Lot 2208 Dα

The Polish Prince-Bishop Ignacy Kasisicki enabled the young artist Christoph Heinrich Kniep to travel to Italy, a journey he undertook in 1781. Kniep stayed in Rome until 1785. Afterwards he moved to Naples, where Hackert and Johann Wilhelm Tischbein were living in the meantime. The latter introduced him to Goethe in Naples, with the result that Kniep was allowed to accompany the poet on his journey to Sicily. The large number of drawings Kniep executed for Goethe in Sicily were not only precious memories for the latter, but also extremely important for his understanding of this cultural landscape. It was only in Naples and Sicily, according to Goethe scholars, that the Greek influence of antiquity became tangible to him. For Kniep, in turn, these Sicilian drawings established his posthumous fame as an artist.

Probably no one has captured the essence of Kniep's draughtsmanship better than the German/Danish poet and patron Friederike Brun when she wrote: "I have never seen such sketches as his. Each one is an academic masterpiece. Air and line perspective, trees, proportions of the architectural parts, everything is perfect, everything is finished with the most elegant daintiness. His own compositions are full of grace; neo-Greek idylls, interwoven with charming appearances" (quoted from G. Striel: Der Zeichner Christoph Heinrich Kniep, 1998, p. 12).

The drawing shows the dreamed land of Arcadia that was so dear to the artists of Kniep's generation; an ideal, invented place where nature and art meet in the most beautiful way, but which does not exist in this form in the world. Accordingly, we find ancient buildings - a temple, for example, or the Cestius Pyramid - and Apollo, the god of the arts and light, accompanied in the foreground by five of his muses, scattered throughout this wonderfully expansive landscape with its wooded hills and valleys.