ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the complex associations between visual and social mores forged in the eighteenth-century association of appearance and morality. That connection comes together iconically in the specific case of representations of Moses Mendelssohn, who embodied, literally and figuratively, the ambiguities inherent in the late eighteenth-century understanding of ugliness. One of the contemporaries who did not understand Mendelssohn's commitment to Judaism but whose respect endured nonetheless was the hugely prolific artist Daniel Chodowiecki. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Mendelssohn's image became his painted or engraved image, which was often produced for collectors and copied as frontispieces, medallions, and paintings as part of the visual culture of the German Enlightenment period. Nineteenth-century portrayals of Mendelssohn reflected the aestheticization of the man as artistic image. He seemed to embody philosophical morality, religious irrationality, and physical ugliness, thus presenting something of a challenge to artists who sought to represent both his (physical) ugliness and his (intellectual) beauty.
