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“What I want to see is the Everlasting Rome, not the Rome which is replaced by another every decade.”[1]

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe passes through Porta del Popolo on the 29th of October 1786 and sees Rome for the very first time, it is the culmination of a lifetime of expectations and the beginning of a life altering transformation. When arriving in Italy he was already famous for works like Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), but the thirty-seven-year-old poet and statesman arrived not merely as an artist seeking inspiration, but as a natural scientist seeking knowledge. During the best part of the following two years, Rome was to be his laboratory, its monuments his specimens and his own perception the principal instrument of inquiry.

During the next half hour I will argue the case that Goethe’s background in natural science profoundly shaped his first impression of Rome and the interpretive framework through which he sought to comprehend it. I will show you how Goethe, by walking, reading, drawing, collecting, observations, reflections, writing and debating brought to the study of the city the same investigative discipline that he utilized in botany, geology and optics. And that through this scientific lens, Goethe transformed both his understanding of Rome, nature and himself. I will do this by looking at the methods he used and cases where we see the scientist in action. My main example of this will be Goethe’s evolving understanding of the Roman Carnival, a case that will allow us to do an in-depth study of the transformative power in his approach.

Italian Journey: Our ticket to ride
We are so lucky as to be invited onto the journey by Goethe himself, via the travelogue Italian Journey, his own account of his famous journey through Italy in the years 1786-1788. The book takes the form of an edited diary and is both a unique sneak peek into the mind of the world-famous poet in some of his most formative years and a valuable, first-hand account of 18th-century Italy. And for this reason it is naturally the main source material for this lecture.

At the same time, due to the complex history surrounding the book’s publishing, it is not a choice without its challenges and limitations. Italian Journey was published in two parts, the first one in 1817 and the second in 1829, a solid 29 and 41 years after the end of the journey itself. The use of more immediate accounts in the form of letters, notes and diary entries, in combination with much later recollections, alterations and editorial decisions, results in a dual temporal perspective: the spontaneity and intuition of the young traveler appear alongside the interpretive voice and matured reflections of the older author.

Therefore, whatever part of the text we are looking at, it imposes the question of whether it is the 37-, 68- or 80-year-old Goethe that is speaking to us. Especially the second part is more eclectic in style and includes that give the impression of being based on heavily edited material or being written later in its entirety. For example Victor Tschudi points out in the article “Goethe in the Hall and His Journeys in Printed Rome” from 2015, how a description of the view from Capitol does not line up with the real view and must be based on an engraving by Fries and Thürmer, from 1824.[2]

Still, it is my assessment that Italian Journey, in combination with other source material, have a lot to tell us about the impressions Goethe took home from Italy, even when we can’t pinpoint exactly what is a more spontaneous revelation and what is altered and refined at a later stage. It is also important to acknowledge the importance of Italian Journey as a wide-reaching perspective in the reception history of Rome. Having taken thousands of readers along for the ride during the 200 years that has passed sins its publication.

First impressions
We first join Goethe as he leaves Carlsbad for Italy in a rush, on the 3rd of September 1786. He sneaks out at three in the morning and in the following eight weeks, the suspense grows day by day. He is a man on a mission, as he writes “I want to study the big things, learn and educate myself before I turn forty”.[3]

But the man that arrives in Rome is, as Victor Tschudi writes in the same article that I referred to earlier, a man already saturated with images of the city.[4] He carries with him an imaginary city, a theoretical, idealized city, built in his mind through “paintings, drawings, etchings, woodcuts, plaster casts and cork models”[5]. He has seen and admired images of Rome all the way back from early childhood, as he recalls “The first engravings I remember – my father hung views of Rome in the hall”.[6]

During his first week in Rome, the mood therefor quickly turns from eagerness to confusion. “Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world”[7] he exclaims as disorientation turns to frustration. In the end the initially optimistic poet must admit “I find it a melancholy business, separating the old Rome from the new”[8].

This double consciousness, the friction between his imagined ideal and the empirical truth that meets him in situ, becomes the starting point for Goethe’s scientific approach to Rome. Like a biologist studying a known species for the first time in the wild, he comes to realize that secondhand knowledge can never replace direct experience. Or, as he puts it, “Only in Rome can you educate yourself on Rome”.[9]

What we see here is the scientist’s frustration with the unclassifiable, with a chaotic reality that seemingly resists systematization. Goethe’s desire to “grasp the evolution of the city”[10] and “understand how epoch follows upon epoch”[11] mirrors his drive in botany, to trace continuity within transformation and uncover the urform, his idea of a primal form that unites diverse manifestations within one morphologic law.

