ABSTRACT
During the last decade of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth centuries, the concept of the arabesque assumed center stage in German aesthetic theory, criticism, and literary and artistic production. This chapter analyzes a particularly salient moment within that development, the illustrations to Goethe’s Faust by Peter Cornelius. Competing concepts of the arabesque are reviewed and a contrast is drawn between the Romantic understanding of the arabesque form as exemplified in Philipp Otto Runge’s Times of the Day and Cornelius’ own realization of the form, which was decisively influenced by Albrecht Dürer’s marginal drawings for the Prayer Book of Maximilian I. This chapter traces Goethe’s personal relations with both Cornelius and Runge and highlights his influence on the final shape of Cornelius’ work. Interpretations of three of Cornelius’ plates bring out the complex interplay between word and image and demonstrate how Cornelius pictorially realizes his own religiously inflected vision of Goethe’s Faust play.
