Locus ornatus: Ornamental structures in the idyll from Gessner to Eichendorff

Abstract

The charming, natural setting of the idyll, the locus amoenus which invites shepherd poets to song, is interpreted as an ornamental space, a locus ornatus framing the creative act. Throughout its history the idyll is a genre uniquely concerned with the origins of poetry, and the German idyll of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries takes up this pastoral self-reflection by employing ornamental motifs to structure its poetic space and represent its aesthetic principles. This study traces the development of the genre through an examination of idylls by Salomon Gessner, Johann Heinrich Voss, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Joseph von Eichendorff. In all analyzed works, two ornamental motifs from the visual arts, wreath and arabesque, dominate both the formal composition and poetic content. These motifs transcend a supplemental role and express opposing paradigms of cultural self-understanding. Whereas the circular form of the wreath represents principles of closure as ideal, the arabesque presents a world-view based on openness and the dissolution of borders. Both forms not only serve a structural and symbolic function within the text, but also, on a metalevel, frame and re-present the idyll as genre. The frame is particularly relevant for the idyll as a mistranslation of the Greek root eidyllon led to its definition as “little picture,” and therefore to an identification with the doctrine of ut pictura poesis . But while in the idylls of the Enlightenment, the wreath circumscribes and frames nature and culture as ideal space, its ornamental logic of proliferation and transformation can also subvert the rational and didactic goals of the framed perspective. In the shift from rococo to Classicism, ornament becomes increasingly viewed as autonomous from the artwork. Goethe engenders the metamorphosis of wreath into the arabesque through introduction of a metaphor of organic growth and prepares the ground for the more radical transgression of the idyll's borders in Romanticism. Because the vertical movement of the arabesque becomes constitutive of the Romantic idyll as an expression of its utopian aspirations, the genre transcends its pastoral origins and loses its contours as it embraces new forms such as the fairytale.