And from here starts the work towards Goethe’s mental reconstruction of Rome. Through thorough investigation and methodological observations Goethe pieces the city back together. And if we wish to understand this new Rome, we must look not only to the poet, but to the scientist. Because his reflection on Rome goes hand in hand with his morphological studies in botany and phenomenological studies in optics. And because Goethe himself views them as one and the same. In a letter from his second stay, he describes how his work in natural history has led him to discover an ἒν xαì πãv, “a law valid for all” that he finds equally applicable to art and architecture:

“The principle by which I interpret works of art and unlock the secret which artists and art experts since the Renaissance have been laboriously trying to discover seems to me sounder every time I apply it”[12] 

Morphology as the unifying principle
Goethe’s dual identity as artist and scientist finds its synthesis in his theory of form.[13] In his view art is not a depiction of nature, it is nature, and he argued that the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures was shaped by the same underlying laws of form and necessity as nature itself.[14] Thereby, via studying the sculptures, Goethe believed he could uncover the same universal principles that governed botanical structures.

In this lies also the foundation of his universal, morphological thinking. The belief that all forms, whether biological or artistic, are variations of a single, generative law of necessity. Rome, with its many layers of historic remains, provided the perfect field for testing the validity of his reasoning. Each ruin and each fragment of sculpture became a specimen in a vast comparative anatomy of civilization. The continuity Goethe sought between ancient and modern Rome is the same principle as he seeks in his botanical studies.

In “The Wholeness of Nature, Goethe’s way of Science”, Henri Bortoft writes that the key idea is that of “multiplicity in unity”. That all plants are different manifestations of the same plant, the Urpflanze, that again is all plants at once.[15]  Bortoft compares it with the famous drawing of the duck/rabbit, that is both duck and rabbit at the same time, but extended into an indeterminate number of perspectives, instead of only two. So when Goethe talks of understanding the continuity between ancient Rome and the modern, we can think of it a bit like understanding what makes the city both duck and rabbit, ancient and modern at the same time.

Seeing as method and the training of perception
Pehr Sällström on the other hand, argues in Goethe and the natural sciences, from 1998, that not even Goethe himself really knew what he meant by urform, and that his theory of the Urphänomen is first and foremost a defense of his conviction that thinking and perception is two closely tied units, to the degree of being two sides of the same thing.[16]

Because central to Goethe’s scientific method is the conviction that knowledge arises from disciplined observation. To see in the right way, to put it bluntly. The key principle in his morphological studies, was that he believes he could train his perception and imagination to approximate the productive and form-generating process of nature.[17] In Rome, he sets out to train his perception through the study of art and architecture in much the same way.

The most striking similarity is Goethe’s attempt at refining his perception through an iterative process of systematically revisiting monuments, or as he puts it “I do nothing except look, go away, and come back and look again”[18]. Describing how it allows him to overcome “initial amazement”[19] in order to study things more freely and objectively.

He also puts great emphasis on the value of seeing the monuments in different lighting and then especially that of moonlight or torchlight. This embodies a proto-phenomenological approach. An attempt to apprehend phenomena through the fullness of their variations. Calibrating his perception, penetrating a bit deeper with each new perspective. For example, he writes after seeing the Colosseum in the light of the full moon “details are swallowed up by the huge masses of light and shadow”[20] , indicating a search for the essential outline beneath superficial change. A way of seeing that anticipates his morphological approach to plants and his later studies on color perception.

Complementary to this, Goethe uses walking as a method to map the city. Or, with his words: “We walk around a great deal, I study the layout of Ancient Rome and Modern Rome, look at ruins and buildings and visit this villa or that”[21]. The act of walking is both a literal and intellectual movement, as it becomes another way of acquiring direct experience. The city becomes a living text to be read through motion and time, its form traced through repeated traversal.

Scientific techniques in cultural observation
And what he sees he also registers and processes through a range of methods. He sketches, models, collects samples and commissions plaster casts. He discusses and refines his findings in debates with his fellow friends and colleagues, and further through journaling and the writing of letters, and articles.

