Alice Goff. The God Behind the Marble. The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State (University of Chicago Press)
For German philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century, beautiful works of art acted as beacons of freedom, instruments of progress that could model and stimulate the moral autonomy of their beholders. Amid the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Germans struggled to uphold these ideals as they contended with the destruction of art collections, looting, and questions about cultural property. As artworks fell prey to the violence they were supposed to transcend, some began to wonder how art could deliver liberation if it could also quickly become a spoil of war. Alice Goff considers a variety of works—including forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne, the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Laocoön group from Rome, a medieval bronze reliquary from Goslar, a Last Judgment from Danzig, and the mummified body of an official from the Rhenish hamlet of Sinzig—following the conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of German collections during the Napoleonic period and its aftermath. (Description from University of Chicago Press)
Alice Goff is an associate professor at the University of Chicago.
Some comments from the jury
Alice Goff’s study provides a cultural and intellectual history of how art objects, collections, and museums in the Napoleonic era shaped and disrupted German ideas of aesthetic freedom, nation, and ownership. Goff’s narrative, grounded in exceptional archival depth and delivered with wit and verve, offers compelling case studies of artworks and institutions that serve to reframe our understanding of aesthetic theory, museum history, and the debates that surround cultural property. This richly illustrated volume will be highly relevant to all who are interested in public debates on the looting and restitution of artworks over time.
