ABSTRACT
The completion of Faust is the great poetic achievement of Goethe’s last years, but the influence of his creative personality extends beyond his own work, and this is perhaps his finest gift to posterity. ‘People from the most distant countries will speak to one another and answer one another’, says the aged Leonardo da Vinci in one of his riddles. The phrase sounds like a motto for Goethe’s activity, which ranged far and wide into distant parts of the world, and continued to do so until his death. The aged Leonardo lived a solitary life in a foreign country. He, too, had his Eckermann with him, his faithful Melzi, who rescued his manuscripts and drawings for posterity. Leonardo, like Goethe’s Faust, planned large-scale construction of canals and reclamation of wide areas of swamp land; he even designed units for prefabricated houses and drew up systematic ground plans for his settlements. On visits by the French Court he acted as maitre de plaisir, as Goethe had done in Weimar, devising ingenious masquerades and clever mechanical contrivances. One of these was a lion that opened its chest to reveal an interior entirely in blue - Goethe’s favourite colour; another was a heart which, when brought on to the stage, split in half to reveal the figure of ‘cupidity’ standing on a globe and divided into ‘polar’ opposites - the right side armed for conquest, the left side pale, in tears and in rags. But Leonardo was lonely and solitary. His greatest works perished in his own lifetime; when Goethe saw the Last Supper he lamented the fact that so inventive an artist should expose his painting so carelessly to decay. Goethe wants to make his influence felt in this life, in the here and now. He speaks to the world, and it answers him.