Initially, one of Goethe’s ambitions when traveling to Italy, was that of becoming a visual artist. He received lessons in drawing and painting from his artist friends in Rome. Though he relinquishes the ambition, with some regret, due to lack of training and talent, he at the same time shifts his perspective and focuses more on drawing as an analytic tool. When reflecting upon his own drawing he writes “The few lines I draw on the paper, often too hasty and seldom exact, help me to a better comprehension of physical objects. The more closely and precisely one observes particulars, the sooner one arrives at a perception of the whole”.[22]

Goethe was an eager collector within a large variety of fields. By the end of his life, Goethe owned a scientific collection of approximately 23 000 objects.[23] During his stay in Italy he collected both books, prints, plaster casts, minerals, botanical specimens and other artifacts, filling up his bedroom on Via del Corso 18 with everything from a replica of a colossal head of Juno to prints and stones. His reasons for collecting were many… remembering, comparing, preserving. And just the pure satisfaction of owning something. But in Italian Journey Goethe explicitly puts emphasis on plaster casts from originals as an important tool for up close- and comparative studies.[24]

He also used other written sources to widen his perspectives and substantiate his findings. He does not arrive in Rome without having read the works of both Vitruvius and Palladio. And while in Rome he studied the writings of Johann Winkelmann, the founder of classical archeology. He also accumulates extensive, theoretical knowledge of the grand masters, like Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci. The influence of Da Vinci is maybe especially apparent as he adopts his philosophy of studying anatomy as a way to mastering the arts of painting and sculpture. For example on one occasion, he describes how he used a skeletal foot in combination with anatomic studies of the bones and muscles, as basis for his work with a sculpture. 

The Roman Carnival: From chaos to comprehension
If, as we have established, the unifying thread in Goethe’s Rome is the search for eternal form, the reoccurring obstacle is chaos. He is haunted by what can’t be systematized. Although his initial frustration with the apparent incoherencies on his contemporary Rome is with time mended through tenacious investigations, the irritation returns with full force as he is faced with the apparent disorder of the Roman Carnival.

During his first visit to Rome, Goethe gives only one short account of the Roman carnival on February 21st, after the final day of festivities:

“At last the folly is over. Yesterday evening the innumerable little candles created another scene of Bedlam. One has to see the Roman Carnival to lose all wish to ever see it again! It is not worth writing about (…) The pure and lovely sky looked down in innocence on all these buffooneries.”[25]

The tone is almost shockingly dismissive compared with the rest of the book. A year later, Goethe is back in Rome for the second time, and the tone does not start of much better. On February the 1st 1788, his views are much the same as the year before:

“How happy I shall be when Tuesday is over and the fools are silenced. (…) On Monday and Tuesday the fools were still making a tremendous racket, especially on Tuesday, when the frenzied business of the Moccoli was in full swing. On Wednesday I thanked God and the Church for Lent. I did not go to any of the festine, as the masked balls are called here.”[26]

Still, something has changed in between the time of writing the first account and the second, as he is “ forced to recognize that this popular fête has its own individual order of proceedings – just like everything else that repeats itself in life.”[27] Moving on from his first visit, when he stated: “It is not worth writing about”, the second stay in Rome comes with a quite long, systematic description of the whole festival, going through the different elements of the proceedings, one by one. Approaching it, as he says “as another natural product”[28]. And he elaborates:

“I was interested in it for this reason, I carefully observed the sequence of follies and saw how this all occurs in a certain and appropriate form.”

This I believe is one of the moments where Goethe the scientist shows himself most clearly. He has created this barrier between himself and the festivities in order to be able to process the phenomena in the only way he feels he can, as an independent observer, looking in from the outside, organizing and categorizing. To Goethe, understanding the carnival is to identify its parts, repeating patterns and characteristics and then translate this into some kind of overview or understanding of the whole.

This act of systematic observation transforms his relationship to the phenomena. What he once experienced as chaos now becomes an organism with its own logic. The Carnival becomes a field study in social morphology, an experiment in seeing order in apparent disorder. The transformation is epistemological as much as emotional, he does not seek pleasure or participation, but a deeper insight.

Significantly, the language Goethe uses, like “sequence,” “form,” “order of proceedings”, mirrors that of his natural science. The carnival, like a natural species, exhibits regularity within variation. Its recurrence each year establishes it as a cyclical phenomenon, a kind of seasonal flowering of collective behavior. By identifying its “appropriate form,” Goethe neutralizes the chaos of experience through the application of morphological reasoning.

This interpretive stance also connects to his earlier reflections on the city as a whole. In both cases, he is confronted with an overwhelming totality, the palimpsest of Rome and the tumult of the carnival. And in both, he seeks the law that governs transformation. His scientific disposition, honed through the study of nature, allows him to read culture as process, rather than product, and as movement, rather than monument.

Integration: Morphological Rome
By the time Goethe left Italy in 1788, his understanding of art and science had undergone an amalgamation. The city that once appeared as a scatter of fragments had revealed itself as a coherent organism, governed by the same principles that he was discovering in the natural world. The scientific methods he applied to plants and minerals became the instrument through which he interpreted human cultural history.

