Keywords
altar, Goethe, harmony, the idea of , the age of Enlightenment, nature,
How to Cite
Fedotova E. D. The "Altar of Good Fortune" by I. Goethe: autonomous form in a park space // The Art of Eurasia, 2018. № 2 (9). P. 193-198. URL: https://doi.org/10.25712/ASTU.2518-7767.2018.02.015.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Current Issue
Information
Make a Submission
Abstract
The "Altar of Good Fortune" or "Altar of Agathe Tyche" was created by Goethe in 1777 in the garden of his house in Weimar. It has a confessional nature, it embodied his philosophical thoughts about nature, human life, the magic of art, the creative power of the artist. Placed almost at the fence of the garden the Altar represented the idea of "perfect beauty", the achievement of which Goethe considered as the main task of the artist-Creator. The altar as an attribute of ancient culture was often used in the landscape decoration of the Enlightenment century. It had in itself an image of a deity, a source of wisdom, engendered religious reverence. So, we can assume that the shape of the Altar, combining the ball with the cube, was chosen to show the identity of God and Nature, the consent of Man-Creator with God, shown in Nature. The altar is a monument to the immortality of the spirit of the human-creator, personifying the higher moral laws that art should serve. The imitations of Goethe's composition (the ball on a tetrahedron) adorn many cemeteries, symbolizing the immortality of the human creative spirit, recalling that the choice of the life path always belongs to Man, that he is the creator of his own happiness.
References
- Eckermann I. P. Conversations Of Goethe (Russ. ed.: Ekkerman I.P. Razgovory s Gete. Translated from German. Moscow, 1981).
- Goethe I. V. On Art (Russ. ed.: Gete I.V. Ob iskusstve. Translated from German. Moscow, 1975).
- Zhirmunskii V. Ocherki po istorii nemetskoi klassicheskoi literatury [Essays on the history of German classical literature]. Leningrad, 1972.
- Shafranovskii I.I. [Mineralogical studies Goethe]. Getevskie chteniya [Goethe's reading]. Moscow, 1984.
