforts, tactfully as ever including the people who’d made it all possible.

Visiting great works of art is supposed to be an ennobling and uplifting experience, and it is not Tiepolo’s fault that history has put this sober and dramatic frame around his masterpiece. Like Byron, he is not a stern moralist, which is why I like him. But we need stern moralists, too—like Wordsworth, for example. “Have I not reason to lament,” I thought at the end of that corridor, “what man has made of man?”

It took a fair amount of time and money in the Residenz gift shop to restore my faith in the species, and then I realised where the schoolchildren had gone. Beyond the shop was an exhibition space devoted to Germany during the war in its entirety—from soup to nuts, so to speak. I hadn’t the heart to go through it all, and anyway it was terribly crowded compared with the palace at large. But given what had happened, I was drawn to the area bombing exhibit, where I learned that palatial monuments similar to the Residenz had been similarly damaged in Munich, Augsberg and Nuremberg, to name but three. Time to find a pub.

Richard Lansdown is Associate Professor of English at James Cook University, Cairns.