Rome, therefore, became not only the site of his artistic renewal, but the specimen for his scientific philosophy. In the ruins and the festivals, Goethe discovered the morphological unity of all phenomena. The, as he put it, “one and all”, that connected leaf to temple. The reconstructed Rome became the basis for his holistic worldview, that dissolved the boundary between nature and culture.

Conclusion: the eye of the scientist
So, to sum it all up: Goethe’s encounter with Rome exemplifies his scientific and poetic approach to the world and everything in it. He arrives with the tools of the natural scientist: observation, collection, classification, and he applies them to the phenomena of art, architecture and culture. He displays frustration when faced with chaos and expresses joy in deciphering underlying order, reflecting the dialectic core of empirical inquiry. And in his descriptions of monuments, his sketches, his comparative studies and his evolving reflections on the carnival we see the emergence of a distinctly Goethean epistemology where the idea of knowledge as the gradual unveiling of unity within diversity starts to form.

When returning home to Weimar, both the scientist and the poet has undergone a profound transformation. With a new gaze he now studies the structure of leaves and the structure of cities with use of the same universal principles. In Rome, Goethe’s search for the Urphänomen, the primal phenomenon underlying all appearances, finds both its metaphor and method. The city, like nature, becomes transparent to law; the carnival, like the metamorphosis of plants, becomes an expression of eternal form within temporal flux. He has seen, as he set out to do, “the everlasting Rome”.

And so Goethe’s first impression of Rome, bewildered and confused, yet compelled to understand, foreshadows his scientific and philosophical trajectory. His journey from admiration to comprehension, from chaos to order, is not merely the story of a tourist in Italy, but the story of how Goethe learns to see the world as one single, living whole.

Literature
Bortoft, H. (1996). The wholeness of nature: Goethe’s way of science. Floris Books.
Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Italiensk reise. Pax.
Goethe, J. W. von. (1985). Italian journey 1786-1788. Penguin.
Harloe, K. (2024). “Greek and Roman Art”. In Goethe in Context (pp. 141–149). Cambridge University Press.
MacLeod, C. (2024). “Goethe the Collector”. In Goethe in Context (pp. 166–174). Cambridge University Press.
Pulvirenti, G. (2024). “Italy”. In Goethe in Context (pp. 245–253). Cambridge University Press.
Sällström, P. (1998). Goethe og naturvitenskapen. Antropos.
Tschudi, V. (2015). “Goethe in the Hall and His Journeys in Printed Rome”. Architectural Histories, 3(1).
Trop, G. (2024). “Goethe and German Idealism.” In Goethe in Context (pp. 206–215). Cambridge University Press.

References
[1] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Italiensk reise. Pax. Page 132. Translated to English by me (Malin), with support from the English 1985 Penguin edition where possible. This is because the Penguin edition had missing sections compared to the Norwegian and German edition, and in several sections was translated in a way that altered the meaning or nuances of meaning in what was written, compared to the Norwegian edition. The Norwegian edition was found closer to the German edition and was therefore used for the research work and then translated to English where needed for this manuscript.
[2] Tschudi, V. (2015). Goethe in the Hall and His Journeys in Printed Rome. Architectural Histories, 3(1):  21. Page 9.
[3] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 116.
[4] Tschudi, V. (2015). Goethe in the Hall and His Journeys in Printed Rome. Architectural Histories, 3(1):  21. Page 1-4.
[5] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 108.
[6] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 107-108.
[7] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 108.
[8] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 112.
[9] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 112.
[10] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 112.
[11] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 112.
[12] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 321.
[13] Pulvirenti, G. (2024). Italy. In Goethe in Context (pp. 245–253). Page 251.
[14] Harloe, K. (2024). Greek and Roman Art. In Goethe in Context (pp. 141–149). Page 144.
[15] Bortoft, H. (1996). The wholeness of nature : Goethe’s way of science. Floris Books. Page 262-267.
[16]  Sällström, P. (1998). Goethe og naturvitenskapen (N. M. Bugge, Tran.). Antropos. Page 89.
[17] Trop, G. (2024). Goethe and German Idealism. In Goethe in Context (pp. 206–215). Page 209.
[18] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 112.
[19] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 130.
[20] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 144.
[21] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 110.
[22] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 148.
[23] MacLeod, C. (2024). Goethe the Collector. In Goethe in Context (pp. 166–174)
[24] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 433.
[25] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 150.
[26] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 411.
[27] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 413.
[28] Goethe, J. W. von, & Dahl, S. (1999). Page 413.